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Post by metokhaesh on Jun 22, 2005 11:54:28 GMT
Why do some of you think Todd McFarlane's work is sloppy?
Is it the art work only or is it the story too?
Please give detailed explanations why you feel the way you do.
Thank you
Metok ha'esh
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Post by philster on Jun 22, 2005 15:23:28 GMT
Todd McFarlane's sequential art is superficial. He pays no attention to consistency of detail, especially anatomically, and his compositional sense is bad unless you count some of his covers. There's no real harmony to the way he drew in the panels.
He was a graphic artist whose best artistic talent was to impress people with his depiction of almost monumental, grand figures and their bustling energy. He was good at advertising his characters. He knew how to captivate the audience's attention by focusing their attention on the characters he drew. He was almost a different kind of caricaturist, except he didn't make fun of his characters, but instead exaggerated their heroic or villianic qualities.
But if you look past that, his art was as technically unsound as you could get and get away with it in the sequential storytelling manner. (Unless you count Humberto Ramos, whose style is the worst.)
Todd did break the mold by introducing a stronger sense of dynamicism to comics, but by the same token he also hurt comics by encouraging an age of bad art that had nothing to do with trying to tell a good story.
In that way, his art reflects his poor writing skills, but he was a better artist than writer, since he could actually sell his art to the audience and fool them into thinking it was good.
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Post by metokhaesh on Jun 22, 2005 15:42:40 GMT
But I like his stories.  When I read his stories I am not looking for technically skilled writing. I'm looking for an emotion and he definitely gets the emotion across to me. Maybe his writing downfall is because he relies too much on readers already knowing where he is coming from in thought. Maybe he doesn't give readers enough back information to help them understand why the character directed themselves into a particular direction. Would that be a possibility? Metok ha'esh edit: Thank you for the reply.  |
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dominiccarr
Apprentice
You're a bloody puppet!...You're a wee, little puppet man!
Posts: 346
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Post by dominiccarr on Jun 22, 2005 16:38:04 GMT
I never liked his work, i couldn't give you a detailed analysis as to why such as Phil has done but i always disliked the way he drew Spider-man and Peter Parker.
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Post by philster on Jun 22, 2005 17:09:54 GMT
But I like his stories. When I read his stories I am not looking for technically skilled writing. I'm looking for an emotion and he definitely gets the emotion across to me. Maybe his writing downfall is because he relies too much on readers already knowing where he is coming from in thought. Maybe he doesn't give readers enough back information to help them understand why the character directed themselves into a particular direction. Would that be a possibility? Metok ha'esh edit: Thank you for the reply. Yeah, if you're looking for a lot of pure, unadultered emotion and dynamicism, Todd's books are fun for that kind of thing. It was also more fun when I was just a kid and didn't care as much about if anything seemed out of place. (I, incidentally, used to like his work a whole lot more than I do now, by the way, and have a lot of his comics still.) I was just talking about why I don't consider him an artist that should be treated as one of the greats. But it shouldn't undermine his importance as a comic book creator, which I don't think can be argued. He WAS innovative and influential - he gave a fresh look to many characters, including the Hulk, Spider-Man, and Wolverine - and his Spawn character was pretty original as far as comic characters went. So Todd wasn't all that bad as an artist, but I don't think people will ever treat anything he did as a comic masterpiece. On the other hand, I do think Todd is GREAT at creating toys - I think that's his real talent - but he has a very twisted imagination! |
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Post by metokhaesh on Jun 22, 2005 17:18:32 GMT
I think that is why I like his stories;
the twisted imagination. ;D
Metok ha'esh
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Post by Shan on Jun 22, 2005 17:19:14 GMT
Phil, I have a question for you from what you have said. Do you think that part of the reason you don't care as much for his comics now is because of the things you have learned from studying art? Shan |
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Post by philster on Jun 22, 2005 17:34:54 GMT
No, I became disillusioned with Todd's art long before I entered the world of art history. Actually, I became disillusioned with comics as a whole back in the late 90's, shortly before I joined the football team for my high school team, due to the terrible Spider-Man Clone Saga. The late 90's was a bad time for American comics - art had taken top priority over writing, to the point where story was almost an afterthought. Writers were hired more to set the stage for the artists, than to tell well-rounded stories.
I almost gave up comics for good. I came back to comics after seeing the Spider-Man movie. I'm still struggling to enjoy more than a couple of American comics even now, and it's part of the reason I am so much in love with Japanese comics these days, too. Daredevil, Astonishing X-Men, and Geoff Johns' work is about all I read right now from Marvel and DC comics collectively right now, though.
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Post by The Spider on Jul 19, 2005 0:34:17 GMT
My two cents:
When I was a kid I liked McFarlane's Spider-Man art. Never got around to buying much since they were overpriced and out of my range at the time.
By the time I got around to buying old McFarlane Spider-Man comics on eBay, I was in high school, and had an interest in drawing and other forms of art (and comic artists whose work I was getting into were Neal Adams, Alex Ross, George Perez, Barry Windsor-Smith, and Dave Sim).
When I got those McFarlane Spider-Man comics, I noticed that the mistakes and stuff he made (proportions, weird faces, etc) were really glaring at times, and the storytelling was rather... rigid (basically going from pose panel #1 to pose panel #2, with a lot of word balloons to fill in), yet strangely enough I still liked it. There were some pictures that looked well-designed and energetic in spite of the problems I mentioned.
Maybe it's nostalgia talking, I dunno.
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Post by philster on Jul 19, 2005 0:46:56 GMT
Yeah... I'll have to admit Todd did make comics exciting for a time, but that was just because everybody wanted to see how he would depict this or that character, I think. He had a flair for drawing pure dynamical figures, that would seemingly just leap off the pages at you. That's why Venom was so popular as a villain to begin with. It was exactly the kind of character Todd was good at drawing panel after panel. He didn't have to worry about inconsistencies in his art because Venom was, well, just a creature of chaos to begin with, anyway. But yeah, I agree with your entire post, spider. |
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Post by The Spider on Jul 19, 2005 3:05:09 GMT
Yeah... I'll have to admit Todd did make comics exciting for a time, but that was just because everybody wanted to see how he would depict this or that character, I think. He had a flair for drawing pure dynamical figures, that would seemingly just leap off the pages at you. Yeah, at the time McFarlane's style was new and unlike anything that kids at the time would see in a Spider-Man book. (Granted, McFarlane's style is close to Art Adams and Michael Golden, but I think the reason Adams and Golden didn't have the superstardom of McFarlane because their output wasn't prolific enough.) Plus the character is simplified enough--his costume is based on the black Spider-Man costume, which only has the webshooters, the spider emblems, and the eyes. Venom also has an exaggerated fanged mouth, something McFarlane does like to draw. And some exaggerations and mistakes can be explained away by the symbiote since it's a living costume. Come to think of it, his work on SPIDER-MAN #1-14 show all the stuff he likes doing... stories about the dark side of reality (ie the Perceptions storyline), long flowing capes (Hobgoblin), freakish and/or monstrous characters (the homeless people in the Morbius storyline, heck Morbius himself, and Hobgoblin and his "disciple", Lizard, Wendigo). |
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Post by philster on Jul 19, 2005 14:03:20 GMT
Stick to what you know best, and Todd did that with these first fourteen issues. Too bad his writing wasn't better.
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Post by Venom65437 on Jul 20, 2005 0:36:24 GMT
Oddly enough, I hate the way Todd draws Venom.
I am not a big fan of him either, thou some of his art makes for cool posters, that I won't own.
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Post by The Spider on Jul 20, 2005 2:44:36 GMT
Stick to what you know best, and Todd did that with these first fourteen issues. Too bad his writing wasn't better. Yeah, the writing on that SPIDER-MAN run was generally bad (though sometimes "bad quotable". "HIS WEBBING -- ADVANTAGEOUS!!" comes to mind). But I will say this... I got around to buying back issues of Image Comics in the past two years. His writing on SPAWN seems much better after the guest writer arc (At the very least, it's a 200% improvement over the SPIDER-MAN run). While not comparable to the likes of Moore, Miller, Sim, Morrison, Gaiman, etc. it's still all right. (Note though that this is referring to SPAWN around the 20's up to the 40's. I haven't read all of it) |
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Post by philster on Jul 20, 2005 2:49:27 GMT
Ouch, thespider. I had forgotten that quote. Thanks a lot  And yes, I have the first 85 issues of Spawn, and the writing did get noticeably better as the series went on. Thank goodness. Still wasn't enough to keep me onboard after Greg Capullo stopped being a regular artist though. |
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Post by dvdavenport on Jul 20, 2005 2:55:30 GMT
McFarlane is to comics what Michael Bay is to movies. |
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Post by The Spider on Jul 20, 2005 2:58:33 GMT
McFarlane is to comics what Michael Bay is to movies. So does this mean I can expect the upcoming Transformers movie to have a line like, "HIS MATRIX -- ADVANTAGEOUS!" Oh man, I still enjoy the parts in the AMBUSH BUG NOTHING SPECIAL where they used the Advantageous line. "Why do you keep repeating the word 'Advantageous'?" "BECAUSE SOONER OR LATER I'M BOUND TO USE IT CORRECTLY IN A SENTENCE!" |
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