Go, Read: 21 Artists Who Changed Mainstream Comics; Seth On Cartoonists

There's a strange but fun-to-read list at AV Club of 21 artists who changed mainstream comics. The choice of language gives the writers a great deal of leeway in what to discuss. It's not like Bill Sienkiewicz's move into greater fits of abstraction, say, led to an army of people drawing comics all of which looked like Bill Sienkiwiecz, but his odd presence by itself changed the feel of the entirety of what was on the stands. So I get it. And it's not like it's really historically focused, so I didn't expect to see Dan Barry or Joe Maneely or Mac Raboy or even Alex Toth. Still, I would have liked to have seen, for instance, the late Mike Parobeck mentioned, as he fits their historical window and he was to my understanding basically the first cartoonist to hit with comic book audiences doing that cleaner animated-looking style that quickly became an almost secondary mainstream art standard. In fact, his work was of such a high quality it rallied several writers-about-comics around it, too, which I can't recall happening in the last 20 years with anyone else, certainly not Alex Ross. Probably someone from that school of comics should have been mentioned, or maybe someone who brought in overt Asian action comics influence and blended it with American mainstream comics art, as much as so many of those comics have been awful. I'm not sure if it could have included some straight-up manga or not.

For even more fun, check out this interview with Seth that received only a brief mention on this site earlier, where the cartoonist and designer marches through a lot of the great figures of cartooning and offers opinion. He feels a disconnect from several of the great ones, which is interesting to me. He also has nice words to say about Richard Thompson and Cul De Sac. One thing that's always fun reading cartoonists dig into art is that they're much more open about criticizing that for which they don't have a particular empathy, as it seems is the case with Seth and his analysis of Barks vs. Gottfredson.
 
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