Am I the Rob Liefeld of Indie Comics?

Do comics have to look good? Does that matter to anyone?

I've been having a bit of a comics-conscience-crisis of late. This was sparked by a lot of things - my studio-mate Julie Maroh's brilliant looking holiday card, seeing the aisles and aisles of gorgeous french comics at Chapitre, and reading an American indy comic - I'm chicken shit and am not going to say which one - that was so impossible to look at that I gave up three pages in.

Julie Maroh's work is undeniably stunning

I started wondering whether art really mattered at all. I found a review of Dash Shaw's massive Bottomless Belly Button - and this was just a customer review on Amazon - that said that readers needed to meet the comic at it's own terms.

What other medium could you ever possibly read something like this? Music? Definitely not fiction ("you have to meet the style / prose / language at its own terms????) Perhaps movies, but only when describing a fun piece of junk.

So, if art is graded on a curve in a comic, what universal standards of quality are there? Storytelling? Characterization? I also read a glowing review of a different indy book from a prominent critic that, as an aside towards the end of the review, said the characters were two-dimensional.

I'm worried these laissez-faire standards will push comics further into the ascending colon of the art world. Maybe there's nothing wrong with this - I don't know. I can't help but have a lot of skepticism about the art world's relationship with comics - when somebody sells a single issue for $40,000, maybe I will change my mind.

A Dash Shaw piece where he adapts an episode of the reality TV show Blind Date. If this type of high-concept work is what critic Tom Spurgeon calls "The Future of the Comics" I'm not sure where my role is.

And maybe it's my own snobbery. I don't know how people can read a long, bad-looking comic. I just give up after a few pages - my eyes get tired.

And hey, I understand that standards of beauty vary, but to me it's obvious when there is genuine craft involved - you get absorbed in the world, it becomes believable, and the characters and story are free to really "live" in the reader's mind.  And I'm not talking about classical standards of beauty. It doesn't need to be a complex, or highly detailed, or even elegant style. It just has to have a style. Box Brown, James Kochalka, and Kevin Huizenga are quite capable artists that nobody is going to confuse with Moebius, but their work is visually harmonious and appealing. Through the power of their pictures, I can connect with their stories.

Great work from Ganges

So who's a bad comics artist? Well in this world of relativisms, one thing that's absolute is that Rob Liefeld is terrible - or at least, it's ok to say Rob Liefeld is terrible.

When I was 13 this was the most awesome thing ever, and I can still see it's charm.

Rob Liefeld is THE touchstone of bad art in comics culture. It isn't just superhero comics fans that bash Liefeld, it's the indy folks - maybe even especially the indy folks. But why? I really don't know. Is it because we have to meet superhero artwork on different terms? Is there any indy style that is trite, or cliched? Does my own work, which draws more than a few things from Clowes, fall into that cliche? Am I the Rob Liefeld of indy comics?

Is there any connection between our elevation of contemporary artists who's art we have to meet on their own terms and these massive, gorgeous, expensive omnibuses of super-talented and totally-deceased artists like Schultz / Barks / Ketcham? Or is it just cheaper to print these books after the artists are dead?

Anyway, enough indignant ranting. Power Out goes live tomorrow on MTV Geek. New stuff! I will be talking about it tomorrow.

Power Out Panic Attack

SO I had a panic attack the other night - I realized I have almost 120 pages left to do of Power Out before I finish, and the work I've accomplished since I've been in Santa Fe has been slow going.

the art is getting better, or at least I think so

I know a lot of this has to do with the pages I've been working on have been pretty labor intensive - the bee cave in chapter 3 has been murder, particularly when drawing the environments. It's taken a minute to get back into the style perhaps my standards are higher now, and that's slowing me down.

this page took forever

And the time I haven't been working on Power Out has been productive, like contributing to the sketchblog Drawbridge and working on my new webcomic Sumfin Silly.

a sketch on Drawbridge of Mike Dawson's Troop 141

But still, I need to redouble my efforts - I already spend a great deal of time working on the project, the key now is to focus efforts on using that time more efficiently. Here's three steps I'm going to implement:

-not obsessing over minute details
-showing more work online, which will encourage me to keep a schedule
-integrating perspective grids into my roughs to save time on backgrounds

making the computer do things in an instant it takes me a while to do with a ruler

Here's an example of the last one in action - this should make drawing the backgrounds a little bit less of a chore. I put a lot of work into my thumbnails - I ink them and everything, so when I light table them I don't have to worry about composition. Now, just by adding two rings of emanating lines in Illustrator, I can get a good two point (or three point with a third ring) perspective without using any tedious vanishing points.




I'm going to start a Kickstarter project, either this Friday or the next, to try and raise funds to print my book for MoCCA. I want to purchase most of the equipment so I can do this work myself; it will be like my own "print on demand" service. I want to get a decent color laser printer, a book binding kit, and paper, and hell, maybe a little advertising too.

I'm going to try and do a longer form blog like this every Sunday - mainly to chart my progress and give myself an extra "carrot" to motivate me to be productive. I need to finish this book - I don't know if I could forgive myself if I couldn't. But there's a whole lot more work to do, and I feel a little overwhelmed. Hopefully, breaking everything into little, week-long chunks when I update on Act-I-Vate (and here) will help with the long hard slog.