"Marc Ellerby’s panel constructions are very manga, but his figure work is squarely in the tradition of American cartooning. This gives his illustrations a puckish, humorous quality that engages both the eye and our sense of who and what his characters are. And for all the whimsy and anti-gravity hair, the tone of the artwork doesn’t overshadow the serious aspects of Rich’s script, as Ellerby captures his characters’ emotions quite well. He does just as well with conveying their ages, portraying them as young adults who don’t look like teenagers. This gives his characters a more mature affect than his style would suggest. With subtleties like this, the reader sometimes sees Ellerby’s images struggling with the rough patches in Rich’s script. There’s room for improvement, but right now Ellerby is a more developed artist than Rich is a writer, and it shows."
Jamie's spoken about this on his blog to some extent and I totally agree with what Jamie's saying. We either get universally slated or there's a love for one and not the other and in some cases we're admired across the board. Which, is interesting to say the least. Some reviews have been quite extreme too, with some quite vicious words for my art, but at the end of the day, the critics (if you can call some of them that, most are just "bloggers" by the look of things) have their world and we as artists have ours. I'm sort of glad I've gotten some awful reviews out of my system and they've made me a little bit more confident in my abilities (after the inital "everyone hates me, sob" melt down) and at the end of the day I take their criticism and if I agree, learn from it, if I don't, then, frankly, they can fuck right off. I do think that LTWYL finds it's stride with perhaps the second issue and the third one possibly has the best work I've ever done on it (I said that about #2 at the time, so hopefully this is going somewhere...) so don't give up yet, folks ;)
The book's finding an audience with women, what with the majority of the feedback I'm getting coming from women. However all the reviews we've had have come from men and mmmmm, the book maybe isn't aimed at them. Don't get me wrong, I think if you like romance books or shows or whatever than you'll find something from this book and of course it doesn't matter what sex you are, but I think the ones who are going to get the most from it are going to be women. Especially #3. When Franz Ferdinand first came about their decliration was that they wanted to make "music for girls to dance to," and well, I've always wanted to make comics for girls to obsess over. Girls reading comics is possibly the best thing ever, right?
I'm pretty much now over the 1/2 mark with the art for #3 and #2 has gone into production.
Here's some pages as I hardly ever show art on here, I guess. These are from #2...
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burnt_jamb) wrote,
hungry
