art in motion
I've picked up a number of comics from Virgin over the past year or so, and have drifted away from pretty much all of them. The premises are usually middling to pretty good, especially the ones that are based on Hindu tales and Indian culture; likewise, the writing is acceptable, nothing to write home about, but definitely not worth reading aloud in a silly voice just to mock.
But the art is -- without exception for the series I've read -- terrible. I won't fault their inkers or their colourists, because the pages are usually rainbow-riffic, and even some of their pencillers have real skill in the pin-up and still shot department. However, nobody's ever taught these artists how to draw a comic. There's no movement -- everything looks entirely static. Action sequences either come off as a bunch of awkwardly posed sequential still shots, or have so much excess visual information that I can't tell what's going on, or both. People's poses are stiff and flat, and the angles are unimaginative. I know nothing about art, and I know enough to complain about how clunky it is.
There was a page in the latest issue of The Stranded (which I picked up 100% because Mike Carey is writing it) that uses sixteen tiny panels to depict a girl's falling through several floors of a building, and I think it's because they were trying to show that she was destroying each floor on the way down before she actually hit it, but I read it three times and I still wouldn't swear that's what's going on. There's another page later where the same girl shatters a plate-glass window behind her, much to the surprise of the man in front of her, only her glass-shattering trick takes up the left third of the long horizontal panel at most, while the rest is his awkwardly horrified face and an admittedly well-rendered cityscape in the background. Way to make something as cool as shattering a window with your mind less visually important than the startled hobo.
Though maybe it's not fair to make the comparison right after reading the fifth volume of Wild Adapter, which just came out in English. Minekura's sense of movement is astonishing, whether rendering it as the dirty, speed-lined version of a gesture in motion, or as a single freeze-framed image, clear as a high-speed shutter snap of a frog's tongue catching a fly. There's a shot of two men treading water as seen from beneath the water, mid-kick, with their clothes floating around them, and it's breathtaking.
Another comic pet peeve I have? Drawing the character that's supposed to be speaking with a closed mouth. That happened so much in the last issue of Angel that I honestly didn't know half the time who was saying what. Unless the party is full of ventriloquists and/or telepaths, people generally move their lips to talk.
If only I could draw! Oh, well, since I can't, I can just complain about it.
But the art is -- without exception for the series I've read -- terrible. I won't fault their inkers or their colourists, because the pages are usually rainbow-riffic, and even some of their pencillers have real skill in the pin-up and still shot department. However, nobody's ever taught these artists how to draw a comic. There's no movement -- everything looks entirely static. Action sequences either come off as a bunch of awkwardly posed sequential still shots, or have so much excess visual information that I can't tell what's going on, or both. People's poses are stiff and flat, and the angles are unimaginative. I know nothing about art, and I know enough to complain about how clunky it is.
There was a page in the latest issue of The Stranded (which I picked up 100% because Mike Carey is writing it) that uses sixteen tiny panels to depict a girl's falling through several floors of a building, and I think it's because they were trying to show that she was destroying each floor on the way down before she actually hit it, but I read it three times and I still wouldn't swear that's what's going on. There's another page later where the same girl shatters a plate-glass window behind her, much to the surprise of the man in front of her, only her glass-shattering trick takes up the left third of the long horizontal panel at most, while the rest is his awkwardly horrified face and an admittedly well-rendered cityscape in the background. Way to make something as cool as shattering a window with your mind less visually important than the startled hobo.
Though maybe it's not fair to make the comparison right after reading the fifth volume of Wild Adapter, which just came out in English. Minekura's sense of movement is astonishing, whether rendering it as the dirty, speed-lined version of a gesture in motion, or as a single freeze-framed image, clear as a high-speed shutter snap of a frog's tongue catching a fly. There's a shot of two men treading water as seen from beneath the water, mid-kick, with their clothes floating around them, and it's breathtaking.
Another comic pet peeve I have? Drawing the character that's supposed to be speaking with a closed mouth. That happened so much in the last issue of Angel that I honestly didn't know half the time who was saying what. Unless the party is full of ventriloquists and/or telepaths, people generally move their lips to talk.
If only I could draw! Oh, well, since I can't, I can just complain about it.