Hepcat wrote:
I thought the problem with Sheldon Moldoff's renderings of Batman was Bob Kane. Moldoff was a pretty good artist in his own right but he was being compelled to mimic Kane's style on Batman, a style which while distinctive was also stiff and artificial.

Yes, the root of the problem was obviously Kane. But I don't think his style was particularly "distinctive". Bob Kane's big problem was that he was simply a mediocre artist. That's a serious handicap if you're under contract to DC to produce hundreds of pages of art every year for a top-tier realistic comic book strip like Batman. Nor did he have the personal drive or talent to develop a compelling art style along somewhat more abstract lines as Alex Toth did.  Prior to 1939 Kane had shown some limited ability as a gag strip and funny animal cartoonist, but he was out of his depth when it came to drawing a serious adventure hero comic by himself.


Dick Tracy was another feature of the time drawn in a very distinctive albeit unnatural style.

Sure, but Chester Gould was a vastly more sophisticated artist. He also understood very early on the limits of the particular graphic process of printing four-color comics. Most important, Dick Tracy is essentially a primer on Abstract Expressionism applied to the comic strip form.  To mention just one example, if you look at the chiaroscuro in the strip, it’s brilliant. I see little evidence of that level of sophistication in Moldoff's work or Kane's.




Last Edited By: alizarin1 Oct 19 13 8:16 PM. Edited 2 times.