I know I’m in a minority, but I hate Jim Lee’s art, and all his imitators (Mike Turner for example). It was fine in 1989, but times have changed, Jim! I’d like to take jim to a library and show hims some anatomy books. Batman shouldn’t have a 72 inch chest.
I hate to pick on the guy, but Jim Aparo could draw one male face and one female face, and just put different hair on everyone.
Alex Saviuk is a dead average artist who did Web of Spidey for what seemed like decades. I met him at a Philly convention and he was an arrogant jerk.
I used to hate Sal Buscema and his chicken-scratch style. One day I picked up a pile of Spectacular Spidey’s and Rom back issues from a quarter bin, and halfway through I had my eureka-moment, and now I love him.
I gotta disagree with my fellow dopers on:
Gil Kane
Steve Ditko
Bill Sienkiewicz
Frank Quitely
Simon Bisley
Kelley Jones
Sam Kieth
Jae Lee
Erik Larsen
I love each of these guys.
Klaus Janson is one of the best inkers ever, but his pencils on Marvel’s Terminator 2 Movie adaption may be the single worst art ever commited to paper.
Aparo drew one of the all-time great, iconic versions of Batman (along with Dick Sprang, Neal Adams, Frank Miller, Bruce Timm, and like him or not, Jim Lee). However, I have the same “one male/one female” face problem with the most overhyped artist ever, John Byrne. Doesn’t help that Byrne is a crazy, ranting, out-of-touch dick, either.
And I have that Terminator 2 Movie Adaption comic, and it is bloody horrible.
Miller’s art, much like his writing, runs hot and cold for me. I loved 300 and Sin City. Can’t stand his superhero stuff. I think perhaps I have an idea of what superheroes are supposed to look like, influenced by folks like Swan and Kirby, and I get angsty when more abstract stuff edges away from them.
I like the wilder artists well enough in other genres.
That’s Tan Eng Huat, and I believe he’s Maylasian, not Korean. I liked his work on Doom Patrol a lot. Very idiosyncratic, but nice.
OTOH, I cannot understand the acclaim for Ted McKeever, whose incoherent scrawling sunk the previous incarnation of Doom Patrol. The absolute worst art I’ve ever seen in a major-publisher comic book.
Gotta agree about his pencils, although he could take artists I was always on the fence about (Sal Buscema, Gil Kane) and make them look like geniuses. I’ll go on record here as saying that Frank Miller’s solo stuff after Ronin is a really acquired taste (DKII, Sin City); but anything of his that Janson inked looks like the work of a true master.
Did McKeever do a Vertigo miniseries called The Extremist? If so, it was horrible, and the art wasn’t even the worst part about it (despite being really bad).
It seemed like Sal Buscema drew half of all the Marvel titles in the 70’s. I guessed it was because he worked fast and cheap. All his characters looked like action figures with their arms and legs bent a little differently from panel to panel. They all had the same grimaces too.
He wasn’t really a bad artist; he just had very little variation and no flair. Readers got tired of seeing his completely uninspiring art.
I’m so happy to get that rant off my chest I’m not even bothered by your disagreements. Three points, though:
The act of telling a story is the first priority of any comic, period. Fail that and you’ve failed utterly. If I ever meet Sienkiewicz, I’m going to thump him over the head, drag him to a tattoo parlor and have this edict permanantly etched on his forehead. When I think of a great comics artist, I think of guys who told stories with no words whatsoever. There are great examples of this, I’m sure you know plenty. With Sienkiewicz, if there were no dialog boxes, the entire comic would only be confusion.
The Spirit Bear thing was indeed a great artistic opportunity. Claremont deserves props for writing scenarios that provide interesting artistic challenges. IMO, you’re not setting the bar high enough with regards to the results. A truly great artist, a Barry Winsdor-Smith, or Todd McFarlane (who I’ve never liked, but still,) or Alan Moore, would have accomplished the mystical, etherial metaphor aspect you mention and still provided a coherent storyline, a sense of the space the characters were occupying, and wildly cool visuals. Barry can also draw a straight line. Sienkiewicz flubbed it.
The more recent Sienkiewicz you linked to shows that he’s gotten much better (although what’s up with that guy’s shoulders?) Someone should ask Sienkiewicz how much he paid Neil Gaiman to teach him how to draw.
No, it isn’t. There’s no rulebook about what constitutes art, Levi. There’s only the art itself.
And anyway, I didn’t say Sienkiewicz couldn’t tell a story. I said he’s not interested in sequential storytelling, where something happens on the left of the page and then something else happens later on the right of the page. He tells great stories, although he does it in a way you cannot appreciate.
For instance: in my experience, Sienk can show chaos and pain better than most any comics artist I can think of – things that were very useful to be able to show in the Legion and Warlock arcs, for instance. That’s because he doesn’t just show you a character who is in pain, he shows you discordance and confusion in the art itself; because the reader naturally tries to interpret what is purposefully difficult to interpret, Sienkiewicz manages to hijack your brain to force you to feel what he wants you to feel, instead of merely informing you that a character is feeling it. You don’t like the way this works, that’s legitimate. But saying he’s a bad artist because you’re not wired to accept what he broadcasts? That’s wrong.
I never liked Steve Ditko. I think his artwork was one of the reasons Speedball failed. Okay, the hokey powers and silly villians probably didn’t help either. But, those mouths Ditko draws! Way too big for the faces. His figures always look very squarish.
Besides, I got the impression from that book that Ditko and Stan Lee were trying to recreate the success they had with Spider-Man.
