re: Rob Liefeld (or Sal Buscema?!?!?!?!) - Worst comic book artist ever?
 

Alan Davis is awesome. And talking about imitators, there are others who grow to have a great style of their own; I thought Brian Hitch was a Davis clone for a long time but he grew into his own style.

Phil Jimenez was almost a carbon copy of George Perez when he started. Travis Charest was basically a Jim Lee clone in his early work (check that Flash Annual, or Darkstars), and now I think he's superior (though much slower). Dodson is basically a faster Adam Hughes at times.

I also love the works of guys like Gene Ha, Chris Sprouse, Stuart Immonen (there's a Legion bias here), Art Adams, Brandon Peterson, Joe Mad (when he was on Uncanny), Jim Cheung (almost made the teen Tony stuff readable... almost), the late Mike Wieringo, Kevin Maguire; and heck, basically everyone Twomorrows has featured in their excellent Modern Masters series. 20, 30 years later, no matter what art style is popular at the time, I'll still enjoy their work.

re: Rob Liefeld (or Sal Buscema?!?!?!?!) - Worst comic book artist ever?
 

Alan Davis is great, but if you say Sal Buscema sucks (as opposed to not being to your taste), then you don't know what the fuck you're talking about.

Put up or shut up -- what sucks about this cover?

http://media.comicvine.com/uploads/0...er-m_super.jpg

re: Rob Liefeld (or Sal Buscema?!?!?!?!) - Worst comic book artist ever?
 

Well, I guess "sucks" is a little harsh. His work is certainly serviceable and isn't an embarrassment to his profession like Liefeld's is. Sal just seems to do the bare minimum and nothing more; most of his work, like that cover, looks like it was done in a hurry. Also, the poses (and the faces) look awkward and unnatural, not Liefeld unnatural of course, but just a little off. It's just not eye-catching stuff.

re: Rob Liefeld (or Sal Buscema?!?!?!?!) - Worst comic book artist ever?
 

I may have to scan some of the pages I really don't like if I get the time.

re: Rob Liefeld (or Sal Buscema?!?!?!?!) - Worst comic book artist ever?
 

Sal's run on the Hulk is classic stuff, but he was turning in quite mediocre work on a regular basis by the late 80s/early 90s. It simply looked like he was putting less effort into the art.

re: Rob Liefeld (or Sal Buscema?!?!?!?!) - Worst comic book artist ever?
 

Where's the background? I mean I guess it was nice of him to draw a floor but where are they supposed to be and is Quasar flying so low in what looks like a confined area?

re: Rob Liefeld (or Sal Buscema?!?!?!?!) - Worst comic book artist ever?
 

http://media.instocktrades.com/large/APR090600.jpg

Does more with less here then that Sal cover IMO.

Nothing unique about the cover, was just looking for any random 90's Alan Davis cover.

And if we're talking strictly about fast Spider-Man artist I'd take Bagley every day of the week over Buscema.

re: Rob Liefeld (or Sal Buscema?!?!?!?!) - Worst comic book artist ever?
 

I hate, hate, hate when people say art looks rushed or hurried. Unless you were standing over his drawing board, you have no idea how long it took Sal to draw that. And I guarantee -- you could give me a year to draw a Spider-Man cover and it wouldn't look as good as the cover Sal drew, whether he hurried or not.

As for the substantive critique of what's actually on the page, can you expand on what you mean by the faces and poses looking awkward and unnatural? They seem natural to me, so I'm clearly not seeing what you're seeing.

re: Rob Liefeld (or Sal Buscema?!?!?!?!) - Worst comic book artist ever?
 

I was a fan of Sal's work on Web of Spider-Man at the time when McFarlane and then Erik Larsen were drawing the flagship Amazing. His artwork was a nice change of pace from the other guys.

re: Rob Liefeld (or Sal Buscema?!?!?!?!) - Worst comic book artist ever?
 

Also, if you want to get technical about it, the action lines should originate/emanate from Spiderman's swing arc...not from outside the page or in front of the object/person. It makes She Hulk look like she's headed towards them and not away. That's just plain lazy right there.

re: Rob Liefeld (or Sal Buscema?!?!?!?!) - Worst comic book artist ever?
 

That Sal cover is awful as is a good bit of whatever he drew.

He was Leifeld before Liefeld.

A friend of one works for marvel and DC and he always complains about these artists as beng the hardest to ink.
Hardest because there's nothing there. He has to create just about everything on the page to make it look like something.

When you see lines like that cover there is almost always not even that many lines, the inker has to fill it in with more lines or more "something" to create a backround.

re: Rob Liefeld (or Sal Buscema?!?!?!?!) - Worst comic book artist ever?
 

The perspective is off - I can't get a sense of the plane they're on. The characters look like they're just randomly inserted into the image, almost like a bad photoshop of a dvd cover where they just put the character's faces on the cover; Sal's doing that with the superheros, just randomly plopping them on the cover with no rhyme or reason. There's also no sense of movement at all, as they all look like cut-outs placed onto a diorama. Like I said, proficient, but utterly lazy. Also, his character faces are indistinct and interchangeable - the only way to tell Sal's characters apart are their hair/costumes. Look at Davis on how to do it right - but he does take WAY more time to churn out work than Sal. By his own admission, he needs to start early, and he can only do about one 25 page book per 2 months, where as Sal can crank out 4 times that amount, and it shows.

re: Rob Liefeld (or Sal Buscema?!?!?!?!) - Worst comic book artist ever?
 

Sal inked that cover himself. The complaint about the speed lines seems off base to me. The cover clearly communictaes that Spider-Man has decked She-Hulk and she's flying away from the camera.

Here are some other Sal Buscema covers of this era that I like:


The comparisons to Liefeld seem way off base to me, because when I look at a Sal Buscema drawing, I know that every line is there for a reason, and I know that he's thought about the layout and the storytelling. Every one of those covers that I posted tells a story and tells it very clearly. Same with his interior pages.

But don't take my word for it. Take Walt Simonson's:

More on Marvel.com: http://marvel.com/news/story/15880/t...#ixzz1nhJOAsuF

Or J.M. DeMatteis's.

http://www.slushfactory.com/features...062402-jm3.php

re: Rob Liefeld (or Sal Buscema?!?!?!?!) - Worst comic book artist ever?
 

I don't think anyone's comparing him to Liefeld. My issue with Sal isn't his storytelling (which is more than fine), but an issue of aesthetics - his stuff is just plain ugly and overly rigid. But I suppose that's more of a subjective thing.

re: Rob Liefeld (or Sal Buscema?!?!?!?!) - Worst comic book artist ever?
 

You mean she should be flying towards the camera. It's obvious that Spiderman hit her but those lines are out of place. The point of origin is incorrect. To the casual observer it wouldn't mean anything but even a novice artist would know the difference.

http://www.beyondhollywood.com/uploa...ers-tron-2.jpg

http://i1.cdnds.net/10/49/550w_comic...tors_cover.jpg

http://www.collider.com/wp-content/u...rs_academy.jpg

http://www.collider.com/wp-content/u...in_america.jpg

The above examples are correct in line placement as opposed to that cover of Spiderman .

As for Simonson; sure he probably liked working with him. What else can he say? Your not going to talk shit about someone who has been part of the industry for what seems like forever and Simonson is a way better artist than Sal. I loved his back up Manhunter series that was in Detective Comics.

Bottom line is if you enjoy Sal's art that all well and good but others don't. So what, who cares? I'm sure there are a few out there that don't like Neal Adams who is my all time favorite but do I care? Nope.

;)
 

Art is not subjective. That was just proven elsewhere on DVDTalk.

re: Rob Liefeld (or Sal Buscema?!?!?!?!) - Worst comic book artist ever?
 

I was fortunate enough to meet Sienkiewicz during WWTX a few years ago, and he spoke about starting out as a clone of Adams. Basically he drew that way basically because that's what Marvel wanted from him -- traditional super-hero art. It was a pretty big source of frustration for him and he was close to quitting comics when he was finally allowed to do his own thing.

I'm right there with you.

Awesome. Sienkiewicz is my favorite artist ever, and we were able to get a sketch of Jubilee (my wife's favorite character) from him at WWTX, and it's our prized possession.

re: Rob Liefeld (or Sal Buscema?!?!?!?!) - Worst comic book artist ever?
 

Fair enough, and if the discussion were "I don't like Sal's art," or "I think it's ugly," then I'd say I think you have bad taste but to each his own. But it started with Supermallet saying he was the worst artist of the 90s, and slop saying he had no style and did the bare minimum, then someone else said he sucks and I had to jump in to defend Our Pal Sal. Yes, his late-80s to present work is not slick in the way Alan Davis's work is, and he's got a stylized technique, but he's building it on a rock solid foundation. The guy knows how to draw, and quite frankly, the complaints remind me of the complaints about the late 70s/80s work of guys like Jack Kirby, Carmine Infantino, and Gil Kane -- artists who drifted away from realism and toward abstraction in the last few decades of their career, but who no doubt about it knew what they were doing.

As for the covers you posted, the speedlines don't seem any more right than on that Spider-Man cover. In particular, on the Guardians of the Galaxy cover and the Quicksilver cover, which direction are the characters moving? I would assume toward the reader on both covers, but both covers have speedlines extending from the character toward the reader. And with neon Captain America (by the way -- WTF!?), I looked at it three times before I saw the red speed lines -- I thought you were talking about the blue flash behind Cap. Which I guess speaks more to the composition and the over-reliance on flashy photoshop effects than how the artist captured motion (and I would say all four covers look far stiffer than any of the characters on that Spider-Man cover).

Again, your mileage may vary, and if you don't like Sal's line, that's cool, but the man clearly knows how to compose an image and he clearly knows how to convey motion.

As for Simonson, I've seen plenty of interviews with him to know that his admiration of Sal is genuine. Think about it -- in the 80s, Simonson was one of the top artists at Marvel (and in the industry). He could have collaborated with anyone he wanted on Thor. Do you really think he was just putting a happy face on having to work with Sal? And still lying about it two decades later?

re: Rob Liefeld (or Sal Buscema?!?!?!?!) - Worst comic book artist ever?
 

Same goes for Jim Aparo and John Byrne. When Aparo was doing Brave and the Bold and Detective in the 70's I couldn't get enough of his work. It was just plain awesome. During the late 80's it was going downhill. I don't know if it was the inks by Mike DeCarlo or what but it just wasn't good anymore. Don't get me started on his run in Green Arrow. Terrible stuff. I've read Sal inked over his pencils in a Batman Annual but I have never seen it. Makes me wonder how it looks like.

John Byrne is the same way. Great early work but when I saw his art in Wonder Woman I couldn't get through it. Not only was the writing bad but the artwork was awful.

re: Rob Liefeld (or Sal Buscema?!?!?!?!) - Worst comic book artist ever?
 

Actually, what I said is that I think Buscema's Spectacular Spider-Man run is some of the worst art I've ever seen in a major comic book. And you know what? I stick by that. The art looks sloppy and lazy. I don't care if Buscema spent weeks on every single line, it looks like ass. I was reading pretty much every Spider-Man title at that time and had to quit Spectacular because the art turned me off so thoroughly. Is he worse than Leifeld? No, his sense of anatomy is better, but Leifeld is so bad that it's really no compliment to Buscema to say he's not quite as bad.

I think there's a big difference between what Buscema was doing and what, say, Sienkiewicz. Sienkiewicz was getting closer to abstraction. Buscema's work is still clearly fully representational, and imo it doesn't stand up.

Re: ;)
 

I was thinking the same thing :lol:

re: Rob Liefeld (or Sal Buscema?!?!?!?!) - Worst comic book artist ever?
 

:lol: :up:

re: Rob Liefeld (or Sal Buscema?!?!?!?!) - Worst comic book artist ever?
 

Yeah, for some reason that whole WW run was terrible (and I wanted really badly to like it; all it did was further ruin Donna). I think it's because he inked himself... I'm not sure if it's deadlines or what (and he has always been very prolific), but a lot of his characters looked gaunt, but I have to think that Terry Austin just inked him really, really well.

As an aside, I was even more disappointed at what seemed to me to be the decline of Chris Claremont... I loved his X-men stuff, but ever since Sovereign Seven he's been almost unreadable; maybe the style of writing has moved on from his heyday, but I still wish he could have adapted a bit better.

Sometimes artists just work with some characters better. Bagley was a good, quick Spidey artist (and decent on other Marvel stuff like Thunderbolts), but his stint at DC, especially his run on JLA with Robinson, was terrible. I thought Steve Epting's Avengers work was pedestrian, but his Crossgen work and then his Cap work has been incredible. And then there's the famous Mike Deodato case where he was basically farming art to other people and putting his name on it.

re: Rob Liefeld (or Sal Buscema?!?!?!?!) - Worst comic book artist ever?
 

Marvel did a series of "Tron" themed alternate covers when "Tron: Legacy" came out. It was just some silly attempt at Disney Synergy, doesn't have anything to do with the story contained within.

re: Rob Liefeld (or Sal Buscema?!?!?!?!) - Worst comic book artist ever?
 

Sure they are. They all start at the same point even if the origin point is off the page you get the sense it's all coming from the same place. If you converge those lines on the Spiderman cover to it's origin point they start at She Hulk's left hip or somewhere behind her ass but Spiderman's swing arc starts way below that. Those two things should intersect but they do not. Any artist that knows composition should apply common sense rules of drawing before he puts pen to paper. If not for the audience but for his own sense of knowing where things are placed and not just because it may look cool but knowing the action is correct and every object in the drawing holds a logical place in it. Otherwise, don't put it in there; technically speaking.