Home > CR Reviews

The World Of A Wayward Comic Book Artist
posted March 9, 2010
 



Creators: Sandy Plunkett, Tim Barnes, Michael Wm Kaluta
Publishing Information: Ohio University Press, hardcover/softcover, 224 pages, May 2010, $55/$24.95
Ordering Numbers: 9780804011242/9780804011259 (ISBN13) 0804011249/0804011257 (ISBN10)

I thought The World Of A Wayward Comic Book Artist, a collection of former Marvel artist Sandy Plunkett's work from 1992 to present-day, good company; I felt like I had taken a drive around beautiful Midwestern countryside in an old truck with a friend of a friend, someone who then showed me some of the best work kept on the shelf of a stand-alone studio with inexplicably great lighting. Plunkett does a fine job of identifying some of the key issues in an artist's progression through a lifetime of making work on paper: the temptation and limitation of nostalgia, the differences in approach between commercial work and personal work, the ability to see the world in a way that's necessary in order to make art worthy of seeing in reflection of that reality. These are reinforced by some of the biographical instances brought to bear: his representational work versus his mother's abstract art; the impermanence of life versus the plastic immortality of diversity-threatening commoditization. He never forgets that the reader is looking at the post-Marvel era sketchbooks of someone whose name even most fans of that very specific kind of material hardly remember, an artist that lives in Athens, Ohio rather than New York City. He doesn't apologize, either. Watching him struggle through certain issues is appealing on a human level that you sometimes don't ever get to experience with artists that are more commercially viable, and I can imagine the book being a certain boon to life-long artists in similar situations.

Is the work itself good enough that people would want a book of it? I honestly can't tell. There is of course a high level of craft brought to the imagery, enough that I went and looked up the bulk of his comics career to note a couple of Marvel anthology stories I want to go back and see. The illustrations seems hard-won and well-constructed. The fully-realized comics here both seem well-composed but also stiff in a way the sketchbook material doesn't. Plunkett talks about nostalgia at one point as both a potential idealization based on a myth that resources were better organized to our advantage in the past, and as a capitulation to experiencing things second-hand, and I think that's a lesson that can be maintained while looking at Plunkett's art. So much of his imagination is borrowed, these comics icons and elements of broad, American rural fantasy; I'm not sure that he brings enough in the way of pure craft chops to transform those works into something of individual, compelling focus. His pulp re-imaginings are not quite Mark Schultz's; his girlie magazine approach to certain female comics characters are not quite Dave Stevens'. The presentation seems okay: I'm not much for overlapping images in an arts showcase, but many designers disagree with me. I also wish the book were bigger. In the end, as much as I appreciate the way Plunkett asks questions about a life built around an artistic process, there wasn't a whole lot in terms of finding answers to such questions, even personal ones. The work -- and attending observations -- I liked best are drawn from his travels around southeast Ohio, the notion of structures in decay as a moment when they connect to the natural world for the first time. All in all, The World Of A Wayward Comic Book Artist ended up surprising me as a book that provided a lot of enjoyment. I definitely wonder after too many people scooping together their own array of interests that match up with the general inquiry Plunkett brings to the page. It's a brave book in that sense, but the extra effort was likely necessary.