I don't know if anyone else has been picking this up (I've been meaning to post this thread for a while!), but if you have, I'd like to know your opinions on issue 7. I read this and it was quite enjoyable, if not quite as frenetic as the last few issues. Still, it was a sort of recouperation/taking stock kind of issue, just like Rennie and Reardon's similarly titled recent run of Caballistics Inc. However, something wasn't sitting right, but I couldn't for the life of me place what it was.
Then it suddenly came to me, like a wet alsatian in a thunder storm! It was the art. It was the art of the story that was putting me off, making me slightly uneasy. Nothing against Shawn Martinbrough, who seems a rather talented artist in his own right, but it just wasn't Jock.
I've always been someone who constantly goes on about the blandness of American mainstream comics because of insistance on making characters fit internal guidelines and not allow an artists own vision of an established character to shine through. Now I find that this 'Jack', or whatever moniker he choses for himself, has so totally engrained himself and his style upon his characters that I eel I can't countenance anyone else drawing them, no matter what pedigree they might hold. Sort of a Carlos Ezquerra/Johnny Alpha type of situation. So I just thought I'd see if it had a similar effect upon anyone else, or whether I'm the lone, babbling voice of insanity. Anyone?
I know what you mean Lord Byron..When Simon Harrison was doing Alpha and Middenface (back in the 600's I think) his facials of the 2 were extremely off putting to me and made it hard to appreciate what a good story it was..Alpha especially was portrayed especially 'Doglike' as if the artist thought that the main characters mutation was that of a dog, hence the title..No whilst not wishing to inhibit an artist too much there has to be some resembelence between the characters whose stories you follow or they soon lose credibility and interest
"his facials of the 2 were extremely off putting to me"
I often find facials offputting...
Yeah, but I think it's also the case that, because Jock had such a strong early run on the title, it is almost impossible to accept anoth artist doing his characters.
To take a hypothetical example. We all know how popular Brian Bolland was when he drew Dredd. But what if he had drawn it from the start, say to the same quality as he drew Judge Death or the last episode of Block Mania? Would we have ever been able to accept anyone else, no matter how good they were? You see that my argument here is not that Bolland was the best Dredd artist, but meerely the effect a strong artist, particularly earlier on in a series' history, can have upon said series. Just like how those artists who came after McMahon (including Bolland) were very influenced by his style and re-design of Dredd from Ezquerra's original.
Of course, 2000AD has a history of characters being portrayed by multiple artists (see Judge Dredd and Ro-Busters/ABC Warriors for examples), so that readers are used to multiple versions of the same characters. MEanwhile, series such as the aforementioned Strontium Dog suffer by comparison when a long running artist, who has shaped and defined the series, leaves, or is replaced, with another, through no fault of the replacement artist.
Fear not - Jock will be returning to the Losers for issue #9 I believe.
I thought that Shawn did a pretty good job of the characters - but I don't know how long I'd stick with The Losers if Jock left permenantly. I admit that I only picked it up in the first place for Jock's art - but I don't object to a few issues with stand-in artists along the way.
"It's the beginning of the end..." A certain drunken boarder to Jock at Bristol