…and my God, is the art bad.

I’m a cartoonist when I’m not writing here or being a historian. I don’t claim to be the best cartoonist ever – in fact, I’m far from it. I do, however, write my own webcomic, which is here, and even my art is better than this. Fortunately for the artist, he or she wasn’t credited by the Nuggets. If I’d drawn this or written the script for it, I wouldn’t want anyone to know it was me, either.

Here’s the cover:

That doesn’t look so bad, I suppose, but the cover art is usually done in more detail than the art inside the comic since it’s designed to catch the reader’s eye and make them pick up the book. A lot of the facial features really disturb me, though – there’s something weird about the way they’re drawn and I can’t put my finger on it.

All four pages – yes, four pages – of the comic, along with my art critic comments, after the jump.

Um…not sure where to start here, but it looks like what was done was a photo of a van was taken and then drawn over in Photoshop. References are fine and all – I even encourage tracing over the outline of an object if you can’t quite figure out how to make it look just right. The coloring is really sloppy, though. If you look at the closeup of Rocky, you can see white spaces in between the colors – whoever was coloring this didn’t care too much about the details.

Actually, that’s why the people look weird, too – same technique of taking photos and coloring over them and adding filters in Photoshop.

Anyhow…Avengers, Assemble!

The script really, really hurts on this page. Like, seriously. Additionally, the way Rocky is edited in is very bizarre and it’s pretty clear that they didn’t draw him in separately each time. It really bothers me that the light sources are inconsistent, too – the players are shaded in, but Rocky isn’t.

Also, Tynomite is not the Stig, so we can put that rumor to rest right now.

Everyone’s poses just seem so stilted, which really doesn’t work if you’re going for an action comic, like this one clearly is. Also, the bowling ball isn’t in the right place (it should be further forwards). It’s okay for characters to occasionally pop out of the panel, though – that does make things more dynamic. However, they’re not changing the angle that we’re seeing the characters at – too many frontal views.

Okay, so the van isn’t on a road or anything? It’s just there and the stadium’s floating in space? And why is the rest of the team in shadow? And could somebody tell me why they’ve got a magical Bible that allows them to talk ‘teamness,’ whatever that means?

This is supposed to be a cliffhanger, I think. It’s not a very good one since instead of making me want to read more it just leaves me utterly confused and depressed that someone drew it.

I don’t even know what to say…I just hope that if the Nuggets do decide to continue this comic thing they’re doing that they go out there and hire an actual cartoonist. It’s important when you’re doing something like this that you go out and take your time to really draw everything in. It’s a short comic, so there’s no reason to spare the details and whatnot…

Yeah. I just hope things improve over time. Either that or the Nuggets stop running this because people are making fun of it.

All images courtesy of the Denver Nuggets Facebook page.