The JLA by Bruce Timm & Yoakum

The second Bruce Timm commission inks, following the Batgirl of two days ago. you know what i learned from inking this one?

Hawkgirl is bad ass. She's fun to draw. Why don't we have a monthly Hawkgirl comic?

Corporate Comics: bad art or bad direction?

We interrrupt the posting of a new bruce timm /yoakum piece for this bit of snark.

Is this professional art, or is this professional coloring? 'Cause it ain't professional drawing.

Recently I had linked to a black widow page of art work that was simply so boring and incompetent that i had to hold it up as an example of bad comic art. This piece is a totally different example of bad comic art. this one is far better about pointing the direction of where corporate comics might be going.

And its scary as hell, if thats the case. Someone channeling James Jean with no structure to the drawing at all.

I mean, look, we all started out apeing someone. But it used to be that you would be told to quit drawing like Kirby or Gil Kane or John Byrne and go learn how to draw. This seems like the perfect example of... well, just about everything bad.

Batgirl by Timm and Yoakum

Bruce Timm. Love his stuff.

Was given a couple of his pieces to ink over for commission. Had no idea how hard it would be to get something that i liked.

How about 5 tries?

I ended up doing this Batgirl 5 times before i was happy with the result. The commissioner of the piece has been extremely patient what i fiddled with them to my satisfaction, and had to delay finishing the work while i took on the Gulacy job.

And then I came back to them and hated them again. So I redid this piece, and the JLA piece that i'll post tomorrow, again.

So what was the problem? Well, Timm's stuff has its own cartoony logic to it, and if you don't nail the line thickness right off the bat, then you're basically dead in the water. There are no little rendering line that might take you eye away from the holding line, nothing to distract you. And maybe i'm being overly picky with my work, and no one else would have had a problem with them, but i did, and since there is no deadline on these, i continued to work them again and again.

And now i need to get them out of my studio before i start to harsh on them again.

BTW - saw some of Rain's colors for Timebomb over my inks and was totally blown away. TIMEBOMB will likley be the best looking book color and production wise that i've ever been involved with and I'm really psyched to see how it all looks in print.

Cross-Over Craziness vs Single Issue Fun

Todd Allen at Publisher's Weekly does a good job of summing up the recent Cross-Over Craziness that is happening at Marvel and DC, and pointing out just how difficult it is to actually find something that isn't part of being tied in to 7 other titles.

This is exactly how I, as the doting father of two girls, who has spent a great deal of time and money over the last 6 years trying to get my children addicted to comics, see the market place. And it sucks.

i hate the idea that my 9 year old will say to me, "What is actually happening in Wonder Woman?" because she can't just pick it up and read a single great storyline. I've started to not pick up the books if they're so convoluted that i can't understand them. And if I can't, there's no way that she can.

Sadly, the Green Lantern series has long since descended into zombie nihilism and i'm not going to subject my kids to the over the top nastiness of Blackest Night. Is it any wonder that they've moved into reading Simpsons Comics over DC in the last 7 months? I was actually buying Superman for a while, enjoying Robinson's run onthe series with Guedes' art. I dropped that when the cross destroyed whatever interest i had in the storyline.

And that sucks again. I would like to love comics again on a regular basis, but almost none of the series will give me a fun reason to show up in the store month after month. As my hands stay covered with small black ink stains as i finish up the Gulacy pencilled pages for TIMEBOMB, I would love to relax with a small stack of enjoyable comics.

And they keep letting me down. And they're letting my kids down. And its pissing me off.