4 Colors
Browsing through the shelves of comic books at Tramp's Records and Books was an eye opener. I was all of thirteen, and comic books were becoming works of art. Companies had just started printing some comic books on fancy paper. At first blush, it was a counter-intuitive gesture. Funny books were for kids. What was the point of printing them on expensive paper?
It was clearly a move to price impressionable adolescents like myself out of the market. I loved looking at all those comic books printed on glossy paper. Frequently, they had naked people in them, or the writer would drop the f-bomb.
However, there was no way I could buy a comic book like that and bring it home. Some friends of mine had unwittingly discovered a means to hide comic books from their parents: their collection was so huge, there was no way their parents would stumble upon the "adult" graphic novels buried underneath the pile of tamer fare.
Unfortunately, I didn't have their purchasing power, so I had to confine my appreciation to the store shelves or leafing through the stuff my friends had hidden within plain sight in their homes. There was another reason for the expensive paper. If I opened up a book like Blood: A Tale with artwork by Kent Williams, that slick paper made perfect sense. Watercolors wouldn't look so good on newsprint:
Over the years, comic book companies started to print everything on slick, glossy, and very expensive stock. My interest in comic books started to wane as they got more expensive. I'd initially chalked up my dislike of the pricier paper to a misplaced sense of latent artistic elitism.
But paging through the copy of Blood: A Tale that I bought for Lisa made me realize that my distaste for the more glossy offset or stiffly starched baxter paper had nothing to do with cultural conservatism. Ninety percent of the time, better paper doesn't do anything for the artwork.
Take any panel, or page from Sin City by Frank Miller, and it's going to look just as good on newsprint or fancy paper. It's all ink, and done in very simple and bold lines:
Nothing is lost if it gets printed on newsprint, and nothing of value is added to the artwork. But it doesn't have to be simple. Dave Sim and Gerhard brought an almost Baroque level of complexity to the artwork for Cerebus the Aardvark, but the art never suffered because it was printed on cheap paper:
Slick paper is here to stay, at least until Jeff Bezos can figure out a way to make comic books readable on the Kindle. As for myself, I'm just glad I have the purchasing power to buy whatever I want, and more importantly, have a wife who enjoys reading comic books as much as I do.
N.B.: If the Cerebus artwork doesn't look so good, believe me, it's a blog--not a newsprint--issue.
It was clearly a move to price impressionable adolescents like myself out of the market. I loved looking at all those comic books printed on glossy paper. Frequently, they had naked people in them, or the writer would drop the f-bomb.
However, there was no way I could buy a comic book like that and bring it home. Some friends of mine had unwittingly discovered a means to hide comic books from their parents: their collection was so huge, there was no way their parents would stumble upon the "adult" graphic novels buried underneath the pile of tamer fare.
Unfortunately, I didn't have their purchasing power, so I had to confine my appreciation to the store shelves or leafing through the stuff my friends had hidden within plain sight in their homes. There was another reason for the expensive paper. If I opened up a book like Blood: A Tale with artwork by Kent Williams, that slick paper made perfect sense. Watercolors wouldn't look so good on newsprint:
Over the years, comic book companies started to print everything on slick, glossy, and very expensive stock. My interest in comic books started to wane as they got more expensive. I'd initially chalked up my dislike of the pricier paper to a misplaced sense of latent artistic elitism.
But paging through the copy of Blood: A Tale that I bought for Lisa made me realize that my distaste for the more glossy offset or stiffly starched baxter paper had nothing to do with cultural conservatism. Ninety percent of the time, better paper doesn't do anything for the artwork.
Take any panel, or page from Sin City by Frank Miller, and it's going to look just as good on newsprint or fancy paper. It's all ink, and done in very simple and bold lines:
Nothing is lost if it gets printed on newsprint, and nothing of value is added to the artwork. But it doesn't have to be simple. Dave Sim and Gerhard brought an almost Baroque level of complexity to the artwork for Cerebus the Aardvark, but the art never suffered because it was printed on cheap paper:
Slick paper is here to stay, at least until Jeff Bezos can figure out a way to make comic books readable on the Kindle. As for myself, I'm just glad I have the purchasing power to buy whatever I want, and more importantly, have a wife who enjoys reading comic books as much as I do.
N.B.: If the Cerebus artwork doesn't look so good, believe me, it's a blog--not a newsprint--issue.
Labels: art, comic books, Dave Sim, Frank Miller, Geek Fiction, Gerhard, Kent Williams, personal
posted by Mark at
5:50 AM
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