Originally published February 25, 2000, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1371
Two things…
I don’t know if other young fans have (or had) this problem, but when I was a kid, I couldn’t distinguish art styles. Take the old Marvel Superheroes cartoon. That was “animated” (if we dare use so drastic a word) by taking panels from various Marvel Comics and doing rapid zoom-ins, Dutch angles, and the occasional movement of one body part (Thor whirling his hammer, for instance.) But they had certain panels that were stock shots. Consequently, if they were doing an Iron Man story by, say, Don Heck, a Jack Kirby Iron Man or Gene Colan Iron Man might suddenly pop into the middle of the action. The thing is, it didn’t really register on me that the style had varied. Not only that, but in letters pages of comics when fans would comment on different artists’ styles, I could not for the life of me comprehend how anyone could just look at a page of art and be able to tell—just by looking at it—who had drawn it. Perhaps I simply wasn’t very… oh, what’s the word I’m looking for? Oh, yes. “Bright.” (Although at that time, I wasn’t actually reading Marvel comics. My dad wouldn’t let them in the house; he felt the characters were too ugly, and didn’t look sufficiently heroic. I tend to think that, sitting in front of printed pages, I would have picked up on Kirby versus Ditko. At least I’d like to think so.)
Gil Kane was the first artist whose style I actually noticed.
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