something I am grateful for today

I've had a few friends ask me how I'm doing, cuz I'm still trying to shake the tail end of this cough/cold that's been dragging on for a couple weeks now. Thing is, when they ask it sounds like they genuinely care, rather than just asking for politeness's sake. It's nice to have people who care how you're doing.

style

I'm the first to admit that I am out of the loop regarding contemporary comics. That being said, here are a couple of observations on some things in the field that I have noticed:

- I see a lot of artists working in a style similar to what I see in Scott Pilgrim: stripped down, heavily cartooned, stylized, with rough heavy energetic inks. I'm not saying that O'Malley created this style [maybe he did], but I gather he's one of its major exponents. And there are many others currently besides him.

- another stylist who's caught my eye in recent yonks is Ben Caldwell, who wrote a couple of how-to books that I really like, and who works in a style I'd describe as partway between O'Malley and late-era Disney 2D animation like Hercules.

I find this loose, hi-energy sutff intriguing and inspiring, and every so often I find myself itching to dabble in it myself...

...but then I eventually realize that this isn't how I see.*

When I envision an idea for a comic drawing, I lean toward classical work, clean, polished and tightly controlled. I'm talking guys like Steve Rude, Dave Stevens, Jaime Hernandez, Hal Foster, latter-day Roy Crane, Wally Wood, Alex Toth, Brian Bolland... this kind of art is what really resonates with me. Passé or no, somehow this feels like where I belong.

So right now I'm wondering: what exactly is “style” in comic art? Is it an expression of some core individual truth? Is it something you try on to see how it feels? Does this process vary from one artist to the next? I dunno...


* FWIW, something similar happened in the mid-80s when I first started getting into manga and anime, and was especially intrigued by the character designs of Yoshikazu Yasuhiko -- wished I could do sutff like that, but just don't see that way...