Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Some Old Pencil Art


MUTANT X












Back in 2000 I became the penciler for MUTANT X and got to work again with Howard Mackie, my co-conspirator on SPIDER-MAN. I was generally enjoying the book and definitely enjoying the work, but two things were causing problems at the time. One: my mom had suffered a stroke in June of 2000. She was in the hospital for some time, but when she didn't die some people wondered why I was affected by it. Not my editor, Jason Liebig, but some others. Two: the atmosphere in comics at the time was highly charged because Marvel had fallen on hard financial times and everyone was seeing books get cancelled and artists losing their jobs. I had started drawing with a "got to please the editor" attitude first and foremost in my mind when I had always drawn with a "got to please myself" attitude first for all of my career before that.
In the end, my art suffered because of an atmosphere of fear.
No one can do well with that going on.
That said, here are four pages from issue 23 of MUTANT X. My figure work is good, but I'm skimping on backgrounds BIG TIME in an effort to save time. Not good.
I like the look of these overall. If you want, you can fill in the "X" areas with black as that was what the inker was supposed to do and you'll see that the pages would have worked fine as they are, but they should have and could have been so much better.
What do you guys think?

SEPTEMBER IS HERE!!!
Where did the year go?????

6 comments:

Tom Lyle said...

Why thanks. Come back and look again some time.

Derik Diaz said...

Wow, its really interesting that I feel like I can see the effects of your not having fun here...It surprises me just how much that can impact your artwork, even when you're an established professional apparently!

Tom Lyle said...

Yeah-
My short cuts had started by now and I'm not happy overall with these pages, but I do know that my art is still better than average here, just not as good as on Spider-Man or the Punisher.

Later.

Tom

DamonO said...

Okay,so are you starting to weaken on your "no commissions" stance? C'mon, its already September -- I was expecting to nag you into submission back in July!:-)

Andrew said...

I think I've seen these pages before in class once, but I'm not sure. I know I saw the unpublished spider-man/namor pages which were pretty good.

There's something funny about seeing pages without as much background in them when you usually harped on us to throw more in, hehe.

Hope all is well, Tom.

-Andrew

Macelo Alencar said...

Dear mr. Lyle

Hi!
My name is Marcelo, I'm a comics fan from São Paulo, Brazil.
In the late 1990s, I bought a complete set of the Famous Comic Book Creators cards collection published by Eclipse Comics.
Since then, I've been trying to collect the autographs from these artists. Some of them I've had signed in person (when the artists came to Brazil) or by mail, after contact them via e-mail; others I've bought on eBay:

- Will Eisner
- Norm Breyfogle
- Steve Rude
- Bob McLeod
- Rick Geary
- Jim Starlin
- Joe Simon
- John Romita
- Howard Cruse
- Martin Nodell
- Larry Marden
- Bob Burden
- Dick Ayers
- Brent Anderson
- Mike Baron
- Marv Wolfman
- George Perez
- Sergio Aragonés
- Matt Wagner
- Erik Larsen
- Trina Robbins
- Carl Potts
- Moebius
- Stan Sakai
- Julius Schwartz
- Steve Englehart
- Todd McFarlane
- Charles Vess
- Timothy Truman
- Paul Chadwick
- Bryan Talbot
- Ron Frenz
- Tom Yeates
- Marc Hempel
- Paul Mavrides
- Mark Wheatley
- Paul Gulacy
- Sam Kieth
- Lela Dowling
- Beau Smith
- Gilbert Shelton
- Dan Spiegle
- Chuck Dixon
- Clive Barker
- Bill Griffith
- David Lloyd
- Roberta Gregory
- Kerry Gammill
- David Chelsea
- James Hudnall
- Matt Feazell
- Frank Cirocco

Now I'm asking you to sign for me the card #63, featuring you.
If you are willing to sign it, please let me know if there is any charge, and to which address I should ship the card.

Thanks for your attention, and best wishes,

Marcelo Alencar
jakutinga@uol.com.br
marceloalencar66@gmail.com