General Category > Artist Spotting

Art Spotting in general

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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.

(|:{>

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