The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

Thanks to Tom Spurgeon for the link on this one.

The Onion has a nice little list piece covering some of the artists it considers the most influential on mainstream (or perhaps better descrbed as Superhero) comics. All the usual suspects are there;Kirby, Ditko, Barks, Perez, Infantino et al. But it’s the artists the Onion includes in the “For Worse” part of the title that brings the smile to my face. For example:

Alex Ross: He’s a pioneer of the dull, unimaginative craze for giving superheroes celebrity faces, and with his shaky layouts and mediocre visual storytelling, he almost seems more interested in product design than comics art—his most celebrated pieces are excessively posed single-shot images. He’s an impeccable craftsman, to be sure, but do people really want their superheroes to look more realistic?

Greg Land: Using photographs as models is nothing new; comics artists have been doing it for decades, and it’s become even more common since the rise of the Internet. But Land’s layouts and poses were so distinctive—and so repetitive—that people began to get suspicious, and ultimately, Land was accused of lifting from hardcore pornography. What’s more, the details were so precise that some claimed that Land wasn’t simply using the porn actors as body models; he was lifting them into his pages outright and doing the bare minimum of work required with Photoshop to make it look like his own drawing.

One nice thing on Tom’s piece on this article is his mention of Mike Parobeck, the late artist on the Batman Adventures who I’ve always thought of as one of the greatest superhero artists I’ve ever seen. I remember a time in the 90s when everything was getting rather horribly and ridiculously dark in comics except for Mike Parobeck’s gorgeous animated style artwork which cut through the gloom like a light through the night. Beautiful stuff and nice to see Tom’s a fan as well.