Top 10 Comic Book Artists

 Now I don’t like doing top 10 lists that much, but after the last one well I needed to celebrate good comic book art. It’s an easy format but now I have two options. I can act like I am a great authority on the subject or weasel out by stating it’s just my opinion. I could go for a meta-angle I suppose and mock the formulaic nature of this sort of article causing half of the internet to shrivel up. I also want to make sure that my introduction looks weighty enough so it takes slightly longer when somebody scrolls past to find out who is on the list. For those actually reading this just because your favourite artist isn’t on the list doesn’t mean they’re a bad artist well with some exceptions (Greg Land of course). I will of course in the bulk of the text reference other artists to sound knowledgeable in an attempt to make it seem like I haven’t just listed 10 artists that I like.  

Emma Rios

Have you ever seen comic book art and just fall in love? Genuine question. Rios has her own art style and she isn’t just a token pick to prove my SJW credentials. She brings something genuinely new, I could best describe it as, Steve Ditko mixed with Mike Mignola, with a hint of Tim Sale, creating notes of Moebius with a massive dollop of Vincent Van Gogh. Now I can’t rank her too high on the list as she’s fairly new, she could become lazy and complacent like John Romita jr so lets hope her art continues to improve.

Jim Lee

Jim Lee has the best grasp of the human anatomy of anyone working in comics, but what do you expect from a former med student? Jim Lee is also the best selling comic book artist of all time, but that’s got more to do with the speculator boom. The biggest problem with Jim Lee is his comics aren’t that good at storytelling, in fact some books he’s worked on are complete incoherent trash (Superman For Tomorrow or All Star Batman and Robin). A Jim Lee comic is more a showcase for his amazing two page spreads, and he uses this far too much, almost every other page. Sometimes I think DC should just release a book of wall posters by Jim Lee instead. 

Michael Dooney

Michael Dooney is on here for one simple reason, he drew the best Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. He has done a few comics, but he’s mostly done covers and the box art for toys. Most notably he did the designs for the 2003 Ninja Turtles cartoon but the few turtle comics he’s done are the best of the TMNT and I want to either bully him more or get people to bully other publishers to hire him to do more comics, he does tones of DC Fan art let him draw a Zatanna mini series or something.

Carl Barks

Carl Barks side-stepped nominative determinism by drawing ducks. That's what he did: he drew ducks for disney, creating Scrooge McDuck in his tenure. He was so good at it he continued in his retirement to draw duck softcore porn (No I will not be showing you that). Bark’s Donald Duck comics reinvented the character, when Barks started Donald was your average suburbanite with a streak of bad luck. Donald evolved into becoming a globetrotting adventurer who searched for treasure and got into sword fights with pirates. Barks created a whole new world for Donald and made it believable that this square would go thrill-seeking with his family. Donald is also the most published non-superhero comic book character and hugely popular in France, Germany and Belgium because of Barks tenure. Carl Barks’ Donald Duck and Scrooge McDuck comics were adapted into Ducktales (sometimes replacing Donald with Launchpad because Donald’s speech is limited).

  

Adam Kubert

We all have our ideas of what comic book art should look like. For me what Superhero comics should look like is Adam Kubert’s art. That should be enough praise to give the son of the legendary Joe Kubert, the founder of the Joe Kubert school. But I can actually say the same thing about Adam’s brother Andy, and if I put them both on the list I’m just saying “this art style is better than others”, which isn’t true no one style is better than others it’s all subjective. No what separates Adam from Andy is that Adam drew Neil Gaiman’s 1602 which is in a completely different art style and still looks good (unlike Andy trying to copy Frank Miller on DKR the Master Race).

Akira Toriyama

The only Mangaka on this list. Akira Toriyama to most people is a one-hit wonder known only for DragonballZ. But there is so much more to him, and even Dragonball gets viewed myopically as nothing but fights. Toriyama is great at visual storytelling so much so the Manga is understandable without translation. His fight scene choreography is so memorable that kids will imitate it on the playground. There’s even more, like his use of slapstick comedy or his world design for the Dragonquest and Chrono Trigger video games. Hell, even Dragonball is set in a great fantasy world with flying cars and dinosaurs at the same time (and you don’t question it, you just say cool). 

Gill Kane

If you drew a comic that is often credited with ending the Silver-age, shouldn’t you be a well known name in comics? What if you created one of the Justice League’s big seven? Well Gill Kane did both by pencilling Amazing Spider-man 121-122 better known as “The Night Gwen Stacy Died” and created Green Lantern (the good one Hal Jordan not Alan Scott). So call it personal bias because my two favourite superheroes are Spider-man and Green Lantern but he deserves to be on this list. Most of Gill Kanes work was when Marvel and DC expected artists to work in their house style, so it takes a good look to tell his art from Nick Cardy, Carmine Infantino or John Romita Sr. Kane on his run on Action Comics worked in a new style, a style of his own that clearly inspired Mike Mignola, a more minimalist style that took inspiration from the Max Fleisher Superman cartoons and CC Beck. 

Jack Kirby

The most obvious and cliched pick of them all. But sometimes a cliche is true. Jack Kirby probably in his career created more well known characters than any other artist. But what Kirby is best at is storytelling, he made comics the melodramatic medium that they are. Nobody in a Jack Kirby comic is narked; they're consumed by a rage hotter than a thousand exploding suns. Their joy is like a million birthdays at once and they’re not sad they’re in a depression that a lesser man couldn’t escape. Of course critics of Jack Kirby will complain about his anatomy, but they don’t get it. Kirby before working in comics was an inbetweens animator at Fleisher studios and this rubbed off on him. Their anatomy isn’t wonky, it's rubber hose, it stretches and shrinks to convey greater movement. I think 2 quotes from Jack Kirby will explain why he was so good “Comics will only break your heart” because he put his all into comics, experimented to make his craft better and got very little praise in his lifetime or money. “I feel my characters are valid, my characters are people, my characters have hope. Hope is the thing that’ll get us through” because he gave us heroes, heroes to look up to, ones that won’t let us down. They might be flawed but they try to do the right thing and by reading them maybe they’ll rub off on us and we can make the world a better place by their example.

 

Chris Bachallo

Jim Steranko made a name for himself by using unusual panel formats, Chris Bachallo took one look at them and went I can do better. Chris Bachallo must be claustrophobic because his characters are rarely boxed in. He never uses a normal panel layout, and as offbeat and quirky as they are they’re always understandable to the reader (well a western reader and manga fan reads in a backwards N as opposed to the normal Z). 

His style is not just made up of weird panel layouts; he has a unique style of character, which may not be to everyone's taste. If you don’t like your characters a bit on the cartoony side then you’ll probably want to stick with his Shade the Changing man but to me he is the definitive Doctor Strange Artist. Also the comic I’m most excited to read is Non-Stop Spider-man, I can’t wait for the trade to come out so I can see Spider-man bounce around the page.

Honorable mention Klaus Janson

When you say artist that’s almost synonymous with penciller. That’s the interpretation I had for this list, although some of the artists on this list did their own inks, it’s mostly defined by pencil work. But Klaus Janson is the greatest inker ever, want proof? He can make Frank Miller and John Romita jr look good (well not as bad as normal he doesn’t redraw their art). He has a skill that is unfortunately overlooked as many think Inking is just tracing. Klaus Janson wrote the book on inking and in it there's a whole chapter dedicated to that debate most famously seen in Chasing Amy.

Another Honourable mention even though he's not as good, but he's trying would be Instagram.com/KBen_on_Art

John Byrne

I actually questioned this decision, because the title of best comic book artist is high praise. Not for his actual art, but because of what's come out of his mouth (or more accurate keyboard). John Byrne has always been a controversial figure in comics, from an early feud with his hero Jack Kirby to his more recent comments. Some of his feuds he has been in the right and was standing up to bullies in editorial, he’s even shown he can change his mind. Earlier in life he was homophobic but after learning he was wrong created Northstar the gay superhero (Northstar wasn’t allowed to be out and proud because of Marvel Editor-in-chiefs stronger homophobia). But as it stands I’m not sure John Byrne’s mind is in mint condition anymore. He now sits on his little forum espousing ignorant views to it’s 600 members who he’ll ban at a moment's notice for disagreeing with him and call them a “Micro-brain”.  How he got like this I don’t know, and how anyone will get him to see the light also baffles me. Maybe it’s from years of not getting the credit he deserves for Co-scripting Dark Knight Returns (even being the one to add a girl Robin), or reinventing Superman for the modern age and being prophetic by making Donald Trump his archenemy. All I know is Byrne drew the best Fantastic Four, X-men, Superman and She Hulk while managing to get a good balance between anatomical detail and storytelling. So I just want to say John Byrne’s art is alway welcome, his views are not. 

Greg Land and The Robot Apocalypse

 Pointing out that Greg Land is a hack, fraud or charlatan is nothing new. Thousands of other blogs have written about his tracing of random sources and calling it his own art. So why would my take on the worst remnant of the speculator boom be any different from the others. Well because Greg Land’s “Art” is the first step to a fully automated comics industry, one devoid of soul or originality. Where comics aren’t created by devoted artists who have studied what came before them but copy pasted crap that devalues the medium. Don’t believe me, read on true believer… 

It is often said that “Nobody gets into comics to make a lot of money” but if you think that you forgot about the speculator boom, when comic stores sold box upon box of Rob Liefeld knock offs to investors who’ve never read a comic. Greg Land started his career in comics during this period of time. So how did he start, well he traced Jim Lee’s Wildcats, renamed the characters and self published it. This work caught the eye of Crossgen comics, whose founder Mark Alessi (nicknamed by Mark Waid “the Donald Trump of comics”) a soul mate. Crossgen comics was set up as a company that would publish creator owned ideas, but instead Alessi insisted it would work like clockwork so if a writer missed a deadline they would be replaced with Alessi’s other soulmate and noted Comicsgater Chuck Dixon. Land worked on Sojourn where he started what he’s best known for tracing porn. After Crossgen folded and was sold to Disney (the speculator boom was now dead, buried and ready to be uncovered by archeologists) for one million dollars. Greg Land jumped to DC Comics and worked on Nightwing but was fired for tracing the previous artist on the book. He then ended up at Marvel, where he still works now. Marvel’s Editor in chief Joe Quesada has commented on Greg Land’s art with “it’s not fair to fire him for what fan’s have alleged”. I do wonder if his opinion has changed more recently since Dark Horse comics have taken legal action against them (Greg Land traced panels from one of their comics). 

With the Biography done, how does this lead to the fall of humanity?

Well his art style is something artificial intelligence can copy, machines have no imagination they can only copy and replicate. They also have no idea how to read emotions and are quite poor at identifying different faces. One look at a page of a Greg Land comic will show he can’t do that either, he’ll reuse the same pic for 2 different characters and they’re just recoloured or the same character will have a completely different face in the next panel. Also according to his comics O-Face runs the entire gamut of women’s emotions. Anytime a man is screaming in a Greg Land comic he looks like he’s jizzed himself so it’s not just women just that he’ll trace for. But with men he’ll also trace pro-wrestlers or once infamously a meme. His run on Iron man was limited because he could only use poses from the first Iron man movies (also Iron man’s armour changes between panels). Similarly his Fantastic Four run was hindered by lack of resources because he traced Bryan Hitch’s depictions of The Thing. 

Now I don’t think Greg Land is actually a robot, but he draws and thinks like one. I realised this fact after reading House of X/Powers of X. Which was luddite propaganda but it’s about Professor X betting the survival of mutantkind on human’s imagination and ingenuity against machines' cold calculations.  Isn’t that what makes us human, the desire to tell stories and make art. Surely to be human is to work on your own art, struggle to get better at your craft? But Mr Land won’t understand that he thinks he broke into the industry quite late at the age of 25 (if you didn’t know most people make it into comics late 30s to mid 40s).