I don’t quite get the beef people have with Greg Land.

I mean, if it looks good, it looks good. Right?

Who cares if it’s photo-referenced or traced or anything else. The end result is all that matter. The final product.

Of course, if it’s a case of people getting a kick out of playing the “gotcha” game, then I guess there’s that.

Otherwise, what’s the big deal? It’s nice, neat, clean art. It looks good.

As long as he keeps working like this, he at least needs to really start shooting his own models. Guys like him and Mack, the lazy fuckers get page rates. Go buy a camera and shoot your own stuff and be a little more classy about it. At least they’ll be tracing their own “work”, instead they skim through porn sites and take screenshots from their DVD collections etc.

A lot of artists use photo references, yes. But a lot of artists don’t constantly have female characters depicted in mid-orgasm, or use the same body model 3 times in a single image for 3 different characters.

When you see stuff like this over and over and over, particularly the incredibly inappropriate use of the “O-Face” on Pixie, it really draws you out of the art. As an artist, Land is supposed to be depicting a characters mood, but he is limited by whatever expressions he can trace from his photo albums.

I think it’s a bit unfair to lump Mack in with a “lazy fucker” like Land. Yes, he shouldn’t have made the swipe on the New Avengers cover, and his re-done one looks better, but the guy is a really talented Writer/Artist/Painter in his own right. It’s an injustice that none of Land’s stuff has ever been pulled (not to mention that he gets high-profile gigs) despite the fact that he does this all the time.

I’m not getting into any sort of debate about whether these guys can really draw at all, Mack clearly has skill, and I know Land can be/used to be a talented artist aside from this sort of stuff as well.

But when you see something as blatant as the Mack cover (and I wasn’t really lumping as much as citing another recent super-swipe – I remember that Magneto/HoM promo stuff from a few years back as a another example of “lazy fuckery”), you don’t get a pass on that because you used to do good or original stuff. That’s hack, lazy work, period.

And as an aside, I’d assume if Mack was ballsy enough to try and slip that cover through, and of course with only my speculation as I’ve not got any proof (because I’m too lazy to look), I doubt this is the first time he’s done something like it before.

And again, no problem with photo-ref (because I’m not a hypocrite! ), but using your own models and photo’s would alleviate so much of this sorta crap. And also, not make these guys lazy assholes (o snap!).

“Aesthetically retarded?”

Wow. Anyway, again, I like his art, so… y’know, whatever. Everyone likes what they like and so on and so forth.

Did he photo reference Wolverine’s arm? Because that’s a really big damn arm.

As long as Land’s work stays out of the eyes of the original copyright holders, then I could see a case for the high sales being worth having him on the book.

Then our mission is clear; we need to start sending this shit to every single one of the copyright holders that Land steals from, forcing him to either a) do some goddamned work of his own or b) get the fuck out of the comic industry, either of which would be fine by me.

There’s more to hate than like. His stuff is stiff and lifeless. His work is like colorforms. Each figures seems to have nothing to do with the scene or the character standing next to it. But at least each figure works on it’s own unlike that other hack job “Greg” Greg Horn who takes a face from one photo and an arm from another photo and a torso from another and doesn’t even change the lighting source to match on all of them.

I remember his work for crossgen being far more dynamic and less static than what he’s been doing for marvel, or maybe I just wasn’t paying as much attention back then. Does anybody have old copies of Sojourn lying around? How lifeless was it?

@Smarty (#2 comment above) – My beef is that the art, although extremely polished and rendered well, is full of recycled faces/poses and illustration that doesn’t fit the storytelling.

Check out this collage I put together based on Phoenix: Endsong. I really wanted to enjoy the story, but with every page I just found myself saying, “Why is she striking a pose like that while fighting? And wasn’t another girl posed just like that a few pages back? Why do Emma Frost, Jean Grey, Emma’s teenage student, and Storm all have the same face and hair? Why does that woman have such a strange expression? Didn’t Sue Storm have that same hair and expression in that other preview art I saw online?” It didn’t serve the story at all – it just distracted.

Maybe he would shine more if he focused only on covers and pin-ups and put all of his effort into those (and that effort included creating his own photoreferencing source material). I’m not sure how suited he is to sequential storytelling art.

The thing is a couple of months ago at the store I was filing some old Dixon/Land Nightwings away and I started leafing through them and I honestly couldn’t recognize the work as Land’s. I had to go back and check several different issues to be sure, but there it was: non-traced, non-porno, non-static and lifeless art from Greg Land circa, what, 5, 6 years ago? What happened? What made him go “Wait…porno.”

I mean, I know what makes me go “Wait, porno,” but still…

I remember a few pretty obvious recycles of drawings from Land’s late 90′s/early 00′s DC period (Nightwing, BOP, etc.), but I think they seemed to occur at least at a pretty reasonable frequency; certainly not to the ridiculously egregious extent they occur at today.

And I’m not sure his artwork in those days was stolen, either.

The man can draw pretty faces. That much I’ll admit.

The thing is, all those faces are the exact same faces, and they all seem to be in the middle of orgasm.

It’s very jarring to see that Sue Storm and Arcanna Jones are apparently the same people, and it’s very, very distasteful to see a teenager like Pixie in that pose.

It’s probably fine if you ignore it, or can’t notice it all, but at this point, only dullards wouldn’t notice Land’s disregard for his craft.

They’re not even the same people. I’ve seen lenty of Land panels where he’s so faithfully traced different models for the same character she doesn’t look at all like the same person… on a single page!

Look how Sue Storm morphs from panel to panel. Her hair goes through multiple style changes in the space of seconds.

That is sorriness. Too bad he sells because he sucks.

Also I sent one of his thefts/tracings to the original photographer but he never replied. Must not care.

But I do. I buy craft not crap.