What Makes Comic Art Good?

Most of us have looked at comics pages without thinking about them and understood that we liked or disliked what we saw. Sometimes a simple aesthetic impression determines all of it. To read and enjoy comics, one might not need too much of a theoretical background; but the good design of comics requires a grasp of various sub-talents.

The great comic book artists, even when they can't explain these talents verbally, understand them; it shows in the way they design art.

Understanding Faces

I have to rank this fairly high on the scale of important sub-talents connected to the quality of comics art. Particularly when one factors writing into the equation, faces become important. On the simplest level, faces should distinguish the characters. More importantly, though, faces should provide some insight into the characters, if the characters contain anything worth noting. If a comic contains two facial expressions - a scowl, plus something besides a scowl - dialogue, captions, and thought balloons must carry what content gives the character depth and distinctiveness. Such an approach seems to reverse an important comics concept (and, in many cases, a literary concept): One does better to show something than to tell something.

We can go back as far as Will Eisner to find talent that understood the importance of faces in humanizing characters. Eisner's characters enjoyed a rich vocabulary of expressions that made a lot of verbal interpretation unnecessary; and Eisner often used these expressions to convey the meaning of events to readers.

A generation after Eisner's work on his Spirit stories, Neal Adams took faces to a new plateau, combining elements of photo-realism with a rare ability to mangle and distort expressions to convey character intensity. Though in many ways Adams did not have peers in the business - he existed as something of a sui generis - a number of other talents came of age in the specialized skills of crafting emotive faces. For instance, Dick Dillin, whom fans may remember for his work on the Blackhawk books of the sixties and on Justice League of America in the seventies, had a very rare way with faces when he decided to apply it. This did much to synergize his work with Steve Englehart on Justice League of America and allowed that book to get away with more character-driven material than had DC's superhero comics of ten years previously.

The changing of generations that comics saw in the 1990s saw a (hopefully temporary) decline in the art of faces in superhero comics. Perhaps, one might speculate, because the new talent to break into the industry had not worked in the business during the lifetime of the romance comic, a form where some artists could hone their appreciation of the nuance of relationships between eyelid, eyebrow, and lip.

Making It Loud

When one dives into the specialized conventions of superhero comics, it becomes useful to liven things up. A comic that contains nothing more than heroes standing in static poses with their capes dangling does little to liven things up; further, it somewhat betrays the form, because action remains a central element of the superhero form. Two man chain smoking in a cafe booth and mumbling about the pointlessness of it all, while subtitles flicker at the bottom of the screen, does not best suit the form.

On this topic, justice compels the mention of Jack Kirby. He invented his own idiom for making his action scenes compel. One can look at his pages and feel the heart speed up and the blood pressure escalate. In many ways he found the meat of the superhero comic in his mid- and late-sixties artistic inventions, finding a new plateau after decades in the business during which he had already distinguished himself by making action spill out of the page.

Some artists, on the other hand, kept both feet planted in the solid and the sane in ways that undermined the vibrancy of action. One might argue, for instance, that lack of dynamism reflected Curt Swan's key defect. One need not unfairly compare Swan to Kirby to make this stand out; just the adrenal shift from Swan to Byrne demonstrates this.

Making It Pretty

Some artists attain a reputation based on the sheer beauty of their works. One might consider this appeal optional, since some artists produced great work that might have lacked beauty (for instance, Kirby, in pieces like Devil Dinosaur, could produce visuals that compelled in spite of their unquestionable ugliness).

Again, one can bring up the name Neal Adams here. He tempered his tendencies to photo-realism with a solid aesthetic sense that made his work gorgeous to behold, even in dialogue-heavy panels where characters might do little more than stand around with their capes dangling.

My own exposure to comics forces me to pull examples from older material, and by this I mean no slight to the younger generation of artists; but, again, to cite artists whose material would stand on its beauty alone, we can note the works of Barry Windsor-Smith and the late Gil Kane.

More recently, one might note the likes of Dan Jurgens, Jerry Ordway, and Brett Breeding, who seem to have a similar notion of visual appeal in comics.

Making It Wild

Superhero comics take their place among a number of forms one might describe as fantastic (or even escapist). Think, for a moment, on the idea of costumed male models with abilities that defiantly spit in the face of laws of physics, and the stories that they move in. The surreal character of such content becomes clear even to those who avoid the medium. In fact, this fantastical essence probably contributes a great deal to a popular distrust of superhero comics; one might easily, if unfairly, assume that someone who enjoys reading about matters too far distanced from everyday life may lack a necessary grasp on concrete reality.

Nonetheless, the best superhero comics never fear to make it wild. Many names, particularly in the Silver Age, reflect the study of advancing the frontiers of weirdness through sequential art. Steve Ditko invented his own visual idiom of weirdness, a peculiar language that would later influence comics long-timers like Jim Starlin (see "The Strange Death of Adam Warlock" for truckloads of Ditko riffs). Kirby, again, that multidisciplinary Patron Saint of Comics, seemed to threaten to explode with strange new visual riffs, from the ink-drop energy field to the half-toned photographic backdrop and his characteristic "Kirbytech" devices. Jim Steranko, though admittedly and intentionally derivative of the lessons Kirby had to teach the world, had his own characteristic feel for the surreal that came through even in pieces like the Captain America slug-fest mob scene.

A Doctor Strange story might not compel without the absurd landscapes of intracosmic and magical places. Fantastic Four would lack something if the Negative Zone appeared as ordinary star-strewn space. Steranko S.H.I.E.L.D. pieces would not endure so well without that disturbing dreamlike property - a tendency to fantasy laced with just a touch of incipient nightmare.

Making It Flow

The comics artist occasionally may pretend to the title "storyteller." The hungry ones certainly aspire to such a skill; the good ones achieve it. Storytelling, as a skill, remains easier to notice than define. We can tell, generally, when art lacks storytelling skills.

Storytelling involves a number of abstract sub-talents. These include flow/pacing and framing, which acting together provide the cinematography of the story.

Pacing determines the speed at which a story moves and the smoothness or abruptness with which scenes change and event B follows event A. With bad flow, the pace may seem jerky or it may tend to drag. The story should move the reader through various component scenes, inclining him to invest attention most at the most important moments. The flow also simulates the passage of time, while pacing can connect scenes in a larger context through appropriate transitions.

Cinematography represents a metaphorical camera-based approach to laying out panels, scenes, transitions, and the whole visual picture. When Neal Adams resorts to a foreshortened extreme closeup or when Frank Miller creates a setting through following a series of sound bites on a sequence of television screens, each demonstrates cinematographic design. Jim Steranko also explored cinematographic approaches, as did Will Eisner before almost anyone working ever saw a comic book.

The more story one has, the more useful good cinematography becomes. The more action one has, the more important flow becomes.

A Sense of Humor

Not all comics have a sense of humor. Not all of them need it, but properly used humor can add a great deal to fine tune the tone of a story.

For instance, sometimes a touch of Tex Avery can perk up a scene where a superhero receives some insight. The humor in conveying surprise can do wonders; the humor of expression that Will Eisner demonstrated in his works across more decades than many living people remember helps make his works classic.

Humor also helps to prevent the calcification of works into a self-destructive self-importance. For many comics, egotistical complacency can act like the ice on the wings of an airplane: a dead weight that might cause it to crash.

Tom Grummett provides a contemporary example of an artist who can use humor to improve a story without turning it into slapstick.

Technical Jazz

I don't want to sound dismissive of the aspects of fine arts training. They can bring a great deal to superhero comics. Many of the features previously discussed can derive from a good educational background; and much of the weakness of some short-lived ink-slingers du jour may come from their lack of a technical background.

Technical stuff, however, provides a repertoire of tools for creating visual appeal. By themselves, these tools can't make a visual great and can't make a story where none exists. Thus, for instance, the non-Cartesian geometry that Neal Adams brought to his innovative page layouts won't do anything for a page that doesn't have other strong points going for it. Compelling art can move even with extremely conventionalized layouts, such as Kirby's four-panel grid or Keith Giffen's nine-panel grid.

Any number of technical elements can provide raw material for an excellent page. Photo backgrounds, used properly, can affect the tone of a page in shocking ways. Zip-a-tone shading can contribute to mood in ways difficult to simulate with pen-and-ink methods. Even computer effects, used prudently, can add to a good page of comics art.

Perspective and realistic anatomy represent two important, but sometimes dispensable, elements in comics art. One would do better to learn these rules before abandoning them. Nonetheless, we may note that Kirby's most legendary art intentionally dispensed with accurate anatomy; humorous work, like Don Simpson's Megaton Man, may sneer at accurate anatomy. Perspective, similarly, provides an excellent tool for introducing motion and making the action break out of the panel (see Gil Kane's work for too many examples to name). Nonetheless, a comic can achieve artistic excellence without adhering to rigorous anatomy or perspective, two skills that, if carried to extremes, leave only photo-realism. Perfect photo-realism mainly provides the benefits of a photograph at a much greater investment of effort.

I consider techniques like the wheels on a car. A car has to have them to move, but a car with four perfect wheels and no engine won't go anywhere.

Adding extra wheels won't necessarily improve the function of the car, and the use of trendy (or, alternately, innovative) technique doesn't necessarily add anything to a comic. Misused, techniques can turn into lame gimmicks, from scratchy lines on the face to multiple two-page splash pages in a book.

The Overall Picture

Any one of the aforementioned strengths might suffice to justify the art in a comic book. The quality of particular assets can make the missing elements less relevant.

One would pursue a hopeless and arbitrary task to attempt to quantify these qualities in a numerical sense, but they do provide a framework. If a piece doesn't stand on any of these legs, and a reader can see nothing in it, it may have entered the broad category of bad and pointless art.

Where comics art achieves one or more of the objectives mentioned in the previous sections, however, it begins to resemble good art. The more bases it touches, the better it seems; and strengths on many levels can place it in the category of great (or even classic) comics art.

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