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).
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