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Post #1263130

Author
ZkinandBonez
Parent topic
The original Marvel Star Wars series
Link to post in topic
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/1263130/action/topic#1263130
Date created
7-Jan-2019, 7:08 PM

screams in the void said:

I get what you are saying , I use photographic resources from the movies in my own art but try to approach them with a painterly aesthetic and hone them to an illustrative quality , they aren’t one click solutions . I do agree about the new comics from the first year though and that is some of the stiffness I was talking about . If that is the approach , I would rather see something akin to Drew Struzan who traced photographic sources on a projector but understood how to draw and integrate the photographic sources to look natural in their environment and have texture .The examples in the uncanny valley article you posted look very unnatural . Part of that is that they are trying to combine two separate techniques , part pen and ink traditional comic art with digitally rendered photo realistic faces .

Yeah, Drew Struzan is a great example of how to do it right. And even Al Williamson used some photo-reference for his ESB and ROTJ adaptations, but artists like Larroca rely too much on photos and 3D models and it ends up looking lazy. Williamson used photos to guide his drawings, while Larroca basically cheats to save hismelf having to actually draw at all.

screams in the void said:

As for going back to simplicity , I find these new comics far more simplistic and lacking depth whereas the old series was chock full of complex stories and depth , issue 76 being a prime example …the genocide of an entire aquatic and sentient alien species , save a few members , who cut themselves off from the rest of the galaxy and isolate themselves where they were once free and open . Or issue 86 which deals with a stormtrooper who is also a survivor of Alderaan who Leia convinces to switch allegiances only to have him be shot in the back by his C.O. at the end and die . deep stuff man !

Oh, I didn’t mean to say that classic SW didn’t have depth to it, there was plenty of it. Stories like Day After the Death Star is a great example of giving Luke some character development, and there were plenty like it. But I still feel that they were “simpler” stories in that they were more focused on being adventurous before anything else. Old SW is not comparable to something like Soule’s Vader where the plot in its entirety is one long character exploration (and a pretty dark one at that). What I meant by “simple” is that you could pick up almost any issue of the old SW comics and not feel lost. Trying to do that with modern comics is just going to be confusing. I do however think the old comics focused a little bit more on character depth than character growth though. Not that they didn’t change at all, but you could always rely on the main characters behaving in a fairly predictable manner. Though you’re right that thus doesn’t alway apply to the new stuff, and I might have thought more about the EU as a whole in my previous post.

screams in the void said:

I can watch a marathon of all the Star Wars movies and slot the Marvel comics in and not be bothered by 40 years of lore and they still work for me . There may be a few continuity hiccups but they are far and few between and a lot less than reconciling 90’s EU with the current canon . I don’t put much stock in canon anyway . I kind of pick and choose from all of it that works for me personally . I still think prose captions should be a part of modern comics though . Comics for the past few decades have been trying too hard to be movies . If I want to watch the movies , I now have unlimited access to them and will pop in a blu ray , vhs or dvd .

It might be a generational thing? (Partially, at least.) A lot of people nowadays seem quite obsessed with continuity, and will outright dismiss or complain about any little detail that doesn’t fit properly. And considering how movies and TV series works now compared to 25+ years ago, its not that strange really. Most TV shows nowadays are continuous stories where each episode is a new chapter in one long plot, as opposed to before where each episode was (for the most part) it’s own story with a beginning, middle and end. There was of course continuity, but if you missed an episode it wasn’t usually a big deal.

I’m personally a bit of both worlds. I enjoy the EU, and the elaborate connectivity is part of the fun, but I couldn’t care less if a comic from 1979 contradicts something established in a comic or novel from 1999.