Young artists are impatient to find a distinctive voice or style. They distort what they see, not out of any expressive need but rather to develop a trademark "brand." To accomplish this they often try borrowing eccentricities from mature artists. Unfortunately, unearned and imitative styles often look inauthentic and unpersuasive.
The comic book artists in the golden age were not concerned with developing a personal style, they were concerned with drawing so they didn't starve. Jules Feiffer fondly recalled cranking out pictures fast enough to survive:
Artists sat humped in crowded rooms, knocking it out for the page rate. Penciling, inking, lettering in the balloons for $10.00 a page, sometime less.... Working blind but furiously, working from the advice of others who drew better because they were in the business two-weeks longer...Reading old crime and horror comics, I was struck by the strange, interesting drawings that emerged not from a self-conscious search for a "style," but from untrained artists working in a pressure cooker.
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| Detail |
Quickly drawn faces by unskilled, underpaid artists ...
...sometimes resemble the studied, careful distortions in the mature styles of fine artists:
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| Saul Steinberg |
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| Seymour Chwast |
Even without trying to build a brand or a trademark style, many of these crude comic drawings have undeniable power that makes them the envy of "high class" artists.
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| Basquiat |
[O]ne suddenly learned how to draw. It happened in spurts. Nothing for a while: not being able to catch on, not being able to foreshorten correctly, or get perspectives straight or get the blacks to look right. Then suddenly: a breakthrough. One morning you can draw forty percent better than you could when you quit the night before. Then, again you coast. Your critical abilities improve but your talent won't. Nothing works. Despair. Then another breakthrough. Magically, it keeps happening. Soon it stops being magic, just becomes education.
23 comments:
I think there is an important thing about these drawings : they are comics drawings. They don’t exist by themselves but illustrate a story. So, good drawing is not the most important here. Telling a story is important.
Li-An - With respect, I have to disagree. Comics is the one medium where I repeatedly hear one element of the creation doesn't matter. To me it's like watching a movie and saying acting, cinematography, editing, and the score don't matter because the director's telling of the story is what’s important. Or listening to a poor interpretation of a great piece of music. I'm definitely not saying there's a set way you have to draw in comics, but I think you do need to know your craft. People like Jim Mahfood, Warwick Johnson Cadwell, and Mike Mignola are far from realists, but they’ve all studied art and choose to draw the way they do. I agree with the philosophy of Scott McCloud that you can use very simple elements to tell a story, but I think he’s frequently misunderstood and has done more harm than good by giving wannabe artists an excuse not to master their craft.
Li-An - And to be clear my use of the term "you" in my response refers to artists in general, not to you specifically. Please, don't think I was going on the attack.
When Al Capp (hardly a slouch, and an artist who learned his craft and the business of comic art partly from Milt Caniff) was asked late in his career what had been his motivation for creating Li’l Abner, he responded without hesitation “not eating regularly”; but what impelled him to continue the strip (with numerous assistants) into the ’70’s was (stated with a self-deprecating sense of humour) “pure avarice.”
Li-An and inmyoblivion-- this issue has long been the subject of rip-roaring debate on this blog and many others over the years. I agree that sequential art has special qualities, and different ways of achieving excellence, from more traditional image making. However, I don't think any of those differences exempt sequential artists from making good pictures within those individual frames.
Far too many artists (and audiences) today attempt to justify sloppy, lazy or downright bad drawing by saying, "You're judging me by the wrong criteria-- you should judge me just by the concept" or the "story" or the "movement," etc. I think that's looking for the easy way out. Look at animation drawings by Disney artists or Richard Williams, for example, and you'll see that it is quite possible for a sequential artist to make every building block an artistic contribution, and it makes a big difference in the quality of the whole sequence.
comicstripfan-- Ah, yes, Al Capp... the Bill Cosby of the comic strip field. It's interesting that so many artists who are motivated by eating regularly then go above and beyond the call of duty, crafting far better pictures than what would be required to just "get by."
LOVE the Feiffer quote about breakthroughs, I'll save that!
When I began animating in the Bluth studio in the late 80s/early 90s, one of the animators told me that when you start you'll be eking out 1 or 2 seconds a week, and this will go on for months. You'll be close to quitting or being fired, then one weekend you'll go home, come to work on Monday, and do 5 or 6 seconds. Previous week you could barely do 2 seconds, next week you'll be on 5 or 6. Just this stairstep bump. I thought this was the stupidest thing I'd ever heard, surely improvement would be more linear than that?
Then about 4 months later, after despairing as a 2 second animator, came to work on Monday and produced 6 seconds.
Catch is this: this doesn't happen if you dabble. You need months of intense effort, hour after hour, before the breakthrough happens. This is why most people don't level up to the next plateau; they may have the potential, but they don't want to put in the time/sacrifice.
Interesting post David.
I suppose the habits characterising an artist's ineptitude or shortcomings (whether or not under commercial pressures) can be thought of as a 'style' in the sense that every artist's style is an unconscious consequence of their particular formal/plastic habits. The difference being that a better the artist the more attuned those habits are to the content of their art.
Well, I won’t reopen the conversation about "good drawing" in comics field. My english is too poor to express my thoughts correctly. As a reader, and french reader, I defended "good" drawing and searched for quality and work. But as artist (I will put myself in "average comics artist"), I discovered I like very much some work considered as "poor" by french/belgian comics fans.
Examples : https://www.li-an.fr/blog/histoire-bd/loeil-chat-fabio-seuil/ https://www.li-an.fr/blog/bd-du-moment/lart-sans-madame-goldruber-mahler-lassociation/. Sfar and Blain are considered as bad drawing artists for a lot of comics fans in France. As Hugo Pratt was.
But I agree that a lot of comics authors (mainly in independent field) seem to consider drawings as secondary. It’s not my opinion as reader and artist.
Let me play the troll: I admire Mignola as illustrator and even story teller but I’m bored by his stories. So I don’t consider him as a great comics artist :-) (it’s a tough battle with a lot of my friends and colleagues to present my point of view).
> "This is why most people don't level up to the next plateau; they may have the potential, but they don't want to put in the time/sacrifice."
Not talking about animation here, but just drawing and painting in general -- I'll regularly step away from physically making pictures for months at a time, but invariably when I come back I discover that my "skills" have jumped dramatically from the last time I made anything.
I'm not sure that the "spurts" as Feiffer puts it are exclusively tied to sacrifice. I suspect that many amateurs would see surprising advances in their art by spending time looking at the world carefully, and looking at high quality pictures regularly.
If you're not an artistic "body builder", and are merely looking for artistic "general fitness", it appears that a healthy diet of good pictures, and low-impact visual aerobics are enough to keep the artistic mind humming just fine.
Would love to see a before and after example of one of your jumps .
Li-An - I don't think any of your examples would be considered "bad" art. Although I admit I've always thought of Hugo Pratt the same as Eddie Campbell...I try to like him, but I just can't do it. The others have a consistent presentation and their style fits what is being presented. I don't think some people realize how incredibly difficult it is to work like Blaine or Sfar or you do. Unless you're a prodigy, I expect you spent years of practice and trial and error to developing how you work.
And, that was great trolling with Mike Mignola. You put something in my head.
@inmyoblivion : Hugo Pratt is a perfect comics artist. He worked very hard to draw the faster he could. I prefer the period he was searching for visual effects. At the end, he uses graphic tricks to have less and less work in drawing and it’s a little boring.
Dermot M O Connor-- It's nice to hear from someone who has paid the dues in the field. Thanks for fleshing out Feiffer's point. My sense is that you are right, these transformations won't happen if an artist dabbles. It is also less likely to happen if an artist is focusing on a trademark brand rather than doing the work.
chris bennett-- Ineptitude in art can be interesting, just as children's art or art of the insane can be interesting, and some very accomplished artists mimic those primitive qualities in a effort to escape their technical skill and muscle memory. Just as it is more difficult than you'd think for an intelligent person to pretend to be stupid, it's more difficult than you'd think for a skilled artist to pretend to be naive. I don't know if I'd call the ineptitude of the genuinely unskilled a "style" because the more they work, the more their "style" disappears.
Li-An-- your English seems fine for these discussions. There are people whose English is eloquent but whose ideas are senseless.
You are a brave person to take the position you take about Mignola. You seem to be saying that a comic artist cannot be great unless the stories, as well as the pictures, are great. In a field where excellent artists often team with mediocre writers (or excellent writers team with mediocre artists) I think that is a difficult standard to maintain. I think most people would agree that Alex Raymond was among the greatest comic artists ever, yet the plots of Flash Gordon are widely regarded as silly.
@David Apatoff : well, I won’t tell my advice is golden truth. It’s just my opinion and taste and I can perfectly understand why people say that Mignola is one of the biggest comics artist in the World. I just do not buy his comics :-)
Artist’s taste can be very strange. When you asked Giraud/Moebius about his favorite western movies, he named B movies not considered as the best ones by the amateurs (included myself).
I won’t give my opinion about Alex Raymond’s work on Flash Gordon, I never have the opportunity to read his comics.
Agree about the writing in Flash Gordon, which admittedly was not I think originally intended for a mature audience, or rather for readers of any age who happened to turn the newspaper page to Flash in those days that they were looking for anything sophisticated. A better case perhaps for meeting Li-An's standards could be made for Raymond's under-appreciated postwar Rip Kirby, the writing and the art.
I shouldn't chip in before reading through all the comments above, but this is too interesting a post and I have too little time.
I think David is hitting the nail right on the head as usual. He's able to consider the context of comic artists being often the less skilled AND paid of the whole illustrative art community, who had to crank out pages at a high rate and not necessarily having the tools to either evaluate or execute their own art.
To those who put storytelling first in comics, while I agree that the storytelling aspect is king, I think that criteria is better applied to those cases where great draftsmanship accompanies poor storytelling, rather than the other way around.
As for the question if certain limitations that can "coalesce" into a personal style, well I don't know. I still apply a very personal and hard-to-explain meter when approaching a pieve figurative art. I can be totally on board with certain epressive distortions and roll my eyes at others.
(Very) broadly speaking, I usually respect more those artists who prove they master all the necessary skills (perspective, anatomy, foreshortening, staging, chiaroscuro etc.). Choosing to use a style means you could choose to change if you wanted to, not that you just chose NOT to develop ertain skills. For some reason the figures in this post brought to my mind the work of underground comic book artist Melinda Gebbie, whom I really cannot warm up to. She is clearly trying to channel old comic book art like the one from this blog post (and even some old Max Fleisher cartoons), but I have the impression she still lacks some of the basics
David Hockney claimed that errors in draftsmanship were the actual constituents of an artist's style. I think this is true, but only to a small extent (and the limiting simplicity of the pronouncement is a fair analogy for most of Hockney's assertions about anything.)
I think style comes out of three main factors, personal physicality and energy, personal sensibility or mood of mind, and artistic concerns. All three change over a lifetime, only rarely abruptly.
Regarding comics, my opinion is that 80% or more of the storytelling is in the pictures and page design. As David Mamet once remarked about films, the best way to write them is as a silent movie, as if the characters can't speak. Because the medium is fundamentally visual and that's the main way the narrative information is conveyed. Such applies even more to the comics medium than film, I would say.
I would say there is almost no weak story that cannot be made absolutely fascinating and memorable by a great comic book artist.
I think Mignola is wonderful in all regards and anybody who thinks differently is probably stuck in a overly left-brained frame of mind.
Kev wrote
"I would say there is almost no weak story that cannot be made absolutely fascinating and memorable by a great comic book artist."
Well that's the truth. All an artist needs is some forms and a motivation to put his skills in motion. How many people believing there was nothing of interest to be found in a thing change their mind because of how someone painted it. I can't help but feel the story is an excuse for the artist to show of his art or the beauty of form and space.
As Mort Drucker said, "just draw. don't worry about style it will come." The Jules Feiffer reminds of Ingres's instruction,"we learn to draw by drawing."
Second what Kev said. The more popular of manga creator Katsuhiro Otomo's works, Akira and Domu, are actually juvenile on the story level, but the art alone puts them on the top shelf of comics. God knows how many utterly disposable tales were made something special by Frazetta's ability. The content of comics is largely adolescent fantasy, and I long ago lost interest in super powers, demons, robots, immortal champions, etc., but it remains a fascinating medium nonetheless.
This is a wonderful blog that displays the knowledge, intelligence and generosity of the host and all participants.
Kev Ferrara: “Regarding comics, my opinion is that 80% or more of the storytelling is in the pictures and page design. …the best way to write them is as a silent movie, as if the characters can't speak. Because the medium is fundamentally visual and that's the main way the narrative information is conveyed. Such applies even more to the comics medium than film…”
To Kev Ferrara: uh-huh, comic art writing - the unloved stepchild of comic artists - somewhere in the universe there’s a comic art writers’ blog where they say: “If it weren’t for us…” then someone might recall Alex Toth (again, no slouch) who praised certain comic art writers and whose favourite and to him most challenging genre was the “talkative” romance comics because: “[R]omance was very special. It dealt with emotions in a different way than the slam-bang adventure stuff. There are a lot of things under the surface... a line of dialogue could say "this," but the expression of the person would say "that”…there were all of these little nuances of line readings, acting, reacting, interpretation, layers of character, personality, integrity, etc., people bouncing off each other... that was suddenly very grown-up, as opposed to the slam-bang [e.g. Westerns]... It was a whole new ballgame, and it forced me to really pay attention, and look, learn and listen.” I understand someone would say in response that Mr. Toth’s comments hardly imply that “Harlequin” story lines are pulitzer prize-winners. Comic writing is not Shakespeare and one should perhaps have no pretense that most comic art is truly “illustration art” but understood in its own context and on its own terms, it is quite special, a mysteriously and sometimes fascinating and challenging conjunction of words and art in many cases essential to each other and appreciated as such by some of the best artists who ever lived.
Li-An wrote: "Artist’s taste can be very strange. When you asked Giraud/Moebius about his favorite western movies, he named B movies not considered as the best ones by the amateurs (included myself)."
Yes, I agree, and I find that fascinating. One has to wonder about the difference between and artist looking at a landscape and an artist looking at another artist's work of art.
comicstripfan-- Agreed, the writing in Rip Kirby was far superior. But it's hard to compare the two strips with any kind of objective formula. What do you say to those who prefer the artwork in Flash Gordon to Rip Kirby, and for that reason prefer the whole strip because they don't attach much weight to the story component?
Gianmaria Caschetto wrote: "I usually respect more those artists who prove they master all the necessary skills (perspective, anatomy, foreshortening, staging, chiaroscuro etc.)."
I share your respect (and prejudice) even though I like many artists who are unskilled and many works of art that include accidents. I usually prefer artists who have deliberately chosen a path out of strength, rather than artists who work around whatever was left by their weaknesses. As the great Dolly Parton advised, "Figure out what you are and then do it on purpose."
Kev Ferrara-- If David Hockney defines "errors in draftsmanship" as deviations from a photographic realism, I suppose there is something to be said for his slogan, but I'm not sure of the value of such an insight.
I agree wholeheartedly with your point that "there is almost no weak story that cannot be made absolutely fascinating and memorable by a great comic book artist." As for your point that "80% or more of the storytelling is in the pictures and page design," I might give slightly different percentages but I take your point. I think Jack Kirby is exhibit A, and A.B. Frost proves David Mamet's point-- no "page design, of course, but man what a storyteller with the rhythm of a great drummer.
I, too, am a Mignola fan although I couldn't tell you whether it comes from the left or right side of my brain.
Tom-- Well, I can't disagree with someone who quotes Mort Drucker. I would note that a huge percentage of Drucker's parodies for MAD were of absolutely rancid, forgettable TV shows such as "Alf," yet Drucker applied the same loving care and his artwork still sings (thus embodying your point that " the story is an excuse for the artist to show off his art or the beauty of form and space."
David Apatoff: “But it's hard to compare [Rip Kirby and Flash Gordon] with any kind of objective formula. What do you say to those who prefer the artwork in Flash Gordon to Rip Kirby, and for that reason prefer the whole strip because they don't attach much weight to the story component?”
I say: (1) Isn’t it wonderful that a comic strip/comic book can be appreciated on different levels, and that you don’t have to pay attention to the writing to appreciate the art? (2) to the comic strip/comic book artists (including letterers, inkers, etc) and writers, an “objective formula” for judging, e.g. a comic strip, might be this: to what extent is the art and the writing compatible and working together to produce a piece of art that as a whole is an “oevre” that is MORE than either form individually? I understand the sad historical fact is that, so many excellent comic strip/book artists were not well-served by the writing, and that the foregoing “formula” or “standard” would be an ideal; but is it not possible to point to a Leonard Starr’s “On Stage” or to a Warren Tufts’ “Lance” and say, you know, these works might at least approach being what would be considered the “perfect” strip that is more than just excellent draughtsmanship?
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