The Four Color Media Monitor

Left Lion has a brief interview with an artist named Becky Appleyard, about comics and tabletop games, and what her inspirations are for drawing, and she offers quite an amazing point:

If you could sit down and chat with any artist in your field, who would it be and what would you talk about?

Bryan Lee O'Malley! Scott Pilgrim was the first non-superhero comic I ever read, and it was quite literally life-changing for me as a creative! It led me down a path to so many indie comics and made me see that art didn’t have to be realistic or flawless to be valuable. I’d want to talk about storytelling, comic panelling and refining a unique art style.

Now there's a viewpoint I can get behind, recalling some very self-indulgent, self-important people in past years who lectured that "realistic" was all the entire readership cared about, whether it was superheroes or not that was the focus. Depending how you view this, of course even flaws in art can be overlooked at times, though I would still argue that, the more skilled the artist and the finished product, the better it can be for reading. Just make sure you recognize that surrealism is a totally legitimate concept for storytelling, and while there are instances and examples where it can be inappropriate - like if you're trying to inject real life incidents into the mix - surrealism with the cards played right can result in an entertaining product well worth the effort. On which note, even Stan Lee turned out plenty of surreal tales in his time for the Marvel universe that were a lot of fun, and a shame only so many PC advocates today won't recognize that fact.

So, congratulations to Appleyard for making a vital point I'd like to make as often as possible myself, why surrealism can make for entertaining pop culture products, if you play your cards right. Now, if only some PC ideologues in the USA would consider that too.

Labels: Europe and Asia, good artists, history, indie publishers