famac wrote:
My favorites are Kirby and Ditko.

Most over-rated is hands down Neal Adams. While Neal Adams inking style is certainly compelling to fans, his actual skill in telling a story are pretty horrible. IF you take his pages as a whole and look at the flow of the artwork from panel to panel, it's often a jumbled mess. Neal Adams is also given the most credit for the smallest volume of work produced. BWS might compete in this category (volume to reputation) but at least Smith came up with a unique style all his own. Adams style if pretty much derived from serious newspaper strip artists and the Giordano/Colletta school of scratchy line inking.


This.

While my favourite artists as artists of the 'Marvel Silver Age' category are probably Colan and Heck, I would rate Kirby and Ditko as the best cartoonists (or writer-artists) easily.

Heck is probably the most underrated; my view is that this was caused by him being assigned to inappropriate material and given inappropriate inkers. See also Frank Springer's brief Marvel Silver Age gig.

Adams is seemingly incapable of drawing a stoiry without making at least one gross, childish storytelling blunder that you would never see in the work of far less-well regarded artists (Tuska, Sal Buscema, Jack Keller and Andru spring to mind).

Steranko is not as bad a storyteller as Adams, but is not as good as anatomy.

There is a theory that Adams' style derives from the Johnstone and Cushing(?) ad agency as much as Stan whatsisname's newspaper strip work.
  

Last Edited By: Tim Boo Ba Apr 25 14 8:37 AM. Edited 1 times.