Print

[narfstar]

I have a site that has examples of 85 different GA artists by name. You can use the site to find work by your favorite artist, see examples of an unknown artist, or look through the examples to learn a style for future art identification. Pick a few if you like and become the expert so you can help ID unknown artists. Hopefully more artists and examples to come.

http://narfstar.cwahi.net/ArtID/

[Yoc]

An excellent start Jim!  I believe Jerry Bail's Who's Who site also has some artist examples for downloading but nothing as much as you have done here.

http://www.bailsprojects.com/(S(bjaxswagwodb0yuhncwzfj45))/whoswho.aspx

-Yoc

[narfstar]

Guess what site most of the books came from that supplied the artist's pages

[Yoc]

Ahh...

Doc V has binders upon binders of artist's id's for Timely-Atlas books.
It's a shame he couldn't put them into an online format for others to study and use.

-Yoc

[JVJ]

This is a great idea, Narfstar,
but my problem has always been trying to remember the name of the person who drew the strip I am looking at. I think it's wonderful to have a place where you can go see what Alberta Tewks looks like or Al Luster (by the way, you have some Luster scans out of place in Hollingsworth and another early entry on the list). I hope that a lot of people make the effort to educate themselves. Getting from a style to a name presents problems that I've never been able to solve, and which become more problematical as I get older. Sigh...

Still, good on ya for starting this.

[narfstar]

I kinda go back to the old adage about how do you teach a bank clerk to identify a counterfeit bill. Not by showing them counterfeits but the real thing enough times. Looking at the scans has helped me start to get a feel. I could identify SA Kubert but have learned to ID GA Kubert. Kinstler is another one I can now do and was pretty good at Eugene Hughes and Myron Fass covers already. I figure if someone will look at a particular artist enough then they will get a "feel" for that artist. Some art ID adepts have indicated that it can be a feel rather than particular details that will help them do the ID.

[narfstar]

Thanks Jim I have moved the Luster. Since AC was above Al I missed a few by a little.

[JVJ]

Absolutely so, Narfstar!
There is no "school" for art ID'ers and you have to immerse yourself into an artist's work and factor in the changes the occurred in their style over TIME. And speaking of counterfeits, it's easy to get waylaid by a swiper who picks up certain aspects of a style to emulate, so the "feel" becomes even more critical. Not only do you have to see how a particular artist draws, but you have to know even more solidly how he DOESN'T draw. So if you see one panel that screams Kubert, you can ignore it if all the rest of them don't even have the "feel".

And, like I said, going from the style to the artist's name is really the hard part. Artist's name to style can be done lots of ways, but "style to name" is purely a memory trick. As I have learned the hard way, you use it or you lose it.

[John C]

This is definitely not my field of expertise, but mention of "swipes" and "feels" reminds me that text often works the same way.  I bring this up because knowing this in text can sometimes help pin down an unknown writer by constructing a timeline.  After all, you don't usually lift a style from your contemporary, which means that (to bring this back on topic) a hypothetical Kubert emulator probably didn't get into the business until the end of Kubert's career.

Regardless, you're right about the starting point.  It's only with experience that you can see what's going on.  However, it's the sort of project where I think it really could benefit from annotation by people with more experience.  For example, I think I can spot a "Ditko nose" from a mile away...but that's only because someone pointed it out to me.

[JVJ]

Yes and no, jcolag,
I can point out places in Avon's Jesse James Comics where Ray Kinstler picked up on some Kubert panels in the NEXT ISSUE of the title and Ray clearly points on in his recent Alter Ego interview how he was influenced by Kubert's brush work almost immediately after he saw it - and applied to his Zorro work in 1955. And there's the case of Bob McCarty who was so taken with Kinstler's style that he "adopted" a lot of it at once, and even ended up as an example of ERK in that issue of Alter Ego.

Ah, but can you spot a Ditko nose in 1954 as well as you can in 1984? That's the real test. Plus, you have to occasionally account for the very similar noses of Jerry Robinson and/or Bob Forgione at various times in their careers. That's when the "feel" business comes into play. Ditko doesn't "feel" like Robinson or Forgione, so it's pretty easy to keep them separate in the "art id" section of you brain.

[OtherEric]

Also, while I understand you were just throwing out a name, we're very lucky that the end of Kubert's career is still at some point in the future.   

[narfstar]

I have never developed a feel for a comic book writer other than some of Stan or Roys stuff in SA early bronze Marvels. I have favorite writers because of good story and plot more than style. I think the amalgam of story and art in comics can make it more difficult to get a complete feel for the writer. I did read enough Doc Savage novels that when I read a non Lester Dent it screamed at me. So it was not so much recognizing the real thing as identifying the counterfeit. Back to the bank analogy.

[John C]

Yes, I did pick a name fairly haphazardly.  I actually originally used Fletcher Hanks as the example, but edited it out because (a) decided I didn't feel like hassling with strapping a posessive to "Hanks" and (b) thought the hypothetical was too "out there" to be copying Hanks.  Really, that's actually what crossed my mind.

Also, I neglected the fact that comics are a relatively recent industry, so the analogy to text doesn't hold quite as well.  I can usually spot a Nathaniel Hawthorn fan, for example.  There are, for lack of a better word, rhythms that you pick up on that you never see in a contemporary.  James Joyce is another one that stands out when a writer has subconsciously taken inspiration from him.

Along similar lines, I'd be willing to bet that Roy Thomas was as much a "Murray Leinster" (Will Jenkins) fan as he was a fan of comics.  Likewise, I think that Gardner Fox was reading much of the same material, but Fox's writing style gelled too early, and so he was more likely to borrow the ideas than the writing style.

That's probably the distinction I was going for.  To get back to my Kubert example, I see a lot of people who superficially ape Kubert's general style of drawing specific things (not surprising, given that he's been active in bringing artists together), but their compositions are entirely different.  I wouldn't expect anybody to be a "false Kubert" in that sense until after Joe retires.