One of our Twitter followers asked the other day if there was ever an artist change that caused us to drop a title. Then the very next day, Rob Leifeld started tweeting about dropping books because he didn’t like the artist change. Then I got an email asking the exact same thing. The universe seems to be conspiring to force this week’s Major Spoilers Poll of the Week upon all of us.
[poll id=”291″]
Stephen Schleicher began his career writing for the Digital Media Online community of sites, including Digital Producer and Creative Mac covering all aspects of the digital content creation industry. He then moved on to consumer technology, and began the Coolness Roundup podcast. A writing fool, Stephen has freelanced for Sci-Fi Channel's Technology Blog, and Gizmodo. Still longing for the good ol' days, Stephen launched Major Spoilers in July 2006, because he is a glutton for punishment. You can follow him on Twitter @MajorSpoilers and tell him your darkest secrets...
15 Comments
A bad artist can take a perfectly fine story & turn it into incomprehensible gobblety-gook. I can’t think of any names in particular, but when you get someone who is quite clearly trying & failing to channel another very stylized artist (i.e. someone doing a bad Joe Mad impersonation), that tends to put me off the book.
I was really digging the new Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel stuff until the art went all Aeon Flux on me. I keep checking Comixology each month to see if its changed back, but no luck.
It’s kind of funny that Rob Liefeld has dropped comics because of the artist, he’s the only “artist” I’ve ever dropped a book because of. Maybe if he took anatomy lessons and learned to draw I’d pick up one of his books.
As of right now no. But if the art on the teenage mutant ninja turtles stays the same and does not go back to Bates’ art then I will be dropping it. His was more of the old cartoon style then Eastman did an issue and it was dark and scratchy. The new artist I can’t stomach the art. He came on issue 22 I will give until 25. If there is no improvement then its gone until Bates returns
There was an artist in the middle-run of V1 New Mutants that I could best describe as a “scratchy, scribbly mess”
It wasn’t until I went to grab a full run of New Mutants that I forced myself to read all of it.
I concur that a poor artistic choice can ruin an otherwise serviceable plot.
Now I simply say, “It was the ’80s. People experimented.”
Funny, I was introduced to New Mutants in that period and for me that was what separated NM from Uncanny. When it went back to typical comic art (which also made the ‘kids’ look five years younger) I was disappointed.
For me Art is 60-75% of why I pick up a book. If they change the artist mid-arch, I will usually finish to get the rest of a story, but I have quit cold turkey if the art is really bad.
Ironically enough, the first and one of the few times I’ve dropped a book because of the artist is when Rob Liefeld started on the book and proceeded to make an absolute mess of it.
That was New Mutants v1. Come to think of it, the other times that happened were almost all because Liefeld joined the book.
I generally do not look at who the artist is.
Yes, X-Force was my favorite comic then Romita Jr “arted” all over it.
The issues were literally unreadable sometimes his art was so bad…
I remember leaving both x-men titles in 2000 because Raney and Davis were trying to outdo each other in the “every character has creepily identical” faces department. Admittedly the writing was not doing anything attractive at the time either.
Heck Yeah!! Most notably when the new artist is extremely dissimilar to the current artist. Off the top of my head there was the Byrne to Lee change in Namor, the Lightle to Larsen change in Doom Patrol, and the McFarland to Larsen change in Spider-man (I actually like Larsen on Dragon, go figure). If the art is really different and bad, I just drop the book, I don’t even wait for the current story line to wrap. It’s a visual medium, I have to like the art, half the price of the book is for the art, IMO.
Law
Back when I subscribed to Marvel comics and got them through the mail, I dropped several titles whenever Steve Ditko or Jack Kirby took over the art duties on a book. Something about those two men’s art has always set my teeth on edge. In the golden age of Independent Comics, I dropped several series when an the original artist left the books, foremost among them was when Howard Chaykin hired other artists to take over the drawing duties on American Flagg – his style is so unique nobody could match it, and made the whole series. It didn’t matter to me that he was still scripting the book, without his art it just wasn’t worth reading. If memory serves me correctly, when WaRP took Elfquest to Marvel, they brought in other artists to take over some of the art chores on the monthly book and I dropped the former WaRP titles at that point, too.
I’ve also dropped titles because of unreliable publishing schedules, or because the artist/writer annoyed me in other ways, such as in the mid-80s when Eric Larsen reduced the number of art pages in The Savage Dragon to the point where his multi-page editorial rambles and the ad pages outnumbered the pages of story and art.
The inverse is also true. I’ve picked up titles I wasn’t really interested in because I liked the artist – especially books drawn by Jim Starlin, Kaluta, Marshal Rogers, Howard Chaykin, and Mike Grell!
I stopped reading Batman and Robin while Philip Tan was drawing. The art was just too jarring for me. I almost stopped reading Hellboy when Duncan Fegredo took over for Mignola. I hold Mignola’s art in such high esteem, the switch was difficult. I’m glad I kept up. Fegredo is a worthy successor.