The Secret of the Wednesday’s Haul

Sean Phillips
Bryan Hitch
Christopher Mitten
Dale Eaglesham
Chris Bachalo
Paul Maybury
Keith Giffen
Steve Lightle
Joe Orlando
John Byrne
Greg Laroque
Howard Chaykin
Jerry Ordway

Those are the creators that contributed art to the books that I picked up last week. You’ve got a few standard superhero artists (Byrne, LaRoque,) a couple that approach superheroes a bit differently (Giffen in his Munoz-inspired Legion days, Bachalo.) You’ve got a couple of tight realist superhero artists in Hitch and Eaglesham. Mitten and Maybury provide some great fantastical elements to their artwork, creating new and exciting environments. And you need a shower to get all the dirt and grime off of you after reading an issue of Phillips’ Criminal work.

Each and every one of those artists are different and create a different reality in their works. They may possibly work within the same shared universe but even when drawing the same thing, Giffen, Lightle and Byrne create different ways of looking at them. Heck, depending on what era of Legion of Super-Heroes you look at, you could be looking at different ways that Giffen portrayed them, from a tight traditional style to a loose style with some European flair to a pudgy and heavier yet more representative style of the Five-Year-Later Legion. And try to compare Mitten, Bachalo and Phillips. Go ahead and try.

See, this is one of the reasons I just love, love, love comics. Each comic contains the potential to show me a unique view of the world. While I love movies, look at what’s out there. A lot of it looks a like. Justin Long looks out of the same world as Chris Cooper who’s in the same world as Harrison Ford. Even though each director has their own unique storytelling style, through the basic use of actors everything blends together to one degree or another. There’s only so much you can do visually to separate out one director from another.

With comics, there’s such a wide array of visual styles before you even get down to the storytelling. Artists are expressionistic, realistic, cartoony, abstract, experimental, hard, soft, kinetic, staid. Every book on the shelf is somehow visually different than the one next to it. Even each book within a title or subset can look different. One of the great things about the current Amazing Spider-Man run is the variety of artists they’re pulling to work on that series; Larocca, Jimenez, Bachalo and Martin. They’re not trying to reduce ASM down to a unified look and feel.

That’s the great thing about comics right now– the acceptance of a wide expanse of visual styles. The expanse has existed since before the days of R. Crumb and Basil Wolverton (to pick a couple of names out of the air) but there’s a reason their comics are referred to as “underground.” Their stuff just wasn’t widely accepted. Even during the rise of independents during the 80’s, there was a reduction of art to the common denominator for the most popular and even for a lot of the indie stuff. A lot of it looked alike except for some artists’ individual ticks. But you didn’t see that much that didn’t look like an attempt to mimic the most popular artists of the time.

Now I’m not saying that the above list of artists cover a wide range of styles. There’s no Hernandez Bros there. There’s no Jeff Smith in that list or Frank Quitely or Kevin Huizenga. In many ways, my weekly reading is focused more on mainstream storytelling than I like or prefer it to be. I’d love to see more perspectives show up on a weekly basis but that’s just not available. Sometimes we’re lucky if we get works from some great artists yearly. That above list is only representative of a week but that’s a pretty good week in most regards.

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