FRAZER IRVING
1 John Higgins in Watchmen. Comics have often been described to me as “pamphlets with the same four garish colors” by illustrators who are unfamiliar with anything beyond the classic imagery of superheroes from the ’60s. With Watchmen that view is both proved and debunked. Are these colors garish? Hell, yes: retina-searing reds and vomit-inducing yellows dance on the page and assault our visual senses like a polychromatic wolverine on amphetamines…yet these are not the same four hues that characterize the comics of the swinging ’60s. John Higgins gripped a generation with some of the oddest color choices back in the ’80s, when he was tasked with adding depth and mood to Dave Gibbons’s sterling, solid line work, breaking the trend for color-coded consistency and easily recognized chromatic landmarks for a nice safe read.
2 Barry Windsor-Smith in Uncanny X-Men #205. This dude painted with the standard four-color process as if it were watercolor. Layers of yellow and magenta and cyan created shades of purple with highlights of white, in a field where such things were generally represented with broad areas of flat color. He brought complexity and realism to a world that was dominated by almost abstract colors. This was the first time I had seen hues within skin tones, the holy rule of “flesh tone” utterly broken down into its constituent parts and laid bare for the world to enjoy. It brought a grace to the page that was almost hinting at the future, a world we now live in where if you want realistic watercolored art in your superhero comics, you can have it.
3 Richard Corben’s Den. The color choices in Richard Corben’s Den are simple, almost basic, yet they are harmonious even when contrasting. The colors wouldn’t actually work in the real world: in reality, there would be far more reflected colors all over the place. But it is that incongruity that makes Den special. It is like watching an early Technicolor motion picture epic on paper. As a youth, I was turned off by the strangeness of this story, yet as an adult I shed my fear of the flesh and embraced the colors that seemed so clearly to define this story and, later, the majority of his painted output.
Frazer Irving is a popular British artist who broke in by drawing for 2000 AD. He was handpicked to be one of the artists on Grant Morrison’s acclaimed Seven Soldiers series. Irving illustrated Klarion the Witchboy and has worked with Morrison on Batman and Robin, as well. He also drew an issue of the best-selling Return of Bruce Wayne. Recently, Irving drew high praise for his recent DC Comics series Xombi with writer John Rozum. Irving is currently developing a creator-owned comic book project.