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Lance Hill
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 22 April 2005
Posts: 991
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| Posted: 06 March 2014 at 6:55pm | IP Logged | 1
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QUOTE:
| I was just having this discussion with someone the other day. He works at a comic store and asked why I don't buy new comics anymore, and I told him, "because they don't make comics anymore". I said that today's comics are so radically different in tone, and look from what they were, that they really can't be defined as "comicbooks" anymore. I said they should call them something else. |
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Godzilla, Some Like It Hot, Back to the Future, Trois couleurs: Bleu, Pulp Fiction and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen are all films, regardless or era, style or content. The same applies to comic books.
There are certainly trends in entertainment, but where exactly would the line be drawn between "old" and "new"? The comic shelves look different today than they did a decade ago, and a decade before that and a decade before that and a decade before that.
There's not much in common between the art of Jack Kirby and Jim Lee, for sure. But was there ever much in common between the art work of Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Neal Adams, Carl Barks, Osamu Tezuka, Eisner, Robert Crumb and Dan DeCarlo?
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John Byrne
Grumpy Old Guy
Joined: 11 May 2005
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| Posted: 06 March 2014 at 9:47pm | IP Logged | 2
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There's not much in common between the art of Jack Kirby and Jim Lee, for sure. But was there ever much in common between the art work of Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Neal Adams, Carl Barks, Osamu Tezuka, Eisner, Robert Crumb and Dan DeCarlo? When I look at modern comics, I see very little of the diversity to be found in the work of the gentlemen you name. It's true current artists are very different from Jack Kirby or Neal Adams -- but it is important to remember Kirby and Adams were working at the same time. They were dramatically different from each other, yet both fully explored and exploited the language of comics. Neal, a superb photorealist, managed to be so without producing comics that looked like traced photographs. In fact, as a young artist, I was shocked to learn many of his images were exactly that -- traced photographs. Neal managed to bring a vibrancy to his pages that made them look like comic books. And that's what's missing in so many current artists. "Comic book" is not merely a format. To borrow your film analogy, I could hire Sir Anthony Hpkins to sit in a comfy chair and read aloud "War and Peace" while I filmed it. It would be a movie, in the sense that it was on film and even had a famous actor in it, but the language of filmmaking would be lost. A comic book is a combination of words and pictures -- but isn't it, shouldn't it be, more? And aren't so many modern comics somehow... less?
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Greg Woronchak
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 04 September 2007
Location: Canada
Posts: 1631
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| Posted: 07 March 2014 at 1:43pm | IP Logged | 3
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Beautifully said. I love it when you clarify vague feelings about comics I personally have difficulty defining.
Darn talented writer types <g>...
Edited by Greg Woronchak on 07 March 2014 at 1:44pm
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Thomas Francis Tryon
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 16 March 2013
Location: United States
Posts: 107
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| Posted: 07 March 2014 at 9:53pm | IP Logged | 4
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JB Wrote: A comic book is a combination of words and pictures -- but isn't it, shouldn't it be, more? And aren't so many modern comics somehow... less? * Sir, your passion for my favorite artform expesses itself with a raw emotion that almost put a lump in my throat. Pity that so little of today's productions (if any) are wothy of it. Sad that today's editors ignore "the voice of one crying in the wilderness". Wow, I got really carried away there! But what you wrote really made me FEEL.
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Conrad Teves
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 28 January 2014
Location: United States
Posts: 2230
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| Posted: 08 March 2014 at 5:45am | IP Logged | 5
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Does anyone else sense that what the Creators want to create, what the Publishers want to publish, and what the Fans want to read can be three different things?
I've been saying that for a while, and got the feeling again tonight as I was looking at Travis Charest's Spacegirl . Beautifully drawn, but no story at all. Nobody wanted to corral this concept into something more solidified with a good writer? No one? |
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John Byrne
Grumpy Old Guy
Joined: 11 May 2005
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| Posted: 08 March 2014 at 6:23am | IP Logged | 6
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Beautifully drawn
Hmmm.. What if Moebius and Art Adams had a child. . . Clicking thru those images, tho, what struck me, as much as your suggested need for a writers, was the need for an EDITOR. There's an awful lot of waster time, with "moments" isolated as individual panels that could be combined.
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Jack Bohn
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 13 July 2013
Location: United States
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| Posted: 08 March 2014 at 7:07am | IP Logged | 7
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John Byrne wrote:
| Clicking thru those images, tho, what struck me, as much as your suggested need for a writers, was the need for an EDITOR. There's an awful lot of waster time, with "moments" isolated as individual panels that could be combined |
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Wow! How often did (do?) comics editors EDIT in that manner? I would guess less as the artist matures. One problem of the "infinite canvas" of digital comics may become the lack of tightness of presentation.
(Got to the third panel of Spacegirl, definite vibe of "written by Calvin (Spaceman Spiff.)")
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John Byrne
Grumpy Old Guy
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| Posted: 08 March 2014 at 7:39am | IP Logged | 8
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Wow! How often did (do?) comics editors EDIT in that manner? And editor does not have to be a separate person hired to do just that job. It is as much a responsibility of the writer and artist to "keep it tight".
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Carmen Bernardo
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 08 August 2006
Location: United States
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| Posted: 08 March 2014 at 9:33am | IP Logged | 9
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My impression from clicking through all of that was that the whole thing would've done better if Charest had organized it as a page of sequential art. I guess he was wanting to do an experiment here.
There's a reason that I read comics. Looking at single panels with only one line of dialogue (or captions) doesn't exactly feel like that.
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