Art Outsourcing?

I've been noticing more and more Latin names in the art credits for DC solicitations (over a couple of years, I guess) and I've got to wonder if DC is hiring artists from Latin America as a cost-saving measure. I know for sure there are lots of US Latino (or Latin-named) artists, but there are just too many Latin names to be coincidental. EG http://www.bleedingcool.com/2011/11/14/ch-ch-changes-at-the-dcu-for-february/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyy57F1SbEA

I really like the Gene Deitch Tom & Jerrys. He's supposed to have gotten a handful of prints from MGM to show the Czech animators, and he more or less taught them how to animate. The soundtrack to "Dinky Moe" is cool.
http://img695.imageshack.us/img695/781/howdy20.jpg
Anyway, Gene Deitch is cool. I love this nose-in-the-harpoon gag. I like the heavy outlines of the characters and the scratchy backgrounds.

Picture unrelated, except that it's from a Deitch cartoon.

I've been noticing more and more Pinoy names in the art credits for DC solicitations (over the 70s in general, I guess) and I've got to wonder if DC is hiring artists from the Phillippines as a cost-saving measure.

In the late 1960s, Filipino artist Tony DeZuniga broke into the American comics industry, under the auspices of DC Comics editor Joe Orlando. In 1971, Orlando and DC editor-in-chief Carmine Infantino traveled to the Philippines on a recruiting trip.[1] Alfredo Alcala, Mar Amongo, Ernie Chan, Alex Niño, Nestor Redondo, and Gerry Talaoc were some of the Filipino komik artists who went on to work for DC, particularly in the 1970s and '80s.

Okay, so was that a dumb question to ask? Or just a dumb way to ask it?

neither, i don't think. i was just making the point that DC have 'form' when it comes to 'outsourcing', tho' in fact marvel and warren comics in america, or ipc and dc thomson in britain, have also hired lots of 'non-american' talent. the 'british invasion' of the 80s is another wrinkle on this.

And Britain itself went in for hiring our cheaper Latin friends to draw comics, which is why 2000 AD featured such sterling names as Redondo, Ezquerra and Ortiz.

Outsourced doesn't necessarily mean "bad", though there's a fair amount of pretty uninteresting art in the big two right now.

And let's face it, the new guys might be hungry enough to deal with a monthly schedule since it seems like a lot of DC's output is barely scraping by in that regard, even with the "head start" that was talked up so highly during the launch.

The real problem is that today's readers demand a different *kind* of art (not all of them, mind you, but the vast majority). They favor draftsmanship over storytelling, scratchy details and textures over clarity, veins over anatomy, three-panel grandiosity over real sequences. Which, coincidentally, is why some really great artists (Cameron Stewart for one) get labelled with the epithet "cartoony".

Cartooning is awesome. I wish we had more of it in comics today.

I've been noticing more and more Mike Deodato names in the art credits for DC and Marvel solicitations (around a decade ago, I guess) and I've got to wonder if DC is hiring a sweatshop from Brazil as a cost-saving measure.