oops
i didn’t want to go to the trouble of scanning this.
Having seen his new justice league cover/promo/whatever it is, i thought i’d try and replicate his unique style.
I stuck a pen in my ear and forgot to take it out. Imagine my surprise when I went to bed.
In the notes of chapter 5 in Scott McCloud’s “Making Comics” (stay with me this isn’t one of THOSE articles), McCloud recounts something said to him by Gene Yang, regarding tools:
Still, I noticed a cheap tool bravado emanating from the web-savvy bay area indie scene. ‘Brushes, Sharpies, Pigmas and even Ballpoint Pens are used,” writes Gene Yang, ‘[Jesse Hamm] walked up to me and Derek during a San Diego con years ago and said, ‘Mignola does everything with a Pigma and a Sharpie!’ I don’t think Jesse’s picked up a brush since.
Today I came home from work greeted by Giannis Milonogiannis’ Old City Blues hardcover - which, by the way, is incredibly handsome; Unlike approximately 80% of other comics, i probably wouldn’t feel ashamed reading it in public - and like most things, his art is even more beautiful to behold in real life. It’s a compelling composite of dozens of sources i already like, such as Ridley Scott Hugo Pratt, Masamune Shirow, Metal Gear Solid/Yoji Shinkawa, Katsuhiro Otomo… It’s more than a penny-farthing mashup of those, though, and I definitely don’t want to characterize it as just a sum of simple components.
I’ve admired Milonogiannis’ artwork for months now, simply because of his virtuoso utilization of simple tools. As he’s described, it’s a mixture of brushes, simple Microns and “cheapo” (sic) paper. His usage of shadows is impressionistic, and every panel is full of electricity, like it was dropped in a puddle that a downed power line fell into. The cityscapes are engrossing without feeling laborious. It’s my favorite kind of style; Hugo Pratt did it, Juanjo Guarnido does it, Sergio Aragones, The Hernandez Brothers - they all do it: They make it look easy. And that’s probably one of the highest compliments I can give any artist, because guys like Brian Hitch and Art Adams can draw one hell of a two-page spread but they don’t make you want to go out and draw one yourself any more than want to put some Bengay on your hand.
Just to boomerang a little bit, though, Milonogiannis’ usage of tools is what fascinates me most of all, not because making a lot using a little is impressive, but because of how well he uses his minimal tools - it’s not like he was forced to use these things, but he did, and his style implements the way they look, rather than work around it. Like Mignola, or Paul Pope, his art is heavily informed by the way his tools behave. It’s a universe entirely composed of steady micron lines and brush strokes, rather than just drawn by them. This is the reason i get a little frustrated on the somewhat-common occasion that a professional, when asked what they use to draw, dust the important question off with “it doesn’t matter what you use”. Though it’s from an extremely important mindset (no one should put off drawing if they can’t afford a Wacom or Windsor & Newton), it ignores the important fact that a lot the time, what’s on the page or the screen is a sum total of the strengths and weaknesses of whatever was used to put it there. Maybe it shouldn’t matter that much, i guess, but art tools deserve to be thought of as more than just ink sticks.
Giannis Milonogiannis is only two years older than me and he’s already drawn this level of comic. Neither I nor the rest of us have any excuse.
(the comic is here, if you want to read it, but I seriously recommend picking up the hardcover, because I’m not joking, it’s an extremely good-looking book.)
borders aside, i am really super-proud of how this turned out. Maybe my stuff just looks better on this Macbook Pro screen.
