Tangled Webs: The Disappearance of the Star Artist

A major trend in recent comics that has affected the Spider-Man books has been the diminishment of the star artist for sales and fan response.

Comics is an artistic medium, and Spider-Man has been blessed with some of the best and most popular comic book artists ever. It’s been that way from the beginning. Ditko was followed by John Romita Sr who was followed by Gil Kane who was followed by Ross Andru. All-time greats John Byrne, John Romita Jr, and Mike Wieringo have had multiple runs on the character. Todd McFarlane and Erik Larsen were so popular that they were able to bring their Spider-Man fans to their creator-owned work at Image comics. There are plenty of other artists like Sal Buscema and Ron Frenz who are widely admired and under-rated.

There seems to be a change in the power of the star artist as a force in comics. Peter Parker the Spectacular Spider-Man wasn’t a top 80 comic with Adam Kubert on art. Looking at recent sales charts, it’s tough to find a book that’s mainly there due to a star artist. The top ten of November 2018 and the top ten of December 2018 have some books that seem to be there due to the combination of writer and character, but very little that’s obviously elevated by an artist. If you pick a random month in the 1990s—like January 1996—Gen 13 is in third place, and Witchblade in 11th place, both books mainly notable for the artist. The top two books that month were Greg Capullo’s Spawn, and you can certainly make for his sustained popularity as artist.

CBR polled its readers on their favorite artists in 2010 and 2018, and the difference is telling. The 2010 list included younger artists JH Williams and Frank Quitely in third and second place. In the 2018 list, they fell to 20th place and 9th place. It would be one thing if they were replaced by newer talent, but they were supplanted mainly by artists who have been popular since at least the 1980s, which points to less interest in the most popular newer artists.

So, why aren’t artists that popular any more? This is largely speculation. It’s entirely possible that it’s going to be a combination of several reasons, and that some of the things I’m considering as potential factors won’t matter at all.

The first potential explanation to address would be the idea that artists just aren’t that good any more for whatever reason—Social Justice warriors hounded out true talents, skilled artists are seeking other industries like film or video games, etc. I’m not particularly convinced of the idea that the explanation is simply to bash newer artists like Juann Cabal, Rosi Kämpe or Javier Garrón, and it doesn’t really address the question of why artists who were once quite popular no longer move sales charts the same way.

A related possibility is that new artists don’t appeal to modern fans the way Todd McFarlane did to the fans of the 1990s. Perhaps a daring new take on characters is on the horizon ready to make someone the most popular artist in decades. But you would need someone who has a distinctly modern sensibility.

A flipside is that increased nichification in the entertainment industries may make it less likely for someone to appeal to a broader audience. Readers are so splintered that it becomes harder to find out about a newer artist than in the days where there was just one version of Spider-Man. The comics media is also more diverse, which means readers aren’t going to learn about new artists from a handful of gatekeepers. In the days of Wizard, readers might have flocked to the artists promoted in that magazine. Now, there’s no one on that level guiding the conversation. Instead, readers are splintered between different titles and fan communities, so they might never learn about the fantastic art in a title that another groups likes.

The production end has changed. One potential factor for the decline of the name artist is the increased role of others in the production team. Digital coloring has really taken off in the 21st Century, and become a bigger part of the emotional resonance of a comic book. Mattia De Lulis showed an example of a panel from his Jessica Jones story before and after the colors, which highlights just what a colorist brings to the material in terms of tone, mood and detail.

With colors more important than ever, the individual penciller no longer matters as much as they used to. It gets tougher to distinguish between various good artists elevated by exceptional colorists, especially when dealing with pencillers with relatively similar styles.

Companies may also be promoting writers more than artists, and the people writing about comics often make the same mistake. When Y The Last Man was announced as a TV series, some in the press credited writer Brian K Vaughan but not artist Pia Guerra. Covers for comics collections will often prioritize the writer over the artist. In most cases, the penciller did more work as it takes longer to illustrate 22 pages than to write it.

These oversights can be understandable. Popular writers tend to be more prolific than artists, so it is more useful for companies to use their finite resources to increase awareness of the writers than it is of the artists, especially since the artist can jump to a competitor for their next project. If someone draws six impressive issues of Fantastic Four, Marvel’s efforts to promote that person as a rising star might end up increasing sales of that person’s next twelve issues of Superman. This could also occur with writers, but there will typically be more TPBs in the backlog for the company to keep selling. People who write for a living may also be better self-promoters.

Because writers are more prolific, they’re more likely to be involved in multiple projects. Brian K Vaughan has Saga, Runaways, and Ex Machina to his credit, while Pia Guerra doesn’t really have anything else on that level, so the writer may have more name recognition. When someone known outside of the comics industry tells a comics story, it tends to be as a writer, either someone from Hollywood (Joss Whedon, Kevin Smith) or someone known for prose (Neil Gaiman, Brad Meltzer.) The point of a cover or a headline isn’t to promote a talent; it’s to get someone to check out the work, and if a company thinks that’s more likely to happen when it’s only the writer’s name being emphasized, that’s what they’ll do.

A related factor is that a notable comics run will often have more than one artist. On Peter Parker the Spectacular Spider-Man, writer Chip Zdarsky worked with pencillers Adam Kubert, Chris Bachalo, Joe Quinones, Michael Walsh, and illustrated his own final issue. Recently, Marvel and DC have realized that their major books will sell pretty well at twice a month, so even an artist who can draw 20 pages a month isn’t going to be prolific enough to tackle every issue. Amazing Spider-Man has Nick Spencer as the one writer, and Ryan Ottley and Humberto Ramos as rotating artists, with Chris Bachalo also coming on-board. The run is going to be referred to as Nick Spencer’s Spider-Man, rather than Spencer/ Ottley/ Ramos/ Bachalo’s Spider-Man.

Companies may have trained readers, consciously and unconsciously, to see artists as disposable. This may intersect with colorists becoming a more significant part of the process, as well as the way the same story may have more than one penciller, especially if it’s long enough.

There is now more emphasis on getting the comics released on-time. When Joe Quesada was Editor in Chief for Marvel, there were some delays on major series like Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch’s The Ultimates (and its follow-up The Ultimates 2), Josh Whedon and John Cassady’s Astonishing X-Men, his own One More Day crossover, and the Mark Millar/ Steve McNiven event mini-series Civil War. The argument was that it mattered more that the work was as good as it could possibly be, and that it would be inexcusable to hire someone else to finish it, with the example given that a classic storyline like the Avengers Kree/ Skrull War was diminished because Neal Adams wasn’t given enough time to draw the last issue. Priorities have changed lately, with greater stress on getting books out on time. This doesn’t mean that work that is late is better, or that artists shouldn’t be prized for their ability to get the work in on the time, but it does suggest a change in the perceived value of the artist when the company makes it clear that—from their perspective—artistic unity isn’t essential.

The market has changed, so buying habits are quite different. When the artists behind Spider-Man and the X-Men went to Image, the main way to buy comics was the monthly titles. Now, Marvel keeps a lot of significant trade paperbacks in print, so an artist isn’t just competing with what’s on the stands, but with the best work of the past, often available in formats that were unimaginable at the time. A new monthly comic is rarely going to look as nice as an oversized hardcover. The fifty dollar Fantastic Four: Behold…Galactus collection includes stories illustrated by Jack Kirby, John Byrne and John Buscema in a 13 41/64″ x 21 1/4″ hardcover. That’s likely to be better looking than even the best-regarded 12-13 issues published in a given month. Artists will also be competing with their own work. Someone going with thirty dollars to a comic shop might end up buying Humberto Ramos’ Amazing Spider-Man with Nick Spencer, but they could also pick up a TPB of Ramos’ Spider-Man work with Paul Jenkins, or one of several TPBs of his work with Dan Slott.

And it’s easier than ever to access art without paying a lot for it. If I really like Marcos Martin’s Spider-Man (and I do), a simple Google images search gets me double page spreads and splash pages. I would no longer need to buy any of the back issues to get my fix. The ten dollar monthly Marvel Digital Unlimited subscription includes Bill Sienkiewicz’s Moon Knight, Jim Lee’s Uncanny X-Men, Mark Bagley’s Ultimate Spider-Man, Alex Ross’ Marvels, in addition to comics published in the last year.

Some of the biggest artists are only doing covers. We haven’t heard anything about J. Scott Campbell’s mini-series with Jeph Loeb in years, but he’s consistently producing variant covers for the Spider-Man comics. Alex Ross dominated the style of painted comics like no one else, but he’s mainly been a cover artist for the last decade.

Finally, readers and the media may be looking for different things than they used to. Diversity and authenticity get media attention, so it matters that the creative team of Black Panther is African-American, or that Ms. Marvel is written by a Muslim writer. This ties creative teams to particular franchises, since a background isn’t transferable to every franchise. The relevance of having a woman write Captain Marvel or a lawyer write Daredevil isn’t going to mean much if their next project is Moon Knight. The emphasis on background does also appear to be pertain more to writers than artists, which may connect to the ways writers get more promotion.

This is a topic I’ve been thinking about for a while, and there are no easy answers. What do you guys think? Am I on to something in observing a trend in comics? What factors are the most likely to matter? Are there other reasons comic artists might be treated differently than in the past? Are there ways to change this in the future?