Hey, look at that! It's Disney versus Time Warner! Okay, I didn't actually know about that piece of news in advance of this column, but I'll throw a little introductory sentence or two in, and, if you squint your eyes jussssst right, we can pretend that this little missive is in relation to that.
One of the things that this column doesn't focus on enough is art. Sure, there's the "this sucks" and some "this doesn't" kind of spittle when necessary, but most of the time, it's the writing that gets the buzz. Now, some people might say that's because Big Two comics don't care that much about art--and there's some truth to that. The continuing saga of behind-the-scenes fill-in inkers, odd issues that show up with two pencilers who have divergent styles, unfinished panels "fixed" by Photoshop trickery, the ability of aggressive coloring to flatten pencilers into a "house style"--if you've read five Big Two comics this year, you've seen it.
But honestly, the reason this column doesn't focus that much on art is pretty basic: art, more so than writing, is incredibly subjective in super-hero comics. Aggressive poster makers who create pages full of "iconic" panels aren't going anywhere anytime soon. Neither are the style of super-hero comics in service of the "everybody is attractive" school. Hyperrealistic "painting" isn't either. I hate all three of those things. If it was biologically possible for my skin to crawl off my body as a result of looking at those three things, I would've died from exposure 15 years ago. (When did Marvels come out? I would've died that exact day.)
But in honor of our new corporate overlords--and yes, the "meet the new boss, same as the old boss" reference has already been made, try again--here's five artists that I do like, all of whom are currently plying their trade at the Big Two. Most of them aren't illustrating scripts of any value, but hey:
bad art never stopped a Grant Morrison fan from pretending that Tony Daniel didn't suck.
Nathan Fox: Nathan has done a bit for Vertigo's
DMZ series, but it's his
Dark Reign: Zodiac book that's the real meat. Although he sometimes gets criticized as a Paul Pope knock-off, Nathan's work is more claustrophobic than Pope's sexpot adventures. Everybody in
Dark Reign: Zodiac--even the "good guys"--is ugly. The rooms shoot up around them, and the weather is always hidden behind electrical wires. He constructs action sequences that are heavy on consequence, if light on logistics. You might not see a lot of jumping in a Nathan Fox comic, but you'll always get up close and personal when meat-hits-floor. His depiction of the damage wreaked upon the Human Torch by Joe Casey's anarchist Zodiac character is one of the more unsettling images to come out of Marvel this year, and considering that this year has pretty much consisted of Norman Osborn killing his way through various playgrounds while chewing on an orphan, that's an accomplishment.
Amanda Conner: I don't know if
The Pro was the first thing that brought Amanda to my attention, but her recent work on
Supergirl has been a minor revelation. Anytime the claim/complaint regarding the lack of "fun" in comics comes up, I usually think to myself "I don't care about that." It's not that I don't like playful comics--I do--it's just that I don't find that DC or Marvel are very good at pulling it off, especially in a marketplace that easily allows for much better versions of "fun" to be found in the newspaper reprint section. (Or in the alternative comics section. Or in the retro DC reprint section. Basically, anywhere that
isn't contemporary super-hero comics.) But Amanda's facial expressions, combined with her flair for capturing the exact seconds of physical action necessary to create the impression of kinetic panels...look, the woman even has me reading
Power Girl. That's something.
Giuseppe Camuncoli: FYI to Marvel Comics, by the way. Giuseppi actually spells his name "Camuncoli", not "Cammoncoli", so maybe you want to have somebody fix that next time his name comes up in the Previews catalog? Nobody likes a spelling nerd, but they certainly dislike massive corporations that can't get the names of their talent right even more. Just saying!
I'd seen Camuncoli's work before, and while I liked it then, it wasn't until this past summer's double feature of
Dark Wolverine and
Hellblazer that he jumped into the "whatever this guy draws, I'm down" category.
Dark Wolverine isn't a story that operated on a whole lot of levels--it's basically Wolverine-as-metrosexual-hipster, as awful as that sounds--but Camuncoli's oddly brilliant take on Mr. Fantastic's stretchable face, as well as an acrobatic Wolverine who bounds like a Slinky, ended up pushing the comic a lot further than its inconsequential plot would seem to allow.
Hellblazer was much less flashy than Wolverine, but the creative variation on the old Mignola/Gaiman style "scary demon girl" stood out for being a particularly effective bit of horror.
Doug Mahnke: I've enjoyed Doug Mahnke's art for a little while now, but his recent work on
Green Lantern still surprised me. Prior to
Green Lantern, I looked at Mahnke's work, thought it was interesting how obsessed he was with drawing the tread on Batman's boots (one shot every three pages, if I'm remembering correctly), smiled at how all the male characters were so quick to pop the veins on their arms and neck whenever the situation demanded...and that's it. But with
Green Lantern, it seems Mahnke has decided to throw out his own version of the McNiven/Hitch school of widescreen destruction, and it's the closest thing to Geof Darrow's
Hard Boiled that super-hero comics has had in years. There's buildings uprooted, gigantic fight sequences that smash across the sort of epic sets that cosmic-based comics allow, and yet everything is endowed with weight and honest physics. You can follow the trajectory of a fist, the turn of a head, collapsing debris--and while even writing that phrase makes it sound pat or necessary, that's the point: it isn't. Thanks to Mahnke, I'm reminded what Big Two super-hero comics can do better than everybody else, when they actually try: big, bold action. (Which is why it would be really, really awesome if they stopped doing what they can't do well: political metaphors and "what emotions mean".)
Tan Eng Huat: Huat is someone whose career I've kept up with for years, and more so than anyone on this list, he's suffered the most. One of the failed
Authority relaunches, a tremendously horrible
Punisher run, a crappy Batman maxi-series--if you're somebody who cares more about writing than art, he's a hard man to be a fan of. This guy illustrates bad scripts. But Huat's career is still one that's worth spending time with, simply because he draws super-hero characters like they're stolen out of an Egon Schiele painting, despite only getting to draw nudity in the most dire of circumstances. That may not sound like much, especially if you don't know Shiele's work, (or don't like it), but in comics, where accurate or exaggerated (read: idealized) depictions are the common preference, Huat's work sticks out. His people are angular, with bodies and faces that discard bone structure when necessary, and they're constantly at odds with entrances and exits, seeming to fold and distend themselves when simple movement is allowed. Similar to the work of Peter Chung (the animator behind
Aeon Flux and
Phantom 2040, and an admitted Schiele fan) Huat's characters are sexual, weird creations. When Huat's strange take on anatomy appears--like it did in Jason Aaron's redneck apocalypse Ghost Rider stories--it lends the story a weird specialness it wouldn't have (and didn't) when it was just straight-edge grime. It's not that Huat draws against the writing, he's probably just doing what he's been hired to do, the best way he knows how. But the result--strange, unique and unsettling--can be brilliant. Here's hoping he gets a script worth his time.
Tucker Stone's writing may be found in print in Comic Foundry and online at The Factual Opinion, where he frequently reviews new releases.
This Ship Is Totally Sinking is © Tucker Stone, 2008
Nathan Fox: Nathan has done a bit for Vertigo's DMZ series, but it's his Dark Reign: Zodiac book that's the real meat. Although he sometimes gets criticized as a Paul Pope knock-off, Nathan's work is more claustrophobic than Pope's sexpot adventures. Everybody in Dark Reign: Zodiac--even the "good guys"--is ugly. The rooms shoot up around them, and the weather is always hidden behind electrical wires. He constructs action sequences that are heavy on consequence, if light on logistics. You might not see a lot of jumping in a Nathan Fox comic, but you'll always get up close and personal when meat-hits-floor. His depiction of the damage wreaked upon the Human Torch by Joe Casey's anarchist Zodiac character is one of the more unsettling images to come out of Marvel this year, and considering that this year has pretty much consisted of Norman Osborn killing his way through various playgrounds while chewing on an orphan, that's an accomplishment.
