If you read comic books, being a fan of an artist's work can sometimes be tough. As a teenager, I started to notice that watching my favorite artists create more and more beautiful work frequently also meant watching their output dwindle away to almost nothing. Adam Warren was one of those perfectionist artists. His Dirty Pair comics and stints on Gen 13 were gloriously loony pastiches of anime, manga, Hong Kong cinema, and self-referential American hipster pop culture, with cheesecake shots sprinkled liberally throughout (which seemed to be simultaneously ironic and...not). And the artwork simply shone. Warren's stock-still images on the pages conveyed incredible speed and action, while he never neglected the storytelling and never left you wondering what was going on. You could see how much heart he put into his work. But the comics came out at a glacial pace.
And then Warren pulled an incredible switch. His next work, Empowered, was not only suddenly in black and white, but it wasn't even inked. He created the entire book in shades of pencil, including expressive lettering, sound effects, shading, and every last reflection on every last shiny surface. In this age in which thousands of digital tools allow us to create every possible effect in comics, he does it all with caveman technology. Ironically, this kind of comic couldn't have easily existed 20 years ago—it would have been too difficult and expensive to scan and reproduce pencil artwork for a black-and-white book—but with computers and high-resolution scanners, it's simple and cheap. Warren has broken through a wall for perfectionists: Use technology to allow yourself to go back to the simplest possible tools in order to put what's in your head on the page.
courtesy of Dark Horse Comics
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Is the new work beautiful? Oh, it is. Does he work faster? This year saw Empowered vol. 4 from Dark Horse Comics, the fourth 200-plus-page volume he's put out in four years. It's a remarkable achievement for any single writer-artist, let alone one as persnickety as Warren. Does it offer hope to people waiting around for the rest of those artists trapped by their own perfectionism? Probably not, but in an industry that has become as technologically impenetrable as comics, it's refreshing to have someone like Adam Warren show us that all you really need is a pencil and paper.
Zander Cannon is a Minneapolis cartoonist who co-owns the cartooning studio Big Time Attic with Kevin Cannon (no relation). Their latest graphic novel, The Stuff of Life, comes out January 15.
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