The aspiring comic book illustrators I knew in art school were already drawing like this before they’d done any commercial work, though. They learned from existing comic books and aped that style. That’s what they wanted to be doing.
Something I noticed extremely recently was that comic books are much, much more likely to actually have illustrations with their own unique style to them - stuff that’s radically different than the comic book standard styles. And it does seem to be illustrators who started off doing non-comic book work and got recruited over.
It’s kind of a muddy term. Because it’s used both for original works that are created as long-form graphic novels and for collections of issues in an arc. Watchmen for example is often referred to as a graphic novel but it was originally released as 10 (?) Individual issues.
@Shuck speaking of individual styles the new Mike Allred drawn Superman: Space Age series looks amazing!
(Edited to add link to preview with several pages (Skip the editorial and scroll down to admire the preview pages) and to correct the series - I forgot that it was a Superman book not a Justice League book!)
From what I remember, and @milliefink Will Eisner originated the term to differentiate his more literary works from his comics like The Spirit. He specifically used it with his A Contract with God books, which were longer-format, but still illustrated…
They are an excellent look at the history of NYC and on immigration. He also did The Plot, which was also written as a graphic novel, that details the history of the forgery the protocols.
On the now-defunct Studio 360 radio program Neil Gaiman told a story about the time he was at a party and introduced himself as “a writer of comic books”. The person he was speaking to looked down his nose and said, “Oh, and who would you be then?” Gaiman said his name and the person said, “Oh, no, no, no, you don’t write comic books, you write graphic novels.”
Gaiman found the distinction both amusing and ridiculous.
Yeah, I was originally distinguishing them, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, by graphical styles - “graphic novels” having had distinct visuals for a very long time, comic book art being characterized by that particular male-gazey tradition with male characters that are all muscle and female characters that are all breasts. What I’ve noticed lately is illustrators who previously were doing highly idiosyncratic work in graphic novels and web comics, etc. are now ending up doing work for the big superhero comic lines at DC and Marvel, bringing art styles that would have been unimaginable in those comics just a few years ago.
Publishers like Oni, Darkhorse and SLG (among others) in the 90s also introduced lot of talent that never really did the whole muscles and breasts thing, even in the superhero books they published. Those creators are now all over the place, including working on Big Two superhero titles (This is how Ed Brubaker came up, though he really just writes these days - check out the collection of his very slacker-y slice of life comic A Complete Lowlife to see what he was up to back then).
And the youngsters coming up today are pulling from all sorts of places - animation they grew up on, anime, and of course manga. It really is leading to a lot more diversity - in styles, voices, and stories - which is wonderful!
Absolutely! For every Gail Simone that makes the big time there are a dozen Chynna Clugston Flores (the incredibly talented writer/artist of Blue Monday and writer of the Lumberjanes/Gotham Academy crossover) around the edges doing great work and never getting a chance to break through. It’s tragic
I get what you’re saying, and if I wanted to be a typical “gotta win this argument!” person I could argue that their spirit was never there to begin with, they just wanted to earn a living instead of making their own style. But instead I will retract the “broke their spirit” because people have different spirits and ideals. Not everyone wants to be the next Peter Crumb.
This all reminds me of what Scott McCloud touched upon in Understanding Comics, that when print quality got better and comics could move away from the 17 print inks and half tones that occasionally wouldn’t line up right, they didn’t move away from the storylines and stuck to the circus strongman costumes. In a way Scott’s argument in that chapter was a little against his argument earlier that comics are a medium, not a content. A bottle can just as easily be wine as it can be soda was his argument.
Which brings me back to the way I am not sure if the section of The Alchemist we see here was drawn unironically, or lampshading to make a point about narcissism and the wandering male gaze. Because that would involve actually reading a graphic novel that doesn’t interest me in the least. I already had a go at it as prose.
Are you sure about that? Granted I don’t collect collect like I used to, but I’ve seen modern art and many artists have very distinct styles. I have become fans of some of them like Franceso Francavilla, who has a very distinctive style. I know John Romita Jr is in demand. Yes, they had an issue in the 90s where artists felt they were the main draw to selling books (mostly true) and formed their own company, Image.
Comics has long been a balance between following the characters you like, and also following an artist you like. I still will pick up something just because I like the artist or writer, even if I am otherwise unfamiliar with the book.
And for every Jim Lee or Mike Mignola who was making books and characters their own, you had 5+ other guys cranking out the other books. Solid artists, but more generic in the style. That’s always been true and hold the franchises down, you said.
Kinda, sorta, and I stopped collecting way back in the 90s, when First Comics went belly-up. I never really collected mainstream, what I still have are Albedo Anthropomorphics (even though I am not a furry, I just liked Stephen Gallacci’s work), Grimjack, The Badger, a bunch of Groo, stuff like that.
I get the feeling I am undermining my own argument, since my experience with comic books began in the mid 1970s as a kid, and changed radically when I hit college in 1985, 1986. I gave the whole Spawn and the grim dark era of comics in the 1990s a hard pass, reading more European works at the time, or Heavy Metal, with artists like Peter Kuper, Rick Geary, and so on.
Every time I looked at Marvel or DC, I was simply bored. I tried Batman: Hush, and man, talk about a comic made for the juvenile male reader! And Marvel was recycled soap opera plots, the artwork still the same hard lines, just with more gradients and shading instead of solids and half-tones.
So that’s why I kinda soured on a lot of mainstream comics. They had become comfort food, fine-tuned to make profits, not to be original.
It’s so consistent with the conventional comic book illustration style, I’m going with “unironic.” I think if it were actually making a point, it would be better done.
Wow! I am honestly amazed that you have engaged with ANYTHING comics related again after that reintroduction! It put me off reading Batman regularly for a while!
Yeah, it was a bad purchase. And sits in the bookshelf to remind me never to trust reviews again.
I’ve gotten the Rivers of London series, but only because those stories only exist in comic form, not for the artwork. The drawings lack character somehow, especially the facial expressions.
I’m going to just reread Cerebus High Society now. Even though Dave Sim turned into a garbage person, I still like his Marx Brothers pastiche in the comic. And then my Hellboy omnibus, and Girl Genius back issues.
Wow! I am honestly amazed that you have engaged with ANYTHING comics related again after that reintroduction! It put me off reading Batman regularly for a while!