In going back over my 2000AD collection—as preparation for the arrival of issue #2000—one of the things I've started getting interested in is the history of British girls' comics. See, a lot of the best writers & artists for 2000AD started on girls' comics, and there was a time when girls' comics were considered the cream of the crop. Now they don't even exist—you can't even find scanned copies being traded on torrent sites. Coincidentally though, (or maybe not) it seems there's a bit of a push amongst the old guard to have another look at girls' comics, possibly (and this is just speculation) with a view to starting some sort of revival. In point of fact, this week we have the legendary Pat Mills (who's always good value for money) appearing on the 2000AD podcast, filling us in on a bit of history in preparation for the reprint of two classic stories.
Oh, what could have been.
EDIT: Is it just me, or does anybody else love that old "paperback-romance" style of art-work? Fuckin' love it. A pity it seems to have gone extinct
2 comments :
I like just about anything not drawn on/with/via a computer but my favourite would have to be the old line drawings, the kind you get in Jules Verne or Dickens with all the cross hatching. Bet there aren't too many people who can do that anymore
Oh yes, I love that style too. I'll bet if anyone can still draw like that, they're in their 80s and either from Europe or South America—probably Italy, France, Spain, or Argentina.
I dunno why so many great commercial artists came out of those countries in the middle of last century. Should do some research on it, I suppose.
It's sad, but it feels like the world is now full of young professional artists who never mastered the basics, and have subsequently formed "artistic styles" that are fundamentally crippled. That's not to say the basics are easy to master—I'm still not there yet—and endless sessions of life-drawing with an eye to lighting and compositon can be tedious and dull—but then, I'm not a professional artist.
Also, digital colouring has ruined a lot of good (or at the very least, decent) comic art. It's not that it can't be done well, it's just that it rarely ever is. Carlos Ezquerra comes to mind: Spanish artist with a really nice, rough, cartoony style; did a lot of great black & white art up until the '80s, when he started painting over his stuff with water-colours, which also looked great; and then in the '90s he started colouring his stuff digitally—and now it looks terrible.
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