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Mm. What Pollack lacked, I think, was any lightness of touch. What was playful in Grant's hands became merely assaultive. There was plenty of good material there, but the reader really ahd to struggle with it.
To be fair, the art didn't do Pollack's writing any favors. Again using Grant Morrison's work as a benchmark: his most successful stories have melded trippy ideas with crisp cartooning—Chas Truog's on ANIMAL MAN, Yeowell's on ZENITH and SEBASTIAN O, Case's on DOOM PATROL. (See also Phil Hester's work on Millar's SWAMP THING, another great Comics Story of Ideas, or the clean-lined Slavic studio work on Delano's OUTLAW NATION, or Frank Quitely's segment of 2020 VISIONS, and so on).
When paired with looser, more experimental art—McKean on ARKHAM ASYLUM, Muth on THE MYSTERY PLAY, Bachalo on NEW X-MEN—the results are less impressive: the art and the writing work against each other (see also Thompson & Kramer on the storyline that saw THE INVISIBLES shedding half its readers, including myself—or Ashley Wood's disastrous v3.2 pages).
Pollack's run was at its best at the start, when Case's pencils provided a much-needed carryover (see also: Chas Truog on Milligan's ANIMAL MAN run). After that, though, the art flailed around for a while before settling in with Ted McKeever's bold, murky expressionism—which worked brilliantly with more tightly-structured scripts (see also: Milligan's EXTREMIST from about the same period), but which only (for me) exacerbated Pollack's weaknesses (see also: Steve Pugh's dark, frankly ugly art on Jamie Delano's ANIMAL MAN, or all of 2020 VISIONS except Frank Quitely's bit). |
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