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[Electricmastro]

Chad Grothkopf helps make Willie the Penguin a hidden gem of a funny animal title. Such a slick, yet flexible way he has of drawing the stories in his style.

Link to the book: Willie the Penguin 6

[Robb_K]

Chad Grothkopf helps make Willie the Penguin a hidden gem of a funny animal title. Such a slick, yet flexible way he has of drawing the stories in his style.
Link to the book: Willie the Penguin 6

I enjoyed reading the stories, and the artwork is passable.  But I was very disappointed in the weak level of the art compared with Chad's 1940s work on Fawcett's "Hoppy The Marvel Bunny", "Sherlock Monk & Chuck Duck", and "Billy The Kid (Goat) & Oscar Ostrich", which is much more fluid, with much more detail, and also the characters are more expressive.  I see the same deterioration as I noticed in Carl Barks' work, and that of so many other comic artists, in moving from the enthusiastic, energetic, and innovative early and middle periods of their comic book drawing careers, as well as a gradual move from high-quality bond paper, to slicker-surfaced, cheaper paper, getting progressively slicker in steps.  The loss of youthful enthusiasm happened with virtually ALL artists whose work I've followed, and the increased slickness of the paper they were provided caused all the inkers to tighten their strokes, resulting in less ambitious movement in their figures in action scenes, and less fluidity, and more stiffness in the figures, and less detail in backgrounds.  That all makes for a lot less enjoyment of the stories to me, because the artwork is more important to me than the difference in storytelling quality.  With Western Publishing/Dell Comics, the paper quality changes happened first in late 1954, and again in early 1959.I think there was another near the end of 1963 (but, by then, the new, horrible colouration and reduction in storytelling quality, and better artists retiring or dying off made it so I didn't care about another paper degradation.
 

[Electricmastro]

Chad Grothkopf helps make Willie the Penguin a hidden gem of a funny animal title. Such a slick, yet flexible way he has of drawing the stories in his style.
Link to the book: Willie the Penguin 6

I enjoyed reading the stories, and the artwork is passable.  But I was very disappointed in the weak level of the art compared with Chad's 1940s work on Fawcett's "Hoppy The Marvel Bunny", "Sherlock Monk & Chuck Duck", and "Billy The Kid (Goat) & Oscar Ostrich", which is much more fluid, with much more detail, and also the characters are more expressive.  I see the same deterioration as I noticed in Carl Barks' work, and that of so many other comic artists, in moving from the enthusiastic, energetic, and innovative early and middle periods of their comic book drawing careers, as well as a gradual move from high-quality bond paper, to slicker-surfaced, cheaper paper, getting progressively slicker in steps.  The loss of youthful enthusiasm happened with virtually ALL artists whose work I've followed, and the increased slickness of the paper they were provided caused all the inkers to tighten their strokes, resulting in less ambitious movement in their figures in action scenes, and less fluidity, and more stiffness in the figures, and less detail in backgrounds.  That all makes for a lot less enjoyment of the stories to me, because the artwork is more important to me than the difference in storytelling quality.  With Western Publishing/Dell Comics, the paper quality changes happened first in late 1954, and again in early 1959.I think there was another near the end of 1963 (but, by then, the new, horrible colouration and reduction in storytelling quality, and better artists retiring or dying off made it so I didn't care about another paper degradation.

Haven?t gone through Grothkoph?s Fawcett work yet, though I imagine he flourished more in those days, going by work such as in Parents' Magazine Press? Funny Book #1: