ORIGINAL TILTLE: "THIS WEEK IN COMICS! (5/18/11 – TRANSFORMER)"
BY JOE MCCULLOCH MAY 17, 2011 VIA THE COMICS JOURNAL
I was reading some Alejandro Jodorowsky comics last week – stuff relating to The Incal, mostly, since that’s the material that’s gotten re-released/completed lately. What interesting in reading a lot of the stuff at once is observing how much the art can change over the course of a story – a lot of these French albums take a year or more to see release, after all, and techniques are bound to shift, even as the collected editions typically released in the U.S. recall the quicker production pace of superhero comics.
One particularly striking case is that of Zoran Janjetov, a Moebius devotee who actually served as a colorist on The Incal itself. Pretty much immediately after the series finished, Jodorowsky wanted to begin on a prequel series, Avant l’Incal, and Janjetov became the artist, initially working in a manner close to Moebius’ own, but gradually moving into a beefier look as the series went on. Following its conclusion, in 1998, Jodorowsky launched a spin-off especially for Janjetov, The Technopriests.
As you can see if you stare intently at the Mortal Kombat-looking fellow at the bottom, Janjetov is working with a good amount of line shading on some of the creature designs; some early pages evidence a type of stippling effect, or tight cross-hatching. These stand in contrast with other elements of the page – not just the digital lightning effect, but the near-photographic hair texture on the bottom character’s mask and especially the eerie computer smoothness to the faces of the bottom-right characters. That last part in particular is a hallmark of the series’ colorist, Frédéric “Fred” Beltran, himself a comics artist since the late ’80s. By ’98, though, Beltran had begun working heavily with digital textures and 3D modeling, debuting his own series with Jodorowsky, Megalex, in ’99.
Megalex was initially created entirely through the use of digital modeling, as you can probably tell from the backgrounds. What’s striking, however, is the female character (I mean, aside from the obvious; and yeah, pretty much every woman in the series looks like that) – she looks remarkably similar to Janjetov’s humanoid female characters in The Technopriests, where Beltran was limited to the use of coloring, texture effects and presumably some modeling. He was also the cover artist for the series, so he’d be used to creating art that looked a bit like Janjetov’s. Yet as the series went on, a transformation seemed to occur inside:
As The 3D models are gone, replaced by a good deal of ‘traditional’ drawing. Oddly, it doesn’t look so much like Fred Beltran, as if the ‘Beltran’ that seemed to wash over The Technopriests was only ever a possibility, a construction of tools used at the time. A specific identity for a specific time, that worked best, I think, with two actors playing the role, and could later be retired in the manner of any collaboration giving way to a series of other things stated in an interview, when asked why The Technopriests seemed to begin resembling more of a Fred Beltran comic than his own: “Working the way I do with FB for a while now, I’ve come to familiarize myself with what I can expect from him. Now I know almost exactly which parts have to be done my way, and which should be left open for “Beltranization”. It’s a collective effort, and all three of us have learned to adapt to each other’s needs in order to make the whole experience more enjoyable.”
Essentially, a type of parity had been struck between ‘artist’ and ‘colorist’ – certainly Janjetov began using less inky techniques, focusing on forms that could be smoothed over with Beltran’s digital stylings. Yet because the latter party had focused so much on transforming his own solo art into a digital construct, to the curious (and English-only) reader he can seem like even less a co-artist on The Technopriests than a dominant force, this despite not apparently being the first party to create visuals on the page. It’s interesting, this trend – Beltran was also instrumental in the early ’00s re-coloring effort on The Incal and Avant l’Incal, replacing the original colors’ brightness with a dimmer, more ‘realistic’ set of environmental effects. Ironically — and while Beltran did not personally handle all of this re-colorization — this eliminated Janjetov’s own presence as colorist on The Incal, and put his Avant l’Incal work a tiny bit more in line with his later, Beltran-associated art.
Perhaps some further, interesting material comes from the artists parting ways. In 2008, two years after The Technopriests ended, Janjetov again participated in a related project, taking over for artist Travis Charest on Weapons of the Metabaron. As far as the credits go, Janjetov appears to have done his own colors on the project, a little brighter than Beltran’s, with figure work that leaves his recent art behind to return to a strong Moebius influence, perhaps in recognition of the Metabaron character’s origins in those original comics, and maybe to set himself apart from Charest all the easier. These two artists were certainly not collaborations.
As for Beltran, the third and final volume of Megalex was released the same year, ’08. It has yet to see English-language release, but I don’t think words are necessary to convey the new evolution in his own work:
The 3D models are gone, replaced by a good deal of ‘traditional’ drawing. Oddly, it doesn’t look so much like Fred Beltran, as if the ‘Beltran’ that seemed to wash over The Technopriests was only ever a possibility, a construction of tools used at the time. A specific identity for a specific time, that worked best, I think, with two actors playing the role, and could later be retired in the manner of any collaboration giving way to a series of other things.
BY JOE MCCULLOCH MAY 17, 2011 VIA THE COMICS JOURNAL
I was reading some Alejandro Jodorowsky comics last week – stuff relating to The Incal, mostly, since that’s the material that’s gotten re-released/completed lately. What interesting in reading a lot of the stuff at once is observing how much the art can change over the course of a story – a lot of these French albums take a year or more to see release, after all, and techniques are bound to shift, even as the collected editions typically released in the U.S. recall the quicker production pace of superhero comics.
One particularly striking case is that of Zoran Janjetov, a Moebius devotee who actually served as a colorist on The Incal itself. Pretty much immediately after the series finished, Jodorowsky wanted to begin on a prequel series, Avant l’Incal, and Janjetov became the artist, initially working in a manner close to Moebius’ own, but gradually moving into a beefier look as the series went on. Following its conclusion, in 1998, Jodorowsky launched a spin-off especially for Janjetov, The Technopriests.
As you can see if you stare intently at the Mortal Kombat-looking fellow at the bottom, Janjetov is working with a good amount of line shading on some of the creature designs; some early pages evidence a type of stippling effect, or tight cross-hatching. These stand in contrast with other elements of the page – not just the digital lightning effect, but the near-photographic hair texture on the bottom character’s mask and especially the eerie computer smoothness to the faces of the bottom-right characters. That last part in particular is a hallmark of the series’ colorist, Frédéric “Fred” Beltran, himself a comics artist since the late ’80s. By ’98, though, Beltran had begun working heavily with digital textures and 3D modeling, debuting his own series with Jodorowsky, Megalex, in ’99.
Megalex was initially created entirely through the use of digital modeling, as you can probably tell from the backgrounds. What’s striking, however, is the female character (I mean, aside from the obvious; and yeah, pretty much every woman in the series looks like that) – she looks remarkably similar to Janjetov’s humanoid female characters in The Technopriests, where Beltran was limited to the use of coloring, texture effects and presumably some modeling. He was also the cover artist for the series, so he’d be used to creating art that looked a bit like Janjetov’s. Yet as the series went on, a transformation seemed to occur inside:
As The 3D models are gone, replaced by a good deal of ‘traditional’ drawing. Oddly, it doesn’t look so much like Fred Beltran, as if the ‘Beltran’ that seemed to wash over The Technopriests was only ever a possibility, a construction of tools used at the time. A specific identity for a specific time, that worked best, I think, with two actors playing the role, and could later be retired in the manner of any collaboration giving way to a series of other things stated in an interview, when asked why The Technopriests seemed to begin resembling more of a Fred Beltran comic than his own: “Working the way I do with FB for a while now, I’ve come to familiarize myself with what I can expect from him. Now I know almost exactly which parts have to be done my way, and which should be left open for “Beltranization”. It’s a collective effort, and all three of us have learned to adapt to each other’s needs in order to make the whole experience more enjoyable.”
Essentially, a type of parity had been struck between ‘artist’ and ‘colorist’ – certainly Janjetov began using less inky techniques, focusing on forms that could be smoothed over with Beltran’s digital stylings. Yet because the latter party had focused so much on transforming his own solo art into a digital construct, to the curious (and English-only) reader he can seem like even less a co-artist on The Technopriests than a dominant force, this despite not apparently being the first party to create visuals on the page. It’s interesting, this trend – Beltran was also instrumental in the early ’00s re-coloring effort on The Incal and Avant l’Incal, replacing the original colors’ brightness with a dimmer, more ‘realistic’ set of environmental effects. Ironically — and while Beltran did not personally handle all of this re-colorization — this eliminated Janjetov’s own presence as colorist on The Incal, and put his Avant l’Incal work a tiny bit more in line with his later, Beltran-associated art.
Perhaps some further, interesting material comes from the artists parting ways. In 2008, two years after The Technopriests ended, Janjetov again participated in a related project, taking over for artist Travis Charest on Weapons of the Metabaron. As far as the credits go, Janjetov appears to have done his own colors on the project, a little brighter than Beltran’s, with figure work that leaves his recent art behind to return to a strong Moebius influence, perhaps in recognition of the Metabaron character’s origins in those original comics, and maybe to set himself apart from Charest all the easier. These two artists were certainly not collaborations.
As for Beltran, the third and final volume of Megalex was released the same year, ’08. It has yet to see English-language release, but I don’t think words are necessary to convey the new evolution in his own work:
The 3D models are gone, replaced by a good deal of ‘traditional’ drawing. Oddly, it doesn’t look so much like Fred Beltran, as if the ‘Beltran’ that seemed to wash over The Technopriests was only ever a possibility, a construction of tools used at the time. A specific identity for a specific time, that worked best, I think, with two actors playing the role, and could later be retired in the manner of any collaboration giving way to a series of other things.
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