#Pat Ollife

[biggoonie]

HAWKMAN #16

written by ROBERT VENDITTI art and cover by PAT OLLIFFE and TOM PALMER variant cover by INHYUK LEE A wounded Hawkman and the Shade are forced to follow the newly empowered Shadow Master into the Shadowlands. In this place, the all-new and all-powerful Shadow Thief controls all. What hopes do a weakened Hawkman and Shade have against a god of shadows? ON SALE 09.11.19 $3.99 US | 32 PAGES FC | RATED T This issue will ship with two covers. Please see the order form for details.

[alexdrawsagain]

Best artist that draws Spidey? Personally for me it's Ramos

Anyone here who’s been following the blog for awhile knows my deep deep love and appreciation for Steve Ditko. I can completely understand why most people gloss over him as their favorite because most people appreciate him the same way you do Abraham Lincoln. He did something important and that’s it. For me, I love him because of how unique his art is. Sure there are many artists who’ve come by who can draw prettier girls, more dynamic angles, bring more power to their art. But to me Ditko brought a special quality that had enchanted me ever since I was 8 years old.

But my runner ups are as follows 90′s Mark Bagley, John Romita Jr. when he gives a damn, and Pat Ollife.

[alexdrawsagain]

What is your favorite run on Spider-Man outside of the classic Lee and Ditko books?

I’ve read my fair share of spider-man but honestly i either read sporadic bits or if i do read big chunks, i can’t say i enjoy it too much. And frequently i find myself (at least when it comes to american comics) where it’ll be that i really only like certain interpretations of a character. At one point i simply said, maybe spider-man is a character i like in theory more than i do in comics. Which saddened me greatly til i found the stuff i love and will not shut up about. Outside of that here’s some stuff i enjoyed.

To answer your question, the only one that comes to mind immediately is untold tales of spider-man which was like, hey here’s a bunch of stuff that happened in his teenage years. The real draw was actually that Kurt Busiek of Astro City fame and Pat Ollife who did the Spider-girl comic teamed up together to do Spider-man and i was over the moon. Yeah the new villains were lame and had forgettable 90′s designs/names but even so, Busiek can spin gold outta hay. I look at this a lot for the AU.

In addition to that, I also really love the Tom DeFalco/ Pat Oliffe run on Spider-girl (cheating i know) which was such a charming book and i loved most of the rogues gallery in that book, and it was just fun. And it’s just so teen 90′s.

I remember one of the first spider-man comics i read regularly was also the marvel adventures line which was an all ages line of comics that were utterly cracktastic. There would be a whole gamut of artists working there from more run of the mill superhero guys, cartoony ones, and the ones that were actually really pretty neat like Mike Norton.

Here are some of the runs i’ve read that were somewhere between okay, meh, and maybe good but the jury is still out.

Ultimate Spider-man (Bendis/Bagley) As much as i love the updates and all Bendis shut the hell up and let the art breathe goddammit. Also these arcs are taking too damn long and you’re overusing decomposition. Still nuggets of gold in here. And i’ve been known to look at parts for inspiration.

JMS/Romita JR: This art is beautiful but even this can’t liven up this rather dull book. A lot of mystical updates fell flat because clearly a radioactive spider bite is less believable than spider-god totem magical destiny crud. Even so, when it comes to this AU, some of the emotional/heart to heart things from this book are always in the back of my head when i write future installments.

Wolfman/Romita JR: I wanted to like it more than i actually did, and somehow i also found the whole hobgoblin thing underwhemling. And Romita’s art here was also disappointing because there are times it’s really good and the other where Peter Parker looks so weird with a tiny face on this huge head. Still the juggernaut story is a great story.

Slott/Various: Some damn fine work and wrote one of my favorite mysterio stories ever. Works with some rather gifted artists like marcos martin. And that good is heavily overshadowed by the bad which stems from a very skewed understanding of the mythos and characters. And him taking the book in strange new places is valid but damn if that was not enjoyable. Unfortunately, i don’t have the same affinity for his pet characters that he kept trying to spoonfeed me.

Lee/Romita: This is some good stuff, and i should like this more than i do. I mean, Romita SR could tell a story much more cinematically than ditko. The girls are incredibly pretty. It’s bigger and glossier and much more dramatic in a soap opera way. Reading it, i felt like i saw the trends that would define superhero comics for years and still to this day. And yet…….i don’t enjoy it as much as i do the ditko stuff. That’s just me.

Nick Spencer: Jury’s still out, but this is actually pretty good. And i feel like it’s both returning Spider-man to his roots but also bringing in a lot of stuff that i’ve missed for a long time. God how much i’ve missed Mary Jane Watson. And i like what he’s doing with the extended cast and rogues gallery.

in short, i like spider-man being more of an all ages thing akin to an animated adaption (like spectacular spider-man) where the drama isn’t overdone but it’s there, it’s colorful, offbeat, has personality, endearing, and funny. And a lot of the spider-man i don’t like tend to descend into soap opera crap, Peter has to be 100% screw up that everyone hates either because he’s stupid or an asshole, and the stories aren’t dumb in a fun way but just plain old head bangingly awful, and the art is glossy but interchangeable and has no soul. A person like Greg Land has no business being on a comic that demands fluidity and energy.

Anyhoo, thank you for coming to my ted talk.