When I was working at the comic shop, I had a lot of discussions with a lot of fans and opinionated co-workers about who was and wasn’t a good artist, but few creators caused as much dissension as Mike Allred. His stint on FF was utterly amazing, with its power and the loving tributes to the best work of ‘King’ Kirby, and his She-Hulk is surely on my list of top ten imaginary character crushes. But for some reason, Mike’s work rubbs a lot of folks the wrong way, for reasons I don’t understand, especially since it was concurrent with Humberto Ramos on Spider-Man, a creator whose style I find much more objectionable and problematic. Still, art and the controversial creator are in the eye of the beholder (or so Rod Serling would have me believe), which leads us to today’s entirely subjective query…
The MS-QOTD (pronounced, as always, “misquoted”) used to have issues explaining the late 80s art of Keith Giffen, but that has actually aged a great deal better than anyone could have expected, asking: What controversial creator do you find yourself defending (or wanting to defend) the most?
6 Comments
I don’t understand the question. Mike Allred’s art is clearly the perfect visual expression for certain stories, like Slott’s Silver Surfer, and the only controversy is that some people are deficient in art appreciation.
Oh, and I’ll plunk down coin for Paul Grist written & drawn comics without batting an eyelash. Pure sequential arts genius.
I like your point of view here…
I don’t feel like I need to defend anyone. Mostly because nobody here discusses this sort of thing, I guess. Another thing may be that in Europe, we don’t have any one “style” everything needs to fit in, like american super hero comics did for a long time. I guess that’s changing and some people don’t like that.
I tend to evaluate art styles more “Does this fit in this story?” rather than “Is this correct from certain point of view?”.
Valid.
I fail to see why Mike Allred would be controversial. He may have a slightly exotic style for current tastes,I suppose.
As for creators that I find to have an unfairly bad reputation, that would be Jim Shooter, hands down. It is incredible how much vitriol was thrown his way, despite his providing the goods and having the proof in the pudding.
Shooter is a prime example of this applied to writers, yeah.