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Underground > Comic Books >

Modern Art is Rubbish!

Haus of Mystery

14:23 / 09.09.05

So, flicking through most mainstream comics at present reveals a heavy bias towards 'realistic' artwork. The biggest culprit must be Hitch's art for 'the Ultimates' - as one of the most commercially successful books of the moment, it really sets the bar. However Hitch's art suits the tone of the book perfectly, and he's an undeniably skilled draughtsman, one who has somewhat re-invented the spectacle of Superhero action.
The problem for me though lies in the myriad of 'sub-Ultimates' comics. The Punisher for example has ungainly, badly referenced art that is redeemed only by a moody palette, and Ennis' hard-boiled scripting. The House of M, and Infinite Crisis books likewise seem to strive for gritty 'real' artwork to convince of their gritty status. And I've had enough of it. The Big Two's comics are littered with superheroes who vaguely remind you of B-list actors, and dynamic stylised artwork is largely absent.
Of course their are exceptions. Darwyn Cooke, Paul Pope, Eduardo Risso, our own Cameron Stewart, (indeed nearly all the Seven soldiers artists) and many others work within the mainstream, producing imaginative, stylised and playful artwork that utilises the comic form to it's full. Most 'photo-realistic' art looks more like storyboarding for a film.
Will Eisner (of course) is a classic example: an amazing draughtsman with a loose confident style, who could realistically depict his world whilst playing fast and loose with lighting, angles and perspective. He also played with the very form itself, incorporating framing devices and story titles into the stories themselves. All within a newspaper syndicated strip about a generic masked avenger.
Other oft dropped names (Toth, Kubert, Steranko and the man-god Kirby) all infused their work with experimentation and energy, constantly pushing the form forward. But the current trend for comics that look like 'real' life feels like a cretive cul-de-sac to me. Whoever wanted their comics to look like real life. I want style and explosive creativity, artists who can tell a familiar story in an unfamiliar way. Comics shouldn't look like movies, they should look like comics.
Any thoughts?

Keith, like a scientist

14:45 / 09.09.05

I'm surprised you didn't mention Alex Ross.

I think I agree with you basic thoughts. This was something I was thinking about just after reading the first issue of Ross's JUSTICE comic. It seemed really cold and standoffish... I felt like I was viewing this stuff from a very distant and removed perspective. I'm not sure if this is because it seems...I think it's because it appears to be still photographs with word balloons. The sequential nature of them has been removed. I love Ross's talent and the illustrations are beautiful, but it doesn't have the motion or lifelikeness of Stewart or Philip Bond. Artists like these seem to be able to capture the personality of someones' inherent "life" even while doing illustrations that are fairly stylized.

14:49 / 09.09.05

Hmmm... JHW3 would be an example of one that straddles both... some sense of realism, as well as explorative style. What say you to that?

I think the photo-realism thing is only a phase. The strength of DCU properties on television has been in large part due to the heavily stylized work of Bruce Timm and his studio. I think that's important factor to your argument.

Also: What comics SHOULD be suggests a subjective debate. However, Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics gives actual scientific proof that simplified style works better, and is... better... I guess.

Regrettable Juvenilia

15:12 / 09.09.05

I think a zero-tolerance policy on Alex Ross is what's needed. If I see another picture of a bulky pensioner who works out I'm going to scream. If you're the sort of person who thinks Grandad Aquaman is a good look, then we clearly want very different things out of comics.

Say no to DIGNITY, kids.

15:16 / 09.09.05

I want to know when Flash decided to grow his hair out. Will this be covered in House of M(etal)?

Haus of Mystery

16:06 / 10.09.05

I agree about Alex Ross. It should be awe-inspiring and is instead joyless. I don't care what Superman would really look like. Ross is to the 00's what McKean was to the 90's, and Sinkiewittchzhzhh was to the 80's; the supposed pinnacle of mainstream comic art. But those guys had style - Ross looks like advertising artwork.

08:16 / 11.09.05

I don´t care for photo-realism at all. It´s boring, and the comic medium is perfect for the craziest experiments.

In the 80ies my favourite comic artist was Walt Simonson. His Thor comics were amazing! Thor was always so over the top it was ridiculous, but WS pushed it even farther. Vikings with machineguns could never look so cool if you´d have gone for photo-realism.

Or later his fantastic four run: Galactus sucking up the universe as a giant black hole killing that black celestial. Awesome. I still have pages and pages where I copied those comics.

10:19 / 12.09.05

Comics rarely suit a "realistic" style. I think the current striving for this style has to be a fad as not many people can do it well(JHW3 and Brian Hitch) and time will out the more uninspired artists (Tim Bradstreet being of particular annoyance to me).

Looking around though, I can't say that there's actually that much of it about. Because of the amount of time it takes to produce I think we can all rest assured that comics aren't about to collapse under an avalanche of pictures of badly posed artists' friends redrawn in wrinkly skin-tight costumes which betray slight paunches, double chins etc.

Regrettable Juvenilia

10:35 / 12.09.05

Tim Bradstreet being of particular annoyance to me

I think the main problem with Bradsheet is that he knocks out 1 Hellblazer and 1 Punisher cover a month, and each one looks almost exactly the same.

I'm depressed by the idea that Alex Ross is a big name artist for the 21st century: I'd rather think that he was a 90s phenomenon, and we'd moved on now to a period of Quitely-inspired weirdness, or Cooke/Stewart/Dini cartoony goodness. But I admit the idea of comics "moving on" is wildly over-optimistic.

I'm Rick Jones, bitch

12:03 / 12.09.05

Quick, someone post that Alex Ross Phantom Cosplay picture!

13:43 / 12.09.05

I seem to recall a comment about Neal Adam’s Batman depiction being about as realistic as it gets for a man in a superhero costume, and I think that’s pretty accurate.

I think Alex Ross’s work is gorgeous, really great to look at, but I find that dwelling on the detail of the art slows down the reading and doesn’t make me want to move to the next panel, and thus is more suited to his illustrated-prose-style works with Paul Dini than comics such as Kingdom Come, the speech bubbles look somehow out of place to me. For want of a better phrase, I call this ‘drawing the eye to the next panel’ skill ‘narrative momentum’, and I find it lacking in many Moebius-drawn stories, too, because the linework is so lovely to look at.

But I dyecress. I’m not really bothered about realism in comic art, or even enormously pretty art, as long as it gets the story across, and perhaps has some degree of internal consistency to it; I don’t think a superhero figure drawn in the Image style would look right on a street scene drawn by Will Eisner, for example. So if the style is photorealism, I guess I’d like it to be consistently so, unless there’s some story-related reason for variation (such as in the Promethea issue where they get booted up to a higher level of reality).

Otherwise, as long as I know what’s going on and who’s doing what I’m usually quite content. As long as pretty pictures aren’t being used to hide lazy plotting or pacing or (horrors) the absence of a solid story, of course…

13:51 / 12.09.05

For want of a better phrase, I call this ‘drawing the eye to the next panel’ skill ‘narrative momentum’...

Why invent a new phrase when "storytelling" works just as well?

14:08 / 12.09.05

Fair point, though I tend to split that general term into component parts like composition, my-made-up-term, ‘camera angles’ etc, when trying to figure out what it is about certain artists’ work that makes me feel it works, or doesn’t, or whatever.

Purely an arbitrary and essentially personal thing, but it’s one of the facets that I feel is most lacking in work which tends towards the photorealistic (or sometimes just the detailed) – it makes the eye dwell on the panel and focus on every shard of glass in the exploding skylight or the wrinkles in the cape and interrupts the flow of the story. For want of a better analogy, it feels like a DVD sticking a bit and keeping the image onscreen just a fraction too long.

Taking the ‘detailed’ example fleetingly referred to above, this was, for my money, one of the problems with the first Miller/Lee ‘All Star’ Batman thing – the detail and hatching of Lee’s linework tends to incline the eye to dwell and take in all the background, etc, whereas Miller’s staccato captions kind of work against that. As opposed to say, Kingdom Come where the captions and detailed art felt more paced in step, both suited to a more sedate pace, as it were.

03:25 / 13.09.05

I was thinking about this the other day and wondered what the difference between Alex Ross and Boris Vajello was. I couldn't come up with much.

Kyle Baker is another cartoony-type comic artist guy.

Just thinking, perhaps there's a problem with the western idea that when you draw a comic story, you use a consistent stylistic approach throughout. Compare this with manga, which happily switches between cartoony and realistic depending on the ideas being put across. Examples of this are the way that for doubletakes and comedic moments your characters reduce to uber-cartoony icons, but for more dramatic moments they're much more "realistic" (as realistic as manga gets) in tone. Also the use of more realism-inspired backgrounds and less so foregrounds, as referenced in McCloud's Understanding Comics.

Maybe the thing is that those who are more cartoony have a more elastic style that they use to vary the moods of the story and make them fit what's going on better than those who are more realism-driven?

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

07:20 / 13.09.05

I think my problem with photo-realism is that it always seems like it's trying to ape film, rather than using the strengths of the comic medium. If you want to make movies, make movies. If you're making comics, deal with it and make fucking great comics.

Haus of Mystery

08:41 / 13.09.05

I’m not really bothered about realism in comic art, or even enormously pretty art, as long as it gets the story across
Photo-realistic art often sacrifices basic storytelling methods (or rather sequential art methods) in my mind. If Bryan Hitch can't find the right picture of Sam Jackson, Nick Fury's gonna look seriously wonky.

11:35 / 13.09.05

I'll admit, Jim Lee blew me away when he first showed up on X-Men. He took Marc Silvestri's fashion-designer sketchbook style and turned it into a gorgeous photo shoot. Then Image got so cannibalistic, so incestuous, it was like they were only reading each other's comics and circle-swiping 'round and 'round, Lee started stealing Liefeld's frankly inferior scratchy scribble inking style, lost what made him so good, and disappeared in the sea of Lee/Leifeld imitators, some of whom were frankly outstripping them at that stage. I really don't know why you'd switch to an inferior art style to the one you have. Erik Larsen did the same thing, and as far as I know, neither had Wally Wood or Gerard Ashworth's excuse of brain damage from terminal alcoholism. Then again, Lee sold his whole travelling show to D.C., I guess that shows how much he cares about his creations.

Haus of Mystery

11:53 / 13.09.05

It's actually worth going and checking out some of the earlier 'B' releases from Image (Brigade, Supreme atc) just to see how unbelievably fucking amateurish and bogawful they really are. Mindbending that they supposedly were supposedly the 'hi-fi' version of comics at the time.
Jim Lee - world's most overrated artist.

19:08 / 13.09.05

Dude - Youngblood 1 needs to be seen to be believed... and that was supposed to be A-list

19:10 / 13.09.05

I guess the main point where more photo-realist art often falls down is with the dynamism of other comic art styles. All to often photo-realist art just comes across as flat and static.

P. Horus Rhacoid

21:42 / 13.09.05

The comic which got me back into comics when I was in high school was The Kindly Ones, and a lot of what I loved about that was Mark Hempel's superb, reductive art. I almost always prefer iconic, cartoony art over more realistic. I agree, a lot of motion and depth of expression are lost when the artist goes for super realism, and realism does seem to jar with storytelling as well. Someone upthread mentioned word balloons- this is actually a huge issue with me. I find that the flat, empty space in a word balloon clashes horribly with art that's trying to be realistic (this is also true of mixed media art, which is one of the problems I have with Dave McKean, though his art is amazing). It constantly breaks up the flow of the story and reminds me that I'm reading a comic, when the story, not the medium, should be the focus.

I'm not sure why it is that realistic art tends to be stiff and lack the motion of stylized art, because I've certainly seen photos with their fair share of motion. Detail overload probably has something to do with it, but it also probably has something to do with the talents of the artist.

As a side note, I have a friend who is convinced that Jim Lee is the best artist working in comics today. I've tried to make him see the error of his ways, but I'm afraid he's a hopeless case.

00:36 / 14.09.05

Most photorealist art is done from reference, often, either a posing model or a posing model in a photo. Which, unfortunately, means that it's almost always a static image, posed carefully, with concern to light and shape, but not to movement.
Caveat: I despise doing photorealism in drawing and painting, and don't particularly care for it, just looking. The actions and methods are unappealing to me in a way that cartooning and abstraction - feeling more integral and honest - are not.
I notice that I liked Alex Ross' work on 'Marvels' and little since. Of course, I hadn't read any interviews or anything with him at the point 'Marvels' came out, which may very well have a whole lot to do with that.

Haus of Mystery

13:09 / 14.09.05

Someone like Brian Bolland has taken photo-realism to something of an art form, but for me it's his exquisite linework that makes art so attractive - it almost seems like an engraving. That said, he's a far better cover artist than interior. Even Dredd, his defgining work is somewhat stiff and clunky. Compare it to the man-god Mike McMahon, whose lumpy battered Mega City inhabitants practically leapt of the page.

Regrettable Juvenilia

12:57 / 12.01.06

STOP ALEX ROSS BEFORE I KILL AGAIN.

What has he done to Superman's face?

13:15 / 12.01.06

Looks like Strom Thurmond.
Also, in a bizarre pop-cultural nightmare move, he's made The Joker, Batman's nemesis, look like Michael Keaton's Beetlejuice.
So, considering the march of photo-realism what do people think of Mark Millar's new Marvel project,1985?
The future of comics, a desperate attempt to keep kids interested, or just Deidre's Photo Casebook with body-paint?

13:41 / 12.01.06

Alex Ross, awful - I like my comic books to look like comics - Kevin Maguire manages to make comics look like comics and more realistic that anything Ross has ever done, just by giving the characters, er, character...

The only photo realisim in comics I'm interested in is a return of Doomlord.

22:17 / 12.01.06

Doomlord - yes, but only if Morrison and Moore team up to write it.

Speaking of how realism wrecks comics and how dumb people look dressed up as superheroes for photos, &c, the current crop of monthly books have ads for the Flash TV show on DVD on their back covers and - wow - I had a vague memory of how dumb that costume looked, but woah mama that's fuckin' TERRIBLE, ain't it? Makes Grampa Aquaman look like Batman Beyond.

22:23 / 12.01.06

I hate to say it in the current climate, buuuut, Benny, LOL.

God I Hate Alex Ross's work, and I'm very glad Barbelith does too.

That looks like a geriatric Larry Hagman behind Batman's mask.

04:15 / 14.01.06

Poor Flash.
And I've released what's worse than Ross' stagey-staged-stageness, and that's his color choices. Maybe it's just me wanting a DayGlo pop everything, but some variety might be nice, yes? And people looking like they're (a) in motion and (b) doing the thing they're actually supposed to be represented as doing.
His Galactus bits in 'Marvels', which are almost framed as direct steals from other artists were pretty good.

ONLY NICE THINGS

12:09 / 14.01.06

Slightly, offtpic, but can I draw your attention to:

This year’s hot star is yesterday’s Heath Ledger

Once again, I show my status as Hollywood insider with a clever movie reference. I mean, who the Hell knows what Heath Ledger is doing these days?

Haus of Mystery

13:01 / 14.01.06

Apparently he's in this gay superhero movie.