Via Rags Morales's message board is a page of the new Nightwing with him on pencils & Mike Bair on inks. I think it's pretty sweet.
But it does bring up to me the old question: can this sort of bravura classic art style still attract hoards of fans the way more abstract "flavor-of-the-month" works do?
There is some comic art that is currently hot that seem to lack all facial expression and subtlety. They belong to that classification of comics art I call "cold" -- very stylish and maybe even beautiful, but no personality.
Whereas art like Morales/Bair's seems to be built around the emotional imperative of the character or scene in question. They almost seem to be asking: "where is the character's motivation?" and take it from that point.
I call that sort of art, for lack of a better term and in the interest of contrast, "warm."
I honestly don't know what readers get from "cold" art -- other than perhaps that "wicked cool!" factor. Okay, say the overly-stylized drawing in question is "wicked cool" -- just like a car or video game character. If there is no emotional impact -- how does it serve the story? What do you get out of it?
And if you're a comic writer and a "cold" artist illustrates your book -- do you get frustrated that something is lost?
It's like you can either get Cate Blanchett or Jessica Simpson to star in your movie.
What do you think?
It's an interesting question. I think you confuse the issue by throwing "stylized" in there. After all, would you call Bill Sinkiewicz cold? I wouldn't.
ReplyDeleteEven Todd McFarlane, for all his faults, was full of emotion. If you weren't breathless with excitement as you read the classic INCREDIBLE HULK #340, with Wolverine dropping in on the big Grey giant... well... you had no comic book soul. Sure, it was an old-fashioned fight, but you could feel every swing of it. That's expressiveness.
That said, I totally agree with the point you are driving at. I was putting my new comics into a box yesterday and I picked up "SILVER SURFER IN THY NAME" and was absolutely convinced that I had forgotten to read it! Unthinkable, right? You get a new stack and you read them right away?
But I really really didn't think I'd read it. Then I opened it up and I remembered that I had. It just hadn't sunk in. The story was vapid and the art...
while enormously complex and pretty and flashy...
had nothing.
NOTHING.
No heart at all. I couldn't stand it. It went in one eye and out the other.
Spider-Man: Threat or Menace? Always with the loaded questions, and without an example, how do we know "warm" from "cold?"
ReplyDeleteBarry Smith is another neo-classicist, but his characters have pretty much always given off an air of aloofness. Is he warm or cold?
Phil Hester and Mike Mignola don't tend to depict the most expressive characters, but that lends them a sense of mood and an introspective nature to their characters. Are they warm or cold?
Phil Jimenez's characters will scream or cry at the drop of a hat, but I always read his art as "cold" regardless, because it plays as calculated melodrama to me.
I'm inclined to assume you're thinking of "hot" artists like Steve McNiven, Dave Finch, and even Bryan Hitch, in which case I can sort of agree. These are guys who've photo-realized themselves to the point of the comic equivalent of dead-eyed mo-cap zombies. They are all capable of bringing the "kewl," and for some projects*, that's all you really need. I like kewl in moderation. I even enjoy Rob Liefeld from time to time, and not just as self-parody.
Ultimately, if Rags Morales isn't a hot, guaranteed sell-through artist, it's largely his own fault. He doesn't seem to court the press, the hot collaborators or properties-- hell, he never even takes up with first choice companies. You're telling me this guy couldn't have followed Hitch on Ultimates if he'd wanted to? You're only as hot as your exposure, and when you follow Identity Crisis with fill-in work on Wonder Woman or JSA Classified, you've clearly opted out of the limelight. Even Nightwing is a second-tier title from the #2 super-hero publisher on which he'll join an editor-turned-writer with a middling profile. That's a choice, y'know?
(*Anything by Mark Millar or Warren Ellis, for starters.)
I hate Nightwing's costume, & kind of always has. Was it just me, or did future Titan cartoon Nightwing's bird logo fit into an S-shield shape? That is really what I want.
ReplyDeleteI don't like Rags Morales art. I disliked it when he was at Valiant and dislike it now. If fact, he's one of the few guys I won't buy a book if I see his name on the cover.
ReplyDeleteAs for warm v cold, I like the cold, please. I'd much rather see cool pictures that give me a thrill than a picture of a guy having the emotion he should have. I dunno, I can't explain it, but I like the hyper stylized art more than a guy like Morales.
Like my favorite artists are Mike Allred, Dave Lapham, and Jae Lee. Make sense?
I think i get what you mean by "cold" and "warm" and i also prefer the "warm". Though it seems hard to define. To me stylized is not less warm. Darwyn Cooke and Bryan Lee O'Malley are warm. Maybe "expressive" as opposed to "depictive" is closer???
ReplyDeleteI find both Mike Allred and David Lapham to be "warm" b/c they're expressive. (I'm not familiar enough with Jae Lee to comment there.)
Rags is one of my favorites, and him drawing a book makes me much more likely to buy it.
What i find less moving is what is often called "photo realistic". Maybe that's b/c one of comic's big draws for me is the wild imagination of them, the ability to tell fantastic, idiosyncratic, largely "unreal" stories.
I'm with Giantkillermantis. I'm not a huge fan of "photorealistic" for its own sake. I tend to find that fairly "cold."
ReplyDeleteInterestingly, the big image you led the post with strikes me as cold due to the cool blue monochromatic color scheme. But beyond that, I think I do agree with you.
Rags Morales has a very expressive style. I think he takes his characters' emotions over the top, and I don't have a problem with that in the least. At least you know they're supposed to be feeling something. He's got an exagarrated take on "realism," and I've been a fan of his for a long time, even if I severely dislike a certain prestigious project he worked on a few years back.
To me, the warm artists are people like Mike Allred. His work has a pop art charisma and exudes the joy of drawing and doing comics. Or, in the case of the characters, being IN comics. Some of the credit- maybe a lot of it- should go to his wife Laura and her vibrant coloring.
A lot of the big names do leave me cold basically because they're using the trappings of comic book art without the underlying rules or basics. Todd McFarlane was in a "how to" video I once watched with Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld proudly advising would-be comic artists to be lazy and sloppy.
Not that I think Jim Lee is either of those things. I do find his art a little too slick and cold at times, but the man can flat-out draw. His disciple J. Scott Campbell surpasses him in the warmth department but all-too frequently uses his immense talents on childish dreck.
I don't think Michael Turner could draw his way out of a paper bag, on the other hand. He personally seems quite warm from interviews and I take it he's a super nice guy... but his stiff, clumsy figure work and rubber-stamp facial expressions do nothing for me. Part of that is because of the digital coloring that just sucks the life out of already static poses and compositions.
And in answer to Bradydale, I actually would call Bill Sinkiewicz cold. I don't think in his case this is particularly a negative. It's just that the extreme angularity of his figure work and stylistic excesses overwhelm the humanity of the characters. Sometimes his pages are more stylistic exercises than comic pages concerned with storytelling and the characters' emotions. I know he does a lot of this to convey character states in an almost abstract way, but that's just it... too abstract.
But for him, I think that's fine.
Whereas Jack Kirby could do rocklike angular figures with absolutely wonky anatomy and really over-the-top emotionalism and just blow a page apart. I think a lot of Kirby's warmth comes from his absolute love for humanity and inherent ability to nail primal emotions and story beats.
Exaggerated, I mean.
ReplyDeleteYou know who does great facial expressions? Amanda Conner. In Black Canary & Green Arrow Wedding Special #1, she gave Wonder Woman more personality with one look of bemusement at Superman's cosmic corn-fed naivete than the last 3-4 WW writers did in their entire runs. Facial expressions are vastly underutilized (I blame Rob Liefield, whom I blame for everything evil in the universe) and Conner's work is just outstanding in that regard.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately for me the artist who immediately came to my mind at the combination of "stylish" and "lacking in facial expression and subtlety" was Jack Kirby. Yes, the man could draw an explosive action scene like nobody else, but to me his faces often have a dull, mask-like quality, especially in Kirby's later years.
ReplyDeleteAnd one artist whose popularity I don't "get" is Alex Ross (photorealistic to the point of boredom in my view).
The problem, as has been pointed out, is that the difference between "hot" and "cold" art has not really been defined more clearly than "art I like" and "art that leaves me cold" and that in some respect the way they are characterized seems self-contradictory.
In art in general I find that "classic" art frequently lacks in personality and that it is usually more easy for an artist's individuality to show in more stylized works. (In a classic style, an artist has to be very good to become "recognizable" as an individual artist).
And I too find that stylized drawing and (emotional) expressiveness go well together, which is why a lot of artists who tell stories where emotions play a larger role than action and adventure use a "cartoony" or otherwise stylized mode of drawing. Which by the way can require a certain degree of artistic subtlety - when you have faces that are made of as few lines as those in "Peanuts", "The Simpsons" or "Tintin", a difference of a fraction of a millimetre in the length or placement of a line can become crucial.
But it does bring up to me the old question: can this sort of bravura classic art style still attract hoards of fans the way more abstract "flavor-of-the-month" works do?
There is some comic art that is currently hot that seem to lack all facial expression and subtlety. They belong to that classification of comics art I call "cold" -- very stylish and maybe even beautiful, but no personality.
I really enjoy Conner's work, too. She's another one that makes me more likely to buy a comic.
ReplyDeletemenshevik: The niche market of superhero fans reliably favor more "realistic", heavily detailed art. The indie audience, however, seems to favor more cartooning, as does the audience that buys primarily Tokyopop, Viz, etc.
Menshevik- I think that's a fair assessment of Kirby. I don't find his warmth in the characters' "acting" so much. And forget subtlety. Even the gang at Jack Kirby Collector had a funny line about Kirby using a wild screaming face for all scenes of intense emotions... and for quiet, sensitive moments as well.
ReplyDeleteBut I think the Thing walking in the rain, with his head down in "This Man, This Monster" and Johnny's crazed reaction to having been sent all the way across the galaxy by the Watcher in order to get a weapon to stop Galactus a couple of issues before are good examples of how he could get across a dynamic sense of emotional states with fairly broad strokes.
But I don't feel it's cold at all. It's some of the most personal and idiosyncratic storytelling ever published and full of the same warmth that the man himself displayed whenever fans would show up at his house unannounced. It's rare for someone in any field to have that sort of immediate connection. Plugged directly into the id or something!
There is some comic art that is currently hot that seem to lack all facial expression and subtlety. They belong to that classification of comics art I call "cold" -- very stylish and maybe even beautiful, but no personality.
Yeah, I think so too.
Giantkillermantis -
ReplyDeleteI would largely agree with you there, which may one of the main reasons why superheroes developed into such a niche market (pronounced "fanboy ghetto"). But that does not mean that it would be impossible to produce superhero comics in a cartoony style or even that such comics had not been produced (just think of Jack Cole's Plastic Man). But my main point was that it is very possible to do emotionally expressive faces in otherwise stylized art. Some artists have already been mentioned in this respect, I would also add Paul Smith (art nouveau-ish) and Alan Davis (verging on cartoonish) as artists I consider "warm" but stylish. By the way, I too find photorealistic art mostly "cold", but would say that e. g. Norman Rockwell showed that it can also be "warm".
Joel Bryan -
well, I would say that Kirby does show that facial expressions are not everything when it comes to conveying emotions to readers or an audience. For instance, since O.S. finished her post by bringing up two actresses, it is worth recalling that e.g. in classic Greek theatre and Noh theatre the actors' faces were/are hidden behind masks and that e.g. Buster Keaton did manage to convey all sorts of emotions without changing his expression (and without words). Part of this is body language, and that was something to which Kirby's style certainly lent itself.