After the “clean and fresh” look of those early comics, Phillips spent a few years doing full-color painted comics for 2000 AD before breaking into the U.S. Phillips’s evolution as a comics artist has included a few major shifts in his approach. It was the latter two titles that published some of Phillips’s earliest work-stories featuring “ballerinas or gymnasts or girls and their ponies or wicked stepmothers,” as he puts it-pushing him outside the comfort zone of the Spider-Man and Conan comics he loved as a boy. The UK comics business at the time was divided into “boys” comics such as Crisis and 2000 AD and “girls” comics such as Judy and Bunty.
The class was intended for adults, but Phillips and a friend talked their way in, and soon he found himself “ghosting” pages for his teacher. Then, at age thirteen, Phillips enrolled in a night-school art class taught by a local comics artist, Ken Houghton. That sort of made you realize that you could actually get a job drawing.” “Me and a couple of friends used to make comic strips when we were maybe ten or eleven,” he remembers of his childhood in the United Kingdom, “and we had a strip in the local newspaper when I was twelve. But unlike most artistic kids, he was getting paid for it.
Like many artists, Phillips has been drawing for as long as he can remember. From Sweet Smell of Success to On the Waterfront to The Flight of the Phoenix to the upcoming Buck and the Preacher, Phillips is responsible for some of our most memorable covers, showcasing a dazzling array of styles and techniques while always being recognizable as the work of a singular artist. Combining the expressive power of a great storyteller with the skill of a master craftsman, Sean Phillips is an artist we’ve come back to time and time again at Criterion.
0 kommentar(er)
