Dead Metal wrote:Sabrblade wrote:CaptainMagic wrote:I have to admit, Scioli's enthusiasm could be contagious enough to make me give this series a shot. Plus, the first issue's free, so what the heck? I am really confused why he chose to draw this thing in a 60s style, though. Why not go for the 80s and double up on nostalgia for the right time period, rather than jumping back twenty years to a time many fans probably won't care about? Oh well, it looks bad in some place and cool in others, so I guess we'll call it art.
To pay homage to legendary comic scribe Jack "The King" Kirby.
Which is still just wrong. It looks nothing like Kirby's artwork. In fact it barely looks like Silver Age to begin with, yea sure Silver Age looked kinda primitive and had bad colouring, but it didn't look this inept. The characters where drown with sharper detail and more realistic proportions than this.
This whole paying homage is just an excuse for bad artwork while firing everyone up for retro homages to convince them this is something worth having.
I agree wholeheartedly. There is a reason few (if any) modern comics emulate this kind of aesthetic: it is bland, dreary, poorly/lazily drawn & depressingly coloured. Also I'm skeptical of the rationality behind trying to emulate an era of comic book history that preceded the franchise being depicted. In those old days, comics were looked down upon as the lowest rung of the reading ladder, a medium accused of adversely corrupting the young target audience - who were supposedly children ONLY.
As such, artists were quick, simple & efficient, adhering to boring "set standard" designs (e.g. in some old comics, the faces of several characters look EXACTLY the same). This was done to the point of blandness because artists were not necessarily interested in the content or the medium, they just needed a job! Some writers/artists didn't even use real names on their work so as to dissociate themselves from the social stigma surrounding comics at the time, perhaps thinking that admitting their involvement would negatively impact their future career choices. The medium was considered sub-standard drivel aimed at children, & therefore unimportant, except as a vehicle through which to advertise & sell toys.
But when those supposedly "sub-standard, mentally deficient" children became comic-loving ADULTS, the industry exploded with writers & artists who genuinely LOVED their work & as a consequence GREATLY improved the medium. The question then becomes WHY would anyone WANT to go BACK to a time when characters are introduced in a way that reads like a toy catalogue? Modern comics are, by comparison & in general, FAR superior in that they are tightly drawn, consistent between panels, well written & talk about issues & ideas that can be engaging & entertaining for older audiences, but still be broad enough to appeal to younger audiences.
The advances in printing technology alone have helped enormously in this endeavour, introducing rich palettes of colour, of which an artist can CHOOSE his colours to best get his or her point across to the reader in direct association with the written text. Ever wonder why so many enemies of Spider-Man are green & purple? Because there were limited colours available to print with (& they couldn't use red & blue since that was on Spidey).
It has always been my opinion that comics are the best way to introduce children to reading, both by what is said & what is left UNSAID on the page. It takes a skilful artist to be able to do this, but by limiting their colour palette, you are denying the artist access to the full creative freedom afforded to them by current technology. By going backwards with something THIS ugly, you're not encouraging new readers to pick up a comic that LOOKS like it was written 60 years ago.
From the excerpts I've seen here, I see no evidence of anything original or particularly creative about this series. For these reasons & those mentioned above, I think this series in particular is a WRONG step BACKWARDS. I simply see no logic behind PURPOSELY retrograding the comic medium to a bygone era of inferior quality writing, drawing & colouring... At least, not in the Transformers universe (others, like Spider-Man, perhaps, but not Transformers).
In closing: peace through tyranny!
"Megatron is the proof that tyranny is the finest form of government, under the right tyrant."
No to silver age Transformers!
PM ME PLEASE!
