There are a lot of cool artists associated with the X-Men, but frankly the one I like the best is and will always be Chris Bachalo. His run on Generation X is just incredibly good, and while I’m not Scott Lobdell’s biggest fan, even the talkiest stories were worth reading when Bachalo drew them. He’s awesome.
Another Bill Sienkiewicz—Psylocke, from the first Fleer Ultra X-Men series. If you’ve ever asked yourself, “I wonder what kind of taste Marvel Comics has?”, consider that Sienkiewicz got a few spot illustrations for this set of cards, and the chases are a really absurd fisheye-perspective puzzle painting by Greg and Tim Hildebrandt, the Thomases Kinkade of comic art.
Great two-pager by J.H. Williams III from his all-too-brief run on Batman.
And here’s another great Ross painting of the X-Men. This guy’s name gets tossed around as the greatest artist who ever lived, which I realize is annoying, but he’s not jut a photorealistic painter. He has a great sense of composition and movement, as illustrated here.
Today it’s just straight superhero art—J. Scott Campbell’s Marvel Universe. Hooray!
I said I’d post some J.H. Williams, didn’t I? Here we go: the cover to Absolute Promethea vol. III. There are not many comic books I will pay $100 per collection to have in slipcased hardcovers that just reprint the original art at larger size on nicer paper, but Promethea is one of them. It was easily worth the money. You can see the Mucha influence here. Again, there are more and less Mucha-influenced pages by Williams, but this is a nice blend of the earlier, classical looking stuff, and the more contemporary emblematic layouts he’s been doing on stuff like Batwoman. Will post more by him soon, because he’s probably my favorite artist working.
This image is from Williams’ wonderful Flickr page, btw.
…one of Michael Wm. Kaluta’s excellent covers for Creepy magazine. Both Kaluta and Vess have Rackham-ier work, but I thought it would be interesting to show how the old-fashioned children’s book illustrator’s style feeds into pulp.
…Charles Vess, Spider-Man: Spirits of the Earth, and finally….
Here we go. Arthur Rackham’s Instantly they lay still, all turned to stone, followed by…
And here’s another guy who’s a huge influence on McKean (and another one of my very, very favorite artists): the estimable Bill Sienkiewicz, one of the few bona fide geniuses working in comics (McKean is another). He’s probably best-known for his Marvel Universe stories, especially Elektra: Assassin, Moon Knight, and New Mutants, which are all collaborations, but his own writing holds up just as well, if not better, on stuff like Stray Toasters. This one’s of Conan the Barbarian, obviously. Many thanks to Thomas Haller Buchanan over at mydelineatedlife.blogspot.com for sharing this one with the world.
GRAPHOMANIA 