Post Good/Bad Comic Book Art - Stop Posting Liefeld

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > BSS: Bisexual Super Son > Post Good/Bad Comic Book Art - Stop Posting Liefeld

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

This thread needs more Brits (sorry for the crappy phone camera quality).

Brian Bolland! Classic Dredd from his last ever regular 2000AD story before he went to the States. His linework is phenomenal, and even though he has his imitators (step forward, Cliff Robinson) nobody's ever matched him.

Simon Bisley! ABC Warriors was his first pro work (I actually prefer his B&W linework to his painted stuff), and I love the sheer dynamism of this page. Why are they hanging from a chain? Why would robots have muscles? Who the gently caress cares, it looks awesome.

I'd put in some Henry Flint (Dredd, ABCs, Zombo and especially Shakara) too, but it was hard finding a single representative page. Shakara is fantastic(ally bizarre), though.

To balance things out, here's some terrible 2000AD art. What the hell, Liam Sharp? We know you can do better than this!

# ¿ May 13, 2011 15:34

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# ¿ May 2, 2024 02:37

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Dillon's early work on Dredd and the like had a nice 'gritty' style to the inking, but as he went on and got a reputation as a super-fast artist (2000AD lost an entire episode of 'City Of The Damned' after he delivered it, so he redrew the whole thing from scratch in about two days to make the deadline) that level of detailing disappeared to leave a very clean, minimally-detailed style where all his characters have one of about six different identikit faces.

# ¿ Aug 30, 2012 16:01

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Silhouette posted:

Charles Bronson isn't looking too good.

That's not Charles Bronson, it's Jason King!

# ¿ Oct 9, 2012 15:34

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Brocktoon posted:

Check out this sultry Catwoman I found while reading Knightfall...

That tree or whatever the hell it is on the left looks like it's reaching in to grab her rear end.

# ¿ Nov 19, 2014 15:58

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Wiggles Von Huggins posted:

- Me every time I watch a martial arts movie

That's why I preferred Dredd to The Raid. There's no faffing around with fancy martial arts; Dredd just shoots people until he runs out of ammo, only resorting to brutally beating them to death in order to get more ammo.

# ¿ Dec 1, 2015 23:44

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Jedit posted:

Dillon used to be a hell of a lot better before he began dialling it in some time about a year into Preacher. The stuff he did for 2000AD in his 20s is very nearly Bolland quality, and he could do it fast enough to actually work on serials.

Dillon's art for an episode of the Dredd story 'City of the Damned' got lost just before the issue went to press, so Dillon redrew the whole thing in an insanely short time to make the print deadline. The original art turned up years later (it had been misfiled), so 2000AD reprinted it - there's no difference in quality between the two, and to my mind the 'rushed' redraw often looks better!

Dillon was definitely a top-tier Dredd artist in the early-mid 80s (with a lot of 'gritty' detailing that disappeared as he streamlined his style), and his characters didn't go full Identikit until quite a bit later.

# ¿ Jan 23, 2016 21:01

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Sundowner posted:

Hope this is the right thread for this. Around 2013-2014 I took a real interest in reading and collecting comics and being from the UK I had easy access to 2000 AD's prog and through that I bought up older back issues and stuff.

Came across a trove of comics in my cupboard, some progs/megazine and some US comics ranging from the mid 80s to the mid 2000s.

Any interest in me digging through these and sharing some of the best/worst stuff I can find?

The early-mid 1990s were the nadir for 2000AD's "third-rate Bisley clone brown-on-brown painted art printed on toilet paper" period, so reliving some of its worst horrors would be fun.

# ¿ Mar 23, 2016 17:54

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

MacNeil and Kev Walker were easily the best of 2000AD's "fully painted" artists, but I'm guessing that the sheer amount of time and work needed to do each page is the reason they both changed their style back to coloured lineart. (Phone posting, or I'd stick up some of Walker's ABC Warriors paintwork.)

# ¿ Mar 27, 2016 20:59

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

BROCK LESBIAN posted:

Yeah that's great but Batman's trying to be all intimidating while having to duck walking through doors it isn't gonna work. How the hell does he even fit in the Batmobile?

Supposedly, on the '89 Batman movie, the first time Michael Keaton got into the Batmobile and closed the canopy it sliced the ears off his costume.

# ¿ Jan 2, 2017 20:15

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

prefect posted:

And I thought he inspired Jason Wyngarde, not Tony Stark!

# ¿ Jan 5, 2017 20:09

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Higgins is a respected comic artist in his own right (he's done a ton of stuff for 2000AD, for a start - probably more than Bolland), so Bolland essentially saying "I wanted to get rid of this poo poo in favour of my TRUE VISION" was a bit of a smack in the face. Wouldn't Moore originally have given some direction about the colouring and lighting in his script? It's not as if he doesn't work very closely with his collaborators.

# ¿ Jan 14, 2017 19:45

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Wapole Languray posted:

Law hates superheros because he's never actually met one, all the superhumans are broken people, either victims or monsters. Marshal Law actually wants there to be genuine superheros, instead of broken people, psychopaths, or cynical assholes.

Law is also a "superhero" himself in that he underwent the genetic modification in the military and was involved in a lot of horrible poo poo in the name of "patriotism", which he's now revolted by, so there's a shitload of self-loathing to it too. As Lynn points out in the first book, the barbed wire around the arm is a pretty big indicator.

There's also that Pat Mills loving hates the very concept of superheroes to the core of his being, seeing them as fascistic, war-glorifying, submit-to-your-betters authoritarian propaganda, and that comes through strongly as well! His take on Batman in 'Kingdom of the Blind' has genuine loathing and anger at the idea that a psychologically hosed-up billionaire who beats the poo poo out of poor people with impunity is in any way a hero, and it's brilliant.

# ¿ Jul 5, 2017 23:53

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

david_a posted:

Wasn't that the point to begin with? I thought the original concept of Judge Dredd was a satire of Thatcher/Reagan "tough on crime" nonsense: what if society actually worked like Dirty Harry/Death Wish, i.e. there are individuals in power who are judge, jury, and executioner all rolled into one. I never really paid attention to who wrote which stories, though.

Going back a while, but Dredd actually pre-dates the Thatcher/Reagan era by a few years. It was more the early 70s Dirty Harry-style "tough cop" genre taken to its ludicrous extreme, where Harry isn't a borderline psychotic rogue but is actually held up as the exemplar of law enforcement. (The original unpublished first script had Dredd executing someone for jaywalking, which is exactly what Harry suggested the vigilante cops in Magnum Force would end up doing.)

What's scary in hindsight is that the first Dredd story came out only six years after Dirty Harry, and three months before Star Wars. The man's been busting heads for forty years!

# ¿ Sep 7, 2017 15:01

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

A Gnarlacious Bro posted:

Man I've been buying up a bunch of classic 2000AD stuff and for my tastes pretty much nothing tops that old Kevin O'Neil art, especially Nemesis the Warlock. It's like everything appealing about the 40K aesthetic but fun and goofy as gently caress.

A detail that's not really visible in the second picture is that Torque-Armada's (the red robot) feet are loving galleons, filled with fanatics turning gears by hand to make it move.

Nemesis is a great strip because O'Neill and Pat Mills filled it with an insane amount of detail about just how horrible this future, and humans in general), really are.

# ¿ May 15, 2018 08:33

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

It's a drat shame Photoshop Phriday isn't a thing any more, because those would be great starter images.

# ¿ Nov 1, 2018 23:09

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Lurdiak posted:

You could totally do that practically, it would just be impossible to get Disney to greenlight it. Look up the films of Brian Yuzna.

The Incredible Shunt.

# ¿ Oct 2, 2020 17:03

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

BiggerBoat posted:

It's not Liefeld

drat. It's Kevin O'Neill levels of grotesque deformation of the superhero form, but without any of the irony/hatred he put into Marshal Law.

# ¿ Mar 21, 2021 00:31

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Edge & Christian posted:

Punisher 2099 was written by Pat Mills and Tony Skinner, who created/co-created Judge Dredd and Marshal Law.

There's a thin line in 1990s comics sometimes between parody/satire and paycheck cashing (see: Lobo) but from re-reading the first few issues, the whole book is far less straight-faced than my childhood recollection of it was.

Mills loathes superheroes and spent a whole Marshal Law story ripping into the entire concept of the Punisher as being outright fascist, so even not having read 2099 I'd imagine it as some combination of satire and critique (with extreme amounts of violence and anti-authoritarian politics).

# ¿ May 16, 2021 13:58

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Lobok posted:

Perfection.

https://twitter.com/Bob_Layton/status/1395000042629570563?s=20

That's, uh, some very flexible and form-fitting metal armour, even by comic art standards.

# ¿ May 20, 2021 08:22

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Sharpe's an oddball, because when he started out in 2000AD he was aping Glenn Fabry to the point of straight-up tracing him (one of his characters in several frames of a Dredd story is Fabry's Slaine with a different haircut), then when Bisley hit the comic like a bomb he leapt all aboard the Biz-train.

# ¿ Jun 25, 2021 18:35

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Darthemed posted:

Absolutely begging for a Batman-style Dick Butt edit.

# ¿ Jul 14, 2021 08:00

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Splint Chesthair posted:

He's really good at drawing superheroes as grotesque abominations, which works great for Marshall Law. Here, it's just unsettling.

Yeah, seeing O'Neill draw the actual superheroes he'd spent several years satirising and ridiculing in Marshal Law is... weird.

# ¿ Oct 22, 2021 11:27

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Chinston Wurchill posted:

Something seems off about these proportions. From Batman/Catwoman #8, art by Liam Sharp.

I was going to say I didn't recognise that as Sharp's style at all, but then I saw the raggedy-splatty scribble detail on the cape (or whatever it is) on the right, and remembered his run on ABC Warriors where everything looked like that.

# ¿ Oct 29, 2021 12:00

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Digamma-F-Wau posted:

Judge Dredd Megazine Vol. 2 #53
Script: John Wagner
Art: Mike "Mick" McMahon
Letters: Tom Frame

IIRC, Wagner and McMahon spent quite some time developing the alien character of Howler because they wanted a new recurring Dredd villain; the problem with Dredd is that his default method of dealing with villains leaves them as a bloodied corpse. (The most successful returnees were Judge Death [already dead]; Mean Machine Angel [actually did die, but was resurrected with the survival power of 'comic relief']; Chopper [not really a villain]; and PJ Maybe [had a good run over multiple decades, but eventually bought it about four different ways at once].) So they had high hopes for Howler.

Until Wagner actually wrote the story, realised there was no way Howler or Dredd would leave the other alive, and since the strip is called 'Judge Dredd'...

# ¿ Nov 26, 2021 23:31

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Jedit posted:

The worst thing that ever happened to comic book art, excluding Rob Liefeld and Greg Land, is whatever the hell Alan Craddock used to digitally colour America: Fading of the Light. I can't find a good image to share, but then again there really couldn't be one. It was appalling and it only looks worse in collected editions where it sits between Colin McNeil's amazing painted original story and Cadet, which came out ten years later when software had moved on.

Ezquerra's "ooh, this Kai's Power Tools can do some funky effects!" digital texturing on Wilderlands came close though.

# ¿ Mar 14, 2022 00:46

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Goldskull posted:

When I was talking to an ex-200AD colourist a couple of years back, he said they tended to hit the black really hard. Those Image ones look a lot like the colourist is mixing black into the flats/shading too, instead of keeping it CMY and letting the linework do all the lifting.
Or they were just crap at colouring.

The printers can be blamed sometimes as well. I used to be a magazine designer back in the 90s, and we'd sometimes get issues back where the pages had been so over-inked on the press that even plain black text would be smeared. (So we'd get orders to lighten the next issue's images to compensate, and invariably they'd come back washed out because the printer had put the ink load back to normal.)

# ¿ Mar 15, 2022 20:17

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# ¿ May 2, 2024 02:37

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

BiggerBoat posted:

Not sure if MAD Magazine has been brought up in the thread but I was a reading an article about their history.

I've always thought the work they did on their film parodies was amazing, especially given how little photo reference was probably available back then. There was no internet or even VCR's to use for purposes of capturing likenesses. I imagine they had several stills to work from but I can't think they had a ton of them or that the studios would want to cooperate with the artists. Maybe they did?

My knee jerk reaction though would be that the film makers might not want to make jokes out of serious films but on the other hand maybe they saw it as publicity. I remember reading their versions of Saturday Night Fever, Dog Day Afternoon and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest as a kid before I ever even saw the movies and being really impressed with the drawings. I mean, I knew who the actors were but was too young to see R rated films.

I wonder how they were to able to draw them so well with such limited reference material though.

Jack Davis drew the posters for multiple movies in the 60s and 70s (and was a massively in-demand artist for corporate publicity campaigns), so the studios were probably happy to send him any reference material he required. And the behind-the-scenes books for shows like Star Trek and Mission: Impossible made it look like being spoofed in Mad was a great compliment and a sign that you'd arrived, so the same likely applied there. (The official M:I book actually reprinted the entire Mad strip!)

# ¿ Apr 3, 2022 21:58

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > BSS: Bisexual Super Son > Post Good/Bad Comic Book Art - Stop Posting Liefeld