Oh, I don’t know about all that, but I appreciate the compliment none the less.
Just like when I listen to music, I want to know who and what influenced the musicians I am listening to, when I read comics I want to know who are the revered masters. If I don’t get the artwork on first glance, and yet I keep seeing their name come up as being worthy of study, I keep looking at the artwork until I figure out why it is so highly regarded.
Carl Barks painted Ducks for Disney. People looked at his work and called it nothing special. And to the untrained eye, it looks simple. AC/DC plays music with four chords. Every hater out there says the same thing about AC/DC: oh, all their songs are the same! and I could play that just as good! Well, no they are not all the same, and better musicians than you can imagine cannot duplicate what AC/DC does.
Carl Barks or Alex Toth and AC/DC.
Barry Windsor-Smith or Michael William Kaluta and Pink Floyd.
There is a REASON those bands and artists are revered.
There is a reason every LCS I have ever seen has at least a couple of shelves devoted to art books by guys like Steranko, Ditko, Kirby, Toth, and so on.
Barry Windsor-Smith was interviewed a while back (I found the transcript in the comicbookresources.com archives). When the subject of the ‘90s artists came up, like Rob Liefeld, Barry said that the biggest problem he saw was that those guys never looked at any artwork besides comics.
Let me say that again: THE BIGGEST PROBLEM WITH ROB LIEFELD IS THAT HE ONLY EVER LOOKS AT COMIC BOOK ARTWORK. Meaning that if Rob had spent his Sunday Afternoons going to museums and sculpture gardens, he might have grown more as an artist.
Drawing pinups is the easy part of comics. But, if you can tell a story with your artwork, and make it something that resonates with every generation, you will have elevated yourself beyond being an illustrator. You will have created a work of TIMELESSNESS.
Timelessness should be the goal for a comic book artist, at least in my opinion. Timelessness can elevate the work beyond its periodical boundaries.
Russ Heath is 90 years old now, or close to it. His stuff looks absolutely fantastic, doesn’t it? It has not aged really. It looks just as good now as it did when it was published.
I wonder why that is?
I wonder what lessons can be learned from Russ Heath?
I mean, if Roy Lichtenstein can blatantly rip-off Russ’s work and sell it for millions, than surely Russ is a better artist than Lichtenstein, right?
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