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Do you wish some comics were drawn by a different artist?

Started by Small Man Big Horse, May 08, 2021, 08:05:48 PM

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Small Man Big Horse

I wrote about this on Facebook earlier today but thought I'd start a thread on the same subject here - so are there any comics you feel would be improved if they were drawn by a different artist?

My original example was that I just don't get on with Eddie Campbell's art on Alan Moore's From Hell, I know many love it but it doesn't work for me and I wish it had either been full on crazy in a Dave McKean kind of way, or perhaps more realistic with Brian Bolland handling art duties.

Another opinion which will probably make people want to pour petrol all over my body and set me on fire is that I've no real love for Steve Dillon's work on Hellblazer, I like the artist elsewhere and some of his work on the series is okay, but I wish Mark Buckingham had drawn those issues as his take on Constantine's world is my favourite.

Oh, and though I love Kevin O'Neill's artwork on Nemesis The Warlock, I secretly would have enjoyed it if for just one week Sergio Aragonés had taken over art duties, hell, they could have swapped comics and O'Neill could have done one issue of Groo!

Video Game Fan 2000

When its good, its perfect but overall : Halo Jones.

PlanktonSideburns


Retinend

I love Campbell's work on From Hell. I couldn't imagine it any other way. I think I like it because it doesn't feel at all like a comic - not over the top at all.

13 schoolyards

I think one of Moore's often overlooked strengths is his ability to play perfectly to his artists abilities and interests. Which also means just about all his projects would have been very different if they'd been drawn by another artist - I suspect this was part of the reason why he knocked back Campbell's offer to finish illustrating Big Numbers.

At the time I thought Grant Morrison's Animal Man definitely could have used a different artist, but these days the extremely average early 90s superhero style seems to suit the material pretty well.

holdover

All of Alan Moore's Avatar work. Jacen Burrows art is so stiff.


Glebe

Apparently Grant Morrison wasn't too happy with David McKean's approach to Arkham Asylum, finding it too florid and arty or summit. Moore originally considered Simon Bisley for The League of Extraordinary Gentleman.

Retinend

 I think the art for V for a Vendetta is is too stylized - sometimes it is hard to make out what is happening.




It's very impressive, technically, but a few more outline lines would have guided the eye more fluently as to what is going on.

...or maybe it's not the lines, but the elusive factor of "dynamism" that's missing. A lot  of Lloyd's art is akin to old-fashioned print newspaper photographs  - high contrast images of figures who are posing for a photo. Not often bodies in motion. Comics usually exploit the figurative form to "point" to the next frame in some way. By contrast, such frames as the ones above end up leaving you confused about which direction the figures are moving in.

I don't have the books to hand, but I would interested in comparing Lloyd and Campbell in this regard: I remember From Hell having much more of this factor I'm calling "dynamism" . Recall the scene of the canal boat moving through the tunnel, for example.

chveik

Quote from: holdover on May 09, 2021, 10:17:26 AM
All of Alan Moore's Avatar work. Jacen Burrows art is so stiff.

yeah couldn't agree more. doesn't fit with the lovecraftian world at all

Small Man Big Horse

Quote from: 13 schoolyards on May 09, 2021, 07:02:36 AM
At the time I thought Grant Morrison's Animal Man definitely could have used a different artist, but these days the extremely average early 90s superhero style seems to suit the material pretty well.

I finished re-reading it last night and while I agree there are better artists out there, and would have loved it if Brian Bolland could have done the whole thing instead of just the covers (even if it meant it would have taken about ten years to complete!) I really like Chas Troug's art, I think he's superb when it comes to capturing facial expressions, and very strong at creating the strange atmosphere found towards the end of the comic, the issues he didn't draw are definitely weaker imho.

Quote from: chveik on May 09, 2021, 02:51:17 PM
yeah couldn't agree more. doesn't fit with the lovecraftian world at all

Add me to the list too, which reminds me, I really hated the simplistic art in the adaptation of At The Mountains Of Madness by I.N.J. Culbard, I commented on it here when I read it a couple of years back and some liked it (which is obviously more than fair enough) but I think it fails to generate any kind of an atmosphere at all. https://readcomiconline.li/Comic/At-the-Mountains-of-Madness/Full?id=116541

BeardFaceMan

Ennis' Punisher Max run might be my favourite comic series ever, for lots of reasons, but one of those reasons isn't Howard Chaykin's artwork, which is comically bad at times. Thankfully he didn't do a lot.

One of the things that puts me off going back and reading early Hellblazer is the art. Well, not the art so much, the colouring. Its proper technicolor vomit, like a black and white artist has just dicovered colour for the first time.

Small Man Big Horse

Quote from: BeardFaceMan on May 09, 2021, 05:20:04 PM
One of the things that puts me off going back and reading early Hellblazer is the art. Well, not the art so much, the colouring. Its proper technicolor vomit, like a black and white artist has just dicovered colour for the first time.

I know what you mean, the first issue is particularly bad on that front and looks really gaudy, though it does improve fairly quickly and there are some aspects of it that I still like. I remember that the first five or six issues were collected together as a black and white graphic novel at one point as well, so we're clearly far from alone in thinking that way.

BeardFaceMan

Quote from: Small Man Big Horse on May 09, 2021, 05:43:38 PM
I know what you mean, the first issue is particularly bad on that front and looks really gaudy, though it does improve fairly quickly and there are some aspects of it that I still like. I remember that the first five or six issues were collected together as a black and white graphic novel at one point as well, so we're clearly far from alone in thinking that way.

Now that's definitely something I'd be interest in reading, I bet it looks much better.

Edit - https://64.media.tumblr.com/fc8390ef3f834185bbabce2091559c0b/tumblr_o80elenvnM1stl5apo4_640.jpg that's the kind of thing I'm talking about with Chaykin doing Punisher. Look at the arm of the guy drinking beer in the first panel, how the fuck did that get past an editor?

Small Man Big Horse

Quote from: BeardFaceMan on May 09, 2021, 05:53:20 PM
Now that's definitely something I'd be interest in reading, I bet it looks much better.

Edit - https://64.media.tumblr.com/fc8390ef3f834185bbabce2091559c0b/tumblr_o80elenvnM1stl5apo4_640.jpg that's the kind of thing I'm talking about with Chaykin doing Punisher. Look at the arm of the guy drinking beer in the first panel, how the fuck did that get past an editor?

Ha, yeah, that's really not good at all, I remember liking Chaykin's work on American Flagg! and Blackhawk in the eighties, but that was the last time I saw anything by him and didn't know he was still going / alive.

BeardFaceMan

Quote from: Small Man Big Horse on May 10, 2021, 09:53:18 AM
Ha, yeah, that's really not good at all, I remember liking Chaykin's work on American Flagg! and Blackhawk in the eighties, but that was the last time I saw anything by him and didn't know he was still going / alive.

I'm not familiar with his work at all, just his Punisher stuff and the covers he did for Ennis' Red Team, and that's kinda put me off reading anything else drawn by him.

On a similar note there are a few artists whose cover work I love, but not so much when you open the comic. The covers Tim Bradstreet did for Punisher are amazing but I haven't seen many actual comics drawn by him and the ones I have I wasn't that taken with. Glenn Fabry is another one, amazing covers, can't really get on with his style when he draws an actual comic though.

willbo

I wish comic art had never changed since the 80s. I wish it still had the 70s-80s look. Artists like John Byrne, Neal Adams, George Perez etc. With bright newsprint colouring and pulp paper. Comics from that time always felt like getting a newspaper from some realistic but otherworldly version of a big city.

Norton Canes

Quote from: Small Man Big Horse on May 08, 2021, 08:05:48 PM
or perhaps more realistic with Brian Bolland handling art duties

If Bolland had been illustrating From Hell he'd still be working on it.


Magnum Valentino

Have youse many examples of this actually happening?

I know that some of Grant Morrison's last issues on Batman Incorporated were redrawn by Chris Burnham (the closest thing to a regular artist than series had) when they were collected into the Absolute format (and later the Omnibus series).

Very interesting to see how two artists differently tackle the same specification. Some panels just look like they've been redrawn, others are 'shot' from completely different perspectives.

The article that reported on this has dead links for the pictures otherwise I'd point you in that direction. As I remember it was very interesting.

13 schoolyards

The last few issues of The Invisibles (which were an artists jam of sorts, getting back pretty much everyone who'd worked on the series for a page or two) had a few pages redrawn for the collection (by Cameron Stewart I think), after somebody noticed that giving the pages that actually explained the concept behind the entire series to Ashley Wood - an artist who's murky work was difficult to read at the best of times - was a mistake.

Mister Six

Quote from: Small Man Big Horse on May 08, 2021, 08:05:48 PM
My original example was that I just don't get on with Eddie Campbell's art on Alan Moore's From Hell, I know many love it but it doesn't work for me and I wish it had either been full on crazy in a Dave McKean kind of way, or perhaps more realistic with Brian Bolland handling art duties.

Another opinion which will probably make people want to pour petrol all over my body and set me on fire is that I've no real love for Steve Dillon's work on Hellblazer, I like the artist elsewhere and some of his work on the series is okay, but I wish Mark Buckingham had drawn those issues as his take on Constantine's world is my favourite.

Disagree strongly on both of those - Campbell's scratchy, grimy, fucked-up-but-realistic seems more appropriate than Bolland's clean lines or McKean's more outlandish works. And Dillon's brutally matter-of-fact art suits Ennis's grounded take on Hellblazer more than Buckingham's, I think. I actually really dislike Buckingham's Hellblazer art, as it feels too loose and rubbery, whereas Dillon, for all his faults (repetitive faces, bland backgrounds, discomfort at drawing the fantastic), makes solid, almost three-dimensional worlds. Characters seen from different angles look like the same people rotated, like the page is a portal to another world, rather than a series of pictures representing that world.

As for what I'd change... Grant Morrison's been cursed with bad art over their career, although I know that was often due to them turning in scripts late. But I'd like to see Igor Kordey either replaced on his X-Men run or given time to actually do the art he's capable of (Kordey has genuine talent not that you can tell from this).

Here's Kordey on X-Men:



Here's Kordey with a proper run up on a Euro comic:



Although if we're giving people all the time in the world, I'd love to have seen Frank Quietly doing the whole of that X-Men run... mind you, we'd probably still be waiting for issues today.


Magnum Valentino

Quote from: 13 schoolyards on May 09, 2021, 07:02:36 AM
At the time I thought Grant Morrison's Animal Man definitely could have used a different artist, but these days the extremely average early 90s superhero style seems to suit the material pretty well.

I've been thinking about this and I reckon the art really reinforces the placement in time of when the book was published and how aggrieved Grant was about DC's determination to shitcan all its older characters. If it was illustrated in one of the more progressive art styles at the time (by Art Adams or a Jim Lee or McFarlane clone, for example), it would have almost hypocritical.

If that makes sense. I've never thought about it other than as what it was - the art in Animal Man. But I like the idea that it could be considered a statement of sorts.

I bet there are tons of folks who picked up Preacher and Punisher books because they thought the insides would look like the covers and were either horrified or delighted by the Steve Dillon work inside.

Took me a while but I've come to regard Dillon as one of the very best ever. His 'acting' (as it's sometimes called) is unreal and his approach to violence is extremely funny.

willbo

In my teens I used to really want to be an illustrator on the level of a comic book artist, but now I can't even see how they do it. Like even with Dillon who's art looks deceptively simple, the facial expressions, the flow of movement, getting the right backgrounds. I'm still not sure how the average comic artist works, like do they just constantly use reference/photos, or do a lot of stuff from memory.

13 schoolyards

Quote from: Magnum Valentino on May 11, 2021, 11:22:07 AM
I've been thinking about this and I reckon the art really reinforces the placement in time of when the book was published and how aggrieved Grant was about DC's determination to shitcan all its older characters. If it was illustrated in one of the more progressive art styles at the time (by Art Adams or a Jim Lee or McFarlane clone, for example), it would have almost hypocritical.

If that makes sense. I've never thought about it other than as what it was - the art in Animal Man. But I like the idea that it could be considered a statement of sorts.

Yeah, I'd agree with that now. At the time I really wished it was drawn by a flashier artist (Doom Patrol was right there with an increasingly distinctive art style) but over the years it's become more obvious to me that Morrison's approach really wouldn't have worked if it hadn't had a firmly retro / traditional style.

Quote from: Magnum Valentino on May 11, 2021, 11:22:07 AM

I bet there are tons of folks who picked up Preacher and Punisher books because they thought the insides would look like the covers and were either horrified or delighted by the Steve Dillon work inside.

Took me a while but I've come to regard Dillon as one of the very best ever. His 'acting' (as it's sometimes called) is unreal and his approach to violence is extremely funny.

I really loved Dillon's work on Judge Dredd - I thought the mix of his 'acting' and having interesting SF things to draw really brought out the best in him in a way that a lot of his US work (where he wasn't flashy enough to make superheroes really pop but outside of that he was just drawing people in average locations) didn't.

He was a brilliant artist and Preacher wouldn't have worked half as well without him, but I never really felt he found a US title he could really shine on after that.

Magnum Valentino

Quote from: willbo on May 11, 2021, 01:41:01 PM
In my teens I used to really want to be an illustrator on the level of a comic book artist, but now I can't even see how they do it. Like even with Dillon who's art looks deceptively simple, the facial expressions, the flow of movement, getting the right backgrounds. I'm still not sure how the average comic artist works, like do they just constantly use reference/photos, or do a lot of stuff from memory.

Frank Miller said something along the lines that you have to sit and study and draw a cup over and over, from every angle, until you KNOW the cup. You can't draw anything you don't know. The same, preusumably, expands out to characters. I guess he spent a lot of time practicing drawing Converse guddies.

That's another one for the list - anything written by Frank Miller and not drawn by him, I want to be drawn by him (possibly excepting John Romita Jr's stuff which is Miller-light ((ahahahahahaha)) anyway).

Mister Six

Quote from: Magnum Valentino on May 11, 2021, 11:22:07 AM
Took me a while but I've come to regard Dillon as one of the very best ever. His 'acting' (as it's sometimes called) is unreal and his approach to violence is extremely funny.

Especially Hellblazer/early Preacher-era Dillon, when he was using heavy crosshatching and you could see the muscles moving under people's faces. Hard to imagine another artist doing those Heartland issues of Hellblazer - a total of about 70 pages of people talking in pubs - without it seeming incredibly dull.

Shame he died before he and Ennis did City Lights, their long-mooted kitchen sink drama comic. Shame also that he ditched the crosshatching in favour of that stripped-down style and increasing reliance on stock faces, although he's visibly struggling to keep up by the Dixie Fried storyline of Preacher, and given how young he was when he died, I wonder if there were long-term health conditions that necessitated a less intensive style.

Still one of the all-time greats, for me.

Quote from: willbo on May 11, 2021, 01:41:01 PM
In my teens I used to really want to be an illustrator on the level of a comic book artist, but now I can't even see how they do it. Like even with Dillon who's art looks deceptively simple, the facial expressions, the flow of movement, getting the right backgrounds. I'm still not sure how the average comic artist works, like do they just constantly use reference/photos, or do a lot of stuff from memory.

Well, Greg Land famously sketches over porn stills...

As for everyone else it obviously varies from artist to artist, although when you see a lot of them (at least, the artists with more realistic styles) in the flesh you realise that they use themselves as models, because they look exactly like one of their drawings. If you see a bloke who looks like a Sean Philips or Chris Weston character, you're probably actually looking at Sean Philips or Chris Weston.

I was very (very) vaguely acquainted with a guy who had some success with a Vertigo ongoing back before that imprint was a gutted shell of a thing, and he said he'd worked out the secret to Dillon's conversations, that there was a particular pattern of shots Dillon would return to for maximum conversational flow. Sadly I was too drunk to get details out of him, and I'm too lazy and talentless to figure it out now, but the answers are out there!

willbo

I never thought of them using themselves as models that much. I didn't realise Steve Dillon isn't with us anymore.

Small Man Big Horse

Quote from: willbo on May 11, 2021, 04:14:30 PM
I never thought of them using themselves as models that much. I didn't realise Steve Dillon isn't with us anymore.

I didn't realise Dillon had died either (or had forgotten at least, as my memory is terrible these days) but it is very sad news. And I did like his work elsewhere, especially on 2000AD, there are just artists I prefer when it comes to Hellblazer.

Midas

I remember curiously flicking through a volume of The Sandman in a bookshop years ago and being slightly disappointed when I realised Dave McKean only produced the covers for the series. I still haven't read it despite those around me insisting it's great, maybe one day I should give it a go.

Midas


samadriel

Quote from: Midas on May 11, 2021, 09:40:22 PM
I remember curiously flicking through a volume of The Sandman in a bookshop years ago and being slightly disappointed when I realised Dave McKean only produced the covers for the series. I still haven't read it despite those around me insisting it's great, maybe one day I should give it a go.

Yeah, the first few issues of Sandman are busted; I think it might be Sam Kieth? He's a pretty patchy artist, sometimes impressive, but the cartoonishness of his Sandman stuff doesn't suit the subject matter. Horrible colouring too, but colouring was a more primitive job back then.

I can't decide where the Preacher artwork failed for me; Dillon's art became a bit bland as the years went by, but he could draw whatever Ennis wanted; I think Pamela Rambo's colours were the real sore point. The lack of shadow in Dillon's later work made her very flat colours seem even duller.