Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION Dr. Gym'll's Cultural Rarities Who are your favorite comic book artists, and why?

Alan Davis and Art Adams are also two of the very few artists who I think did imaginative justice to Bill Sienkiewicz's creation, Warlock from "New Mutants."

Very true. Under other artists, Warlock sometimes looked like an artist's doodle, more than an actual character who belonged on the page, but I remember in the New Mutants annual set in Asgard, in particular, he was drawn in such a way as to show emotion and react (the picture where Hela appears and he points, and a tiny face on his index finger is screaming, and the speech bubble says, 'Scream!' is just hilariously meta) that is both cartoonish, and yet doesn't detract from the seriousness of the surrounding narrative, which was a juggling act that not many artists have been able to pull off successfully. (A struggle for characters like Deadpool, Rocket Raccoon and Squirrel Girl, as well, IMO, finding a balance between artistically portraying 'whacky' and playful, without degenerating into farce.)

If I had the money to buy pages of original comic book art, the story I'd most want is the Uncanny X-Men/New Teen Titans inter-company team up, drawn by Walter Simonson & Terry Austin:

http://legionworld.net/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=143590

The main reason is that it's the only one of the original four inter-company books that was not printed in the oversize "tabloid" format.

As beautiful as it as in the standard format, the thought of being able to see it at the size it was actually drawn...wow.

BUMP

For Lardy, who recently mentioned in the Anywhere Machine forum that the writers of the DC television shows made a particularly nasty metafictional insult to John Byrne by naming a fictional human trafficker after him.

Hope this helps you feel better.

There are some comics folk where I can separate the creator from the created, and appreciate, say, the writing of Morrison, while finding the man himself to be... a bit curmudgeonly and off-putting, or the art of John Byrne, while noting that he's got issues by the spinner rack, or the writing of Jim Shooter, who is apparently impossible to get along with.

And then there's creatives who I hear bad stuff about, like Rob Liefield purportedly screwing over / cheating other people at Image, and I also happen to dislike their art/writing/tiny stinky feet/whatever, so it just doubles the heat of my burning disdain.

All good examples. Thank you, Set.

I have to admit that my opinion of Neal Adams' work has been somewhat tainted by nasty accusations -- stories of him contradicting his stance on creators' rights by treating his proteges badly and disrespecting his collaborators (the latter is amply on display in the Green Lantern/Green Arrow stories, where he basically imposed his counterpoint to Denny O'Neil's opinions in an increasingly dissonant way.)

And then there's the strange case of a wonderful Golden Age artist named Jack Burnley. Overlooked by historians despite working in a style similar to Mac Raboy or Reed Crandall, poor Mr. Burnley would be unheard of today were it not for the vocal admiration of Starman scribe James Dale Robinson, whom I find overrated as a writer and nigh-impossible to like as person. So I feel I have to give Robinson credit for that, at least.

Gil Kane.

It's not easy for me to put aside his remarkable qualities as a person and focus mainly on his work. But I'll do my best.

I'll start out by admitting that I was a skeptic in my misspent youth. Kane inked by Kane, in particular, turned me off with the choppy lines, lack of proper shading, and ugly faces. But even then I could appreciate how a softer, more shadowy inking style, such as those of Wallace Wood or John Romita Senior (or, to a lesser extent, Sid Greene or Murphy Anderson), could do a remarkable job of bringing out Kane's artistic strengths.

Kane was an intense, passionate individual, and from about 1965 on, those qualities consistently shone on the pages he produced. Green Lantern circa issues 35 through 50, along with the concurrent issues of Atom (as well as a short but very sweet 1968 run on Captain Action), was an astonishing display of Hogarthian anatomy and Kirbyesque dynamics, with a generous side portion of lyricism derived from the best Golden Age artists such as Lou Fine and Reed Crandall. Much as I love John Buscema, I think the title "Michelangelo of Comics" is better suited to Gil Kane. Especially since the men are far more sensually rendered than the women, just as it arguably was with that particular Old Master. This homoerotic aspect of Kane was not lost on his peers and editors, to the point where Stan Lee was alleged to have been unnerved by Kane's style, and that is why Kane only began to get more work from Marvel than DC only after Roy Thomas began taking over most (and eventually all) of Lee's editorial responsibilities.

Gil Kane's work from his Bronze Age Marvel years is often criticized as being amped up to the point of wearing down the reader. And while I think that is a legitimate criticism of some of his lesser interior art, I also believe there are plenty of examples where he regulates the intensity to produce a reading experience that is not exhausting, but rather exhilarating -- Captain Mar-Vell, Warlock, Iron Fist, John Carter, What If, select issues of Amazing Spider-Man and Daredevil. And then there were the covers -- I *love* Kane's Marvel covers, especially when they were inked by John Romita. If anything, Bronze Age Gil Kane was probably better suited to covers than interiors.

As the 70s gave way to the 80s, Kane was increasingly at odds with Marvel's then-EiC Jim Shooter, who had quickly developed a tendency to impose a uniform look to the publishers output -- rigid six-panel grids and a profusion of medium shots. This, ironically, was exactly what Kane had rebelled against at DC in the mid-60s. So it was understandable that he'd expand his horizons (newspaper strips, animation storyboards and designs, a return to DC) until he'd left Marvel altogether (though he did return after Shooter left, and probably would have done more work for them had it not been for a near-fatal health scare at the end of the 80s.) Most notable of his second run at DC were, of course, his Superman stories, as noted by Lardy in the Bronze Age Superman thread. These are a near-perfect culmination of his various artistic passions -- even Kane's own inking is rarely less than good.

During the 90s, Kane's work generally stayed close to the quality level of the 80s Superman art, and by the time he passed away in 2000 at the age of 74, his legacy was assured. Fittingly, a Superman Elseworlds that Kane was unable to complete was finished by none other than John Buscema, with the always-remarkable Kevin Nowlan keeping the ink style consistent.

Gil Kane's body of work is a remarkable one, evolving from near-anonymity to near-overwhelming power to near-perfect balance. His articulate opinions and insights, faithfully chronicled by the fan press with whom he cultivated a wise elder statesman relationship, combine with the artwork to keep that special Kane fire burning brightly.

One artist who I have not seen mentioned in this thread is Tony Harris. His work on the early Starman issues was a major draw for me, he made Opal City and its characters come alive with his unique style.

While Tony Harris's Starman work does not appeal to my personal tastes, I do appreciate his art as being in a style very much his own. And I do like Harris's Legion covers from around the middle of the DnA era.

Carmine infantino and gil Kane were the first artists whose art I could recognize Without checking the credits of the book, so I have a soft spot for them, but I wouldn?t call them favorites. (In fact, I remember being bewildered when Gil Kane was put on Wonder Woman bc I thought it was such a bad fit.)

Bill Siekiewicz was the first artist that truly turned my crank, as it were. Man, how I loved his style. Moon Knight and then... Demon Bear and Warlock!

Keith Giffen?s style during most of his Legion Work really made me happy, although I know that is not an opinion shared by many people here. Great future tech.

I loved the dark foreboding of Olivier Coipel?s art.

Today, I love the crisp cleanness and facial expressions of Jamie McKelvie, and the weird, expressive puffiness of Frank Quitely. And Nick Dragotta?s work. He draws a very expressive nasty, mean face.

Rokk Steady, thank you for mentioning Coipel and Quitely. Both of them took a while to grow on me, but today I adore both their styles.

I, too, like Coipel's flair for the dark and the foreboding. I can't think of anyone better at drawing Umbra-slash-Shadow Lass, and the displays of her powers. I love how he portrayed Saturn Girl's powers, too.

Quitely is a whole school of art unto himself. I think his frequent collaborator Grant Morrison nailed it when he noted the influences of early 20th century newspaper-funnies pioneers and of early 1930s Disney animation.

A wonderful 2018 interview with Frank Quitely that I found a couple days ago:

https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/comic...nterview-looks-back-on-his-iconic-career

Turns out one of his key influences was none other than John Buscema. Yay! No wonder I came around to loving Quitely's art.

Kane never did Wonder Woman interiors. You might be thinking of his brief run on Teen Titans, where he drew the original origin story for Wonder Girl. But I agree, he was not a good fit for that kind of thing. He was almost equally "miscast" on the Batgirl feature.

One very good artist I had been taking for granted until recently was Carlos Pacheco. But when I just skimmed through my favorite block of Flash issues (Waid's v2 run #75-100, The Return of Barry Allen through Terminal Velocity), I noticed that Pacheco's two full issues (93 and 94, the 2nd & 3rd appearances of Bart Allen,) really stood out to me in contrast to the artists who preceded and followed him, Mike Wieringo and Salvador Larocca. Pacheco's style was not quite yet fully formed, but compared to Ringo's hard-hitting angularity and Larocca's lack of distinction (at that early point in his career,) it's very impressive -- dynamic yet clean, with nice curvy lines.

This immediately put me in mind of how I have always felt that Pacheco was one of the very few outstanding artists to emerge during the overall stultifying blandness of late 90s/early 00s superhero art. At his best, Pacheco refined what had been most promising about his early work into an easily recognizable style that combined smooth draftsmanship with energetic, gut-punching layouts. At the time, I was buying very few superhero comics, but I almost always made an exception for Pacheco, especially his spectacular work on the Avengers Forever maxi-series. I do have to admit that I started losing interest when he started doing his own writing on Fantastic Four, and that the last time I was actively paying attention to Pacheco was more than 10 years ago, when he did a very bland tag-team job with Doug Mahnke on Final Crisis, after J.G. Jones was unable to follow through on his commitment.

^^Update on Carlos Pacheco:

I finally read 2018's "The Life of Captain Marvel" mini-series starring Carol Danvers. Carlos drew all the present-day sequences, and very well, too. Even if the mad energy of his vintage work is largely gone, he can still out-draw most of the people who have come along in the last 15 years.

So, nice to see Carlos has still got it. Unfortunately, the story itself is a mixture of SyFy Channel Original Movie cheese and Hallmark Channel treacle. So I'd only recommend it if you're a lapsed Carlos Pacheco fan like me.

I feel like if I tried to compile a list like this, at least half the artists would be from the "alternative" age. That is, becoming known in the mid-eighties or later... and not primarily for superheroes.

It'd be hard to do. Once in awhile I'll take a deep dive into current webcomics, and some of those have really terrific art, too.

Good point, Cleome. This thread has been rather superhero-heavy until now.

Maybe it's time for it to evolve.

I would have to have Mary Fleener and Gilbert Hernandez on my list. No question about it.

I tend to prefer the previous generation of off-the-beaten-path comics artists, from when it was called "underground" rather than "alternative."

Diane Noomin (whom I've been told I vaguely resemble) and Aline Kominsky-Crumb are only a little younger than my mom, but their work resonates with me more than artists closer to my own age.

And having said that, I do like both Mary Fleener and Gilbert Hernandez a great deal.

My favorite artist from the milieu of Noomin and Kominsky-Crumb is probably Carol Tyler. I sold off my issues of Drawn & Quarterly that she was in a few years ago. It was with a somewhat heavy heart. But I'll always treasure her feel for color and line.

If we are going beyond super-hero artists I'm going to put in a vote for my two favourite duck artists, Carl Barks and Don Rosa. Of course in both cases part of the appeal was their writing as well.

Barks really reinvented the way to look at funny animal characters. His clear lines and detailed worlds tied with his adventure stories to create three dimensional characters out of slapstick movie fill-ins. He made them "people" you cared about instead of just something worth a few chuckles.

Don Rosa tried to follow and expand on Barks legacy and to a large extent succeeded. Barks is still my favourite but Rosa was able to add in some of the techniques developed in later years to good effect.

As I said it is pretty impossible to separate their art from their writing but picking up one of their comics will always bring a smile to my face.

Cleome, I like Carol Tyler, but the reason I prefer Noomin and Kominsky-Crumb is the way that they soften the harsher stuff by filtering it through the farcical antics of their over-the-top alter-egos. Tyler sometimes cuts too deep for my personal comfort.

Stile, I've been a Barks fan since before I could walk or talk. My parents were both fans when they were kids, so they raised me on Barks reprints. I agree with your description of Barks's innovations to the funny animal genre.

Not that crazy about Don Rosa personally, but I do love the Italian Disney stories from the 70s: great artwork by Giorgio Cavazzano, Giovan Battista Carpi, Romano Scarpa, Massimo DeVita, Gino Esposito, Sergio Asteriti, Giulio Chierchini, Franco Lostaffa...and the writers included none other than Jerry Siegel!

Never knew Jerry Seigel wrote some duck stories. Cool.

A number of recent posts in more than one LW forum have inspired me to work harder at keeping this thread vital. The most crucial was this one from Cleome in the current Kill This Thread game in Spaceopoly:


Suddenly, what should have become obvious to me a long time ago finally hit me like a falling ten-ton weight in an old cartoon:

This thread is in serious need of gender diversity! True (and thanks again to Cleome,) we had the recent posts about underground/alternative/indie artists, most of whom are female-identified, but what about all the women who *have* done genre work over the decades?

I hope this post will be only the first step in remedying that. I'll start with my some of favorite current female genre artists (of whom there's been an explosion in the past ten years alone) and work my way further and further back in the past. First up:

Sara Pichelli (whom I did mention earlier here when she placed in my personal all-time Top Ten list)

Now in her late 30s, she is a former animator who switched fields and broke into comics in the mid-2000s. Like a lot of female-identifying genre artists, her work has a great deal of expressiveness in such a way that it never comes across as smarmy, nor treacly, nor cliche. Her line is loose and often angular, but her obvious knowledge of the basics of drawing, combined with a compositional gift similar to that which Cleome identified in her Cynthia Martin post) makes Pichelli both accessible and distinctive. Her breakthrough was a single arc of Runaways with writer Kathryn Immonen, collected in the Runaways: Homeschooling trade. Pichelli reteamed with Immonen for the equally charming miniseries X-Men: Pixie Strikes Back before becoming one of the go-to artists for the ever-controversial (and sometimes interesting, honest) writer Brian Michael Bendis. Their co-creation of Miles Morales, the second Ultimate Spider-Man who now inhabits Marvel's canon universe alongside Peter Parker and the whole Spider-Family, is a breakthrough that cannot be underestimated -- Miles is a biracial superhero (part Black and part Latin) who has managed, in his decade or so of existence, to never suffer the indignities and stereotypes visited upon so many of the non-white superpeople who preceded him. Pichelli followed that up with a brief but memorable run on Guardians of the Galaxy (also written, at the time, by Bendis.) When she was announced as the artist on the much-hyped 2018 relaunch of the Fantastic Four, her future looked bright. Then, for whatever reason, she left F4 after only the first 3 issues -- but at least she stayed around long enough to introduce a potentially awesome new cosmic villainess, the Griever At the End of Time, and to kill the Molecule Man, a character I passionately hate (by now, he's probably been brought back, but I'll always treasure the panel of Griever zapping him good and dead.)

She has been low on the radar since then, but with her frequent collaborator Bendis no longer DC Exclusive, I think she will most likely make a richly deserved return to the spotlight.

I've also edited in a couple posts from another forum with examples of Pichelli's work:

https://legionworld.net/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=913579#Post913579

https://legionworld.net/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=913580#Post913580

Good idea. As I think I have mentioned I often fail to note who the artists are on what I read but I do enjoy the information I read here so please keep it coming.