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| although i haven't read it for a while, i remember finding grendel/batman 2 pretty diappointing. for one thing, grendel prime is not as engaging to me as hunter rose. for another, i find matt wagner's artwork increasingly less attractive as his career progresses. it's not that he's gotten worse, it's just that...well, it happens with a lot of talented artists, they find a cartooning style that they feel comfortable with and i find, especially with really simple drawing, the appeal becomes kind of hit or miss. i really like jeff smith's art on bone which is really simple but i can't stand chester brown. even artists i revere like bill sienkiewicz also have "cartoony" styles which i don't find particularly compelling. as frank miller's art becomes increasingly self-referential (by which i mean that he draws characters in poses and using techniques that have a basis in the already stylized reality of his previous efforts which in the past at least referred more to reality. look at the physical proportions of the characters in his recent work, like dk2 or any of the sin city books he's done recently: huge hands and feet, skinny little bodies, women's anatomy becoming bizarre in a way that makes jim lee's art suddenly a paragon of naturalistic posture, as opposed to say, dark knight returns where his characters are grotesque but less cartoony). anyway, something about matt wagner's style doesn't do it for me anymore. i loved the original mage series but not mage ii. his writing gets better (especially in sandman mystery theater and i'd have to read all of grendel in sequence which i don't think i've ever done to see if it flows as well, but the concept is so strong... like david mack with kabuki, matt wagner's created a fantastic vehicle/framework for telling basically any kind of story he wants to tell) but his line quality... maybe that's what it is. something that cartoony jeff smith or cameron stewart have is a very attractive quality to their lines. maybe it's the brush... also i don't think matt wagner writes batman particularly well. in the past he's created a good visual atmosphere (very good design sense, that matt wagner has) for gotham and the batworld (also in the legends of the dark knight story: faces) but...i forget what i was saying. his batman stories just seem too run of the mill...without the moral ambivalence that makes wesley dodds or hunter rose interesting. actually, i'd be interested to know who does write batman well. frank miller played the one note really well, grant morrison sort of avoided him in arkham asylum, alan moore never really tackled it, ed brubaker in catwoman (i just bought issue 10), sort of ignores that aside from being a supporting character he's still, y'know, BATMAN (and best played, as he has been post-dark knight returns and probably before although i'm not as familiar, with a little pathos) even though they all wrote good stories in the batman universe. what does this have to do with grendel? not terribly much. matt wagner's art disappointed me in g/b 2. |
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