The passing of Quinton Hoover, an original Magic: the Gathering artist, made me think of this — as did something he wrote.
For those of you who don’t know Magic, its early creative was very laissez-faire. Artists were given the name of a card and told to illustrate whatever (I’m not even sure today’s R&D process would accommodate this). There was little indication that the first set’s cards all even belonged to the same world.
As the backstory of each set gained in importance, so too did the desire to create a cohesive fictional world with each set (or block of sets). This caused some favored artists, especially those with greatly unusual styles, to fall by the wayside; after all, the artist known for illustrating soft, willowy figures may find it difficult to draw stuff for many aspects of a Gothic horror world.
Anyway, Quinton Hoover didn’t really like this, as you may guess:
What approach do you think works better? Obviously, something is lost here; is the loss “worth it”? Would you throw away the idea of the cohesive look for a world in order to accommodate a huge, varied range of art styles?
I don’t normally care much about “look”, unless “look” is the whole point or that particular look is just unappealing in itself to me. But it should stick to canon, if any; Gandalf as a leather clad woman with a shaved head wouldn’t exactly fit in with the canon for example, nor should wizards be using ray guns. If the canon is that all characters of type “X” wear leather trench coats, then they generally should all be drawn as wearing leather trench coats.
However canon often isn’t that specific, and a world is a very large place. “The Planet Of The People Who All Dress Like Goths” isn’t very plausible. There should be more than enough room for all sorts of styles in a setting that isn’t highly restricted; just look at the real world.
I like having all the cards of a given block be of a similar style, almost as if they were all stills taken from the same film or comic. Sorry, Hoover.
Actually his is one of my favorite styles in the cards - and I will comment that I really did like all the different styles in the original set. I have no objection to card sets with an internal art consistency but it gets boring to me to have everything all in the same style of art.
When TSR released the Dragonlance series of games and books, they had four main artists creating works accompanying all the materials: Larry Elmore, Clyde Caldwell, Keith Parkinson, and Jeff Easley, though more soon came on board as the series progressed. Each of the artists had a distinctive style, and though they tried to take Larry Elmore’s character design as their lead they inevitably took them in new directions, so that soon no two images of Sturm Brightblade’s armour looked alike.
I didn’t mind too much, though I soon picked my favourite artist of the team (Keith Parkinson), but there’s only so much you can expect from an artist.
If there’s one thing I really dislike is how comic book artists are chosen because their style is directly imitative of whoever is hot at the time. I grew up with British comic books, where each artist was given the freedom to use their own style when drawing their characters, even when it was someone firmly established like Judge Dredd. Meanwhile in America every superhero comic looked like it was drawn by the same guy, namely Jack Kirby, until someone distinctive came along and shook things up. When Jim Lee arrived on the scene suddenly every artist tried to imitate him. Same with Todd McFarlane for Spider-Man.
I prefer it if there’s a variety. Imitation is too restrictive, boring, and tough on the artists.
I like some variety, but do appreciate overall artistic direction - case in point: the *Lord of the Rings *movies, they made a real effort to ensure each culture had its own look-and-feel, and even evolve some stylistically over time (see differences in Men at Last Battle compared to current Gondor) but they had Howe and Lee and others, working together, to ensure a consistency to the artistic output, so the whole feels distinctly organic.
Hoover’s art on the original Regeneration card is just about my all-time favorite.
The all-over-the-map art style of the early sets was a good thing, IMHO.
It makes sense to enforce consistency in how certain things look in a given world. Goblins (for instance) from Alara/Mirrodin/Ravnica all have a different “look” about them, for good worldbuilding reasons. It would be counterproductive to mix different types in the same world. But what’s wrong with one card having a photorealistic goblin, while another has an Art Nouveau goblin, and another has a watercolor goblin.
I wonder if consistency of design somehow became conflated with consistent art style.
I never liked Magic: The Gathering, and I think there is a separate issue there of whether a card game needs to take place in a clearly defined fictional “world” at all. I don’t need canonical backstories and personalities for my chess pieces. The little I did play Magic, I preferred the idea of Goblins (or whatever) as archetypal goblins that could look like whatever the artist (or I) wanted, rather than the whole game feeling like a tie-in to a movie I’d never seen.
On the broader topic, the real world has a consistent look, I suppose, but besides being BIG, it doesn’t stop artists from depicting the same things quite differently. I’ve been reading a lot of comic books lately, and the current Superman artist, Kenneth Rocafort, has a very distinctive style that doesn’t look like anyone else. That’s fine with me, and I think it works great for the stories he’s drawing. It also doesn’t bother me that other artists, even when they fill in on the same story, have very different styles. (Except when they change artists within a single scene; then it’s distracting.) OTOH, some of the artists draw Clark Kent with very distinctive Harry Potter-style glasses, and other artists draw him with traditional square-frame glasses. That actually bothers me because it doesn’t look like differing artistic representations of the same “thing” but two different things. It looks less like different art styles and more like a continuity error.