I mean, you look at Marvel, or at what’s happening with DC’s New 52 – it’s an anomaly for someone to stay on anything for very long. It’s like, they launch Wolverine and The X-Men with Chris Bachalo and then it’s Nick Bradshaw for a couple issues. Carlos Pacheco does a few issues of Uncanny X-Men and then it’s Greg Land. Who knows who will be doing those books this time next year? I don’t know if it’s done by design, but it has effectively devalued artists to the point that they’re more or less interchangeable.
I re-read Grant Morrison’s run on New X-Men recently, and it was kind of depressing. He starts off so strong with Frank Quitely and they have this great thing going, and then it just turns into musical chairs. Regardless of the talent involved – and I really admire some of the other artists on those comics – I ultimately felt it undermined what Grant was doing. You look at wonderful, classic pieces of work like the Dark Phoenix Saga or what Frank Miller and Klaus Janson did on Daredevil – Alan Moore’s work with Dave Gibbons on Watchmen or with Rick Veitch, Steve Bisssette and John Totleben on Swamp Thing or the Lee/Kirby FF books – they’re not pock-mocked by rotating artists.
And everything over there is like that now. Comic book artists in particular are treated more as commercial artists than storytellers. They might as well be doing greeting cards for all the impact they’re allowed to have these days.
That’s Eric Stephenson, talking about the treatment of creators on Marvel and DC books these days. The line at the end about “artists in particular are treated more as commercial artists than storytellers” strikes me as particularly important, but I’m not entirely sure how I feel about it, to be honest. I’m torn because, well, as much as I agree that creators are storytellers, there’s also part of me that thinks “Well, they are commercial artists if they’re doing work-for-hire, aren’t they?” I understand that work-for-hire doesn’t mean that the quality of work is any lesser than creator-owned, but what I don’t quite get – or, perhaps, just can’t quite verbalize, because there’s a nagging buzz in the back of my head when I think about this – is that the idea of “storytellers vs. commercial artists” is somehow an either-or proposition. Perhaps the disconnect for me is in thinking about it from the artists’ perspective, and Stephenson is talking about from an editorial perspective? As in, “artists aren’t interchangible pieces in a machine if you’re looking for a consistent product”…? I don’t know, just yet, but there’s something there, in that line, that speaks to an expectation in the minds of editors, creators and fans that I suspect will become more of a pressing issue over the next year or so.
December 21st, 2011 at 2:36 pm
I read the interview, and that bit caught me too.
For the most part, I agree with him. I’d rather wait for a great, cohesive final product than have a compromised one on time. Can you imagine if they’d subbed in a different artist for, say, Watchmen #8, because Gibbons fell behind. It would have diminished the whole thing.
But if the comics industry is set on producing on-time monthly comics come hell or high water, then subbing out artists is what they have to do. It’s product first, art second.
The middle ground is to have rotating artists, so each story arc is at least consistent. Or to have the non-regular artist handling a very specific part of a story (a flashback, for instance).
December 21st, 2011 at 4:04 pm
stephenson’s comments on morrison’s x-men is spot on: it was pretty much a mess art-wise after the first arc and that’s why i have trouble loving it as much as other people.
on the opposite end of the spectrum is robinson’s starman run, which used fill-in artists in a wonderful way (and often had fantastic artists doing the work).
December 21st, 2011 at 6:17 pm
I think he’s being a bit dismissive of commercial art. A lot of it can be really good.
Then again, it seems like he’s making a career out of dismissing DC and Marvel of late, so why not dismiss others?
December 21st, 2011 at 8:24 pm
This is a false dichotomy. One can be a storyteller and a commercial artist. All artists working in mainstream comics are commercial artists. That doesn’t mean that they’re not storytellers.
December 22nd, 2011 at 10:12 am
We’re living in an age that values timeliness over artistic integrity. I blame the internet.
December 23rd, 2011 at 7:36 am
Drawing comics is a J-O-B and if you can’t hit your deadlines, the publishers, who have a financial interest in the comics going out, are going to replace you. Grant Morrison’s run, as awesome as it was and it was awesome, had many, many delays. No company should be expected to sit back and wait as its employees blow their deadlines.
December 23rd, 2011 at 7:58 am
Actually the pre-Internet era valued timeliness over artistic integrity far more than today. That’s why in the past we used to have the inventory fill-in issue, the issue that was kept in storage in case of the regular team missing its deadline. There also were lots of fill-in artists back in the day too. Long delays like we see with Kevin Smith’s Daredevil and Black Cat books, Allan Heinberg’s Wonder Woman and Millar and Hitch’s Ultimates were rare to nonexistent. The idea that we care more about timeliness and the internet is to blame or that the past eras cared less about timeliness is ridiculous.
The main difference is that in the past artists were better at hitting deadlines. And if an artist couldn’t hit monthly deadlines, like say Art Adams who is great but known to be slow, he would be kept as a cover artist or an artist used only on annuals and specials. Nowadays we have artists who are not only slow but keep getting hired to do monthly gigs.
December 23rd, 2011 at 4:25 pm
I should really start using emoticons. It will avoid useless info I already know from Random Initials People.
sigh.
Whatever.
December 23rd, 2011 at 11:13 pm
It’s not my fault you can’t express your points or your sarcastic intent more clearly. Whatever point or joke you were trying to make is nowhere near as clear as you believe it was, hate to break it to you. Work on that in the future.
December 24th, 2011 at 6:35 am
No.