Comic Book Art?!


Question: Recently(and by that i mean the past ten years), the art work of comic books has differed significantly from the 60's-90's style of artwork. I am not referring to character design, i am talking about the overall look of the art in the books.

So my question is:

When did this change occur?


Answers: Recently(and by that i mean the past ten years), the art work of comic books has differed significantly from the 60's-90's style of artwork. I am not referring to character design, i am talking about the overall look of the art in the books.

So my question is:

When did this change occur?

Comic art has always been a cheap form of illustration. Nothing has changed that, ever. Whatever people are looking for, that's what comics give them. The earliest comics were thus like any other cheap form of illustration -- very cheap. They were more closely related to pamphlets and other forms of newspaper art than they were to even pulp illustration, which generally required more time. In the earliest days, the teens and twenties, they were aware of modernism, and in fact influenced by early modernists because the latter did so many important pictures of modern life.

The first true comics style was developed by Noel Sickles, who by copying black and white photographs (which tended to reduce the range of values in pictures by about ten per cent, evolved a realistic seeming style which could be drawn quickly and once it was adopted and popularized by his friend Milton Caniff in Terry And the Pirates enabled dozens and ultimately hundreds of artists to work on the same material because they so looked like each other.

At the same time there were humor books which required the same skills as Disney and Fleischer were putting in animation and classically trained artists like Lou Fine, Mac Raboy and Alex Raymond doing their thing.

As we got to the fifties, people assimilated modern imagery as they hadn't yet Picasso's markmaking, and guys like Neal Adams, Stan Drake -- Fine and Raymond were also copying from photographs, while trying to avoid flattening out the value range which was something Sickles and Caniff had embraced.

When the sixties got into full swing, fluxus, Pop Art and other movements which made pure markmaking accessible to the general public took over. Artists like Kubert, Alex Toth, and Kirby who had all started as Caniffians (which was what Sickles's style was called) but developed either more careful draftsmanship (Kubert and Toth) or a strong sense of design (Toth and Kirby) were all the rage. Kirby exaggerated everything: perspective, figures, muscles, light and dark areas. This was especially influential. One of my friends, and I'm sure many others, said when he did the Eternals he'd forgotten more about drawing than most people would ever know.

That exaggeration influenced what you might almost call the last generation of Caniffians. You see, the realistic style was now becoming somewhat easier, and while sixties graphics in general emphasized markmaking (look at fillmore posters or any issue of Life Magazine or Saturday Evening Post for the ads) as the seventies got underway artists like Rowena Merrill and James Warhola -- to name two examples in Science Fiction illustration -- came along who were busier and fussier. While a few Kirbyesque Caniffians like George Perez, Marshall Rogers, John Byrne and Walter Simonson thrived into the eighties, art directors at the big comics companies were increasingly looking for more realistic work.

Adam Kubert, Joe's son, is a good example of that. The last issues of Thor actually look more like Sidney Sime than they do like Jack Kirby. Sime was an illustrator best remembered for his work with Lord Dunsany. He tended to mix the lovely and the grotesque, but had a good sense of design and sense of the values in his pictures, even if some of his renderings were crude and he mixed styles very openly. Kubert's academic drawing is very good (There are a few places where he chooses what an academician might call bad linework though). He tends to mix styles on his pages and does not exaggerate perspective at all, something which even John Buscema did occasionally when he worked on the strip and which Simonson did a lot.

By the mid-nineties a new style was the norm, influenced by Kirby and other caniffians, by the realists who came after them and by Japanese animation. Everything is as busy as it has been since the 1980's -- while there is exaggeration there is no concommittent simplification happening in it. The style has evolved over longer than the last ten years, and the connection is very clear (if discouraging) to those of us who've been following it for a while.

What can I tell you? Hold on tight, this too will pass.

I'm not sure what change you're talking about, specifically, but in the early 90s Image Comics was created (1992, to be exact). Image influenced the comics that came out, because it was so popular. A lot of artists started trying to immitate the styles of Liefeld, McFarlane, etc.

Another change was in colouring, and lettering. Comic creators were able to use computer programs to colour and letter books. So instead of mainly flat colours, with only a few tones to choose from, there could be gradients of any colour you wanted. This happened around the same time as Image.

it's evoleved year to year but the 90's was a very different time in terms of art, people like jim lee, lae lee, todd macfarlane, rob liefeld and more changed art. more recently there has also been a lot of "magna" type of art has also emerged

if you like comics join my yahoo group at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/superheros...



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