Soulless Sequential Art

One upswing of having so many doctors' appointments is that I get a chance to catch-up on my reading. Having canceled over half of my magazine subscriptions (and severely curtailing my comic books for the moment), I actually get this much done regularly now. And so it was today that I was reading a response to what Steve Rude said in a past issue of Sketch regarding how today's comic books lack "soul."

The commenter was just this side of aghast, though he agreed there is a lot of crap on the market. But it got me to thinking even more about the sentiment, because although I agreed with it when I read it and I agree with it now, I really wondered why so many of today's comic books are product, as opposed to sequential art.

Let's get the obvious out of the way: I know the entertainment industry - I know a little about The Biz - and I fully appreciate why it's called show business. Comic books are no less a part of the entertainment industry and no less a business. Granted, I take this with a grain of salt, but I accept it either way because I understand why it is this way; this is no monarchy and there are no elite factions to fund sequential artists. Besides, if there were, there is no guarantee we unwashed masses would ever see their work, so it has its benefits and drawbacks - like most things, it is not perfect, but it's the best we can do right now and Webcomics, self-publishing, and so forth is not the point of this article.

I have also come to... not completely hate the way computers are used in comic books. I did - I really did - at first. After struggling to learn that damned letter guide and exploring coloring methods (toner, markers, ink, wash) and so on - learning the traditional methods the hard way - I came to appreciate these elements as part of the art, especially since I am not very good at them. I most certainly "cheated" with fonts, and Elektra: Assassin opened my mind to exploring multi-media in the traditional comic book, but I still find those heavily-computerized comic books lacking in artistic depth. I freely concede some of it may come from the admittedly adolescent idea that it is "cheating." Again, while I am far more open to the concepts these days, those projects which overly rely on computerization seem to me, quite literally, mechanical.

All of this came together for me while reading an issue of Draw! Howard Chaykin said, flatly, he thinks the bar is set too low these days, and Mike Manley expounded that modern sequential artists simply aren't as accomplished because of the celebrity factor and the absence of an apprenticeship. Manley notes that the sequential art industry used to be - in his words - a craft, where one began at the bottom and worked his way up. "You swept some guy's floor, and then he allowed you to erase some pages, then he allowed you to ink a nose... and you moved up. Now people... go from being some guy on the other side of the table drawing pin-up shots to suddenly, they're the next hot thing." Regular readers know I could not agree more, but that's only part of it and I have had that sneaking feeling for some time now.

It all solidified later that same issue, while reading Manley and Blevins' article on working from photographs.

Why Are So Many Comic Books These Days Soulless?

All of these components are pieces of the puzzle: there is a lack of talent, there is too much reliance on mechanical shortcuts, and too many workers in the industry see it as a stepping-stone to another field/industry.

I never told you why I didn't get along with A. Kubert (I'll let you figure out which one), but this is why: he introduced himself as a commercial artist and basically shat all over sequential art - as a career, as a career. He was touting his success on this ad campaign and how his illustrations had appeared in that national magazine, blahblahblah, and the whole time, I'm thinking, "I want to draw comic books." I was young, I am very expressive, and he is not a stupid man; he could tell I was thoroughly unimpressed with his success in other fields. In my defense though, he was a pompous little blowhard and this was evidenced in the way he singled me out and was overly-critical of my work during that same class. Some 15-odd years later, I wonder where A. Kubert would say he made the most money, garnered the most acclaim, and so on, but we'll leave that be; the point is that A. Kubert wanted to make money, not draw comic books. This is the problem with most of the workers in the industry this very day.

Is computerizing works "cheating," well, sure - I can live with that. But this is coming from the same guy who never traced! Seriously! All sequential artists - hell, all cartoonists - know how important tracing is. There is a whole method to it and we should get into it one day, but suffice it to say, you could argue that it is The Secret to sequential art. In my youth, I was foolish enough to think it a "cheat." There are others who would agree with that, but tracing is as much a tool as the eraser or pencil, and it's really as simple as that. The computer is the same. The problem comes in the over-reliance on it.

The Weirding uses digitalized photographs (manipulated to look like drafts) for index page backgrounds. Some of them are actual drawings, but most of those "pencils" are actually photographs on which I used the "Sketch" effect tool. Now, that is nowhere near all I did - every one of those pictures were painstakingly manipulated through a series of methods and all of them included heavy work by hand - I erased lines, changed weights and contrasts, brightened areas... I spent no less than 2-3 hours on every image used on the site, whether I drew them by hand, swiped them, or manipulated a photo. There are many reasons I did this, but the primary one is that the photographs were already digitized for use online; that's why the original art and images take so much longer to load - they're significantly larger files.

Truthfully, my lettering sucks, my buildings are so stylized as to look goofy in backgrounds, and I'm going to cheat on sets anyway because I hate drawing them. So if I can achieve a more professional, better-looking, effect through some method other than sketching it out, so be it.

But Manley really hit the nail on the head when he was discussing some background work he had done on a projector that Al Williamson inked: he noted Williamson often left disparate lines disconnected, "This approach is more atmospheric and more like the eye actually sees things." This is the problem with so much of today's computerized work - even Chaykin's Photoshopped toner work!

Note on The Weirding how I did the very same thing. In many instances, I adjusted the brightness so the lines seem to disappear in places. The mind automatically "connects" these - it finishes the lines for you - and in that subconscious way, it becomes more interactive. In this same article, Blevins is discussing why he changed certain aspects in the drawings he did from the photographs, noting - and this is just a brilliant quote - he made these changes to "make them fun to look at and run the eye over." By including the computerized elements without modifying them to fit with the rest of the project, the eye has nothing "fun" to roll over, and too many comics do this these days.

Comic books are attracting novelists who have no idea how to collaborate; commercial artists who think their use of design and sense of "fun" outweighs their glaring lack of anatomical knowledge; and editors who are more concerned with parlaying properties into movie franchises than guiding characters and creators through serialized adventures. The stories are thinly-veiled cross-promotional marketing campaigns ushered by self-proclaimed "artists" from other mediums (looking to develop a fanbase in this "hot" medium) and completed through mechanical means so they can be shipped on-time.

Yes, comic books are a business, but it's a creative one and all that creativity has been pushed to the side in order to make more, and greater, business strides in business. We've all seen bad porno - now, think about that, because that's what this is - and it makes us shamefully aware of exactly what it is we're watching: it's awkward, uncomfortable, and - bluntly - ugly; it is not sexy. All the pretenses are dropped and we see through to the business behind it all - what it really is we're looking at: two soulless bodies performing an act so many deem sacred in a manufactured attempt to move the audience.

Sequential art needs to bring the "craft" back to the industry. Until it does, we are doomed to repeat the boom and bankruptcy cycle comic books have suffered basically every decade since their introduction.

© C Harris Lynn, 2008