Karen Comes Clean page 8
So I just got back from a perfectly lovely trip to New York City. Had a nice meeting with the Zuda guys, drank a few beers with two-thirds of Team Hammer and the Timony twins and half of their better halves.
Plus I came home with a stack of books as long as my arm.
One such book is EISNER/MILLER, a fascinating conversation with two of the giants in the comic book field, Frank Miller and Will Eisner.
Highly recommended reading for anyone fooling around in the comic biz or really anyone just interested in some of the thinking behind two giants of the industry. I read it on the plane ride home.
Anybody whose spent any time reading my stuff is probably aware that I'm a pretty huge Miller fan. His work has had tremendous influence on my own noodlings here on the fringes of the comic book world. Reading the book, I was a kind of surprised by what comes across as Miller's contempt for the superhero readership (of which I count myself a card-carrying member). One really gets the feeling that he regards the majority of superhero fans as a collection of whiners who can't stand the idea of anyone messing with their childhood icons.
He seems to be mostly referring to the reception that The Dark Knight Strikes Again received as not being as good as The Dark Knight Returns because it wasn't just the same old thing over again.
I'm more in the camp that thinks the problem with DKSA wasn't that it was different, just that it wasn't as good. I think it really suffered from the computer coloring and the fact that the ending didn't make much sense (to me at least). The original Dark Knight was successful in large part because it was completely different from the Batman comics of the time. It completely changed the way Batman was perceived and presented from that point on. The sequel was just sort of... odd. I still find it fascinating though, even if only as a failed experiment. Every so often I read it again, just to see if my opinion will change. Upon repeated readings, mostly what bothers me is the color. I don't really know if it's the case or not, but it seems like Lynn Varley was just learning how to use the computer as a coloring tool and DKSA was a test case. It looks like somebody just fumbling around with Photoshop filters. Ah well, this is an old argument for everybody so I won't keep rehashing it any longer here. I think I'll go read it again.
That's my fascination with Miller. I'll even read the things I don't like over and over in the hope that I missed something the first few times.
I have been enjoying All-Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder. It took a few issues for me to get into it. At first it really seemed like Miller had completely lost his mind. But if you just sit back and go with the crazy it's a pretty fun book. In the context of his comments in EISNER/MILLER it seems pretty obvious that ASBRBW is just Miller enjoying himself by poking superhero fanboys with a sharp stick while enticing them with the carrot of Jim Lee's art. I like it though. I think the parody works better with Lee's traditional superhero artwork rather than Miller's own increasingly simplified cartooning.
That brings up another interesting thing that Miller talks about in the book - how he's become more interested in simplified cartoonish images rather than the kind of Neal Adams-inspired illustrative linework that marked his earlier work.
I rather miss the more detailed stuff. For my tastes, Miller's art reached it's pinnacle in the first Sin City book where it balanced on the edge of intricate linework and abstraction.
Since then, it's evolved more and more into broad simplification and has lost some of the beauty of the linework without really gaining that much energy.
I kind of feel the same way about David Mazucchelli's stuff. He is probably my all-time favorite artist and I think he reached his absolute peak right around Batman Year One and Big Man from Rubber Blanket - that perfect balance between detail and abstraction.
For me, City of Glass tipped a bit too far over into simplification.
This is all completely subjective personal taste of course. And Asterios Polyp is in that fat stack of books I brought home with me, so maybe I'll think that's just as brilliant as everybody else does.
I should mention, that I am a big fan of the more cartoony and stylized artwork in many cases. Kyle Baker is a big hero of mine and I absolutely adore his cartooning.
Darwyn Cooke is another favorite.
His work took a little time to grow on me, but I love it more every time I look at it.
I find the question of balance between detail and simplification, between realistic and cartoony images extremely interesting. In my own artwork, I find it more difficult to draw in a cartoony style and achieve a result that I'm happy with. I'm striving for (and mostly failing to achieve so far) more of an economy of line. It seems like this is something that a lot of artists move toward as their individual drawing styles evolve. At first glance it might seem like a time-saver - less detail equals less drawing - but the more I get into it, the more I appreciate the aesthetics of a spare line rather than a million hatches and squiggly details. It's that balance, that fine balance that the best artists achieve. At this point, I've got a long way to go. But I'm having fun getting there.
Okay, there's my ruminations on EISNER/MILLER and some of the stuff it made me think about. Mostly though, it just makes me feel like DRAWING.
Have a heckuva week.
3 comments:
You should get it off your chest more often!
What a lot of artists don't seem to understand is that there's a difference between abstract and flat. The good artists can get cleaner and more abstract over the years without their art losing its sense of three-dimensionality. The lines represent the same three-dimensional objects, but more efficiently.
Unfortunately in the last 15 years a new generation of artists has grown up influenced by guys like Bruce Timm, and they incorrectly assume that abstract = flat. Bruce Timm, who only sometimes draws as if there was a three-dimensional object underneath the lines, was influenced by guys like Alex Toth, who could draw clean and abstract without flatness, because they were representing a three-dimensional object.
Same thing with anime/manga. Western artists think that because the anime nose looks like a triangle, that means they don't have to think. But there's a difference between proper anime/manga where the artist is outlining or mapping over three-dimensional shapes, and Western anime/manga-influenced art, where the artist is drawing flat, because he can't see the shape beneath the lines in anime/manga.
So we have a photocopy-of-a-photocopy degeneration effect. Only rarely, in this day and age, does an artist develop his own mental algorithms for simplifying the world. More often, what we get is comics-like-substance: it looks like comics, but it's just flat, off-model amateur art.
I don't know how you do it, Mike. This blogging stuff is a timesucker. I coulda drawn two pages in the time it took me to write all that. :)
And that's an interesting angle, Felicity. I hadn't really thought about it that way. It's certainly something to keep in mind while moving from a figurative toward a more abstract style. Remember the structure!
But I actually really like Bruce Timm's stuff.
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