Too many comic book artists?

Cafe Society
1

Why is there so much turnover in comic book artists these days? I collected heavily (buying between 40-60 titles/month, depending on what was going on) between 1987 and 1991, and it seemed that back then Marvel and DC tended to stick with an artist once it was shown that a particular artist’s style was a good fit on a particular title. Some artists drew the same title for years.

After a layoff of several years, I started collecting again in 2004. I’m more selective these days (I have to be, at $3.00 a book), buying fewer than 20 books a month, so my decision to add a title to my list is based on several factors. The two primary factors I consider are: 1) Do I like the writing? and 2) Do I like the artwork?

Amongst the titles I collect, the writers have stayed pretty stable, but it seems like most of these titles are going through artists like socks. Very few of these titles have kept the same artist for more than a few months, and what’s happening is that the writing remains good enough to keep me buying (at the very least, I simply want to know what happens next), but the artist whose artwork hooked me has been replaced or has decided to move on, and I find myself reading good stories with putrid artwork.

Now, I realize that art is subjective. I suppose somebody must like these artists. But I don’t. A good example is Supergirl. The first five issues were pencilled by Ian Churchill. His art drew me in. Great detail, and a nice job of presenting Supergirl as the 16-year-old hottie she’s supposed to be. For issue #6 we got Ed Benes, whose work I’ve seen before and liked just as much as Churchill’s (the inker remained Norm Rapmund, which probably contributed to consistency). Churchill returned to pencil issue #7. Ron Adrian pencilled #8. Churchill again for #9-10. Issue #11 brought in Joe Benitez, whose work I’d seen before, and enjoyed, so it was still acceptable. This is also the first issue not inked by Norm Rapmund. Issue #12, pencilled by Amanda Connor and inked by Jimmy Palmiotti, looks like it was inspired by afternoon TV cartoons, and I breathed a sigh of relief when Churchill and Rapmund returned for issues #13-15.

And then … #16 and #17: Alé Garza and Marlo Alquiza: a strange and, to my eye, inconsistent combination of realistic and cartoony. #18: About half the pages pencilled by Garza and half by Adam Archer, with inks by Sandra Hope. I think I will not deliberately buy another comic pencilled by Archer. He made my eyes bleed. Just atrocious - Supergirl looks like a … fish. #19: Garza & Alquiza again, looking even more cartoony, but at least more consistent from page to page.

And finally, issues #20 & #21, pencilled (and colored! never seen that before …) by Renato Guedes, inked by Jose Wilson Magalhaes. Gaaaaah! Supergirl appears to have been left alone with a truckload of chocolate ice cream. She looks mannish and overmuscled. And … and she has thunderthighs! The pencils are not helped by the spidery inking.

And that’s just one title I’ve seen this on in the last few years. New Avengers had great artwork in the beginning, but the last few issues have been wretched.

What’s going on here?

2

The days of pencillers (and writers, for that matter) staying for years on the same title are long gone. Plus, nowadays these talents see datelines more as a guide. Probably that’s why you see a different artist filling in for a couple of issues.

And apropos of nothing: Drop Supergirl and pick up JSA or JLA or Birds of Prey. Or even Blue Bettle, a good comic that needs more love than it’s receiving.

3

I love Blue Beetle! That one’s interesting, artwise — I don’t usually care for that style (in case you couldn’t tell from my OP, I prefer a “realistic” approach), but in this case it fits the feel of the comic perfectly, so I find it acceptable. I also read Justice League of America, and JLA before that. Is there a new JSA series? Because I read JSA for a while, and then dropped it when I realized that, after reading it for more than a year I still had no idea what most of the characters had for superpowers and/or abilities. Like Mister Terrific. What the hell does he do? On that title, the art was great; the problem for me was the writing. I also couldn’t figure out what the hell was going on. I didn’t start with issue #1, and it felt like I’d walked into the middle of a conversation where understanding anything depended on knowing what had been said earlier. And in these days of no “editor’s notes” … I was completely lost.

4

There are a lot of artists, then there are those that have disappeared. One of my all-time favorites, Stephen Platt, has seemed too have moved on long ago.

I don’t think anyone would doubt that when eliete artists emerge there will undoubtedly follow scores of copycat style artists. When artists like Jim Lee and Todd MacFarlane started getting popular so did their style. Stephen Platt didn’t have the huge body of work likie they did but ever since Moon Knight 55 first came out I really think Platt made an impression. I had a WTF in the comic store today after I saw a copy of World War hulk #3. He’s back? No, just another guy who sort of seemed to borrow a piece of style.

Supreme #25 (Platt)
WW Hulk #3 (David Finch) (click on picture and new link for bigger picture will pop up)

Just MHO though.

5

I think that the quality of art has come a long ways since you (and I, for that matter) were readers back in the 20th century. I think that across the board there is more a demand for more detail from the penciller and inker and the coloring is a totally different creature than it used to be. The more detailed and complex the art, the longer it takes – in general – to create it.

So one possible answer is that they rotate the art teams in an effort to maintain a regular schedule.

Mark Bagly’s stint on Ultimate Spider-Man was consistently great and pretty well detailed, but he seems to be the exception that proves your point. John Romita Jr. can also deliver page count, but his loose, sketchy style lends itself to that. But I digress.

6

I love Platt - I had no idea that he wasn’t around anymore. Remember when those first Moon Knight issues he did all spiked to like $30 each overnight?

What shocks me the most is how embarrassingly bad some of the art is that makes it out there in big-name books. The art from the last few issues of New Avengers is quite frankly not of publishable quality - you’d think that an A-list book like that at Marvel would be able to demand top talent!

7

Taste is subjective. I for one love Yu’s work.

8

Links people, I love links. I hate having to google every example so I can chime in. I haven’t seen any of the New Avengers books VCO3 mentions, but Yu is the same guy doing the Ultimate Hulk vs. Wolverine which I though looked pretty good. Albiet work on it continues very… very… slowly.

9

Maybe the inker is the problem, then. Back in the day there were certain pencillers I really liked when they were inked by certain inkers, but not so much when a different inker would take over. The composition of the art in New Avengers isn’t bad, but there is a lot of stuff there that just feels … extraneous. Like everybody’s nose - there are all these shadow hash marks that just make it look like the character’s stuck their noses … somewhere … and got smudges of … something … on the ends of their noses. And rings around everybody’s eyes that make them all look crazy, or hopped up on something. It’s like the inker is trying to do things with black ink that would be better handled with shading and gradients, by the colorist.

bigbabysweets2000, the art in the last few issues of New Avengers looks nothing like the art in the link you provided. The low quality of the art in the latest issue really stands out, because right in the middle of the issue is a 4-page preview of an upcoming X-Men title with some awesome Billy Tan artwork. The contrast is startling.

10

A large part of the turnover is because Comic Book art is time consuming and does not always pay the bills. You work freelance, you are never quite sure where the money comes from, and unless you are crazy fast you probably only do one or two pages a day.

A nice job in advertising allows things like sick days and weekends that comics don’t. You don’t get the cool factor of drawing for a book, but you get health insurance for your kids.

(Disclaimer: I am not an artist, but I worked with a lot of them)

11

I’ve inked drawings for other people who couldn’t do their own inks (not due to lack of time but to not knowing how). They were always happily surprised by the results, as well as by the tools I used (black regular Bic, black thinpoint - no you don’t need to buy china ink and mink brushes). One of the things that they had all been doing wrong was inking every single line they had drawn in pencil. With pencil, you press more here and less there resulting in lighter and darker areas with the same tool. To get the same in ink, you have to use full ink in the dark places, grids or lines on those that were lighter in the pencil. And you should always, always, ink as if there’s a colorist coming behind you, even when there isn’t. Too many inkers use too much ink and forget about the colorist.

12

Most of my favorite comic artists are notoriously slow, so they do covers and pin-ups and posters and the occasional big event, but their work doesn’t get out often enough. I’m thinking of Art Adams, Travis Charest, J. Scott Campbell, John Cassaday (will we ever see the last issue of Planetary?), and Adam Hughes in particular (although I loved it when Hughes was the monthly artist on Giffen and Maguire’s Justice League America in the early '90s). Mike Allred might be my favorite comic artist of all, but he’s an indie guy who mostly sticks to drawing his own stuff, so his delays aren’t as glaring.

13

Yeah, it must be the inking, then - all I know is that the end product looks like complete garbage for all of the reasons listed above. This is the only real sample I can find online, and it’s one of the better and prettier examples (which I still think looks like garbage).

14

I always thought that, if I was working on comics, that I’d like to be an inker. Alas, I’m no artist. But for a while, I took up the “hobby” of photocopying comic book covers, laying tracing paper over the copy, and setting to work with brush and india ink. I actually got pretty good at it, though I realize that what I was doing was a whole different thing from inking somebody’s pencils. Still, I was figuring out the principles of inking.

Eventually, I tried to learn to draw, with help from some good instructional books I picked up at the local art supply store. I got pretty good at doing faces (I did a portrait of former Seattle Mariners outfielder Jay Buhner that I was really proud of), but didn’t get as far as learning to draw figures. I’d draw in pencil, and then go over the drawing with ink, with pretty good results.

I’ve got all this stuff scanned, somewhere. I’ll have to try to find the CD and post it up.

I wish I had a scanner right now so that I could scan few pages from the latest issue. Is it just me, or does Iron Fist look like his parents were a little too closely related?

15

Hmmm. I just noticed that many of the artists I listed that I don’t like on Supergirl have Spanish names. So maybe what I’m seeing is a different cultural approach to the art, which simply doesn’t agree with me.