# The most god-awful comic artists of all time **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [April 11, 2005, 10:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-god-awful-comic-artists-of-all-time/298860 "2005-04-11T22:29:44Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Superdude](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/superdude/32/13450_2.png) [@Superdude](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Superdude)\ **Post date:** [April 12, 2005, 3:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-god-awful-comic-artists-of-all-time/298860/21 "2005-04-12T03:22:13Z")
> [@Miller](#): > > Can we get some links to examples for those of us who aren’t as knowledgable about crappy comic book art? [Sam Keith](http://pages.prodigy.net/maxx006/image3.htm) ---
**Author:** ![Cliffy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/59ef9b/32.png) [@Cliffy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cliffy)\ **Post date:** [April 12, 2005, 3:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-god-awful-comic-artists-of-all-time/298860/22 "2005-04-12T03:35:05Z")
Byrne’s pencils are still great. The problem is that he often demands to ink his own work, and his inking is either really poor or very ill-suited to his pencils. When he has a good inker (and really, any inker other than himself is good), his pencils still sing. –Cliffy ---
**Author:** ![Kamino\_Neko](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kamino_neko/32/34_2.png) [@Kamino\_Neko](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kamino_Neko)\ **Post date:** [April 12, 2005, 3:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-god-awful-comic-artists-of-all-time/298860/23 "2005-04-12T03:41:42Z")
> [@RikWriter](#): > > Herb Trimp. (Or was it Trimpe?) > Hated his art with a passion. Trimpe. Not so bad as silver age Marvel artists go. Then again, I don’t have too high an opinion of most SA Marvel artists. (Yeah, that includes Kirby. I appreciate his creativity, I appreciate his love of and influence on the genre, I appreciate his layouts, even. I just don’t like how everything looks.) Modern artists I dislike… Michael Turner. I, and 2 of my friends, all had the same reaction to his art. ‘They all look like stretched out toffee.’ Everyone’s so…well, stretched out. It shows most on their stomachs. It’s like everyone started as 5’ tall, and was stretched up to 7’. Rags Morales. I’ve commented on him several times. He’s not so bad when he’s not inked by Bair, who works way too heavy, but even under an inker more suited to his style, there’s problems - everyone looks sad all the time, and they’re way too much alike, despite the amount of detail he uses. ---
**Author:** ![Selkie](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/bbce88/32.png) [@Selkie](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Selkie)\ **Post date:** [April 12, 2005, 3:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-god-awful-comic-artists-of-all-time/298860/24 "2005-04-12T03:58:16Z")
[Jim Balent](http://www.flash-zine.de/flash026/dcross17.jpg) Could anyone follow Chris Bacholo’s art on _Steampunk_? Anyone? Each individual element was pretty, but in terms of sequential storytelling that was about as bad as it gets. ---
**Author:** ![LordVor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/90ced4/32.png) [@LordVor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LordVor)\ **Post date:** [April 12, 2005, 4:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-god-awful-comic-artists-of-all-time/298860/25 "2005-04-12T04:00:46Z")
> [@Big Bad Voodoo Lou](#): > > Bill Sienkiewicz Bill’s only sin, in my eyes, was creating a character (Warlock) that really only fit his abstract style and then not killing him when he left the book. His original run of New Mutants is one of my favorites. ---
**Author:** ![shy\_guy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a6a055/32.png) [@shy\_guy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/shy_guy)\ **Post date:** [April 12, 2005, 4:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-god-awful-comic-artists-of-all-time/298860/26 "2005-04-12T04:55:30Z")
I agree about Michael Turner. He only really draws two body types. I still like looking at his stuff, although the fact that it’s always complemented with very pretty coloring helps. > [@](#): > > Byrne’s pencils are still great. The problem is that he often demands to ink his own work, and his inking is either really poor or very ill-suited to his pencils. When he has a good inker (and really, any inker other than himself is good), his pencils still sing. What are some examples of this? ---
**Author:** ![Ranchoth](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ranchoth/32/1066_2.png) [@Ranchoth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ranchoth)\ **Post date:** [April 12, 2005, 6:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-god-awful-comic-artists-of-all-time/298860/27 "2005-04-12T06:23:47Z")
> [@Miller](#): > > Can we get some links to examples for those of us who aren’t as knowledgable about crappy comic book art? Since the Liefeld link above isn’t working, I just thought I’d toss out a [couple](http://www.sequentialtart.com/archive/july00/bb_0700.shtml) of [alternates.](http://members.aol.com/chrisv82/america.htm) ---
**Author:** ![Hometownboy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/5e9695/32.png) [@Hometownboy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hometownboy)\ **Post date:** [April 12, 2005, 7:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-god-awful-comic-artists-of-all-time/298860/28 "2005-04-12T07:13:52Z")
Somebody’s got to say it. [Bob Kane](http://www.lambiek.net/kane.htm), cool as he was for inventing Batman, was not an artist who had a good handle on perspective. The ideas in his stories were always better than the art. ---
**Author:** ![Leviosaurus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/439d5e/32.png) [@Leviosaurus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Leviosaurus)\ **Post date:** [April 12, 2005, 8:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-god-awful-comic-artists-of-all-time/298860/29 "2005-04-12T08:27:17Z")
> [@Big Bad Voodoo Lou](#): > > Bill Sienkiewicz As I already mentioned in the other thread, if I were to make a top ten list of the worst artists ever, Sienkiewicz would be numbers 1, 2, 3, 5, 7 & 9. Here’s how much I detest him: I quit collecting comics almost _twenty years ago_. I haven’t read a Marvel title since 1991. Other than Cerebus (until Dave Sim went insane) and Hate (bought the entire run after a bad end to a bad relationship. I still love Hate for that,) I haven’t read any comics at all, yet here I am in this thread, mouthing a passionate abhorrence that still holds me in its throes long after my interest in comics has dissapited. Back in the day, I was doggedly devoted to anything Claremont wrote, and thus grimly churned my was through each new edition of New Mutants whether I wanted to or not. The thing that got me was, with Sienkiewicz drawing and inking, you couldn’t follow the action from one pane to the next, you _never_ got a sense for the space the characters were occupying, and the action sequences read like a Dadaist invention - it was like he drew the panels separately, put them in a bag and shook them, then drew them out randomly and stuck them on the page. Isn’t telling a coherent story the essential part of comic art, that sets it apart from other mediums? The issue that I remember in particular involved the Mutants fighting a ‘Shadow Bear’ or something. You never once got a look at the beast they were fighting, because instead of taking the time to actually draw anything, Sienkiewicz just dumped ink on the page to represent the bear. Claremont had apparently specified a chart to be drawn on the page to show an overhead view of where the bear was in relation to the characters, and Sienkiewicz’s chart consisted of bloated, distorted lines, making the chart illegible. At 14 years old, I remember looking at this thinking ‘My God, the man can’t even draw a _straight line_.’ There were no discernable expressions on the characters’ faces, the skin tones were awful (the neon red coloration of Dani’s skin approached racism, in my opinion,) the characters’ sizes and perspective changed dramatically from one pane to the next (look, now Cannonball is apparently seven feet tall! Look, now Wolfsbane is now bigger than Cannonball!) and the art was woefully out of sync with the dialog and the story. What made this really painful was the fact that art in Marvel comics was particularly good in this period. Byrne was in the middle of his legendary run on FF, Simonson was penning Thor, Barry Winsdor-Smith was all over the place. All the major Marvel books had just unbelievably consistent good quality art. Returning to New Mutants every month was always a huge letdown by comparison. Every once in a while another artist would come in to do a New Mutants Annual or something, and it was like a light was suddenly switched on - Wowsers, a story that’s actually coherent! Then Sienkiewicz would come back in and everything went to crap again. Things improved a lot when Marvel finally stopped Sienkiewicz from inking his own stuff (gee, there were actually drawings under all that black ink Sienkiewicz was dumping everywhere! I never would have imagined!) and then he mercifully left, taking his pathetic migrane-producing excuse for talent somewhere out of my view, hopefully for good. A friend in college introduced me to Liefeld, who was terrible, and showed me some Marvel books drawn by those fill in guys who came into play after McFarlane left Marvel and took that boatload of talent with him. A lot of those guys were really horrifically bad, their stuff looked like it was drawn by a highschoolers doodling in math class, but you could still follow the story, which made them better than Sienkiewicz. The guy was just unspeakably pathetic. I looked for some examples online, but depsite an extended google search, I could only find a couple of rare examples of Sienkiewicz which really didn’t demonstrate his typical art. Surprise surprise, after all the sturm unt drang from Sienkiewicz supporters about how wonderful the guy supposedly is, nobody likes him enough to actually post a gallery from that New Mutants run. Good riddance. Whew! That felt **good**! ---
**Author:** ![Tuckerfan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/eada6e/32.png) [@Tuckerfan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tuckerfan)\ **Post date:** [April 12, 2005, 9:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-god-awful-comic-artists-of-all-time/298860/30 "2005-04-12T09:26:07Z")
I don’t know who was the hack responsible, but in the early 80s, X-Men had someone drawing for them who was better suited to making rorshach tests than doing comic books. Most of the characters faces’ were flesh colored blobs with squiggles for eyes and mouths. When the storyline became a blatant rip-off of a Dr. Who episode (which itself borrowed heavily from the movie _Alien_ and _The Fantastic Voyage_) I quit reading X-Men. I haven’t picked up an issue since. ---
**Author:** ![Scissorjack](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/c67d28/32.png) [@Scissorjack](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Scissorjack)\ **Post date:** [April 12, 2005, 10:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-god-awful-comic-artists-of-all-time/298860/31 "2005-04-12T10:44:51Z")
> [@Big Bad Voodoo Lou](#): > > Maybe not the worst ever, but my least-favorites: > > Bill Sienkiewicz > Frank Quitely > Simon Bisley > Kelley Jones > Sam Kieth > Ashley Wood > Jae Lee > Glenn Fabry I’ll second Bisley, and dispute Fabry: not so keen on Fabry’s full-colour painted stuff, but his delicate black and white work on **Slaine** in 2000AD back in the early 80’s was immaculate: I’ve never seen an artist better at drawing _realistically_ muscled human anatomies, and he draws the best faces in the business. Then the strip went full-colour and Bisley, who was hot off **ABC Warriors** came along and _ruined_ it with his inverted trapezoid men and pneumatically inflated women: all swollen muscles, bulging breasts, scanty loin-cloths and improbable swords. The guy would be happier doing Iron Maiden album covers. ---
**Author:** ![Walker\_in\_Eternity](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/46a35a/32.png) [@Walker\_in\_Eternity](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Walker_in_Eternity)\ **Post date:** [April 12, 2005, 11:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-god-awful-comic-artists-of-all-time/298860/32 "2005-04-12T11:03:06Z")
> [@shy guy](#): > > I wanted to reply, but then I saw that people actually think that Gil Kane and Steve Ditko were bad artists (I also disagree about Don Heck, although I can see why people would think that - his figures were bland and he was overly dependant on arrows to guide the eye from panel to panel), and my head exploded. > > Ditko absolutely astonishes me. His layouts were incredible, as were his character designs and figures. His Dr. Strange absolutely blows me away. > > . I agree Ditko was not too bad, I enjoyed his work on Dr Strange. Now these I pretty much agree with (at least the ones I recognize) Bill Sienkiewicz Frank Quitto ely Simon Bisley Kelley Jones Sam Kieth Ashley Wood Jae Lee Glenn Fabry I also want to add the artist that drew the sequel to Dark Night Returns, the art was so bad I didn’t even buy it. ---
**Author:** ![Kamino\_Neko](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kamino_neko/32/34_2.png) [@Kamino\_Neko](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kamino_Neko)\ **Post date:** [April 12, 2005, 11:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-god-awful-comic-artists-of-all-time/298860/33 "2005-04-12T11:27:03Z")
I’ll step up here a moment and defend Bisley a bit. Just a bit, though. Biz isn’t all bad… He’s just really, really obvious when he’s been misutilized. When he’s on a title where his particular style is appropriate…he does it very well. And even if it would be inappropriate for the internal story, it can make for [a nice cover](http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v78/Nekogami/Comics%20Random/DoomPatrol34.jpg). If he’d been the artist for anything other than the cover of Doom Patrol, for instance he wouldn’t have worked, but give him just the covers, and he came up with a couple of my favourites. Actually, come to think, I don’t think I’ve ever, actually seen him doing the main art for anything he wasn’t suited to, which probably accounts for my lack of dislike for him. ---
**Author:** ![GuanoLad](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/guanolad/32/42_2.png) [@GuanoLad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GuanoLad)\ **Post date:** [April 12, 2005, 11:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-god-awful-comic-artists-of-all-time/298860/34 "2005-04-12T11:52:40Z")
> [@Case Sensitive](#): > > I’ll second Bisley, and dispute Fabry: not so keen on Fabry’s full-colour painted stuff, but his delicate black and white work on **Slaine** in 2000AD back in the early 80’s was immaculate: I’ve never seen an artist better at drawing _realistically_ muscled human anatomies, and he draws the best faces in the business. I have to totally agree with this assessment. However, I really liked Bisley’s _ABC Warriors_. He did great giant robots and his sense of epic scale and thin linework felt a lot like he was a successor to Kevin O’Neill and his earlier _Nemesis the Warlock_. As for crap artists in the history of 2000AD, [Simon Coleby](http://www.2000adonline.com/functions/cover.php?choice=783&Comic=2000ad) would have to be the worst, in my opinion. Though the early 90s for 2000AD sprouted a whole bunch of crap art (i’m looking at you, David Pugh). ---
**Author:** ![JThunder](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e95f7d/32.png) [@JThunder](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JThunder)\ **Post date:** [April 12, 2005, 12:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-god-awful-comic-artists-of-all-time/298860/35 "2005-04-12T12:13:13Z")
Phil Jaaska. \<\< Shudder \>\> ---
**Author:** ![Hey\_It\_s\_That\_Guy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/6f9a4e/32.png) [@Hey\_It\_s\_That\_Guy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hey_It_s_That_Guy)\ **Post date:** [April 12, 2005, 12:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-god-awful-comic-artists-of-all-time/298860/36 "2005-04-12T12:20:41Z")
> [@Case Sensitive](#): > > I’ll second Bisley, and dispute Fabry: not so keen on Fabry’s full-colour painted stuff, but his delicate black and white work on **Slaine** in 2000AD back in the early 80’s was immaculate: I’ve never seen an artist better at drawing _realistically_ muscled human anatomies, and he draws the best faces in the business. I’m gonna have to go with the great Kevin Maguire on that one. But I only know Fabry’s art from those much-ballyhooed Preacher covers (which I found to be grotesque eyesores every single month) and Authority: Kev, which left me cold. ---
**Author:** ![Cuckoorex](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/ad7895/32.png) [@Cuckoorex](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cuckoorex)\ **Post date:** [April 12, 2005, 12:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-god-awful-comic-artists-of-all-time/298860/37 "2005-04-12T12:29:38Z")
OK, now I’m in the awkward position of having to defend Bill Sienkiewicz a little bit. I’ll grant that his sequential stuff can get too much on the “creative” side and hard to follow, and for that reason alone I can understand why some people might hate him. The ‘read’ of his sequentials tended to vary from [‘somewhat easy to follow’](http://www.lambiek.net/sienkiewicz.htm) to [‘pretty damn hard to follow’](http://galeon.hispavista.com/comic-artpag/img/1036077318.jpg) to [‘just plain fine-artsy confusion’](http://www.artandcomix.it/gallery_usa2_eng.htm), and like I said, I can understand someone dreading the task of figuring out what was going on…but the man was _not_ a talentless hack. He does know how to draw, he does know how to paint, but he tried to push boundaries with the layout and the storytelling and the art, and it’s partially because of him that painted comics exist today and some of your more creative artists are even involved in comics at all. Specifically to defend the New Mutants work that Leviosaurus hates so much; the whole “Spirit Bear” thing was, in my opinion, one of his most successful runs in comics. It was very deliberate that you never got a full look at the Spirit Bear; it was a _spirit_ after all, it was supposed to be mystical and ethereal and somewhere on the boundary between the material and spiritual world, and the shadow was supposed to be a metaphor for the beast’s influence and power, not an actual physical shadow. The fact that he allowed black ink to take up a lot of space in those panels is not a reflection on him being lazy; it’s a measured decision. As an illustrator myself, I can appreciate what he was trying to do. Now, all that being said, I have to reiterate that the tradeoff with Bill S. is that storytelling sometimes suffered, sometimes badly. So I’m not going to dispute that some people just hate him for that. But give the man _some_ credit. ---
**Author:** ![Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spectre_of_pithecanthropus/32/12343_2.png) [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus)\ **Post date:** [April 12, 2005, 12:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-god-awful-comic-artists-of-all-time/298860/38 "2005-04-12T12:56:08Z")
No names. Just [The Worst Comics Ever](http://www.lileks.com/comics/worst/index.html) ---
**Author:** ![Cliffy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/59ef9b/32.png) [@Cliffy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cliffy)\ **Post date:** [April 12, 2005, 1:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-god-awful-comic-artists-of-all-time/298860/39 "2005-04-12T13:05:16Z")
Sienkiewicz, when he’s in full-on ink-splatter mode, is one of the best artists to grace popular comics. However, he generally finds presenting images more important than sequential storytelling. I find that it can be a very powerful way of presenting a story because it avoids a lot of the tricks readers have developed to keep everything locked down and understandable. (I also loved similar experiments by Quitely in We3 and Sears in The Path.) If you don’t like that, more power to you, but saying you don’t like Sienk’s pencils because they don’t have good storytelling is like saying you don’t like Ezra Pound because his poems don’t have good storytelling or John Cage because he doesn’t use formal counterpoint. Yeah, that’s the point. You may not like the style, but that’s 'cuz you don’t like the style, not because it is bad. I, for one, can’t really stand John Cage, but that doesn’t mean he’s a bad composer, just that he works in an idiom that doesn’t speak to me. –Cliffy ---
**Author:** ![CandidGamera](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/candidgamera/32/2878_2.png) [@CandidGamera](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CandidGamera)\ **Post date:** [April 12, 2005, 1:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-god-awful-comic-artists-of-all-time/298860/40 "2005-04-12T13:11:26Z")
> [@Stryfe](#): > > I also want to add the artist that drew the sequel to Dark Night Returns, the art was so bad I didn’t even buy it. Frank Miller. Can’t stand his art, either. Of course, he also drew Dark Knight Returns. Bisley, Quitely, and Keith are artists I abhor. Also, there’s a fellow with a Korean name that has done some DC books over the laster two years that I cringe when I see his stuff. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-god-awful-comic-artists-of-all-time/298860.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-god-awful-comic-artists-of-all-time/298860.md?page=3)