Sunday 18 January 2015

Scratting around the digital page

You know in the Ice Age cartoon movies there is that squirrel creature bounding around chasing an acorn always trying to climb a wall or God-knows-what, desperately trying to find a purchase with his tiny claws?

That's my eyeballs with digital comic pages. My eyes just slip off the page; turn the page, see a digitally illustrated colour comic strip and, wheeee - turn the page again as I have nothing to focus on.

2000AD regularly has strips illustrated in this manner; ABC warriors, Slaine, American Reaper.... not read any of them. My eyes just glaze over at it. Doesn't matter who writes it, who draws it - if it's photoshopped, digitally enhanced faces I've got no chance of focussing on it.

And I think that is why I hate American Reaper so much. I was brought up on UK comics in the seventies with ten panel, hand drawn pages by the likes of Mike Western and Joe Colquhoun.
AR has maybe 5 panels the width of the page.
Are they going for the widescreen look? I dunno.
It's not as though I don't like the idea of the story; witness the Reaper Files painted by Fay Dalton - they are great. It's just that bloody photoshoppery. For me that's sixteen pages that could be put to much better use with something else - reprint, small press contribution, interviews, anything.

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