Illustrator Reacts to Good and Bad Comic Book Art

Kind of just looks like a bowling ball. The fabric wouldn't dip into her butt crack like that. Oh boy. But this is just gorgeous. That's right another person jumping in on the trend of professional whatevers reacting to good and bad stuff in their own profession. I love watching the Corridor Crew react to good and bad special effects and I've loved watching LegalEagle talk about good things and issues in It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia's court episodes and I figured, hey, I've technically been a professional illustrator and animator for seven years now, so I want to go over some different comic pages and panels and talk about what went really right and sometimes what went not so right. Oh boy okay so for context this image was drawn by Rob Liefeld who is the creator of Deadpool and is a self-taught artist. He got into working at Marvel by being purely self-taught but because of that it means he didn't really get a traditional education in anatomy and that has led to some pretty janky Anatomy in a bunch of his artwork and this is easily the most famously janky image he's done. You could almost fix it by just pushing Captain America's head forward like it wouldn't make it perfect but right now it kind of looks like his his back and shoulders are lined up straight like this and his chest is like this like his body is this shape somehow instead of being all in line. But the thing is when you're working for someone else and you're on someone else's deadlines if you have to get something done even if you're part way through and you realize it's not great you kind of just have to finish it and send it in and I want to think that this is one of those times where that's kind of what happened I don't know that that's the case but I want to give the guy the benefit of the doubt because the fact of the matter is he is objectively a better artist than 99% of people on the planet also again let's remember if it wasn't for Rob I felt we wouldn't have Deadpool so let's go easy on the guy in spite of the fact that he also he also drew this wedge this to me is his works where is his hands are just like melting into his side I don't know if there was supposed to be more text down there to block stuff so that it wouldn't matter but kind of just looks like a bowling ball also his armpit looks like a bubble they sorry to be crass but it's true but talking about Anatomy issues let's move on to one of my favorite artists Umberto Ramos his art is so stylish and in a way where his Anatomy on his characters looks broken a lot of the time but in a way where it's stylistically done on purpose like he's making it broken on purpose and when you look at his work you can kind of tell that like in this image here spider-man's back is ridiculously big like his lats are huge and his waist is really tiny and the perspective is being forced a lot to make it he just looks warped but it like the anatomy doesn't look busted in a way where it's an artist who doesn't know what they're doing actually know what I think I would actually kind of interesting I'm gonna pull up one of his comics scrub through it and try to find a panel that I don't like okay you know is it what's right here so this image here halfway down the page where we've got Nova shouting this background to me doesn't work for Humberto Ramos as art and this probably wasn't him this was probably the colorist doing this but this background just looks like they took a photograph and added like like a fast blur on it and because Humberto Ramo says art is so the lines are so sharp this kind of just feels weird like it could I see the idea because there is high contrast between the sharp line work and the sharp coloring and the faded background so you really do focus on Nova and just don't think the to blend that well together and again if you disagree with anything I'm saying to let me know in the comments and tell me your opinion because a lot of the stuff I'm talking about even though I do know illustration pretty well a lot of it is kind of just my bias and what I like seeing out of comic book art this is this is just so unsettling to look at I mean the pose the but then to the neck and like I guess to be fair I've probably seen spider-man in this exact pose but like in this style I just don't think it really works and the neck feels so offset that the nose is so tiny and it because like most of this the proportions of the body it kind of feels like it's going for a sort of painterly realistic kind of style and not super comic-book II so this awkward kind of broken pose in that style just to me doesn't work and really just looking at the face like the nose is so tiny the lips are really big and unusual and and just how form-fitting the fabric is across the body and I know that's a thing with comics I mean with comic book art pretty much every character is just wearing skin tight outfits and like a lot of the time you can see abs in a way that you wouldn't be able to see through fabric but in a style like this it just feels so unusual to see the fabric going so far into her butt crack like that cuz like I mean here look this is a pretty tight shirt so I can probably give a good example like pretend my knuckles here are the butt and when they're being spread apart like her butt cheeks are being spread apart in that image the fabric isn't suddenly dipping right down and form-fitting against my knuckle like it is dipping down a bit but it's not going down that sharply and weirdly and again you can push stuff in comics like it's all fictional you can stylize your art to make that seem reasonable but I think it was an odd choice on Marvel's part to get me Luminara to do this piece because I'm not super familiar with his work but from what I've seen he largely does like erotica kindness and in an age when comic book companies have been making an effort to make a lot of their female characters less sexualized and less of like the girlfriend and nothing else it's really weird to get an artist who specializes in erotica kind of stuff to do your cover first I believe this was like a rebooted Spider Woman number-one comic from I'm no five between five and ten years ago yeah well that was a weird choice on Marvel's part this is gorgeous Francis Mann poles art is fantastic it's really stylish and this panel itself how everything is kind of I like to refer to the term toilet bowl like everything is just kind of a toilet I mean that makes it sound like a bad thing that's not how I mean it but like everything is just swirling down into the middle onto the focal point that we're supposed to focus on and it's just Oh gorgeous I love the composition of this page is it's simple but it's just it's beautiful and the colors are just really nice I believe in this case he wasn't doing his own coloring and inking whoever he was working with knew his art well enough to to bring his style through in the inking and coloring and that's another thing for people that don't know the comic book industry that well when you're working for a company like Marvel or DC a lot of the times the person doing the pencil layouts the the actual drawings isn't the one that's inking and coloring there's usually three people doing all that and then a letter as well in a lot of cases just so stylish you you can't look at something Kenneth Roquefort to draw on any of his work and not go wow this is so stylish like just my favorite thing about this page is just the the fire and smoke it's so weirdly done but works so well in Rockford style like and just the way it's so like unrealistically completely unrealistically circling around Supergirl and like encasing her and making us focus more on her and it's got a little smoke almost arrows pointing at her even even the panels are basically just like arrow is pointing us towards her and I just love with Kenneth Rock for its art I almost look at it more thinking about the graphic design of it and less the actual illustrations cuz he's always got those cool shapes around his panels and he just works weird shapes into his art all over the place that just looks so cool and make everything such a style that's so niche to just him and now the admittedly the only thing I'd say against this page and maybe it's because I'm reading it out of context but I I don't exactly know what order he wants us to read these panels in like it doesn't really matter that much because it feels like the whole point is we're supposed to be looking at this awesome image of supergirls because even Clarke's eyes are kind of looked in that direction and that last panel of him but I don't totally know if the third panel we're supposed to look at is her or that headshot of Clarke if a comic page is laid out well as it's supposed to be your eye will go through the story exactly the way that the artists want and you won't even be thinking about it you should never have to think about where you're supposed to look next if you are then the artists have done something wrong and that's not something I frequently find with Kenneth Rucker for its art his he's really good with his page layouts it's this is probably just a case where it's because I'm looking at this page out of context look at this and it is like if you explained this image to me without me ever having seen it I would think it was such a weird idea for a Batman cover I mean it's like first of all something that should be pointed out if it's not obvious as this is a reference to the very first comic book cover appearance from Batman Detective Comics 27 that's a this right here and like if you just told me okay we've got Batman swinging and a bright yellow and pink sky in the background characters in the foreground are very purple the building below him a pretty stark saturated blue all of that to me just sounds like what you've got a bright yellow and pink background for Batman but this is just gorgeous as much as I love Greg polos work the inking is fantastic by Danny Mickey the story is fantastic by Scott Snyder the thing that stands out most to me in this whole run is FCO placencia coloring it's just such a bizarre concept that works so fantastically well I'm so sorry that I'm butchering the pronunciation of your name okay wait actually I'm gonna go over one more artist because I feel like I can't do this video without talking about some art by Jim leave who is the first comic book artist whose name I actually knew besides maybe Mark Bagley but Jim Lee has some of the most iconic comic art out there like I think even non comic book fans have all seen that poster of Batman standing on a gargoyle looking straight out over Gotham he's an absolutely fantastic artist and I loved all his work but something someone recently pointed out to me is that he will do anything he can to avoid drawing feet and I'm I've never noticed that myself so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go into Google Images search Jim Lee comic cover and I'm gonna look at the first five covers and see what the ratio of people to feet is okay let's see this first ones a Fantastic Four cover I'm not familiar with that's definitely some of his older work probably from the early 90s oh yeah like that we got five characters in there and no feet none at all all again we got feet in this one black widows feeder out of it Wolverine one of his feet is there one of them's hiding behind a stair or a step of some kind Captain America you kind of see one and a half of his feet let's say we can see both of Captain America's feet so we've got two covers eight people three feet so far oh there we go look at that Harley Quinn and Batman both of them got all her feet in four extra feet still not a great ratio oh boy okay now this is a very iconic cover it's from when Justice League was being relaunched in the new 52 the very first issue well look at this look at this we got one two three four five six seven the seven are united and none of them have their feet shellin he legit drew seven people nobody's feet are showing in this case I think that's kind of fair this doesn't feel like anything was being forced so that people's feet were hidden and we got I don't know if I'll count the Doomsday's as as people so let's just sit I mean I guess the kind of well let's say we got three more characters none of them have feet either and I think was that four or five I think that was four and then we got picture of Superman speeder showing so here we go he's not always hiding feet he's one of the best artists in the industry he obviously knows how to draw feet they are surprisingly more complicated to draw them a lot of other things which is weird like hands I get because drawing hands a lot of artists find hands hard to draw including me and every artist I've ever met because it's like drawing a whole nother person in terms of limbs like your average person has four limbs but then drawing hands it's like having to draw another ten tiny limbs because a lot of the time your fingers aren't all pointed in the same direction like this like if I'm doing a simple drawing I'll often draw the hands kinda like this so I can simplify it a bit but a lot of time your hands are doing things like this and this and look at all the complicated angles and perspectives you got to draw the fingers in can be a real mess anyway regardless of what I've said about the artists that I've talked about today whether I was talking about good artwork of theirs bad artwork of theirs or both I have a huge amount of respect for all of these artists they're all absolutely incredible becoming that great at illustrating takes years and years of intense practice I hope I'm on any of their level someday and hopefully someday I'll watch a YouTube video where some punk kid that doesn't know what he's talking about is laying into my artwork that's how I'll know I've made it alright everybody thank you so much for watching this a little bit weird episode of pop cross studios I'm Christian Pearson these are the nerdiest art videos on youtube if you enjoyed this let me know I might do another one leave a like subscribe ring the bell most of the stuff I do on here is art Nana based off of pop culture and yeah poop this was fun put out videos every Monday and Saturday and I'll see you all in the next one goodbye

Channel: PopCross Studios

Views: 1,268,643

Rating: 4.7808676 out of 5

Keywords: artist react, illustrator reacts to good and bad comic art, VFX Artists React to Good and Bad Special Effects, react, professionals react, artist reacts to comic art, lawyer reacts to it's always sunny in philadelphia, artist breaks down comic art, animator reacts, rob liefeld captain america, fco plascencia, scott snyder batman, jim lee, jim lee drawing feet, Kenneth Rocafort, Humberto Ramos, milo manara spider-woman, best comic artists, pros react, comics, worst comic covers

Id: kAd68xwEI4s

Length: 15min 21sec (921 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 22 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/TheGodofAssassins]

Thanks for this, it was fun!

[u/Avenging_Spectre]

Videos were entertaining, and it cool to see his take on certain art. If I was gonna offer certain criticism, it would be talked about certain pieces for to long.

Other then that 10/10.