Friday, September 19, 2008

Awesomeness that Comics has Lost

Believe it or not, this isn't about how comics used to be better than they are now; this is about two artists that aren't working in comics anymore - though I really wish they were. John Hebert and Arnie Jorgensen.

John Hebert (not 'Herbert') was in comics around the mid 90's, doing work on some Punisher titles and most of the 'season two' X-Men Adventures book. (You'll know which ones he did because they're the ones that look really good.) I always hoped Marvel would move John over to a 'real' X-Men book, (he drew the best Omega Red I've ever seen) but no such luck. (He was discovered by Mike Zeck and I believe, to some degree, was a protege.) While I don't know the details, rumor has it that some shady office politics stuff went down and suddenly John's out of a job and some other guy who wasn't half as good was propped up in his place. To me, that is a HUGE loss. If things had gone a different way, we would've had 10+ years of improvement upon his already kickin in '95 style. I've talked briefly with John, and he's got a 'never say never' attitude toward the industry - so there's at least a little bit of hope that we could see this type of dynamism return to comics.

Hebert

Arnie Jorgensen, to the best of my knowledge, was 'lost' to comics in the same way that Joe Madureira was - video games. Now, I love video games - and I love comics - heck, I even love video games about comics (even when they suck, which they do about 3/4 of the time)... and I totally support artists moving to a profession where they can earn more and diversify their skill sets - but it sucks for me, the comic-buying consumer who likes their comics to look cool. Arnie did work mostly on fill-in issues for the Big Two, but he'll always be a legend to me for being the guy who introduced Prometheus. He did the full interiors for the Prometheus one-shot, along with the full-interiors to the JLA issue that introduced him. Tell me we couldn't use this guy in comics today.

Photobucket

Sidenote: apparently I am looking for way way more villains with helmets, and with things sticking out from their helmets...

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