Must say that I like the rather atmospheric panel 2, with ol’ Willy Pete’s word-balloon tail snaking into the background and looping behind that pillar. Moody and ominous!
Should be noted that I’m a semi-closeted fan of stark, high-contrast black and white artwork, an appreciation which is often difficult to indulge due to my character-design tendencies. That is, the stylized, manga-influenced facial architectures that I prefer—especially for female characters—don’t lend themselves as well to bold shadows and intense chiaroscuro as do more realistically oriented chara-design approaches. Still, I’ve long toyed around with brief forays into what I refer to as “harsh B&W” rendering, dating back even to my high school and Kubert School days.
That’s also why I get a tad annoyed when, after almost every g-d time I post a high-contrast B&W piece, someone inevitably chimes in, “Hey, this reminds me of Sin City!” Listen, pal, I was playing around with high-contrast, ink-intensive illustration techniques long before Frank Miller’s noir series was ever published. In fact, my primary influence for “harsh B&W” imagery—and, I suspect, an even bigger influence on 90s-era Miller artwork—was Jim Steranko’s starkly beautiful Chandler: Red Tide graphic novel. I only ever saw a mere handful of pages from that project, but they inspired me greatly in my periodic stabs at high-contrast rendering.
However, I can’t claim that this particular story’s mixed Sharpie®-marker-and-pencils medium make for truly “harsh B&W” artwork. Later on in Empowered, circa vol. 3 or so, I would switch over to a far more high-contrast approach of Sharpies®-only rendering for an occasional story or two. In fact, I’m not sure that this story’s specific mixed-media approach ever gets used again… No, wait, that’s technically not true; presently, I do use Sharpies® to fill in large areas of black on my otherwise penciled pages, in an attempt to save my oft-ailing drawing hand a little stress.
Harshness-wise, though, hard to beat the idea of a supervillain who skull-f**ks his victims to death, huh? “Harsh B&W,” indeed.
-Adam Warren
