Masters of Style: Woodring, Fleeter, Muradov & Hernandez | Panel

As a graphic designer, I notice that there are majorly two different kinds of designers who get hired. One that is hired for being a master for their particular style, and another that is hired because they are masters of being a chameleon and adapting to the style needed for a particular job. I feel that can be similar for illustration and comics and that both have their positives and negatives. 

It’s easy to spend a lifetime figuring out what you love to do and sometimes even longer trying to figure out your sense of style for your illustration personality. How does one find this style? Or does the style find them? Does the style depend on the story or content at hand or does an overarching style work across very different projects?

Comic Con @ Home held a panel called “Masters of Style” in which these questions and more were asked and answered by some of the most iconic comic book illustrators throughout the years. Below is a description of the panel and who was in it, and below that are my favorite key points from the panel. 

The diverse but instantly recognizable styles of master cartoonists Jim Woodring (The Frank Book, Poochytown), Mary Fleener (Life of the Party, Billie the Bee), Roman Muradov (Vanishing Act), and Gilbert Hernandez (Love and Rockets) inspire many admirers and imitators. Join them for a discussion of line, color, abstraction, and the choice to hone (or not to hone) a single visual style of the course of a comics career. Moderated by Fantagraphics publisher Gary Groth.

  • Groth asks did you choose your style, or did your style choose you?
    • Hernandez says style chose him, he says he does not have a particular style, it’s like a buffet. He says he does not have natural drawing skills. 
    • Flener responds that she is struggling so hard right now drawing people but she chose that style of hers and always felt that she never really liked her style when she was younger. Felt that something was “missing”. She says she had her “bingo” moment from a back cover of a bob armstrong comic and deliberately swiped that style because she felt that is something she could have fun with. So she chose this style. 
    • Woodring claims he has always been a terrible draftsman. He says he still needs reference when drawing things like his hands but says the struggle keeps your edge keen. As for style, he admires the clean, strong and virtuaustic way where the content shines through and that’s what he strives for. He says though for hsi Frank comic style, it somehow suggested itself to him. 
    • Muradov says he is a believer in free will, that we make no decisions at all and everything is chaos. But he thinks he made decisions but it could be his brain tricking him to believe he is alive. Each book he makes is in a different style. He says he just plagiarizes badly and that’s his style. Early on in his 20’s he tried to exhaust as many things as he could but now later he sees himself narrowing things down. 

  • Speaking of consistency and continuity, Hernandez says he hears a lot of students don’t want to get into comics because they are not able to constantly draw a character in different angles and it’s the same character. But even the great Jack Kirby, he would draw things so fast that in later frames details would be missing. Kirby rarely inked his own stuff, and during inking that’s where people can find mistakes. Hernandez says for him drawing the same character is easy, but using the imaginary camera to make the scene not boring while staying consistent for the background is the hard part.
  • Groth asks Woodring, between freewill and determination, if he chose the style he needed to choose because it was based on his own necessity. Woodring responded that as soon as he thought he had anything that was halfway decent he felt that was a breakthrough he ran with it. He says he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life trying to do something, he wanted to work with something and once he had a tool he wanted to start using it. 
  • Hernandez says there are a lot of mainstream artists that are more interested in the drawing and line trying to make it the coolest they can. Indie artists seem to focus more on telling their story and the observation of the world. It’s your personality doing the drawing. Plus there are a lot of shortcuts because you don’t have to really fully represent things, they can be tweaked. For him he draws in different styles also because certain styles wont work for certain stories. 
  • Fleener loves to do freak out scenes to take the geometric scene as far as she can because she likes to have fun when she’s drawing and also have fun having happy accidents getting really loose with things. 

  • Groth asks if style follows content or if it’s the other way around. Does the style follow the content you innately want to tell. 
    • Woodring says things can be stylistically linked but can come from entirely different places within a person. And when talking about style for him in his work, he says the style just pops into his head but he will make sure he stays true to the marching orders and does it. 
  • Hernandez says content and style are one. It’s his personality, and he’s able to draw it on the paper and this his little niche. He says authors do that, they are able to put themselves into their content. The style comes out of who they are. 
  • Woodring felt that developing a style is like staking out territory. In earlier years when working on his style, if he felt he might have a similar style to someone, but would stop because he didn’t want his work to resemble someone else’s because that would be distracting, people might see influences but he didn’t want that to be the headlines. He wanted something original in some way that could stand in its own way.
  • Fleener gave the advice to try to be original, try to keep changing and growing. 
  • Hernandez says sometimes it helps to put yourself into a character, like how an actor does, and this helps sometimes with cartooning. It can bring something out of you to do something bigger and better. 

Is trying to find a style holding you back from pursuing your passions? Is your style more of a chameleon based on the project, or do you have an overarching style? Who are some of your influences and have you checked out any of the panelists art? Let us know in the comments and we will catch you same Nerd-Time, same Nerd-Channel.

If you enjoyed this post and want to watch the full video panel, HERE is the link.

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