#lee bradley

[michigandrifter]

The Battle at Apache Pass 1952

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Lee Bradly

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Marvel Comics - and Marvel UK - celebrated in British summer exhibition

Marvel Comics – and Marvel UK – celebrated in British summer exhibition

Journey into Marvel is a new exhibition opening at the Forge Mill Needle Museum, Redditch, in Worcestershire this weekend, which will explore the Marvel characters and comics many of us grew up loving. The summer exhibition runs from Friday 23rd July until the 20th September for a full eight weeks. Artist Lee Bradley is the instigator of the project, and says original published pages will be on…

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Coming Soon: the first-ever Worcester Comic Con

Coming Soon: the first-ever Worcester Comic Con

  Taking place at the University of Worcester Arena on Sunday 21st August, with a promised one hundred traders of wonderful things, from comics to film and TV merchandise, the first ever Worcester Comic Con offers a great line up of comics creators as guests, plus appearances by film and TV guests from Doctor Who, Game of Thrones, Red Dwarf, Star Wars and many more. Comic creators announced…

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THE 99 #27 (2012)

Naif Al-Mutawa & Stuart Moore [w] Lee Bradley & John McCrae [p] Sean Parsons [i] By Gilbert Smith

Things are really rockin' in Seville, where the 99 Steps Foundation is throwing a party to get to know their new neighbors. The problem is, it isn't just the band that's doing the rockin' but Tremor, a villain with some earth shaking abilities. Oh, and there's an 800 pound gorilla in the room too. $1.99—comiXology

Fighting game combos are based on a bug in the release of the original Street Fighter II. Or maybe Turbo or Arcade Edition. I don't know, not gonna look it up. In any event, combos were not introduced into fighting games on purpose. In whatever Street Fighter game it was that first had the bug, players discovered that if you performed certain sets of moves, you could attack your opponent two or more times without their being able to block or move away or counter attack. This wasn't intentional, but it turned out to be the perfect gameplay mechanic to reward a player's ability and to force them to really earn every little piece of the opponent's lifebar they're taking away. For the next installment, Capcom decided to emphasize and expand the bug rather than fix it.

At a certain point, the smart thing to do is adapt to your audience. Would we still be playing fighting games today, at all, if Capcom had just patched that bug out, or would Street Fighter II be remembered as a neat little experiment that had this really cool exploit that you could do? Without some kind of artistic purpose behind the process of adapting to your audience, all you've got is metrics and analytics and algorithms chunkin' out stuff that nobody really likes but people keep buying.

But what I'm talking about is Happy Accidents. Hanna Barbera used to have scenes where Magilla Gorilla would play in a band because a three minute pop song is three pages of script you don't have to write, and an opportunity to loop five seconds of animation for three minutes of screentime. Feature two songs, three songs on a show and that's half an episode for an afternoon of work. Hanna Barbera characters all sing lousy surf-rock songs because Hanna Barbera knows how to save money.

But isn't a rock band with an ape for the lead singer kind of a cool idea?

Superhero tropes are largely built on Happy Accidents that become deliberate artistic choices. Superman has that S on his chest because printing was so crappy back in the day that you wouldn't be able to tell which character was which without a chest-sized emblem to tell you. Then Batman did it, then everyone else did it, and now we go watch movies on IMAX screens where the characters still have the first letter of their name on their chest.

It's kinda neat that superheroes wear their names on their chests. What if we all took that much pride in our name and what it means?

Some of these things become important signifiers. The chest emblem lets us know that this is a superhero. Complex combos let us know that we're playing a skill-based fighting game. Some day, eating will be a distant memory, we'll all be drinking some junk like Soylent. But the sweeter protein shakes will still be dyed the color of fruit. Everything evolves away from purpose and towards the abstract with language and symbolism calling back to more pragmatic considerations.

Drop everything that signifies a superhero story and... you're not really doing a superhero story anymore, are you? ScarJo has godly superpowers in Lucy, but where's her cape?

In the past I've talked about comics being a medium of symbols. However elaborate the artwork may be, the image of Superman in a comic book registers as quickly as the word Superman does, the pictures are words. A panel is a sentence, a page is a paragraph, and comic book artists are just writers who are working way too hard.

Language is just stuff that has adapted to its audience so incredibly well that it doesn't even need to be depicted literally anymore. You can refuse to adapt to the audience, but sooner or later, you're not going to be speaking the same language as the people you're talking to anymore. And where will your artistic integrity get you when there isn't even a point in sharing your thoughts?

The 99 #27 mixes all the important superhero staples with a rock band that features a singing ape on vocals. It's an efficient, immediate way of establishing itself in terms of tone and content. A lot of the heroes in this story are little kids, so that's pretty fun.

It has the same vibe as like a Disney Adventures comic from the 90's... Or from the 00's or 2010's, I wouldn't know, I haven't read that magazine since the 90's.

On sight, you can instantly identify The 99 for what it is, and what it is is my favorite kind of comic book: a breezy way to kill 15 minutes on a summer afternoon. I'm not saying that that's the best thing that comic books can deliver, but it's considerably more than most do. VERDICT: 3/5 Stars

[cbarriefans]

Chris with Lee Bradley and co

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Still my favourite of our Lee Bradley drawing (it's tough between this and DeapoolLoki but...)

[barefootmarley]

lee bradley