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    Chris Bachalo

    Person » Chris Bachalo is credited in 815 issues.

    A Canadian comic book artist known for his work on Amazing Spider-Man, Generation X and X-Men.

    Stop comparing Chris Bachalo to anime.

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    stambo42

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    Edited By stambo42
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    It just isn't appropriate, and I think it underlies a kind of ignorance among comic readers. When I look at the books that are currently being put out by the big two, a lot of what I see is attempts at a kind of cold realism. Some of these attempts work, and though not particularly dynamic, they look good and get the job done. Most of the stuff falls short though, with awkward limb placement, inaccurate face planes, and poorly rendered expressions. Maybe people who aren't visual artists who work with the figure don't see this, but for those of us who do, it is glaring. The dominance of this style, or at least attempts at it, feels rather uncontested in the comic vine community. It is like a kind of recognized standard, and anyone who deviates from it is labeled as "other".

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    I think the people who support this style need to look back to Jim Lee in the 90s... and they need to take a long and considered look. From where I'm sitting, he feels like the grand daddy of rendered realism... the bastion that a generation of comic artists grew up on and rallied around. We accept attempts at rendered realism as his linage... and in doing so, we fail to look at what he was actually drawing. The guy was hugely stylized. The musculature of his figures, the approaches he takes to shading... the fact that most of his faces look like variations on a hand full of themes. He's a great artist, but like most of the guys that emerged in the early 90s (and not just the ones that went on to form Image) he was a stylist.

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    Now, when people speak ill of Bachalo, they almost always deride him as too stylized, too cartoony, too confusing, and finally they compare him to anime. The guy is cartoony (aren't we all?), and he has undeniable style. I've never found his compositions confusing, only dynamic and engaging... and i can think of only one brief phase in the late 90s where his work actually resembled anime at all. Even then, it was more dynamic, individualistic and engaging than any anime or manga I've yet to see. Truth be told, he's taken to so many changes in style over the years I find it hard to pin any labels to him. He's like Frank Zappa- playfully dipping his hands into any genre he feels like, but somehow preserving a constant recognizable flair and energy.

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    People who want to call him sloppy need to take a crack at drawing themselves, and understand the skill and competence it takes to depict such wild and frenzied images and still hold them together. You can't draw angles like that and not know what you are doing. he's sloppy in the way that Zappa was sloppy... which is to say the guy didn't allow his musicians to take drugs because they would't be able to play the music, and he expected every one in the band to know how to play every song in whatever time signature he felt like indicating by hand signals on the fly mid concert. This kind of sloppiness is also known as being insanely organized.(High level organization)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aU47shd3j_s (High level chaos)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrzOzgYL1-o

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    Folks who say he can't draw faces need to realize he's been making comics since the early 90s. Through 1995 or 96, he probably did more than any other artist I can think of to give every character a distinctive face. He caught a lot of flack for it from Marvel. Read his early run on "Shade: The Changing Man", "Death, The High Cost of Living", and the better part of Generation X. In reading Gen X, you really get to see his range,- he notably changes his approach to the figure and faces five or six times during the run. One of these changes resembles an Anime style. In the past decade of so he's settled into a more compact style. True, his faces have become more simplified, but he still knows more about conveying attitudes and emotions in the gestures of the face than most comic artists out there. He also still bothers to draw character faces for our more rough and tumble types like Wolverine and Sabertooth. These are qualities I've never seen in Anime art, which seems overwhelmingly to rely on symbolic convention to convey emotions- the American equivalent of a Ninja Turtles one sided scowl.

    In the end, I think the fear of Bachalo is the fear of something that is different... something that still manages to challenge the status quo. Comparing him to Anime is like calling anything with a saxophone jazz influenced. Saxophones don't make jazz- blue notes, swing, improvisation, soul, and advanced harmonic theory make jazz. Simplified or stylized faces don't make anime. Last I checked, most faces ever drawn in comics were either simplified or stylized.

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    Billy Batson

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    #1  Edited By Billy Batson

    Who compares Bachalo to anime?
    BB

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    stambo42

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    #2  Edited By stambo42

    @Billy Batson: Whenever I hear someone detracting him on this site, it is usually followed by them saying that he is cartoonish or that they dislike him because they see too much anime in his style in his faces. It existed for a couple of months in 1997 or so. It wasn't there before, and it hasn't been there since... but I see people citing it all over this site. I think most of them aren't artists or people who have a very strong visual vocabulary... cause as a comparison it makes no sense.

    Hell, I've even seen it in issue reviews, and those are supposed to be by our more informed members...

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    xerox_kitty

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    #3  Edited By xerox_kitty

    I've never seen any comments linking him to anime. His style is too detailed & messy for anime. I'm just sick & tired of people bashing his work as 'bad'; I understand they don't like it, but I do!

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    sesquipedalophobe

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    #4  Edited By sesquipedalophobe

    It doesn't look anything like anime to me.

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    TheGoldenOne

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    #5  Edited By TheGoldenOne
    @Billy Batson said:

    Who compares Bachalo to anime?
    BB

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    ApatheticAvenger

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    #6  Edited By ApatheticAvenger

    @xerox_kitty said:

    I've never seen any comments linking him to anime. His style is too detailed & messy for anime. I'm just sick & tired of people bashing his work as 'bad'; I understand they don't like it, but I do!

    Same here, I think he's a genuinely good artist. Hell, he's one of the only reasons I picked up the first few issues of Wolverine and the X-Men (the other being Kitty Pryde, I just love her so much that I can get past the name "Jason Aaron" being on the cover).

    I'm used to people bashing some of my favorite artists though, as I like Frank Quitely (at least on everything he's done with Grant Morrison).

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    stambo42

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    #7  Edited By stambo42

    @ApatheticAvenger said:

    @xerox_kitty said:

    I've never seen any comments linking him to anime. His style is too detailed & messy for anime. I'm just sick & tired of people bashing his work as 'bad'; I understand they don't like it, but I do!

    Same here, I think he's a genuinely good artist. Hell, he's one of the only reasons I picked up the first few issues of Wolverine and the X-Men (the other being Kitty Pryde, I just love her so much that I can get past the name "Jason Aaron" being on the cover).

    I'm used to people bashing some of my favorite artists though, as I like Frank Quitely (at least on everything he's done with Grant Morrison).

    Quitely is a beast. He's so fun to read, such a sense of line. Folks like him and Bachalo set you in a particular universe with their drawing, real mood that is just absent in most comic artists. I'm glad that everyone else here sees the comparison as ridiculous, and most of you haven't seen people saying this. Maybe it's said less than I feel it. But I have seen it written, multiple time, and every time it's such a glaring WTF that it burns itself into my mind.

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    ChocolateFrogs

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    I love Bachalo's art! I like the explanations of his distinctive style you give. I've definitely noticed how he can convey emotion even if a face is more simplified or in the background.

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