Thanks very much for the replies! Sometimes when I post here it's like chirping crickets.
I see what you are saying, Mike, about the brands being maintained, but I wonder why they don't make more effort to keep the brands "pure"? If you print Spider-Man comics just to keep the copyright alive, then why print so many versions of him? And why not have a house style that makes these characters more recognizable? So much comics art these days is muddy and sketchy.
Really? I'd go as far as to say a lot of it is too clean and photoshopped. *cough*Greg Land*cough* And the big guys I can still name, like Bryan Hitch and John Cassady (I presume he still works) are very tight draftsmen. But there's a zillion different styles, even in today's wasteland. Maybe you read All Star Batman and Robin. Jim Lee's pretty good, and for better or worse became a titan in the field based on his style, but he likes to put lines all over the place. I wouldn't call him muddy or sketchy, though... now Frank Miller
himself has regressed to the point where that charge would be accurate, but I think the last thing he
drew was Dark Knight Strikes Again...
Regarding house styles: the last house style that was
seriously attempted and
seriously sustained, that I know about, was Valiant. Now, whether this was a good thing or not...
To a lesser extent Jim Lee's and Rob Liefeld's wings of Image, which became Wildstorm and Extreme/Awesome/Supercalifragilisticexpialodocious Studios respectively maintained something
like a house style, at least in the early days--especially Liefeld, who had Myrat Michaels, Dan Fraga, and a few significantly lesser stars who aped to some degree Liefeld's bombastic style; but of course Lee had Brett Booth. I don't think that was dictated, however, and that this was more of a case of following the leader, and possibly just the artists-turned-human-resources-manager hiring people whose work they liked, which
coincidentally happened to be people who drew like they did.
(Fraga and Booth, afaik, developed their own styles and became quite awesome; I thought Michaels had some iota of talent, but have no idea what happened to him; see also Brian Murray, who was the excellent artist of the early Supreme books. Then again I'll still defend Liefeld's art, so I am idiosyncratic at best when it comes to judging artists.)
In any event, house styles are a double-edged sword, emblandening even the greatest comics producers (like early Valiant), and I also suspect that most good artists are, well, artists, not animation sweatshop hacks.
In the old days, when comics were printed to sell er...comics, characters were often re-drawn by artists whose job it was to keep everyone "on model". Wouldn't that sort of thing fit in perfectly today with the corporate mentality that "we're really selling t-shirts, not comics"? Also, seeing as DC and Marvel both have huge reservoirs of characters from which to draw---literally thousands of them---why do they ever launch new ones?
My only guess is that there's still good in them, even if they are more machine now than man.
Why they didn't switch to a GN-only format ages ago is beyond me, however. I remember Warren Ellis predicting the collapse of monthlies any time now. Yet somehow they survive, even though they became obsolete by, at the latest, 1986.
