blogging by Andrew Wickliffe


Black Widow (2001) #3


Bw3

Yuck, there’s a lot of design work from Hampton this issue.

A painter shouldn’t do eighties advertising style design. It just doesn’t work out.

Oddly, nothing works in this comic. Well, except some of Hampton’s skies. He has some beautiful upstate New York blue skies with clouds here.

Otherwise, his work is just wrong throughout. It gets even worse when he’s got to do talking heads scenes and relies on the design stuff. I guess it’s not as static as doing paintings, but—combined with Grayson and Rucka’s weak dialogue—the scenes don’t work.

At the end, the writers try a lot to make the Marvel Universe seem really dark and complicated—way too complicated for someone like Daredevil to understand—and it all comes off like Grayson and Rucka are writing a spec script for a bad Bond movie.

The series is a stinker, but the skies are nice.


One response to “Black Widow (2001) #3”

  1. There are very few comics that are convincing in a painted style, but Hampton has had a few of them in his day. Just not this one. He’s just not an action artist, more like a classical, portrait type of artist. Maybe not such a good sequential artist, either. He’s got a brother(?), Bo(?), who I also believe paints.
    Very decent paintings, just not comics art…

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