http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=en5DRgVpWeo


It was interesting to hear an artist talk about the way computers have changed the way comics artists work now, different even from 15 or 20 years ago.

Also interesting is how he said that it has sterilized the work and taken away much of the spontanaity and playful creative aspects from the work, and created a field that conforms and imitates many of the aspects of storytelling and "realism" in movies.

I still look at much of the early/mid 1980's work as a Golden Age of comics, with a lot of clever, innovative and fun stuff being produced, from the likes of Pacific, Eclipse, and First, as well as groundbreaking material in that era from Marvel and DC.

I think there was a lot of stuff in the 80's that were intelligent and clever stories, that were uniquely possible in comics form. And I have to agree that much the current material wastes pages and pages of cinematic panels establishing "mood", and yet it still comes off as a cheap imitation, of just trying to do movies in a comic book form.

Baron and Rude's NEXUS was never one of my favorites, but it certainly had a number of very good issues, that demonstrated the full potential of storytelling possible in comics.

I'll listen to it later, but it seems interesting. I agree with him and you about the digitalization of colouring and comic book art in general.

I find it odd that books started getting more delays when computers became the norm. I bet the artists get distracted by porn that they fail to meet the deadlines.

Similarly in book publishing, I see way more typos in books and articles. With computers, it's much more easy to fix typos and other errors, but I think the knowledge that they could fix errors easily instead makes them less careful and actually results in more typos. Even in online articles that could be corrected after-the-fact.

Some stuff that I remember fondly in comics are the early overtly computer-generated projects, such as the SHATTER series, the IRON MAN: CRASH graphic novel, and BATMAN: DIGITAL JUSTICE graphic novel.

Although I spoke once to Peter Gillis at a convention about the SHATTER series he wrote, and he let on that the artists cheated and hand drew much of the "computer art", because at that time (1985-1988) the computer art was still too limited to do what they needed to finish the project.

Rude is one of my favorite artists. He's like a cross between Dave Stevens, Alex Toth and Jim Steranko.

In a perfect world, Rude would be drawing a top ten book for DC or Marvel but, apparently, he prefers to do most of his work for creator owned titles and only takes one shots or limited series from the Big Two.

actually, he's tried to get more work from Marvel and DC. he's one of several name artists that can't seem to get work from either company these days.

Yeah, I've heard that guys like Roy Thomas, Len Wein and Joe Rubenstein and many other 70's/80's artists likewise are unable to get work from the big two.

Yet another reason not to buy or support Marvel and DC. It's awful the way they treat many of the grandmasters of the field.