New Blood… #534
So as I am writing this, I am making my final preparations for the Pittsburgh Comicon show that I will be attending this weekend in Monroeville, PA. As that little blurb under the strip says, if you’re planning on attending the con and you mention this strip, I’ll give you something for FREE!
Now, about this strip itself… frst I want to thank a lot of my Twitter friends for giving my suggestions for the super villains even though they had no idea what the strip was going to be about. I know some of you (like my wife, mainly) might be disappointed that Mystique didn’t make the final cut. It was a difficult choice. Originally, since the shop is called “Bad Boyz”, I was planning only to have male villains in this one but I kind of dug Triple Girl’s 1960-style costume so I put her in last.
As far as Rob goes, you can Google him to find out all the back story and history and why his name is suddenly popping up all over comic book web sites. I won’t add any more but what I will do is tell a little story about my time in art school…
See, when I was 19, artistically, I was heavily influenced by a great many comic book artists… artists such as Walt Simonson, Matt Wagner, John Byrne, George Perez. I was especially influenced by Matt Wagner’s style when he was doing his original Mage: The Hero Discovered series. In fact, for the longest time, I was drawing all kinds of knock off imitations of Kevin Matchstick.
At the same time, I was also going to art school – Maryland College of Art and Design as a matter of fact. And during one particular classroom critique, my art instructor at the time said something to me that still has stuck with me to this day. He told me back then that all of my work lacked any kind of singular style, that my stuff was all over the place because I was too much of an artistic sponge. In essence, I was always trying to draw so much like other artists I admired that any individuality I had was buried so deep, if you lined up all my paintings and drawings side by side, you would swear they were all done by different artists.
The difference between what I was doing at the time and what Rob has been doing for a very long time, is I wasn’t using any special equipment to “ape” other artists. There was no “Photoshop” back then and I was way to broke to even dream about owning an art projector. No, the only tools I was using was simply using my observation and drawing skills to mirror someone else’s stuff. Sometimes you’ll see people do something similar in art museums where they try to paint duplicates of the masters.
But this is entirely different that what Rob has been doing.
When you’re simply tracing or using an art projector to duplicate another person’s work, you’re not doing any”creative”. You simply become a human copy machine – only WAAAAAY slower and more expensive.
And I think a lot of artists that go to conventions, that go about it the right way by purchasing an artist alley, are upset because when someone like Rob comes to light, it throws a shadow of a doubt on every other “no-name” artist sitting in artist alley. Suddenly, people are left wondering if that art that’s in Joe Schmoe’s book is REALLY his stuff or did he just Photo Copy it and digitally color it. And when that happens, it hurts ALL artists in artist alley.
Whether you have a “name” or not.
-Chris
