Who's actually good at painted art?

Simone Bianchi. NOT IN A BAZILLION YEARS McKean.

That guy that did Devlin Waugh with John Smith. Sean Phillips, I think? He was good.

John Bolton's painted work is really nice, but like most he has done more painted covers than interiors. I liked that Man-Bat mini series/trade he did with Jamie Delano which is fully painted.

J.H. Williams III, at least based on Promethea. His gorgeous art was the biggest reason I kept reading through those magical Kabbalah gibberish episodes of the series. Though I think the painted style worked because it was contrasted with traditional pencilwork, so it reflected the contrast between the heavenly visions and the more mundane happenings. I'm not sure if I'd want to read a fully painted comic by him though.

I think Michael Zulli managed to pull off those "Wake" issues of Sandman pretty well. His images had a classic quality without the stiffness often associated with this sort of style. Maybe that's because he used an unusual technique of combining pencilled (but not inked) drawings with paints?

On the Euro side I really like Lorenzo Mattotti's expressionist/futurist painted style, but unfortunately with most of his work I've read the scripts haven't really been the same quality as his art.

The Wake wasn't painted.

Bianchi is terrible. (based on Shining Knight only)

Does Jae Lee paint? Looks like it. He's good, tho really it's a case of "who's good DESPITE painting" which seems a bit wrong.

The Wake wasn't painted.

Hmm, it's been a while since I've read it, I guess it could've been done with crayons or something. It certainly didn't have traditional comic colouring.

I've often though about what it is with painted comic art that makes it so often so distracting... I guess one reason is that fully painted pictures carry more weight than drawn pictures, so the reader pays more attention to single panels, which can distract from reading multiple panels as the whole of the story. Also, compared to regular inked comic art traditional painting styles have fewer methods for expressing motion, emotion, and other flows required for comic storytelling, which can also make painted comics heavy and distracting to read. One reason Mattotti's painted comics work is that he borrows from futurists' and expressionists' bag of tricks to convey movement and emotion. (Of course traditional comic art has also borrowed from those same sources.)

I guess the safest method to use paints with comics is to draw the outlines with ink and use watercolours for the rest. People like Moebius and Charles Vess have gotten wonderful results from this method. This way you can bring the more nuanced colourworlds of paints to comics without sacrificing the flow of the story for the more distracting "three-dimensionality" full paintings bring with them.

One more thing is, I think the "three-dimensionality" and relatively bigger realism of painted pictures makes it more difficult to use caricaturization with them, and caricaturization of course is an essential method in comics.

It certainly didn't have traditional comic colouring.

It certainly did. (where "traditional" means "the same computer colouring that the previous fifty or so issues had had")

Hmm, apparently it was indeed done by the regular Sandman colourist Daniel Vozzo. But at least to my eyes there was a world of difference between The Kindly Ones (also coloured by Vozzo) and The Wake: the former is clearly computer-coloured, the latter doesn't look computer-coloured at all.

John J. Muth does good stuff.

Another vote for Bolton. Though the endless vampire porn he seems to turn out when left to his own devices is a bit dull.

Bolton is a lovely painter but not much of a cartoonist.

Crisis thread reminds me - McCrea was really good at avoiding the "stiff single images" trap on the two Troubles series.

Kent Williams