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Goodbye Carlos

Started by JayzusB.Christ, 01 October, 2018, 03:57:12 PM

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broodblik

When I die, I want to die like my grandfather who died peacefully in his sleep. Not screaming like all the passengers in his car.

Old age is the Lord's way of telling us to step aside for something new. Death's in case we didn't take the hint.

Frank

Quote from: broodblik on 16 October, 2018, 04:54:14 AM
Another good article about Carlos: http://sequart.org/magazine/69183/cursed-earth-carlos-in-memoriam-of-carlos-ezquerra/

Very good analysis of the work and appreciation of Ezquerra's unique strengths as an artist. Thanks for sharing, Broodblik.



Geoff

Yes, a very thoughtful and well expressed article. Thanks broodblik.

Frank


It's interesting that the quality Ezquerra's fellow pros value most in his work is his consistency - it's the word that crops up, consistently, in the Thrillcast's excellent tribute to King Carlos.

David Bailley's memory of Ezquerra describing the serrated outline he gave to figures as a way of animating a static image - as PJ Holden adds, a way of making the character come out of the page, towards the reader - was wonderful.

The most acute observation belonged to Dave Gibbons*, who said Carlos's art reminded him of the sense of involvement and energy in his own drawings as a small boy, where you could see every bullet passing between dogfighting aircraft - the idea that Carlos was telling stories the way readers would want to do if only they could draw as well as him.


* Who really does talk about comics fantastically well. He was a great choice for Comics Laureate.

Magnetica

I am looking forward to getting hold of some classic Equerr stories like Major Easy and El Mestizo for the first time.

As a small boy I never understood what those dotted lines were, so it is very interesting to get an explanation of it all these years on.

Another thing I could never quite work out was whether the shading around Johnny's eyes when he was wearing his helmet was meant to be a shadow or a visor.

Frank

Quote from: Magnetica on 17 October, 2018, 12:35:09 PM
As a small boy I never understood what those dotted lines were, so it is very interesting to get an explanation of it all these years on.

The thing they reminded me of most were the voting coupons in each prog. I was never sure if the jagged outline was an instruction to cut around the image of Johnny Alpha on the cover or if it just meant the voting coupons were drawn by Ezquerra too:





JOE SOAP


"'That was just because I wanted things to come out from the background,' he laughs, pouring another glass of tinto barano, the 'red wine of summer' mix of red wine and lemonade. The sky turns azure and then crimson. 'Because instead of making a thick line as it was done by any other artist, when I had a fish-tooth line he look more mobile, you know? And at the same time it separated the foreground from the background. I still carry on using that some times.'"
2000 AD: The Creator Interviews, Volume One




Frank

Quote from: JOE SOAP on 17 October, 2018, 06:19:44 PM
"'That was just because I wanted things to come out from the background,' he laughs, pouring another glass of tinto barano, the 'red wine of summer' mix of red wine and lemonade. The sky turns azure and then crimson. 'Because instead of making a thick line as it was done by any other artist, when I had a fish-tooth line he look more mobile, you know? And at the same time it separated the foreground from the background. I still carry on using that some times.'"2000 AD: The Creator Interviews, Volume One

Cheers, Soapy Joe.



IndigoPrime

I always knew it was about focussing. What surprises me is more people in the B+W era didn't do something similar. Some played with slightly thicker black lines, but Ezquerra's had real dynamism to them.

Steve Green

I adored his use of colour on his painted (or colour inked) pages.

Splashes of neon through the spectrum from panel to panel.




There's also a panel of Odell in Countdown to Necropolis just loosely painted in silhouetted in a lit doorway, which gives another layer to the art.

JayzusB.Christ

Yes, his painted work was incredible.  While everyone else was trying to do Bisley, Carlos had a beautiful, dynamic and atmospheric style all of his own.  Still can't believe he's not around any more.
"Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest"

Frank

Quote from: Steve Green on 17 October, 2018, 08:04:19 PM
I adored his use of colour on his painted (or colour inked) pages.

Splashes of neon through the spectrum from panel to panel.

http://www.illustrationartgallery.com/acatalog/EzquerraJD680-3a.jpg

There's also a panel of Odell in Countdown to Necropolis just loosely painted in silhouetted in a lit doorway, which gives another layer to the art.

Douglas Wolk mentions that sequence in his excellent Necropolis post, one of the finest pieces of writing about any 2000ad story.

I wish I knew the correct technical term for that thing Ezquerra did where he assigned a different, vivid contrasting, non-naturalistic, almost flat primary colour to each plane of the image - like the panels of McGruder and the hand holding the stick, here:



It's the chromatic equivalent of the jagged outline technique discussed above. Look at the way the blue figure pops out from the red-orange background.

I remember going through Necropolis and Young Giant, doing little roughs in my own sketchbook to capture the different colour combinations he was using, because I was convinced Ezquerra had worked out a secret system of colour that worked on the brain to produce maximum impact.

Once we did the colour wheel at school, I realised Carlos was mostly exploiting the complementary properties of colours at 180 degrees from each other, but the insight or instinct to use that so boldly and in context of the focal plane is rare and particular to the greatest talents:



As Jayzus says, in terms of colour, Ezquerra was refining his own distinctive aesthetic at a time when everyone else wanted to be someone else. You see the odd panel of Dermot Power or Sean Phillips's painted Dredd that make occasional use of the technique, but they're rare.

It's only really MacNeil - who's open about his debt to and adoration of Ezquerra - who makes real use (the best possible use) of Carlos pushing the envelope, like Chuck Jaeger, exploring the limits and showing others the possibilities for original expression the medium he loved still contains.

And that's just one aspect of Ezquerra's game.

Alongside the bombast and chutzpah of panels that laid down bold slabs of ink straight from the bottle, he could suddenly drop the thick black line and switch to beautiful, delicate studies of MC1 architecture that reminded me of the crystalline structures demolished by the Dozers in Fraggle Rock rather than any other artist's vision of his most enduring and beguiling creation.

Again, Ezquerra was using that contrast, that shift in focus and depth, in the service of controlling the reader's eye and interest, taking them through the panels and around the page at the speed and in the direction that best told his story. What a talent, and what a loss.



Steve Green

Yeah, it's amazing work. Colour Dredd in the annuals was a Christmas treat.

A colour Carlos epic, really was like having our Christmases at once.



I love black and white, it's what I grew up with - but this was stunning.

Jim_Campbell

Quote from: Frank on 17 October, 2018, 10:47:06 PM
As Jayzus says, in terms of colour, Ezquerra was refining his own distinctive aesthetic at a time when everyone else wanted to be someone else.

One of the most interesting things I thought anyone said on the Thrill Cast was (I think?) PJ, who observed that there are many, many artists working today who you can immediately identify as influenced by Bolland, McMahon, Kennedy, Dillon, but no one you can point to as wearing an Ezquerra influence on their sleeve. McNeil had an early Carlos phase, but it's a fairly brief period in his own impressive canon.

There are so many 'tics' that you can identify as being unmistakably Ezquerra — the dashed outline, the firing-a-weapon-and-round-impact-in-the-same-panel thing, split panels, round cornered panels, montage pages... occasionally you'll see an artist pay obvious homage to one of these, but no one, Colin briefly excepted, seems to have attempted to absorb the whole thing into their style.

Maybe it's because, as D'israeli noted when he attempted his own homage to Ezquerra in an Apocalypse War flashback, all these things looked deceptively easy when Carlos did them, but turn out to be murderously hard when attempted by lesser mortals.

(I attempted my own homage to the great man in a contribution to Dogbreath many years ago and can add to that list his ability to design costumes that no other artist in their right mind would come up with knowing they'd have to draw the damn thing from multiple angles week in and week out.)
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Frank

Quote from: Jim_Campbell on 17 October, 2018, 11:19:25 PM
There are so many 'tics' that you can identify as being unmistakably Ezquerra — the dashed outline, the firing-a-weapon-and-round-impact-in-the-same-panel thing, split panels, round cornered panels, montage pages... occasionally you'll see an artist pay obvious homage to one of these, but no one, Colin briefly excepted, seems to have attempted to absorb the whole thing into their style.

As a kid, those split panels drove me mad. I was outraged that Ezquerra was cutting corners, and felt sure the writer would be narked that he'd drawn what was essentially one big panel instead of the three I imagined had been described in the script.

I now treasure them and understand this was an example of what Carlos meant when he said he could control the speed of the story. TB Grover had almost certainly only described one panel, but trusted Carlos to make his own decisions regarding storytelling.

You make another great point about the idiosyncratic nature not just of Carlos Ezquerra's costumes, but of his unique talent for character design and his entire aesthetic. I can sympathise, Jim.