I tried the Ms. Marvel trades and adored them, but I don't want to buy the normal book. The covers are too offputting. Why does Marvel put Greg Horn on cover detail for all the female books? They could at least find an interesting cheesecake artist. Being extremely generous, his stuff looks like he stole an aspiring lingerie model's portfolio and is photoshopping different costumes on her pictures.
I actually have some Greg Horn stuff I like: His ESPERS stuff with James Hudnall.
ReplyDeleteBut when he decided to follow Hughes & Bolland into professional cover artist land, he got to be more often boring &/or annoying. I just don't like how he draws certain characters I normally like, like She-Hulk.
If comic book companies want painted cheesecakey hotties on their covers, they should give a better deal & get painters like Julie Bell, Chris Achilleos, & Ray Lago. At least they have the sense to go beyond the generic, like giving an action heroine some muscles.
For some reason this reminds me of that "Heat of the Moment" video by Asia.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlTvWvfEMxE
The sad thing is, Horn's plastic and over-Photoshopped work ruined what could've been a neat cover concept. If it looked more like the spinning toy that inspired it and less like a bunch of illustrations trapped under inexplicable speed lines, it might've worked. Also, if it was a better artist who didn't use pin-ups as pose references.
ReplyDeleteOf course, this is the artist who gave us the "grinning nightmare horse" on a She-Hulk cover, so I expect the worst.
Carol's a veteran of the Air Force and space rebels. She deserves better art.
I like the idea of the cover, but... arg, they don't even look like women. And what's up with the woman in the middle's hair? No more weaves for you!
ReplyDeleteI thought that around half of Horn's She-Hulk covers were actually pretty good, especially that one with Shulkie holding a pair of scales.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately the preponderance of his covers look traced from porn a la Greg Land.
I can't stand these covers but my wife adores them.
ReplyDeleteThey do look like porn models with costumes painted on. God, get some better darn cover art!!
ReplyDeleteHey, the Greg Land shot is a little low. At least Horn, by and large, manages to keep the characters consistent between covers. And no porn face (so far).
ReplyDeleteAnd completely off topic, the word verification I need to put in before it will let me post this is 'yakluv'. Make of that what you will.
I kinda miss that Binary Costume. Her other two just look like clones of Mar-Vel's outfits.
ReplyDeleteActually, IIRC Horn's cover model is his wife, which is why all his women look alike.
ReplyDeleteAgree that his covers are teh suck, though.
The thing that weirds me out about Horn's covers is how smooth and shiny everything is. This is, to some degree, a problem with painting comic art under a deadline (Alex Ross' art has this problem sometimes, too), but it's especially characteristic of Horn's art.
ReplyDeleteHis compositions tend to be dull, too.
Sigh...
ReplyDeletePlastic, dull, flat out boring!
This isn't worthy of being a calendar page, much less the cover to a Ms. Marvel comic.
But this isn't even the most grievous misstep where Horn is concerned.
I'd have trouble thinking of a comic storyline I'd rather hand to a teenage girl with no experience of the tights and spandex genre than Emma Frost: Higher Learning.
That is, I'd love to hand it to a teenage girl if it weren't wrapped in frankly sleazy Greg Horn covers, depicting an adult Emma in pose and costume that would make even HER roll her eyes.
Nobody ever expects a bittersweet, well-written, coming of age tale lurks behind spank material!
Oh, comic companies, How do you have feet left to shoot yourselves in?
My only problem with Greg Horn's covers is that most of them aren't very dynamic at all. He's done a few really excellent scenes, but for the most part his covers strike me as window mannequins.
ReplyDeleteYou know what's great on that?
ReplyDeleteIs that I have no idea what effect he was going for, but ended up having the effect of proof that his women are all the same (really, it took me a while before realizing it was all mixed up).
Just... dead.
Well, in all fairness, they are all the same woman: they're all Carol Danvers.
ReplyDeleteBut ye cats, oh yes, please stop the madness.
>>>>>they are all the same woman
ReplyDeleteOh well... good?
(I meant in the sense that it was supposed to appeared the body parts were switched -- so you'd catch a few of the lack of continuity in their arms etc -- but they're actually lazily made "one", he just made the squares and broke the continuity in some places, like arms, one of the waists and the uniforms... although, in classic Land-Horn mode, they doo look the same, in the other sense)
(and I'm still figuring out why one of them is blowing me -- or the camera man -- a kiss)
Oh, what? So now you have a problem with fighting crime in a costume that is almost design for crotch-based wardrobe malfunctions?
ReplyDeleteWell, to hell with you, sister!!!
I don't know how they do it in the femmenazi camps, but I wouldn't want to fight crime any other way!
MMHMM, breezy!