Most overrated comix artists/writers

Artist: Alex Ross.
Writer: Bendis.

alan moore obv

Gaiman, I suppose.

MARK WAID. Peter David runs a close second.

I enjoy Peter David, and Alan Moore is really rather good (though often overrated, yes). Alex Ross is awful. Neil Gaiman is my first thought - the praise for Sandman was simply ludicrous. Will Eisner gets something of a free pass for having a go at proper literary material in comics form early on, but he's not that great. Chris Claremont still has his strong admirers, but while he used to be okay in a limited way, he is unspeakably crap now. Neal Adams could draw a bit but was among comics' worst storytellers, and was widely revered for ages. Jim Starlin ran out of ideas after about three minutes and had plainly never seen a real human body.

There really are loads: the standards of criticism and appreciation in comics really are very low, so almost any old crap is likely to have been highly praised by some fool sometime (probably including me, as a former leading comic critic).

Certainly Neal Adams as an artist: he could not draw comics and there is probably a case for him not being able to draw, but I'm not the man with enough interest in his work to research and analyse it. As a writer, Don McGregor, for his insistence in thinking that comics were Big Little Books or some other manner of heavilly-illustrated prose fiction. Gaiman also scores here, as he seems to be under the impression that comics can become Serious Works of Art by having everyone wear black and tossing in a few quotations from Literature. Alan Moore is good, but probably overrated. Moving on to cartoonists (alias writer-artists), Eisner enjoyed the benefit of being good and interesting when most other material was really quite bad; his reputation has clung to him like a barnacle (EC comics also enjoyed this phenomenon). Jim Starlin might have had some good ideas for about three minutes, but to me it looks like he had one good idea, which is called 'ripping off Jack Kirby' (a common good idea in the comics field; Stan Lee still enjoys celebrity status because of his use of it); additionally, his anatomy is what my brother once called 'sub-optimal.'

Finally, a lot of people seem to be under the impression that the ability to accurately render ordnance makes one a genius. This would make the guys who do the diagrams in Haynes workshop manuals geniuses.

Here endeth the rant. Unless I think of something else and come back with another post.

Use other words please: "storytelling". It's a vague and unhelpful term that can mean just abt anything you want it to - panel-to-panel continuity? Clarity? Simplicity? Fidelity to a script? Pacing? If Neal Adams' 'storytelling' is so poor, howcum his X-Men, for example, are a million times more exciting than the 'well-told' surrounding issues by Don Heck or Werner Roth? Don't tell me Adams was stoopid enough to think that comics are a visual medium - oh dear, how terrible of him to concentrate on packing a pictorial punch rather than faithfully serving some deathless plot abt costumed creeps beating the crap out of each other AGAIN. And dumb old Don McGregor, not realising that there is only one APPROVED way to write captions/dialogue...

Mr "former leading comics critic", what exactly is this "proper literary material" that Eisner started off w/? Surely the Spirit = an amalgam of German Expressionist Cinema (via 'Citizen Kane'), radio mysteries, pulp mags and Damon Runyonesque 'light crime'?

problem is that the world of comix has such a bad self-image and the world of criticism is so fannish that surely everyone is over-rated in the sense that's been mentioned. so yes Alan Moore will have been described as a genius (ick), but I bet the same has been said of the Spawn/spiderman guy (whose name I forget, Todd someone?). so EVERYONE is over-rated. who is more consistently over-rated. Gaiman for sure. Los Bros Hernandez (know most will disagree with me on that).

Adrian Tomine, he's quite good, but hasn't done anything spectactular IMHO.

Jim Davis

When I say that Adams was a rotten storyteller I mean that it's very hard work telling what is happening, who is where, even which order to read the panels in. There is a dynamism in his drawing, but he throws away any gains in energy by making you stop and figure out things.

I said that Eisner was one of the early ones to be self-consciously literary, not that his earliest work is that. The Spirit is very well done pulp-style material. His pioneering 'graphic novel' work in the '80s got him a great deal of credit because it was so hard to spot other comic creators who had so obviously read some real literary books. They aren't all that good, of course, but people are easily fooled by a superficial resemblance to literature (cf Neil Gaiman).

'dumb old Don McGregor, not realising that there is only one APPROVED way to write captions/dialogue... ' Yes, I couldn't agree more. That one approved way, in case the Dauntless One is evesdropping, is to not describe what's happening in the panel in the caption to said panel, and not to describe what's happening in the panel in the caption to the next panel. Putting dialogue in balloons also helps, given that we're talking about comics rather than novels or Big Little Books. It might also help if he could have paced things more efficiently - there're at least two War of the Worlds stories where the ending is rushed in comparison to the build-up (Amazing Adventures #25 and #26).

― Tim Bateman, Thursday, 11 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Steve Gerber is still a huge favourite - I don't mean his new work, obv, but I still adore Howard The Duck.

Of course all the rules can be broken, but you've really got to be something special to (to pick one of Tim's examples) use your captions to describe what can be plainly seen in the panel and not simply make the story harder work and slower, with no obvious gains. Mind, I could see why McGregor felt the need when it was Adams drawing the comic, as it was so hard to tell what was happening.

art spiegelman, bill griffith, julie doucet, joe matt, harvey pekar.

Yes, I apologise for that, Andrew; I was attempting to put in a new para, but did B rather than BR in the maths symbols.

I would love to see a more sophisticated writer than McGregor doing what he was attempting to do and succeeding. In fact, I'd love to see a defence of McGregor's work so I could justify my liking for his War of the Worlds work. I was hoping that you might be offering...

I would gladly swap Adams' and Steranko's entire ouvres for one page of Curt Swan being able to draw human beings without ludicrously distorted anatomy.

You cheat! You've been peeking at your flatmate's copy of The Old Comics Club v. 2 # 7, where I confess that the pacing problems in 'Something Worth Dying For!' are probably down to my beloved Gene Colan. And yes, that is a risk creating comics the Marvel Way, which I don't recall being that beloved of me (though I see the sense in it... for some work - but not, for example, Sgt. Rock, Enemy Ace or Balloon Buster).

We'd better not get into 2001. And I'm wondering if there should be a new thread entitled 'Don McGregor: Classic or Dud?' or possibly 'Don McGregor: Philosophical Genius or Verbose dwarf?'

Julie Doucet??!?!?!?!???

Try telling me you haven't snickered a few times (with the comic, not at it) whilst reading Dirty Plotte. Go on, try.