J. Caleb Mozzocco, off off Every Day Is Like Wednesday, muses on my own dismissal of Manara’s version of the Scarlet Witch:
Wisse is right, of course, but then, do any characters look like themselves anymore? Close your eyes and imagine just about any superhero character, the Scarlet Witch is a fine example to do with.
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Hell, if Batman and Spider-Man, whose costumes cover somewhere between 90% and 100% of their bodies, look completely different depending on which artist is drawing them. Neither DC nor Marvel use style guides or character bibles or character designs of any kind to dictate how characters look anymore. The Hulk can be anywhere from six feet tall to 20 feet tall, a foot across or eight feet across. Sometimes Spidey’s built like a praying mantis, sometimes like a runner, sometimes a swimmer, sometimes like a competitive body builder.
It doesn’t need to be this way. If you google for images of classic Belgian comics character Spirou, the images you get, whether by Franquin, Fournier or Janry, are recognisably of the same character, even if you omit the bell hop uniform he insists on wearing. (This is also a great example of how “simple” you can make a character design and still make it distinctive). Granted, European comics have always been more stringent in setting guidelines for what their characters look like than American comics have been doing for decades, but even in American comics it’s possible to have widely divergent art styles and still show the same recognisable character.
Remember the New Mutants? First ongoing X-Men spinoff series, back at a time when that was still unusual, it debuted with a graphic novel (also unusual) written by Chris Claremont (who else) with art by Bob McLeod, who also was the first artist on the series. McLeod was, how shall we say, competent but a bit dull, a bit worthy, a decent realistic draughtsman in the Adams/Byrne tradition. Then, with issue 18, a new artist took the reigns: Bill Sienkiewicz, whose style was quite different. Yet if you look at the McLeod version of the New Mutants and Sienkiewicz’s version below, you can still recognise who’s who.
Art style, interpretation, house style, even the technical competence of an artist can make a hell of a difference in what any given character looks like from issue to issue, but they can still be recognisable as that character even out of uniform (or even nude, as iirc Byrne once said). With Manara’s Scarlet Witch this just isn’t the case: strip her uniform away and she’s just another Manara woman.
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