Andrew Hilsmann
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 16 June 2004
Location: United States
Posts: 844
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| Posted: 26 March 2005 at 12:43am | IP Logged | 2
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Ian Evans wrote:
| Been looking for examples of nineties comic art off and on over the last year or so that I have regained a little interest in comics...much of it has a similar 'feel' to it, what I have understood is the Image style,and having just googled whilce portacio it seems his art (at least on the x-men) is a slightly more elegant version of the same stuff...am I doing him a disservice? On first impressions I would find this kind of style too distracting from the story - too much going on in each panel, story at service of the artwork, that sort of thing |
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Ian, I would say about the same thing so far as Portacio is concerned. Though his work is highly detailed, he seems to have very little aptitude for storytelling. One almost has the sensation of swimming upstream while reading it. Portacio seems like a rougher-hewn Art Adams before Adams switched to the more cartoony style -- clarity is not his strong suit. That said, I was extremely impressed with the first arc of Stormwatch: Team Achilles (issues 1-3), so much so I bought the first two trades based on the two issues I found in the quarter bins. Essentially a war comic with a special unit of soldiers (the good guys) facing off against rogue superbeings (the bad guys), in essence it's like reading The Incredible Hulk from the army's perspective. The tag line is "We're not superfucks. We KILL superfucks" or something like that. I was so much more impressed with Micah Ian Wright's writing -- very strong characterizations, relevance to the war on terror, humor, a historical turn on military ordnance and tactics, packed with intelligent ideas, and perhaps a little too much of a left wing political satire on the currrent administration. In the first arc, a super-powered terrorist group allegedly from the Middle East is revealed to be something else entirely. Reading it, tho, I felt that the writer, Micah Wright, was carrying the burden of the storytelling (as Vertigo books also often do). My enthusiasm for the series waxed and waned after that initial 3-issue arc, but I enjoyed many things about it, and it was one of the very few cases in comics nowadays where the creative team actually attempts to put too much into each issue. Wright had his scripts for the series posted on his website -- www.micahwright.com -- last I checked. Definitely worth looking into online or by raiding the quarter bins. Joe Casey's Wildcats 3.0 is one of my all-time favorite comic series since I too returned to comic book reading about 3 or 4 years ago after a hiatus of more than ten years. If you liked Next Men, I can't recommend Wildcats 3.0 highly enough. It's utterly unlike any other comic I've ever read.
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