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Rian Hughes. He gets respect as an artist and a good income as a designer and creator of fonts. But reading Dare last week on computer what immediately struck me was how masterfully it was illustrated, how precisely placed each line was to such powerful effect. It's always cartoony but that sense of design moves the eye forward through the story and snags it at just the right places. No frame is cluttered. The vistas, like the early spread of London, are laid out with an architect's eye and a storytelling sensibility but still capture something of the children's book in their approach to sci-fi. He does emotions in a few lines on an angularly-modelled face, like nothing from nature, a language exclusive to comics and cartoons, but even a neophyte reader would know exactly what that character was feeling. It's incredible stuff.
And yet apart from a couple of stories with Grant that will be reprinted shortly and the utter waste of talent that was his art for Mark Millar's fucking awful Robo-Hunter, he's hardly done any comics art. He doesn't really have to, I guess, and didn't get enough acclaim to make it worthwhile. But damn he's good.
(I'm with DavidXBrunt on Ron Smith, as well; he didn't draw any of those Dredd spreads or covers that McMahon and Bolland excelled at, he never got the big stories, but so many classic Dredd stories were told by his pen. Thousands of pages them and he rarely gets a mention. The Graveyard Shift and Citizen Snork are particular highlights.) |
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