Gotta agree with you, Panther. Fraccio/Tallarico were everywhere and stank wherever they appeared. To be fair, Fraccio was the greatest problem. Tallarico by himself was competent. From an interview I gather that Tallarico was something of a hustler able to sell all kinds of projects (e.g. his series of how-to-draw books, which I used to see in every bookstore). Fraccio's pencilling comic projects freed Tallarico to cast his net even wider. I hated their stuff. They must have worked cheap, too. They seemed to show up whenever a company was on the skids, for example Dell. They also did some work for Warren during his first slump. The switch from Williamson, Torres, Toth, etc. to Fraccio/Tallarico was hard for this art fanboy to take. And they had the gall to credit themselves as "Tony Williamson." (Later the credit was softened to Tony Williamsune.)
It's difficult to name a single Worst Golden Age Artist. In the early days many of them were unschooled kids who'd never have been hired a decade later. Fox published some of the worst art. Fox didn't give a damn for quality; he just wanted to fill the pages. Hardly any Fox artist signed his work so God alone knows who drew some of that stuff.
For Robb, here is a sample of Lee Sherman's straight work. It's the Red River adaptation beginning on our page 22.
https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=71433
He's pretty awful, but Howard Browner is right up there with him. Check out the Edwin Land bio strip from Catholic Comics v1#13 (page 20):
https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=29911
Wow! That Edwin Land story is almost as terrible as the worst Human figure drawing I've seen in any comic book. But the Aesop's Fable drawn by Sherman is right up there in terribleness (is that a word?).
Land's work is much worse than Sherman's Human figures. Not that the latter was even remotely decent at Human figures, but his weaknesses in drawing show up to a far greater degree in his funny animals, and more simple backgrounds in those stories.
i think it is more difficult to express complicated movements and proper positioning in movement, and structure of animate and inaniment objects in cartooning (e.g. more simplified drawing) than in detailed drawing. And therefore, the artist must know the structure of living things, and non-living things much better, and must know how the body of animate living things and how moving non-living things and living animals and people look when they are in motion, much more than artists who portray their subjects in a realistic style.
Take Charles Schultz's "Peanuts" strip and characters, for example. The layperson looks at the paucity of Schultz's drawn lines, and the apparent simplicity of the drawings, and thinks......"Even I can do THAT! How come that guy can have World Fame, and be a multi-millionaire", and that hasn't happened to me???"
What the average person doesn't realise is, that with far fewer lines available for use to depict a scene using characters and backgrounds, it becomes MUCH, MUCH, MUCH more important to know the details more strongly, so one can still express that feeling of how the inanimate object looks, or exactly where the line of shade would fall, where the tree parts move when they blow in the wind, how a giant 50 Kilo sack of potatoes
flops and creases in the arms of a weak boy trying to carry it, etc. - and how the muscles of a human or animal move, and change shape when they run, jump. dive, etc. - and how a Human or animal's facial expressions change with the different emotions, being able to put the emphasis on the most telling of the line changes, that give away which emotion is being expressed. These things take a LOT of days and hours over a number of years of close, meticulous observation, and study.
LOTS of lines of muscle movement that create differences in light and shadows on the face are occurring when the face expresses emotion. The artist needs to learn which are the most important indicators of that emotion. Many beginning artists using the fewer lines use them in the wrong places, and fail to express the emotion, at all, or even express an incorrect emotion for what's happening in the panel art. That can be absolutely exasperating to readers - making them want to throw the book down onto the floor, and jump on it.
So, I see that the terrible weaknesses in Lee Sherman's art show up a lot more in his absolutely abominable cartooning, much more than in his very weak more detailed, more realistic "serious" drawing. I'm not saying his "realistic art" is decent, or acceptable. It's not "enjoyable" to see. But, it doesn't make the fan of the genre sorry he or she opened the page. On the other hand, Edwin Land's attempt at "realistic art" seems to almost reach that level of badness.
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Topic: Worst Golden Age Artist? (Read 6551 times)
