Artists (including me) changing their “style”

After struggling for a long time to find an artist I could say I could describe myself as similar I think I found it but in the most unlikely of places. I study a lot of Simonson and Leonardi, John Romita Junior but I also love some of the rougher more textural inking styles of guys like Bill S. and Danijel Dell’edera, and all the artists I said I think I look like have clean inkers. But I’ll come back to that.
Artists say they are influenced by everything they see and it’s true. Even if it’s influenced to not look like them, just like interacting with people. Additionally I may love and look at a lot of artists that I look and draw nothing like.
For example I’m starting to really like the cartoonstrip-style Herge-eske “dot eyes,” and have even tried it in a few panels where I probably would have done the classic superman comic strip “abbreviation” for eyes: The line for the top lid and a pupil somewhat overlapped underneath. I think that matches with my philosophy for comic art in general, with my approach to them – that you should be able to see the artist, tell that it is a representation and interpretation of life; The super realistic artists I used to admire either all worked from photos – basically any realistic cartoon strip artist pre-1979 – or tried so hard that I didn’t see them (the artrist) anymore – I just saw Fumettii. Tacktful inking can save this, like Al Williamson, Hal Foster, etc etc.
But I find the artists I’m really opinionated about are the ones with a very distinct style, like Kelley Jones, Denys Cowan, etc. Btw- just found out about Milestone comics, awesome! It’s a shame Static Shock is the only one that survived from it. Another artist saying is, that they want you to like them or hate them but don’t be only passive with their art, they want you to have a reaction.
We’ll it might have been from seeing him in a “history of comics” vhs a few years back or just seeing his older art but I absolutely hated Howard Chaykin. It might have been all the “budda-budda-budda” that filled the panels of his early 2000’s DC comics or that all his panels were bleed panels and his characters filled the frame.
But now I look at his new work and see a more striking similarity with my art that probably anyone else I’ve seen. I thought it was sloppy, fast, dirty and his characters were so blocky, and some of those same qualities were the ones I admired in different combinations with the aforementioned Leonardi, JRJR, and Simonson. But as I told my students when I taught for a brief time at a college here, Consistency was the biggest must-have trait (in my opinion) to developing a style, and he is, so how can I fault him.
I think I’ve come to drawing like how I do now because it’s the only style I can do consistently. I used to think of it as a non-style, my default drawing type, and yet after seeing enough of it and comparing it to the other artists I can see my similarities in what makes a style. It’s usually everything I mentioned on the list of things that I would describe Chaykin’s work as – but I’m okay with that. And I’m very comfortable in the style I’m using now, my non-style. Places where something looks inconsistent is probably where I’m trying to do something that I want to but is not me – which is a hard concept to wrap your head around as an artist.
You may like how certain things look, be able to replicate them in your art consistently and yet if you weren’t thinking about them when you draw you wouldn’t draw them. “Affectations” as one of my instructors used to call them.
I still haven’t come around on Milton Caniff’s art who has been cited by some if not all of the artists I’ve talked to and admire, in the same way Kirby is. There is pre-Kirby, prime-Kirby and post-Kirby. I think jobs in comics are so sought after and not really set up as a retirement deal that once an artists starts making a living doing it they have to keep at it so constantly that (I feel) all that’s left is their affectations – they settle into their niche and get pushed into that corner to an extreme. They become exaggerated in the things that make them “them” and the general drawing rules start to fall by the wayside. Personally I think Mike Perkins and Doug Braithwaite, Mark Texiera have started to be that way for me. Their faces are starting to look incredibly asymmetrical, despite being inked so well you can hardly tell. Of course, Tex and Braithwaite are just going from shaded pencils now while when they started were inked over by some of the best in the biz.
So to circle back around (again) people say that about Caniff, “of you have to read Terry and the Pirates,” or one of his other series, but then always add the caveat of not one of his other series. His layout is the best, black placement amazing, his gestural inking etc etc etc. Almost like a band/singer with a long career. If you catch them at the wrong point even now-fans of their art would criticize them.
I mention it in reference to music, because ideally (I think), and in movie series to some point, each one (cd/sequel etc) has to be a bit different from the onset – think Back to the Future. Set against 1980’s back to 1950’s, into the future then back to the old west. Still Back to the Future, but all fun because it’s not a rehash per-se because it’s all been turned on it’s ear. Or Empire, with Kershner. And then movie’s that flop because they stick so close to the formula that the original invented, The newest Pirates of the Caribbean (I thought), Ghost Busters 2 etc.
I’ve heard musician’s talk about this, when they create a fan base in one type of music and then grow, change, evolve into another a few songs or albums later and people chastise them for it. Its like there is some perfect combination between changing but not too much.
Ok back to art, take Jae Lee for example, early 90’s he was doing backgroundless ink-crazy and yet Jim Lee inspired art like Hellshock etc. Then he took a few years off and reinvented himself. I can’t stand him now, no backgrounds still lol, but totally different otherwise. And especially with comics where you are drawing so many panels per comic that by the time your done with two issues, you’d be hard pressed just mathematically from ythe number of angles to circle a character to not havea similar panel. So how do you keep it interesting? Change, grow, keep learning? I guess, if the fans come with you. If you don’t keep changing how will you know you’ve reached your prime, and once you do – can you just stay there, stagnant Doubtful. What’s even more, are changes like that really even totally conscious? Is it like they say about love, “you don’t find it, it finds you?” Especially if we’re influenced by everything we see.
When someone gets a JRJR sketch at a con, are they getting it to see what he looks like now, or for the affectations that made him famous? Do they really want him as a person, a growing artist, or just the stereotypical version of what they used to look like? Can you blame an artist for playing toward that?
Like JRJR, he has done so many comics (most of which I own) that I can see every fight scene goes down the same way, all the same angles almost every time. The legitimately new pages/panels are few and far between and that’s the point that I start going backwards with the artist, same with music. If the look stagnant now, try finding their art form before you started liking them. JRJR’s X-men stuff form the 80’s, Daredevil with Williamson etc is all some of my favorite stuff from him even though I got into him with the ultra bulky Punisher: War Zone stuff form the 90’s.
It’s interesting with some artists how they just became “them” at certain points in their career, Bill S looked like Neil Adams for the longest time, Travis Charest like Jim Lee, so many people like Jim Lee lol, same with Adams in his day though, Barry Windsidor Smith during his first few issues of Conan and Greg Capullo, the one who “jack of all trades, master of none” does not apply. I can’t take credit for pointing this out but on the CGS podcast, or maybe it was my friend Hobbes, he pointed out that Capullo can ape another artist’s style and then do “them” better then they can. He had a JRJR phase, Todd McFarlane (famously), and a few others and made it look like a better version of those artists. So what does Capullo actually look like – what is his default/no-style? Some say his Batman stuff now is that – maybe it is – for now.
This is even a bigger question to inkers, do you try and make yourself visible over the top of someone elses’ art or should you be the invisible hand that just makes the penciler look like the best “them” that they can be?
All questions, that artists all answer differently. And we get to see their answers in the pages of our comics books everyday.

Tezuka vs Kirby

I just got to take a look at Osamu Tezuka’s “M W” which was awesome and so amazing because it is still shocking how ballsey it is even today (originally published in 1975 and just released in the states in 2007). To preface, I am not making any judgment calls on the material in MW, but it was shocking to see some of the things that were in it, especially for someone as famous as to garner the nick name “the godfather of Manga/Anime.” He called it his “anti-Tezuka manga” with a story involving Catholic priest who is sworn to celibacy with women, so he gets his jollies in the loophole of sleeping with a guy who crossdresses as a woman for him. There are scenes of implied sex with children and even scenes that suggest things with animals (like a whole page of the crossdresser wrestling in the tub with his dog – framed to always show both the dog and human’s full bodies even though the lower half of their bodies serve no importance). Things that are less explicit but you can tell are meant to make you connect the dots. Making such notably odd comics as Charles Burns’ “Black Hole” look like Sesame Street by comparison.
There were some questions I had about the inconsistencies in his choices about how overt to be with his rendering of the story. Some scenes seem so graphically violent (explosions which throw severed body parts at the viewer and a murderer sticking an unconscious victims head in a furnace) and yet other scenes, especially sexual ones will skirt around the overt images, and I’m not sure if this is the case in the original manga or just how it was edited for American audiences: Things like an image framed to show full naked bodies will fade to white towards their waists leaving only a line or two to describe any detail, and yet leaving this blank space to occupy at least ½ the panel. Similar scenes cut to pure abstract shapes moving with the character’s dialog over the. Certain sexual scenes will become increasingly dimly lit the longer the scene lasts until they are purely silhouettes. I also noticed oddities like entirely black word balloons – which I’m not sure what it is supposed to mean.
It’s such an odd mix artistically because Tezuka’s characters’ are so cartoony and exaggerated and yet the props like guns and backgrounds will be photorealistic unlike Kirby’s backgrounds which follow the basic style of his figures. This may be due to Manga’s approach of using assistants specific to items and not processes, like a motorcycle artist, or gun artists, instead of the American process of a penciler and a an inker or finisher. And while Jack “the King” Kirby is reported to have drawn 20,000 pages over his career in comics, Tezuka is reported to have drawn over 150,000 – almost just less than 8 times as many pages – though I believe Manga’s storytelling at the time was much more decompressed than American comics – something we’ve started to match pace with over the last 10 years. Both men helped write the stories they worked on, and created much of their country’s comic visual vernacular, as well as did many things outside of comics, not the least of which for Tezuaka was pioneering the start of Japanese animation. It’s startling to see how these two seemed so similar and influential, like peers to compare and yet so vastly different I in their output, both probably effected by the culture and processes they worked in.

"A page a Day"

Jack Kirby is estimated to have drawn somewhere between 24-25,000 - yes you read that right, twenty-five-thousand pages, not to mention creating and sometimes writing the stories for hundreds of characters over his career. I'm not sure if this credit is finished pages or including breakdowns which he did for almost every comic artist during his time at marvel, because of his explosive in-your-face storytelling.

The saying is that you have to be good enough to finish one page a day to be a professional comic book artist. And logically that makes sense, 22pg comic and with a one-month deadline and 28 days in the month, minus weekends and give a little leeway for big pages or laziness is about right. And when you start out in comics you start working and say "hey, I can do that. It's not impossible" That is when you are in highschool or College and if your not in class then you just have a bunch of time to kill and if you can avoid watching reruns on tv or playing video games then you're doing pretty well. have most of your free time. But if your anything like me you have a job, you have bills, you have homework, class, a girlfriend, friends and you have to take care of stuff like hygiene, food, dishes, laundry etc. And after you leave college you will also have loans hanging over your head for the next 20-30 years, if your lucky. Which means you will probably be working a part if not full-time job for at least your first few years into your professional comics career. Add on top of this if you have kids in the near future, get sick often, blah blah blah. So you can see how quickly you need to become faster than a page a day to make a deadline for a monthly book.
Tom's been talking about how volume counts, and it makes sense - (the more you draw, the easier it is next time and the quicker you find and correct your weaknesses). He's mentioned some people work too fast and others too slow. And his take is that while your in school, you should not be playing to your strengths but facing your weaknesses and getting help on them. If all you wanted from college was an expensive pat on the back then ignore me. But its just been something we've been talking about a lot recently.
For me specifically I have to work fast because i already have to have a job and I have no doubt that if i could dedicate more time to it i would probably be where i want to be by now. But with everything i already have and how many outside projects i have going all i can do is focus on quantity and facing those problems I haven't concurred or "creatively avoided" as i like to say. It's no wonder the running motto in comics is "when in doubt black it out" and artists like Todd McFarlane are famous for doing things like inserting random smoke or FX to hide a difficult or ugly portion of a drawing, and he is not the worst example by far just one of the more famous, *cough* Rob Lifield *cough* .
Manga is this side of the coin and it shows that to a large and growing amount of readers that "volume counts." Backgrounds are close-to-none and speedlines, caricaturized easy to read and repeated expressions, similar compositions and cool looking angles and fx take the place of intentional thought-out and time-consuming aspects. Even inventions like Zip-a-tone were invented, and artists usually who wrote/lettered/drew and inked their own books (as opposed to assembly-line American style) took on unnamed assistants who's strengths were their weaknesses - all to save time and so they can stretch a story on to take up most of their lives to complete and end having worked on multiple phone-book sized works. Osama Tezuka, you could call him the manga/anime Jack Kirby, and as his bio on this website describes he is "Dubbed "The Human Dream Factory" by manga authority Frederick Schodt, Tezuka produced an estimated 150,000 pages of comic book art, 21 animated series, and 500 individual manga and animation stories."
So I'm not saying one is better than the other or that the artists like Bernie Wrightson who take years to complete select master-works at a speed slower than painting are any more/less talented than people like Kirby or Tezuka I'm mearly stating that as I get close to graduating it becomes clear how different people in this industry across the world have used their time in it and what they seemed to have valued based on their accomplishments.

*On another note, (the reason I wrote this) I drew and inked my super-hero page for Faber Castell Yesterday and colored it today and realized though I had a while to think/thumbnail the page actually drawing and inking it only took about 8/9 hrs (but it was pretty much straight-through next to dinner) and only about 4/5 hours to color, today, (try making a brown with only red, yellow and blue). But I love the page and am really really proud of it, as it seems I am more and more with every project. I'm sad that they want the originals but I have scans and will post them after I'm allowed to in a few months. I got to use my old character from way back that I've now dubbed "THE OSPREY" (which is a bad-ass plane/helicopter by the way -> google it.) You can see my old maquette and turnaround designs for him in my first post for Vitamin Z, here. But it was my first paid gig for a sequential art page! Though I cant say it was published per say, but it was the only time my hand has hurt from working on a page and it was probably all the small lines and me bearing down for control and strait lines with the tech-pens.

And finally now I go on to design and paint a mural for Carter Ink here in Georgia, design my next tattoo and try and get aired and finish all 11 episodes of my "Terra Novus" Radio Drama, though its future as was planned seems uncertain, but I'm exploring alternative routes to get it out there.