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[QUOTE=Steel Inquisitor;4457273]ISome artists I didn't like can grow on me, like Igor Kordej (not sure whether that's his name) who was on Grant Morrison's X-men run.[/QUOTE]
His art on New X-Men was pretty bad, but it was drawn to ridiculous deadlines. When you give him enough time he's a good artist.
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[QUOTE=Jim Kelly;4457589]If you're proposing that the term "bad art" is totally useless--because no two people can agree on what's bad--then I'd agree with that proposition. [/QUOTE]
Not quite. I think it's perfectly fine to call art bad, but should accept that that is a subjective judgement.
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[QUOTE=Spike-X;4458448]Yes there is, and yes there is.[/QUOTE]
No.
In a world with Van Gogh, Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Rob Leifeld, Sergio Aragones, John Romita Jr, Mike McMahon etc, Roy Litchenstein, Any Warhol - Any one of these artists might be considered "bad" by any objective criteria you can choose to find.
There's no single set of objective criteria which can define what good art is, so there can't be any way to objectively prove it's bad. Art is too much about the beholder for that to be possible.
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I think we can criticize an area of an artist work, even calling it bad, but that doesn't mean it is bad art. We can say their anatomy sucks or they are bad at page layout. These are more objective. But there are artists with bad qualities in their art that still produce comics that are dynamic and enjoyable to read. Other times these failings make the comics unreadable. But that too can be subjective.
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I should not have said bad art. I understand that now. I should have said does art you dont like take away from the story.
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[QUOTE=tbaron;4459318]I should not have said bad art. I understand that now. I should have said does art you dont like take away from the story.[/QUOTE]
Yes, you should have. Now go to your room and think about what you've done.
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Yes. Yes it does. I can't get into a series with artwork that hurts my eyes.
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I remember the Todd McFarlane 1990 SPIDER-MAN, on which he was writer and artist, as not being a very good read. His art was good to look at, but he did a lot of one page and two page spreads, which were virtualy like posters and there wasn't much story to read. You could get through the whole comic in about two minutes. If you wanted to admire the artwork, you could spend as much time as you wanted looking at that, but McFarlane managed to pump out a book, where he did almost everything except the lettering and colouring, by simply not bothering to break down the page into panel progressions where there was a story to read--thus saving himself the effort it would have taken to construct a full script. I imagine his script for a complete issue was about one page long.
Objectively, I don't think that's story telling. You might like looking at McFarlane images and not care about panel breakdowns and the flow of a narrative through sequential art, but I don't think there's any way to say that that's story telling. This was a case where the art was good, but it wasn't comic book art as folks like Will Eisner and Scott McCloud defined it.
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Most definitely. It's very difficult for me to truly get into the story if the art doesn't pull me in. Reading comics for me is kind of like watching a movie or show; even if the actual story is good, bad reception is very distracting and ruins the story for me like bad art can make me uninterested in even the best of stories.
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[QUOTE=Jim Kelly;4464444]Objectively, I don't think that's story telling. You might like looking at McFarlane images and not care about panel breakdowns and the flow of a narrative through sequential art, but I don't think there's any way to say that that's story telling. This was a case where the art was good, but it wasn't comic book art as folks like Will Eisner and Scott McCloud defined it.[/QUOTE]
I think it's better to say that McFarlane did here was low-density storytelling. That's something I've thought of when I read the old Golden Age Wonder Woman stories. The number of pages is somewhat more than half that of a modern comic (12 pages plus the splash intro page, while modern stories have 20 content pages, of which some are splashes), but the number of frames have stayed constant, with about eight frames per page in the Golden Age and five frames per page in the current stories. Both get 90–100 frames per story, though the Golden Age ones have more text expositions.
But you can still tell good stories with fewer frames. The "Citizen Croc" story in [I]Dog Days of Summer[/I] told a great and effective story in 40 frames.
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I've only read a little bit of Spawn, but from what I've heard, the writing gets better and the stories get more intricate and detailed later on.
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I think when McFarlane was his own boss on SPAWN, he could budget time to devote to the product. And I also remember he brought in other creators to handle the workload. Whereas, he probably was doing a lot of other things while producing SPIDER-MAN for Marvel--so I had some sympathy for him, but still he was really cheating the fans who bought his new run on the strength of what he had done for THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN. I feel like if a story is just told with full pages and two page spreads, then you miss that special something that you get from having a few panels in sequence on a single page. Even if the number of panels is only three or four (and not as much as the six to nine panels per page in a classic comic), you're still getting a sequential narrative on the page.
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Bad art can kill a good story, and good art and improve a bad story. I have a couple of examples of really crappy artists that ruined the story for me, but in case they are visiting these boards, I'm not going to mention any names.
It is also the fact that when you have gotten really used to an artist, like John Byrne on X-Men, all new artists feels wrong at first if their style too different from what you associate with the comic.
I did try to read the first issue of a new Transformers comic some years ago out of pure nostalgia, but the colorist had run amok with the computer, making my eyes hurt. Computer coloring has improved since then, but I still prefer it when it was all done by hand.
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It can also be title/character specific. Something noir/occult oriented can actually benefit from styles that use a lot of shadow and unrefined images. IMO, that style would handicap Green Lantern, a high requires crisp detailed images as intricate light constructs are an integral part of the concept.
Similarly, martial arts characters (ala Iron Fist) need photo-realistic poses and motions that make for a convincing depiction of fighting styles, even if they're not 100% accurate to any given technique. The Spectre doesn't necessarily carry that burden.
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Took me years to approach the dark knight returns cause of the atrocious art.
Bad art doesn't kill a good story but it sure can make it hard as hell to appreciate.