Art Spotting in general

[Yoc]

You might want to check that URL Narf.

[larrytalbot]

Jack Kirby & Early Captain Marvel Panels:

Thanks! everyone for all your info on Kirby. It cleared up a long standing question in my mind about the odd early Cap Marvel artwork attributed to Kirby.

SRCA1941: Your pointing out that Briefer inked Kirby's pencils. It looks like he took broad liberties in his inking & knowingly or unknowingly transformed Kirby art into a hybrid Briefer art. (Possibly under the pressure of the big workload mentioned by Josemas). Yes, I do see more Briefer than Kirby in those panels!

Yoc: The Simon-Kirby blog you steered me to had early examples of Kirby pencils that looked nothing like the anomalous Cap Marvels that had long confused me about Kirby.

JVJ: Jim, I'm not very knowledgeable about the artists. I just enjoy reading comic books. The question I raised seemed pertinent to this thread & the answers I got cleared up the issue for me.  From those odd Cap Marvel panels attributed to Kirby I had mistakenly assumed that Simon was the more seasoned artist. But, after seeing early Kirby artwork, I now realize that he was at least par with Simon. Your own statement (reply #22 Dec 6) is an apt summation:
"The Capt. Marvel job is an anomaly and in no way indicates the capabilities of either artist."

Thanks!

[josemas]

My thoughts on this are: why do we need a file on Matt Baker when we've got DCM and GCD to give us the information? Search for Matt Baker sorted by Date in GCD and then go look on DCM for what you find. Voila, you've got the info. I think we're past that sort of duplicating effort. If people want the info, it's there for them.

What we "need" is not for everybody to be able to identify well-known artists - I think that's pretty much been done, or can be done by anyone who's interested - but some way to put names to styles that haven't been I.D.'d.

Another approach would be to post a couple of pages of an unknown artist every day and get input on what people are seeing or think they are seeing.

My efforts want to focus on adding MORE names to the lexicon or comics or adding more credits to little known artists. YMMV.

Peace, Jim (|:{>

Well I used Baker as an example because most people (certainly the people on this forum anyway) are familiar with him but the concept could just as easily be used on less well known artists.  Having files with concentrations of known examples of any artist's work divided by years will give people a chance to more quickly familiarize themselves with that particular artist.
Yes one can go through GCD and then DCM or GAC in tracking down artists but I think that this would help speed up the process of being able to art spot particular artists.

Certainly agree with you that trying to put names to the many unknowns is desirable and the artist file concept could be used this way too- only applying the sort of nicknames that you and Hames used to the files.  Maybe then as more people become familiar with these "unknown's" styles it will increase the chance of someone eventually finding an obscure pulp or slick or whatever that the same artist signed and thus giving us a name to go with the "unknown".

Best

Joe

[Yoc]

Hi gang,
I'd like to welcome any artist collections on DCM.
And this might be another good way to share scans of any Mystery Artist's work as well.
Just collect and create a file and upload just as always but put them in the Archives and Collections section with a name like 'Mystery Artist #xx' and inside the description area list which books all the scans came from when known.

Just a thought.
-Yoc

[JVJ (RIP)]

I certainly agree that there's great value in collecting scans of individual artists over time, Joe. I'm not sure that the GCD/DCM Viewer approach is all that time-consuming (I use it ALL the time), but that is a personal preference because I want to see the entire strip, not a selected page or two.

Yoc's post with the links to the viewer files are a simple compromise, BUT you would need BOTH because I would imagine that the main use of the scans would be to help someone identify a story that they don't know who drew. To learn how to recognize an artist, I'd vote for the GCD/DCM approach.

To match up a style you're looking at (e.g. possibly George Mandel on chapter one of Daredevil vs Hitler for example), and Eric hadn't given us George Mandel's name, how does one go about using the tool we'd be creating with these example scans? That's the key question.

Yes, collecting scans from known artists over time is fantastic.
Yes, collecting examples of unknowns over time is fantastic, too.
And how do we go from those scans to matching up a comic story with a sample scan? The more samples we collect of more artists over more years just gives us a whole slew of pictures to plow through hoping for a match that we can identify.

It would be an incredible tool for learning the styles of artist - IF you can remember them. And it would be an incredible tool for finding who did an unsigned story - IF you can remember the style and connect it to the name. No matter how you look at it, it requires a great deal of memory as well as the ability to distinguish between mannerisms and style points.

I don't want to put a damper on this project, but I'd hope we can think it through before rushing off to make a million scans. What are your thoughts on how it would/could be used? The patterns of use will help determine how it should function/look.

Yoc - again, I question how one gets from the scan you're looking to identify to the scan someone has posted as 'Mystery Artist #xx'? Other than flipping through dozens (hundreds?) of scans, how can it function? Think of what functionality we're trying to implement and how we can/will use it.

my 2¢

(|:{>

[Yoc]

Well, there's no way around the memory issue.
What I'd love to see happen in this new section is some pages are shared or a file uploaded and we ask everyone to suggest a name to who it might be.  Much like is done on the Timely-Atlas group.
Bounce the ideas around and see if a consensus can be reached.
If they are - let GCD know and let them update their listings.

There's no way around needing to memorize so many things and it only works if we can get as many of the 'expert' art spotters out there to participate.  I'd love to see Hames join in if it were possible.

-Yoc

[JVJ (RIP)]

The reality is, Yoc,
that there are far more willing students out there than there are capable teachers. How many people have commented on Eric's "possibly George Mandel" post? How many speculations about Chapter 2? Zero. The problem is that the level of knowledge is fixed. Nobody seems to be learning any more than what they already know. That's what I'm TRYING to do - learn new names/styles.

What I don't want is to be the only one checking a dozen posts and ID'ing the art. It's possible that I might be able to do it, but it rather takes away from the continuity of my personal projects. Simply put, I don't want to be the only one playing the game. As you may have noticed, I haven't posted about the Daredevil pages, and don't intend to without some serious discussion that I can join.

There was an entire article about George Mandel in Alter Ego. Someone must have SOME idea of what his art looks like. Perhaps because he never drew "good girl art" nobody cares. The point is, unless this is an active, vibrant thread that I might learn from, I'm resistant to just giving the only opinion on something. Eric's post is great. Someone's thrown out an opinion/guess on an entire book yet it's elicited little response from anyone. That's disappointing to me. Not surprising, though. As I said, the level of knowledge is pretty stagnant.  Getting past that inertia and moving into new information is VERY difficult.

Folks like to learn, and so do I. Doesn't anyone have anything to say about the Silverstreak stories that have been posted?

(|:{>

[josemas]

The way I see an artist's file being set up that would be most useful is where we would include all of a particular artists known work (entire stories, not just isolated pages) in the files.  Prolific artists who worked for many years would have files for each separate year.  Less prolific artists could have their work broken down into periods.

We would not have to make a million scans to do this either as we could use the scans already on the site to build these files in much the same way as some of the guys have already been building the character driven files in the archive.

As new titles are added to the library the artist files could be updated when ever a new story or two of their's turns up. 

The memory thing is always going to be there but having easy files to refer to can only help.  Also the more people we have looking at these files the better.  Some people may initially just check out the files out of curiosity and eventually turn into art spotters.  It's all good.

As we run across a story where the artist is not already IDed at GCD we can run a topic on it through the forum and hopefully someone can offer and answer.

As to those "unknowns" that Jim and Hames only have nicknames for if they can supply a list of those particular artists credits we could build files under the nicknames until such a time (if ever) we can actually add a real name to the file.

Just some ideas I'm tossin' out.

Best

Joe
 

[Yoc]

Hi Jim,
I see your points and I know you're a busy guy.  I love that you'll sometimes spot the artists for some of the uploads being made.
Personally, I'm very limited in my confidence to comment on most artists.  I think like many it safer to shut up that look a fool.
I've got a feel for Walt Kelly, Briefer is usually safe to spot, and my confidence on Baker is now shaky.
I agree we need more 'experts' here but I can't force them to join in.  We've built the baseball diamond in the corn field.  It's up to them to start showing up to play ball.
My hope is Henry, DocV and some of the others out there decide to join the discussion.  Perhaps some others I'm not as familiar with.

Fingers crossed.

[JVJ (RIP)]

I suggest that you try to set something up on a very small scale and then try to use it, guys. As I have been trying to say, it how it will be used that will determine the approach to take - form follows function.

And I will reiterate that we really already have access to "all of the work of an artist sorted by year". Adding more links to the same data base from a different entry screen sounds like a lot of work for an unspecified reward to me. If I want to see what scans are available for art identified as George Mandel, it takes one GCD search for penciller sorted by date. If you can automate that and a way to jump to the preview of the comic, that would save someone a lot of work. (The first thing you'll notice is that the sequence of the GCD entry might not match the sequence in the scan...)

But my basic question remains: how would this be used?
1. By people trying to learn Geo. Mandel's style?
2. By people trying to ascertain whether a specific story was by George Mandel?
3. Or by people trying to figure out who is drawing a story (where George Mandel is the answer)?

If the first or the second, okay. It will work. If the third, it won't. No matter how complete you make the files/scans of Mandel's work, one would have to be inordinately lucky to stumble across his work amidst the work of dozens, if not hundreds, of named and unnamed artists in the database.

What the third requires is:
1. knowing what George Mandel looks like.
2. recalling that knowledge when faced with the story in #3.

Knowledge. And Memory. And the most difficult of those is Knowledge. Trying to figure out what constitutes a George Mandel drawing (vs. one by his look-alike brother, Alan) is savagely difficult. Ask those on the boards here like Tilliban or Narfstar just how hard it is to keep all of those traits firm and straight in your mind.

You said it yourself, Yoc: you can recognize a couple of well-known guys. Trouble is, it won't be the well-known guys that people will be trying to ID. They're the easy ones.

Try a small-scale test. See whether it helps anybody.

(|:{>

[Yoc]

I see all your points Jim.
I don't know what more DCM can do as a site to help the process.
GCD is certainly welcome to link to pages in their own discussions which must cover the same ground as here.
Frankly if more spotters don't step forward this section will be a pretty quiet place.

If anyone has suggestions on what more we can do here let me know.

[srca1941]

Nope. I will say that I'm more than willing to look at others' guesses on other pages/stories and offer opinions. Even if they have no guess. We may not come across any new names here (and I wasn't expecting to anyway), but there are still plenty of stories by the artists that HAVE been named, that haven't been properly credited yet, or often miscredited. I think anything helps.

-Eric

[tilliban]

I think it's great to have this topic now.
Just a few things:

First: Patience, folks. It's out there now, a beginning has been made.
There won't be answers rolling in overnight.

Second: Spread the word.
If you know people taking interest in or knowing about art spotting, contact them actively.
Court them into joining DCM.

Third: What may be helpful, is a kind of a register or listing of "experts" and their fields of expertise.
Just to get an overview who's out there and what they might know.

In my case - for example - that would be just early 50s (and mostly pre-code horror art).

Still working on my LEAGUE OF ART SPOTTERS - normal folks, but with a supervision for certain artwork.
 

[srca1941]

Well, as I said, my expertise is probably superhero series. No particular company, but I have seen a lot of Nedor, Novelty Press, Fawcett, and Lev Gleason...

-Eric

[bchat]

Potentially, people are talking about two different things here, and I'm not 100% clear which it is.
1 - An "Artist Appreciation File", where the work of one artist is gathered in an archive type format.  While focused on one artist, this would be more of a "spotlight" type of file as opposed to a teaching tool.
2 - An "Artist Identification File", where samples of artwork are gathered into one file to be viewed by anyone who wishes to learn how a person goes about identifying an artist's work.  Obviously, this type of file would serve no use to anyone who just wants to read comic book stories.
 If everyone is talking about creating "Artist Appreciation Files", then just ignore the rest of my post.

It may be easy to say "Such & Such artist has had their work identified already", but that statement does nothing to help someone new learn how to identify an artist's work.  If the goal is to identify the "unknown artists", then some type of effort should be made in order to increase the number of people able to acquire this "skill", without alienating anyone because they haven't figured-out how to learn to ID artists on their own.

IF the files are going to be used to teach others how to identify a particular artist, then they have to have a place to start the learning process.  With popular artists like Matt Baker, Jack Cole or (pick your favorite artist), someone new to this can be taught the techniques of "art spotting" by seeing examples of artwork that has already been identified.  Without a basic understanding of what they should be looking for, someone new to "art spotting" is going to have a tough time being able to identify or give an opinion on an "unknown artist".  In addition, there is no good reason to not have everything a person needs in order to learn how to identify an artist's work all in one place.  If they want to see additional examples of an artist's work, or even see full stories, then there is no good reason why a simple text file cannot be added to the "Artist Identification File" so that someone who wants to learn how to ID artwork doesn't have to jump back & forth between multiple sites.  The "Greatest Art Spotter" of all time may be walking through the door tomorrow, why make them jump through any hoops if they don't have to?

In my opinion, an "Artist Identification File" doesn't need to contain any complete stories.  Splash pages, covers, page layouts, figure drawing, backgrounds and inking (if the artist was also an inker) should be the focus of an "Artist Identification File", not writing & storytelling.  One file should be able to cover a single artist's entire career, making it easier to see how an artist's style progressed/evolved over their lifetime.

Of course, all of the above is just my opinion ... take it or leave it.