#ninoscapes

[chrislanier]

#alexnino #ninoscapes More Alex Nino comics - I’m lowkey obsessed. Today I’m posting pics from a Conan story Nino illustrated. Was never into Conan - it always seemed you’d have to have a certain level of testosterone poisoning to groove with the Hyperborean Age - and this story is no exception. It’s laughably misogynist (the hero is a guy who’s intending to murder a romantic rival, and the attitude of the story seems to be this is just Something Guys Do, and it’s a given that the woman has no say in the matter). It starts in the modern world, and then the protagonist is hurled back into his past life as Conan - in a time when Men Were Men and Pecs Were Pecs. So yeah, pretty pathological stuff. But the drawings! The layouts! The art is so gorgeous - and welcome to that split-brain issue that enthusiasts of American comics are saddled with - admiring the mastery of the art, which is tied to scripts that are often moronic or worse. https://www.instagram.com/p/CMU35FzBuyv/?igshid=1hn0ekzbqr3za

[chrislanier]

#alexnino #ninoscapes All right, last pic from this story. I love the nearly-abstracted efficiency of the face, and the expressiveness of the hand. I actually feel like I wasn’t giving Nino enough credit for throwing some subversive touches to the story - like a dummy, I didn’t notice how similar the attitude and framing of the blue face and the red face were, a few posts back. And here, the hand of the man is mirroring the hand of the beast. Nino is linking the trolls and the beasts to the protagonist, suggesting their florid savagery is actually internal - that they’re really expressions of the protagonist’s psychology. The snakelike beast becomes entwined with the man - a creature of sin and jealousy, perhaps. https://www.instagram.com/p/CMV7UKzhXVY/?igshid=1sk22dv3dyiyu

[chrislanier]

#alexnino #ninoscapes This is typical of the lack of respect cartoonists are saddled with - Nino obviously intended these pages to be printed as a two-page spread. You can see his signature near the bottom right- and I can imagine him stepping back from the art, and signing it with a flourish, justly proud of a job well done. But in this printing (Marvel Treasury Edition #19), the left hand image was printed on a right hand page, so that you can only see the right hand image separately, after you flip the page. All it would have taken to fix this was juggling one of the pin-up images that are printed in the middle of this anthology to the back of the book. I had to stitch together two photos to give a sense of what it was supposed to look like. https://www.instagram.com/p/CMVnpO8BDfL/?igshid=1mh9os1cqqvbf

[chrislanier]

#alexnino #ninoscapes On second thought, maybe Nino was working overtime to suggest there’s something not quite right with the narrator. I love the way he scribbled his face up with his eccentric shading techniques here (the whole story showcases Nino’s odd way of sculpting and scraping shadows). There’s not a credited colorist for the story, and I’m assuming Nino did the colors himself. In his credited color work, he usually deploys a really eccentric and bold palette. The colors in this story are off the hook, breaking free of naturalism with abandon. https://www.instagram.com/p/CMVTtE0hZTu/?igshid=1snt84828e5ew