Saturday, January 8, 2011

More layouts from Green lantern

Here are two more pages from green lantern #49 that I helped Jerry Ordway out on by doing layouts. It's always interesting to see what little changes are made, and of course since I am only laying it out any changes Jerry would see fit to make would be A OK with me since he's far more familiar with the current DC crossover material. I think we make a great team and look forward to doing more with Jerry if the opportunity comes up.
My layouts are much closer to full pencils than the example by John Buscema below. They look simple, but only the very best artist could break a drawing down so simple and still have everything needed on top of great dynamic storytelling. Simple isn't easy!
Buscema was the King of doing these looser pencils, everything is there, and not one line extra, if you are a skillfull enough inker who can draw, this is all you would need. In the case of most of the Silver Age greats like Palmer or Sinnott, Giordano, Giaccoia or the great artist from the Philippines like Nestor Redondo, Alfredo Alcala or Rudy Nebrse to name but a few artist who were master draughtsmen, but maybe without the dynamics Buscema brought to the page.

Marvel even had a whole system of penciling at once time, from Shakedowns ( very, very loose pencil, really just breaking don the story into panels with the loosest placement of figures or elements) , breakdowns to full pencils ( which had all of the blacks spotted in or indicated) all based on what the Buscema brothers would do as pencilers on books. This way they could churn out several books a month as the storytelling skills and dynamics, speed and drawing they brought to the table couldn't be beat. Put a good inker over them and you had a good comic books. The business has really moved away from this way of working in the past 15-20 years. Now detail is King. There will never be artist like the Buscema brothers again, nor workhorses like Gil Kane as the industry doesn't require or demand that type of work any longer.

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