The Few, The Proud, The Unproductive
By Dan BrownLet us now praise those comic creators who had a big impact on comic history despite spending very little time in the spotlight.I’m talking about your David Mazzucchellis, your Michael Goldens, your Paul Chadwicks. You may have your own favourites.What do these artists have in common? Compared to such stalwarts as Kurt Swan and Jack Kirby, they were . . . not all that productive. Which hasn’t stopped them from inspiring wildly loyal fandoms.Some of them are still active today. Once in a while.They had brief runs (that are still remembered 50 or 60 years later), they did an amazing job, they revolutionized comics. And then they more or less disappeared.Perhaps some of them had a hard time meeting the grind of monthly deadlines. No doubt some of them made more money as illustrators in other fields. For whatever reason, they found other vineyards to toil in.Oh, we young comics fans loved them. If it was up to us, they would have had their choice of assignment.Mazzucchelli we knew as the artist on Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One, which reset the Dark Knight’s origin for a new generation. The Neal Adams Batman belonged to our older brothers, but this one was OURS. The brilliance of his style was that you couldn’t tell which era this Batman came of age in. Was it the 1970s? The 1930s? The modern day? You couldn’t pin this Batman down, he was timeless.Oh yeah, Mazzucchelli also worked on Daredevil briefly, then years later came out with the graphic novel Asterios Polyp. Might he be a perfectionist, might that be the reason that prevented him from doing more?Michael Golden lit the comic world on fire with his 12-issue run on the Micronauts. It was a comic adaptation based on a toy line, and like Mazzucchelli he also created an otherworldly milieu, with exhausted heroes and truly diabolical villains. Then, a glimpse of something even more awesome: For one issue, Star Wars No. 38 in 1980, Golden showed us a vision of a galaxy far, far away with art that we actually dug.It had seemed up to that point Marvel was abusing Star Wars fans on purpose by using mediocre artists.When we got a little older, graduating to more mature stories, Chadwick spoke to our young-adult selves with his thought-provoking Dark Horse series Concrete. A book built around a superhero who wanted only to sit around and think? We were intrigued, It was as if Ben Grimm had become a philosopher.But unfortunately for us, it didn’t last. He was another creator who, it seemed, had found other things to do outside of comics. Perhaps he just lost interest.Like I said, not everyone is blessed with the work ethic of a Kirby or the endurance of a Swan or a John Romita. Not every comic creator even wants to be in the conversation.Some are destined to be excellent, then be gone. Could be it’s a blessing in disguise? One byproduct is we will never get sick of their expressive lines.Nor am I suggesting any of these talented people are snobs for finding other pursuits. Not everyone has thousands of individual issues in them, I get it.Heaven forbid they should ever be among the most productive people in the industry’s history. Because those folks get a different label: We deride them as hacks.Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 32 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
