Artist of the Day: Alex Ross!!

The only reason I started rereading comics or graphic novels or slims, is because of Alex Ross. I had turned my back on the medium, just tired of the juvenile art, the storytelling style, everything. Then Alex Ross exploded onto the scene with the one-two punch of the graphic novels MARVELS then KINGDOM COME.

Self contained, stand alone, complete stories, told with jaw droppingly astonishing painted art. People immediately began calling him the Norman Rockwell of comics, and that term is not quite undeserved.

Like Norman Rockwell, Alex Ross is able to imbue his scenes with a sense of homey Americana, that calls back a yearning to better, simpler days now passed… or perhaps never existed.

But he does more than imbue scenes with nostalgia, he does something Rockwell never did, perhaps never dreamt of doing, Alex Ross imbues his scenes with a sense of awe, of scale, of grandeur.

Of myth.

It has become habit these days for people without a fraction of Ross’ talent or vision to take his work for granted. To call his effort: extremism, and to call his meticulous paints: stiff, over rendering… I see nothing stiff or over-rendered in the work of Alex Ross but people are allowed their opinion, though the criticism always struck me as uninformed opinion.

It always struck me as the voices of jealous ants trying to deride an elephant. People disparaging Alex Ross, simply because he was that good.

Alex Ross is a meticulous perfectionist, who paints worlds that never were, but should be, and populates them with the stuff of faith…rewarded. Long before Hollywood made a habit of making our marvels real, Ross reached out to the lightning, and called down the thunder, and put it on paper, and gave us all a vision… to aspire to.

Many a painter has come on the sequential art scene since Ross’ mainstream debut, and they all bring something wonderful to the mix. But it’s a testament to Alex Ross’ skill, his understanding and his love for the heroic… that none of the numerous painters now in the medium, quite grasp that sense of grandeur that Ross brings to even the least of his creations.

All his creations look out at you with eyes that have seen the worst, yet still seem to say… “endure, be better.”

And end of the day, I figure… that’s not such a bad message for an artist and his art to leave us with. So for all these reasons Alex Ross is our Artist of the Day.

Check out all his work at the links below:

Site for Alex Ross Art and Info!

Mythology: The DC Comics Art of Alex Ross

Rough Justice: The DC Comics Sketches of Alex Ross

The Dynamite Art of Alex Ross HC

The World’s Greatest Super-Heroes

Absolute Justice

Absolute Kingdom Come

Uncle Sam: Deluxe Edition

DVD REVIEW: BAND OF BROTHERS?!!— You’re kidding me right?

What I’m Watching:

BAND OF BROTHERS- They call this BAND OF BROTHERS, and there ain’t no Brothers in the movie? WTF? 🙂

I’m only half joking though.

Film kinda ignores the heavy colored presence, to include such decorated veterans as Walter Morris, of the nationality: American, of the ethnicity: Black, of the occupation: Bad Ass, who was a paratrooper and spearheaded the 555th during the same 1944 period this series covers.

Don’t get me wrong BAND OF BROTHERS is not a bad show from the bit I watched of it, it just seems a bit… opaque. I mean even if your central story is of this certain company… fine, that’s fine, but then I look at the major massings, the troop movements with the group transports when they get on the boats, there’s like two Black faces in a crowd, that if you blink you missed it.

It just seems the filmmakers went out of their way to portray an entire war fought sans persons of color, and that if I might say, in my best British accent, is… bollocks!

Ahhh feel better now. But my feeling better aside, that… shortsightedness, that tendency to ignore, is increasingly the cinema of 21st century America, a cinema of turning back the clock.

It’s pretty much a big eff you to the people of color who lost their lives in yet another War for liberty, a liberty that, at V days end, again failed to extend to them and their families. Yet fight they did. So to paint an entire war as absent of that perspective, even that awareness, (hell RED TAILS had white people in it :)) well that just strikes me from every angle as whitewashed bs.

Because if you can’t acknowledge that inexplicable fact of every American War, from the revolution down,,, that people denied equality fought for it, fought for the dream that lives behind the lie, the promise of America… then you make a lie of the sacrifice, not just of those of color who fought and bled and gave their last best measure, but a lie of all who fought, of all who served, of all who gave, of all who lost.

Because the war, was about the very rights of man… and to forget that, to not acknowledge that, with every generation, with every nation, with every breath… is to savior the axis philosophy… rather than to slay it.

Ohhh… deep.

So to be less deep… Goddamn producer Tom Hanks! Even damn racist John Wayne put a couple people of color in his films. WTF? And to think I liked you in FOREST GUMP! :).

Yeah I can’t watch anymore of this BAND OF WHITE BROTHERS :). Grade: I’ll pass. Nicely acted, from what I can see, just have no interest in finishing it. Damn I ain’t saying make Billy D. Williams the star, but would it have killed you to acknowledge the war was fought by more than CW stars?! :).

‘CW stars’, that’s a good one. I slay me. 🙂