On the racks today is the Batman International collection, which includes Batman: the Scottish connection by Alan Grant and Frank Quitely. I like Frank’s artwork normally, but glancing inside at his depiction of Edinburgh Castle as viewed from the Grassmarket I can’t help but wonder why he didn’t render a more accurate depiction of the scene:
The Grassmarket is an old area – there are inns there that were already old when Robert Burns came to Edinburgh in the 1700s – but it doesn’t look like this. There are buildings which don’t exist which have been added in, an extra bridge where it shouldn’t be, buildings in the main foreground mostly do exist but are badly distorted, the Castle and Castle Rock appear to have been grabbed and stretched taller and thinner out of normal proportions, the street and road on the side of the Rock are missing… It’s a major world landmark (and indeed part of a UN World Heritage Site) so it isn’t hard to find decent visual references to base the art on. It does make me wonder however, how accurate – or inaccurate – comics depictions of other major cities are, ones which I don’t personally know so can’t really tell.
(actually it looks a bit more like this)
Yes, I know, its fantasy and there’s artistic license to consider – perhaps Frank deliberately drew it in this manner for a largely overseas audience. And to be fair Scottish Connection is a daft but quite enjoyable Bat-romp, but it does irk me that they couldn’t be bothered to render a reasonably accurate image of such an important landmark. When Denise Mina had John Constantine go to Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Art Gallery & Museum she supplied the artist – who had never been there – with visuals and a fairly good representation was made of the building in Hellblazer, so I wonder why not here with an even more famous landmark? Have you ever seen your own town or city either distorted or well depicted in comics? Answers on a postcard as they say (or more likely in the comments, which is much easier).
March 18th, 2010 at 5:40 am
It’s cause he’s from Glasgow. You should see how folks from Edinburgh draw Glasgow – all casual violence and people telling jokes no-one else in the world can understand. Oh, that’s actually a true depiction…..
March 18th, 2010 at 8:58 am
That’s a damnable slur on a city of fine architecture and many museums and galleries, sir, and as such an east end razor gang has been dispatched from the 1950s stereotype facility to deal with your observations :-)
March 18th, 2010 at 11:39 am
The cover of Amazing Spider-man 95 springs to mind. The Houses of Parliament squeezed next to Tower Bridge (which morphes into Brooklyn Bridge half-way across)
March 18th, 2010 at 4:21 pm
Actually, the first Excalibur comic (released as “The Sword is Drawn” graphic novel) always really impressed me, because they went to the St Enochs centre in Glasgow, somewhere I often visited when I was in the city, and it was pretty darn accurate. Next time me and my friends visited, we couldn’t help but go on about how Nightcrawler landed over there, and teleported up there, etc.