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Mark Bagley
Chris Bachalo
Adam Kubert
Carlos Pacheco
Steve Skroce
Jack Kirby
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everybody else
Gilesdub?
Hey, it was worth a shot.
Accordingly --
John Severin (look at his just-concluded Bat Lash -- he's as good as he was 55 years ago! It's as if Minnie Minoso came back today & hit .300 with power & speed!)
Russ Heath
Marie Severin
Steve Ditko
Wally Wood
Curt Swan
Kirby
Gene Colan
Joe Kubert
Kurt Schaffenberger, maybe. Or John Romita. Matt Baker? Basil Wolverton? Mac Raboy? Lou Fine?
It also goes without saying that Carmine Infantino was great, but the quality of his work was heavily inker-dependent. Same goes, to a slightly lesser extent, for Gil Kane.
Also -- Bill Elder, RIP
All-overrated -- Neal Adams
The current crop? Bagley is fast, at least (quite an attribute in a field where lazy layabouts like Adam Kubert & Frank Quitely [imagine Steve Trachsel. Now imagine Steve Trachsel embedded in frozen molasses] are allowed to spend months if not years presumably gazing soulfully into mirrors while dawdling over a "workload" that Kirby in his prime could've dispatched with in a weekend ... & no, I'm not exaggerating one jot), but overrated. He's not a patch on Amanda Conner or Cliff Chiang or maybe even Barry Kitson, among others.
When I posted this item I was wishing I could borrow Repoz's brain for the intro. Mine just doesn't mingle the macabre and the arcane with enough delight to have done this thread justice.
I would also move Kirby up a lot simply based on the insane quantity that he produced. Yeah, not everything was perfect, but it's not going to be when you're churning out a couple thousand pages a year.
In terms of more recent guys, I'd also throw Mignola, Eric Powell and Darwyn Cooke on the lists. All have fantastic, and instantly recognisable, styles.
But inside, I agree with most everything else that has been said, especially Kirby.
I like Darwyn Cooke's work a lot, but I'm told his current style -- which, again, I love -- is a deliberate aping of someone else's ... Tim Sale's, maybe? (My real period of near-expertise is the Silver & Bronze Ages, as my list obviously shows. I laid out of comics for a quarter-century till getting back into them about 4 years ago, to my wallet's painful detriment.) Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I'm not sure how much credit to give him for a "fantastic, and instantly recognisable" style if it's not really, y'know, his.
A very nice renderer of statues. Wake me up when he draws, y'know, a comic.
Well, that's because they appear to be in Yankee Stadium. Which is odd, because Jeter's wearing his road uni. Then again, it also has his name on the back.
But it is Bizarro World, so anything goes, really.
My interests lie more in the Gold and Silver ages - hence my interests in seeing Eisner on the list. I've got almost nothing from the Bronze age.
If you change quarter century to twenty years, that almost perfectly describes my experience.
With respect to Cooke and Sale, I've gone through stuff by both and, although there are some limited similarities, I can't say that I see anything that would constitute aping. Besides, can it really be aping when it seems to be better than the alledged source?
Not suprisingly, given that he sucessfully ressurected The Spirit, I'm willing to fight like a bastard to get Cooke's name on the list of top-notch recent guys.
Shouldn't he say "bad-bye"?
I would no doubt move him up several slots if not for the fact that I was downright traumatized by his butcherings of Captain America & Black Panther after he came back to Marvel in the mid-'70s. (Yeah, I know he co-created the characters, but that didn't give him license to completely ignore the previous several years of continuity & character development. I remember that I wrote Marvel saying as much about Black Panther & got a letter back from Roy Thomas expressing a certain amount of symphathy.)
Hey - there was nothing wrong with his work on Kingdom Come and Marvels. Justice, on the other hand, was not a pleasant book to go through.
That being said, I agree that he's more of a "Covers and Merchandise" guy than a comics guy. I'm talking work-wise, of course - his interviews and articles have shown that he really loves comics for the sake of comics.
And I certainly don't feel like opposing you. His rendering of Wonder Woman alone -- actually, of every woman I've ever seen him draw -- earns him major points in my book.
Speaking of the new Spirit, I wonder who drew the issue that came out today (I skipped going by the comics store till this weekend)? Supposedly, we were getting Mike Ploog, but I think he's done only one issue. Just another typical industry lie these days, sad to say.
Ah. You're referencing the Captain America and Falcon: The Mad Bomb years. I can't say that I've read any of that, so I really don't have any way to argue with you on that point. I did, however, really enjoy his work on The Eternals from roughly the same period, and his Fourth World stuff which preceeded his return to Marvel.
Incidentally, his choices in that era with Marvel may seem a bit more reasonable if you read Evanier's biography on him. The guy was just a brilliant artist who had an absolutely fantastic record at getting screwed over in his business dealings - for which he does bear some responsibility.
Don't get me wrong -- Ross is immensely talented. I just don't get the sense of, I dunno, dynamism that I think separates comics from illustration. (Granted, John Severin & Russ Heath are at least as much illustrators as they are comics artists, but they're also John Severin & Russ Heath.)
Not a clue. I got up to issue 14 and decided that I just didn't like the look and feel of the comic once Cooke dropped it. It just seemed like it had become a matter of stuffing whichever guy in the office who wasn't working on the art, and I don't think I like the writing duo of Aragones and Evanier. The DC site says this month's art is Paul Smith, which is a name that I don't happen to recognize.
Close choice between Adams and John Byrne.
I lost touch a good 35 years ago, so my all-time team is slanted very gold and silver. The top ten after Kirby:
Carl Barks
Matt Baker
Steve Ditko
Will Eisner
Creig Flessel
Hal Foster
Carmine Infantino
Joe Maneely
Alex Raymond
Jim Steranko
So I see you've gone through the set of books he did on Superman/Batman/Wonder Woman/Shazam then. Beautifully drawn, and extremely static.
Speaking of Captain Marvel - the original one - Jeff Smith should also be added to the list of current top-tier artists.
Barks is undoubtedly an all-time great, but for some bizarre reason I just can't deal with funny animals. (Krypto & Streaky do not, of course, count.)
Carl Barks is one of the great quasi-forgotten artists. I mean, the guy defined the Disney comic style for decades, but very little of his stuff is available in any collected format.
Incidentally, they're just beginning to release a full set of everything he ever did for the Mouse. Volume 1 (of 10) comes out in December - all 960 pages of it.
Don Rosa also does the most incredible aping/homage of Barks' style, and his stuff is well worth buying.
I'm well aware, and looking forward to it. Incidentally, there's also a biography on Ditko coming out soon. It should be interesting, as Ditko seems to be/have been a unique personality.
I know Smith drew last month's issue, which may well be the last one I buy new (the idiot things are insanely expensive, of course -- as we all know, a comic should never cost more than a coke, & where I live, at least, coke machines sure as hell don't ask for $2.99 or $3.50). I wouldn't know his art if I saw it, but I do know he's very highly thought of because of his work on one of the hundreds of X-Men titles some time back, as well as a neat little fantasy book a few years ago called Leave It to Chance.
It's not Barks, but try picking up a copy of "The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck". If you can't enjoy that, then you're completely right about your inability to enjoy funny animal comics. On the other side, if you want to read something really painful in that vein, you should try Marv Wolfmans' "Scrooge's Quest".
That may the understatement of the year.
Edit: Removed an accidental evasion of the filter.
Very nice artist, yes. Unfortunately, I'm still in a snit over his turning Mary Marvel into a toddler.
Dammit, if I'm gonna pay $5.95 or whatever obscene prize for a slick-paper pamphlet (I realize, of course, that OPEC/DC, not Smith, sets the price), & over the course of 5 or 6 issues at that, I by god want teenage Mary Marvel!
Also, my funny animal near-phobia appears to extend to Bone.
I think we can safely call him eccentic as hell. It's not like he's, oh, Dave Sim. That's completely insane.
Well, I guess that means you're a horribly flawed individual then.
I can understand your position. There are certain styles which I just can't seem to enjoy, even though I recognize them as being well done.
A new front-runner for understatement of the year already!
But yeah, it's comparable to how I'm a big (or, rather, was, as I've largely drifted away from the field, though my roomful of books would seem to indicate otherwise) sf fan who nonetheless has no affinity whatsoever for stories set anywhere but earth ... & a recognizable earth of the near-future (or or course the past or present as well). My sense of wonder is ... somewhat hobbled.
(I blame the Republicans. Just because.)
I just did a quick check, as I had him mixed up with a comic blogger. Your description seems dangerously accurate.
As an auteur, he wasn't much. That jarring habit of homonymic names (Apokolips, Sersi, Darkseid, Kamandi, Makarri, etc.) got old fast. Like you say, his dialog could be pretty stilted.
But there was nobody in his league as a creator of characters or as an artist.
I would balk only at Hal Foster & Alex Raymond, simply because they did comic strips, not comic books.
All right. Substitute Robert Crumb and Shelly Moldoff, then.
Just noticed that. Good call. Though Byrne does get points for having been quite prolific, at least by post-Kirby standards, in direct contrast to Adams. Also, I'm pretty unfamiliar with Byrne's post-'78 work, which I gather is what really made him a legend in his own mind, but when he was just starting out his art on 3rd-tier strips like Doomsday+1, Iron Fist & The Champions was pretty darned fun.
Some beautiful work on Hawkman, too. Kubert seems to be more closely identified with the character, as well as more admired, though.
Dan de Carlo, Jay Scott Pike, and Al Hartley also belong somewhere in this discussion.
Well, if we're talking cartoonists, then we should add the following:
George Herriman - his colour work is some of the best stuff I've seen
Chester A. Gould
Charles Schulz
Milt Caniff
Bill Mauldin
Windsor McKay
EC Segar
Frank King
Bill Watterson
Berke Breathed
Gary Larson
And, of course, Raymond and Foster as mentioned above.
I think SeaLab when I hear "Bizarro."
Sadly enough, even with my interests in comics, I think of the same thing.
The oldest Marvel I ever owned, Journey Into Mystery #90, featured Thor as drawn by Hartley. That was ... counterintuitive.
Jim Aparo, Nick Cardy & George Perez should've been mentioned by now, too, as well as such off-beat guys as Pat Boyette & Tom Sutton.
Also, the ultra-realists, like Gray Morrow & Alden McWilliams.
And all sorts of Bronze Age greats, like Frank Brunner, Val Mayerik, Gene Day, Paul Gulacy, Marshall Rogers. Just tons of 'em.
Plus the great inkers -- Joe Sinnott, Bob McLeod, Klaus Janson, Tom Palmer, Sid Greene, Murphy Anderson, etc etc etc.
Another excellent artist of more recent vintage -- Kevin Maguire. Alan Davis is awfully good, too. And I'd take Adam Hughes over Alex Ross as the best of the current cover artists.
really Byrne overrated? who in comics does better group shots? I love me some Byrne. I can't imagine a crisis without him.
Amadee (Wohlschlaeger)
Willard Mullin
Lou Darvas
Bill Gallo
Karl Hubenthal
You must be Don Francisco's sister.
I'm familiar with Bizarro from reading comic books. I have yet to see an episode of Seinfeld.
It does warm the cockles of my black little heart to see Todd McFarlane's name no where in this thread. I've never liked his stuff. He took John Romita's adorably hot Mary Jane Watson and turned her into a freakin' whore.
A legendary issue, for all the wrong reasons. I kept expecting Patsy Walker to show up.
really Byrne overrated?
Just my $0.02. Other artists I never "got" but of whom others seem to think highly:
Jim Aparo
John Buscema
Nick Cardy
Mort Meskin
Alex Toth
George Perez, easily. Who has the added attraction of not having turned into a bitter old curmudgeon.
I had the same reaction to the absence (unless I missed it) of the insufferable Frank Miller.
You must be Don Francisco's sister.
It's a greater honor for me.
Needless to say, I loved 'em. Still do, when I can get my hands on them.
Edit: Oops, and Hergé via Children's Digest.
I'm familiar with it from Seinfeld myself. I think most of my exposure to Superman was from reruns of the '50s TV show. Tights and fights don't really interest me, but I do get into the stuff that Paradox Press put out (The Bogie Man, A History of Violence, and Road to Perdition.) Maus, of course, was great. I even liked the adaptation that someone did of Paul Auster's City of Glass.
So maybe there was some wormhole where the Tin Glove Award votes from the Bizarro World got mixed in with our world's Gold Glove votes and that's how Derek Jeter won his first Gold Glove? After the first, you win a couple more by inertia.
"Me Retej Kered. Me worst fielder, me catch everthing to right side."
Even the Bizarros can't explain Rapheal Palmiero's Gold Glove.
As one who lost interest in comic books after the first couple years of American Splendor, seeing this:
Scrooge McDuck? Even as a little kid, I didn't like that character one bit. Donald was about the only Disney character that I liked. This must be something quite different -- I looked on wiki and saw the Timeline and that did look interesting.
(My love for Bizarro goes way back to the "Tales of the Bizarro World" 80-Page Giant*, Superman #202, when I was a kid. I'm pretty sure Tales of the Bizarro World was the first modern TPB I ever bought, about a decade ago, years before I got back into comics.)
*The 80-Page Giants were, of course, the coolest comics ever. There is no room for argument here ... it's simply a statement of fact.
Personally, I prefer Dave Johnson (2, 3, 4, 5).
James Jean is nice, too.
[Edit: So is Mike Mignola.]
How you guess me am really Bizarro No.1?
Never heard of him, but that is some fine work.
That's the one! I sold my entire collection in the summer of '81 (except, of course, for my Sgt Furys & Not Brand Ecchs , which would've had to be pried out of my cold, dead hands), but when I learned about eBay in the late '90s that comic & a Captain America lot including Steranko's 3 great issues from '69 may well have been my first 2 purchases.
Well, along with a few old Sporting News ABA guides. And quite a few vintage punk records (it's not like the Anemic Boyfriends' "Guys Are Not Proud" 7" was sitting around in stacks in North Little Rock).
I'm glad you agree. I mostly just pulled covers from "100 Bullets", but he's done some damn good work other places, too.
Here's his site.
Oh, yeah -- nice, nice work. I don't know if I've ever laid eyes on 100 Bullets (I'm not sure my LCS gets it, & for that matter I guess it's a crime comic, which I tend to pay no attention to, since story-wise I've found that they don't really offer anything I can't get out of a novel ... Ms Tree [who of course has been the subject of a novel recently] being a notable exception), but I recognize Johnson as having done the fronts on some of the Boom! titles I own, like Cthulhu Tales & Zombie Tales.
And yes, James Jean is excellent as well.
My stated preference for Adams Hughes probably owes something -- OK, everything -- to his luscious run of Catwoman (now cancelled, of course) covers.
quite an attribute in a field where lazy layabouts like Adam Kubert & Frank Quitely [imagine Steve Trachsel. Now imagine Steve Trachsel embedded in frozen molasses] are allowed to spend months if not years presumably gazing soulfully into mirrors while dawdling over a "workload" that Kirby in his prime could've dispatched with in a weekend
Not in the mood to defend the sloth of the Kubert Bros (Andy's a slowpoke, too), but complaining about Frank Quitely being slow is like complaining about Ryan Howard or Adam Dunn striking out too much -- if you want their best work, you have to let them be who they are. Most guys forced to a monthly grind aren't going to churn out Kirby's FF or, um, Byrne's FF -- they're going to churn out stuff that looks like a cross between 80s Marvel fill-in chaff and 90s Image Lee/feld clones.
From Johnson's work for Boom!, this Cthulhu Tales cover is one of my favorites. If you like CT, you might want to check out Mnemovore, a six-issue Vertigo limited that's pretty nifty (good Mike Huddleston covers, too).
I sort of agree with this; some guys just aren't cut out for a monthly schedule, but they're still capable of very good work if used in the right role. Steve Bissette is a good example of the principle: he never saw a deadline he wouldn't break, but some of his work on Swamp Thing in the '70s is just classic.
I generally like Quitely, but I do wish he knew how to draw more than one jawline.
Last I heard, he was doing some kind of project with Michael Moorcock. Never saw any of it, though.
More recently, he did the covers for John Severin's Bat Lash miniseries, which I raved out above. Pretty decent, I guess, but I think they suffered badly in comparison with the interiors. Maybe Severin, who I think is 89 years old, just didn't feel like doing the covers.
If by pretty bad, you mean dreadful, then I agree. As you note, it didn't help that Chaykin's art was somewhat inconsistent in style, making it almost impossible to follow.
Incidentally, I'm waiting for Bat Lash to come out in trade, as I really like the old western heroes. Is it worth getting?
You're right, of course. It's just that I find Quitely & his foot-dragging brethren incredibly slow, so much so that it's a joke for them to be assigned to a putatively monthly or even semimonthly publication. (Which of course actually reflects on the idiocy of Marvel, DC or whomever, rather than the artist.) I mean, would a newspaper hire an extremely able but legendarily slow writer to cover a beat? I would hope not.
It's as if Ryan Howard & Adam Dunn not only struck out a lot, but only got around to playing every 10th game or so.
The Kubert brothers? Their father should beat them both to within an inch of their lazy lives. If Adam is going to blame illness for making him a year late on Action (all the while doing work on other projects & gallivanting around conventions, apparently), he should be genuinely incapacitated, I say.
Very much so. It's not quite the old Bat Lash, but it's pretty darned good. Alas, sales apparently were abysmal, probably because today's fan base appears to consist largely of imbeciles (present company as demonstrated on this thread very much excepted, of course).
(Note to self: Commence hunger strike until Marvel gives us Essential volumes of the Rawhide Kid, Two-Gun Kid, Western Kid, Outlaw Kid & all the other Kids.
(Fat chance, since they haven't even gotten around to doing so with the Sub-Mariner or Sgt Fury ... DC's Showcase Presents line has already outstripped them there, with the announcement of a forthcoming Blackhawk volume renewing my faint hopes for Tomahawk & even Sea Devils collections.)
Agreed. Good horror has largely been the province of Dark Horse (& to a lesser extent Image) the last few years, but Mnemovore was a notably creepy exception.
You're right about most people not being able to keep up with Kirby, but most artists aren't asked to do that anymore. Rather, it should only be reasonable to expect that someone can keep up with a single monthly book - it's not like they're being asked to simultaneously cover FF, Thor, Captain America, and whatever else needed to be done. After all, given the increasing number of ads, a single book is only about a page a day, and many of them don't even have to worry about their own covers.
Now, if you want to put them on a vanity project and let them release something whenever they feel like it (All Star Batman and Robin) that's fine, but I really can't stand it when an artist turns a monthly book into a bi-monthly one through inability to hit a deadline.
Yeah, he's very good, but his apparent inability to draw anything but rounded, pretty much edgeless faces is a striking idiosyncrasy. They no more have jawlines than a basketball does.
Byrne was prolific by any standards. Kirby was not that prolific, at least in the silver age. I don't know about his 50's work. He only had lengthy runs on Fantastic Four and Thor.
I had the same reaction to the absence (unless I missed it) of the insufferable Frank Miller.
Miller is great, Mr. Supreme Judge of Comic Art. Miller actually made fights between guys in spandex look real. Oh yeah, and he can write a little, too.
quite an attribute in a field where lazy layabouts like Adam Kubert & Frank Quitely [imagine Steve Trachsel. Now imagine Steve Trachsel embedded in frozen molasses] are allowed to spend months if not years presumably gazing soulfully into mirrors while dawdling over a "workload" that Kirby in his prime could've dispatched with in a weekend
Honestly, you bash Byrne for being an old curmudgeon, but come on, that is exactly the type of thing he would say. Kirby was fast, he was Kirby. He came from a different generation, where comics were more product than art. Kirby cranked out the product, with varying quality. Most of what you see in a Kirby comic are the inks, anyway.
I was born years after the silver age came to an end, but I love Kirby and what he brought to the medium. Simply an amazing creative talent. That said, his work is not "pretty". He threw concepts like "correct anatomy" out the window. It was pop art and that's why we love it. But to the objective eye, I have to believe Quitely is by far the more impressive artist.
It's pretty arrogant to assume Quitely could just crank out 22 pages a month, if only he weren't so lazy. People draw at different speeds. Quitely obviously is not comfortable drawing at the rate comic book fans consider adequate, and I for one am thankful he chooses to produce his best work regardless.
ANYWAY, I don't want to get too nasty, so sorry if I came across that way. And here I thought I was the only baseball fan/comic geek around. :)
Boy, you aren't kidding on that one. I picked the "The Other" by Niles and Wrightson, and yeesh, art not great at all.
The official answer to this question can be found in the Bizarro sequence from Alan Moore & Curt Swan's wonderful "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?" (which essentially was the farewell to the "Silver Age"). If there's anybody here over the age of 35 who followed DC but hasn't read this story, your life is a lie and you don't know it.
Re: Bud Selig as Mr. Mxyzptlk--
No wonder he won't talk about Brian Giles.
When he was drawing basically every Marvel title & as often as not doing the layouts for the ones he wasn't, you mean? Sheesh. Define "prolific."
A very little. Unless you think writing the same Sin City story over & over again for years is "writing." More like cutting-&-pasting, really.
As noted above, I actually blame the companies for this, rather than Quitely. Still & all, if he can't draw comics with anything approaching regularity, maybe he should ... ummm ... do something else? Which actually he's doing anyway (so I guess my position is moot) -- All-Star Superman is no more a regularly published title than I am Stan Lee.
Kirby, at his peak was generating about 1500 pages a year, while creating many of the characters which still form the core of the Marvel Universe. That's prolific by any standards. If you want to talk commercial success, as many of his later works weren't, then that's another topic of discussion.
With respect to anatomy, I don't have a problem with his stuff conforming to a standard interpretation, as it was internally consistent - it was, after all, the Kirby style. If you want to complain about inconsistent or bad anatomy, then you should really be pointing at Rob Liefeld, who seemed to only have the most minimal understanding of how the human body works.
With respect to your comment on his work as "Pop art", however, I'm inclined to agree. That being said, I prefer Kirby to pretty much anyone else.
I don't think most people have a problem with how quickly someone like Quitely can generate art. It's more a matter of how frustrating it can be when someone like him is placed on a project which requires him to generate 22 pages a month, while being fully aware that there is nothing in their history to indicate that they are capable of doing so. I just don't understand how someone can make a living in that industry without being able to handle a monthly book.
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