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Review: Comic Art Now
Comic Art Now
Written by Dez Skinn, with a Foreword by Mark Millar
Published by Collins Design, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers. $29.95 USD
From the first paragraph of Skinn's Introduction, with its confusing references to Carole Bayer Sager, Peter Allen, Barenaked Ladies and Huge Jackman, I was concerned that he as author and I as reader just wouldn't be on the same page, and that turns out to be true for the most part in this coffee table book of comics art meant to represent the contemporary pinnacle of the medium. Actually, I'm not quite sure what Skinn's purpose is here. The Introduction goes on to hint that now that comics have come of age and are popular worldwide, this book would represent the best of what's popular, or maybe he's after something else altogether. Maybe it's just the stuff he likes best, or what was available to reprint cheap, or the best and cheapest of artists he knows? I don't know, but since I've been told before not to try to guess at creators' motivations, let's just look at what the book is.
We begin with Chapter 1, Heroes and Villains, with a nice, busy double-page spread of various Marvel Comics heroes and villains drawn by Ron Garney. Now, I like Ron Garney a lot. He's not a brilliant, envelope-pushing artist, but he's a reliable, appealing, underrated craftsman. OK. If Skinn is going in this direction, more power to him. There's a brief description of Garney's process and a quote from him on how inker Bill Reinhold complements his work. But then on the next page we get a few panels of not a comic, per se, but a superhero comics-inspired ad for something called "Aussiebum," drawn by a John Royle, who apparently works on a UK Spider-Man comic as well. The style is standard, fairly generic superhero stuff, which you'd probably expect in an advertisement, in Royle's defense, but hardly justification for a coffee table book. Then follow nice, if to my eyes fairly derivative images of The Hulk, Wolverine, Spider-Man and Thunderbolts by Garney, Carlo Pagulayan and Mike Deodato, Jr., a striking Alex Ross take on the Golden Age Daredevil, a computer-aided but rather disappointing Michael Golden Thing/Surfer battle, and some unknown to me characters and teams such as The Danger's Dozen, S.T.E.M. Cell (Ha!), Garth, Jet Black, Crimson Todger and others, which I'm guessing are European album and comics properties. And believe me, I'd love to be blown away by artists I haven't seen before, but Huw-J Davis, Cosmo White, Jack Lawrence and Dan Boultwood didn't do it, and for the most part don't appear like they have the skills to make it in North American comics.
My worry already was that while Skinn certainly knew about lots of comics I'd never heard of, he wasn't going to show me much if any that I felt I was missing. Chapter 2 has a lovely CG space image by John Ridgway, an artist I know who has always used the latest technology to stay interesting, perhaps to his career detriment as his evolutions mean he doesn't have a recognizable style. Then there's a pencil page from a Starship Troopers comic, followed by the final version, which isn't much different except that it highlights how the computer coloring is way overdone. There's some nice stuff from Rian Hughes and Matt Haley, and a monstrosity called "Nunblade" that I hope is a joke and not a real character, some crazy manga called Dominator by a Tony Luke, some decent Judge Dredd stuff by Siku, and again, some mediocre stuff you're not missing.
This is just the way of the book. For every startling image by an Al Davison, Carl Critchlow, Bryan Talbot, Ben Templesmith or Sean Phillips, there's plenty more average work by artists known or unknown, and sometimes annoyingly repetitive. I mean, how many Norm Breyfogle pages does a reader need to get the idea? By the book's end, and with no final attempt by Skinn to pull it together into some sort of context, one feels this book was a missed opportunity. Comics art is at least as important as story, and most would agree there are many exciting artists working today, and yet Skinn excludes so many to focus on genre artists, and many of them not of high caliber. There are some good artists here, for sure, but the reasonably well-read comics reader will already know the work of almost all of them.
Written by Dez Skinn, with a Foreword by Mark Millar
Published by Collins Design, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers. $29.95 USD
From the first paragraph of Skinn's Introduction, with its confusing references to Carole Bayer Sager, Peter Allen, Barenaked Ladies and Huge Jackman, I was concerned that he as author and I as reader just wouldn't be on the same page, and that turns out to be true for the most part in this coffee table book of comics art meant to represent the contemporary pinnacle of the medium. Actually, I'm not quite sure what Skinn's purpose is here. The Introduction goes on to hint that now that comics have come of age and are popular worldwide, this book would represent the best of what's popular, or maybe he's after something else altogether. Maybe it's just the stuff he likes best, or what was available to reprint cheap, or the best and cheapest of artists he knows? I don't know, but since I've been told before not to try to guess at creators' motivations, let's just look at what the book is.
We begin with Chapter 1, Heroes and Villains, with a nice, busy double-page spread of various Marvel Comics heroes and villains drawn by Ron Garney. Now, I like Ron Garney a lot. He's not a brilliant, envelope-pushing artist, but he's a reliable, appealing, underrated craftsman. OK. If Skinn is going in this direction, more power to him. There's a brief description of Garney's process and a quote from him on how inker Bill Reinhold complements his work. But then on the next page we get a few panels of not a comic, per se, but a superhero comics-inspired ad for something called "Aussiebum," drawn by a John Royle, who apparently works on a UK Spider-Man comic as well. The style is standard, fairly generic superhero stuff, which you'd probably expect in an advertisement, in Royle's defense, but hardly justification for a coffee table book. Then follow nice, if to my eyes fairly derivative images of The Hulk, Wolverine, Spider-Man and Thunderbolts by Garney, Carlo Pagulayan and Mike Deodato, Jr., a striking Alex Ross take on the Golden Age Daredevil, a computer-aided but rather disappointing Michael Golden Thing/Surfer battle, and some unknown to me characters and teams such as The Danger's Dozen, S.T.E.M. Cell (Ha!), Garth, Jet Black, Crimson Todger and others, which I'm guessing are European album and comics properties. And believe me, I'd love to be blown away by artists I haven't seen before, but Huw-J Davis, Cosmo White, Jack Lawrence and Dan Boultwood didn't do it, and for the most part don't appear like they have the skills to make it in North American comics.
My worry already was that while Skinn certainly knew about lots of comics I'd never heard of, he wasn't going to show me much if any that I felt I was missing. Chapter 2 has a lovely CG space image by John Ridgway, an artist I know who has always used the latest technology to stay interesting, perhaps to his career detriment as his evolutions mean he doesn't have a recognizable style. Then there's a pencil page from a Starship Troopers comic, followed by the final version, which isn't much different except that it highlights how the computer coloring is way overdone. There's some nice stuff from Rian Hughes and Matt Haley, and a monstrosity called "Nunblade" that I hope is a joke and not a real character, some crazy manga called Dominator by a Tony Luke, some decent Judge Dredd stuff by Siku, and again, some mediocre stuff you're not missing.
This is just the way of the book. For every startling image by an Al Davison, Carl Critchlow, Bryan Talbot, Ben Templesmith or Sean Phillips, there's plenty more average work by artists known or unknown, and sometimes annoyingly repetitive. I mean, how many Norm Breyfogle pages does a reader need to get the idea? By the book's end, and with no final attempt by Skinn to pull it together into some sort of context, one feels this book was a missed opportunity. Comics art is at least as important as story, and most would agree there are many exciting artists working today, and yet Skinn excludes so many to focus on genre artists, and many of them not of high caliber. There are some good artists here, for sure, but the reasonably well-read comics reader will already know the work of almost all of them.
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