I took a panel from an old Flash Gordon strip and tried to break it down to figure out the secrets and see if I can make them work for me.
It's lighting and shadows. That's the secret. With me you can see that I use my lines to draw shapes and make outlines to show the object. It's all shadows and highlights with these guys. Dale (?) her clothes and the man behind her were all defined by the shadows on them. The folds I drew out were rendered by the shadows they cast and not the folds themselves.
Y'know. Painterly.
I'll bet the money in my pocket that Dale and Flash were also drawn using live models or photos of them. Going through other strips they always looked posed, they lack the exaggerated caricature of the rest of the characters, and their hands are normal human sized. (Most comics make hands bigger than normal because they're basically tiny little sausages at the end of an arm.)
They stick out like a normal sized thumb.
What have I learned?
- If you want realism, use references.
- Even back then readers rarely look past the bodies and faces so you can get away with fudging some details for the rest of the panel.
- Stick your heroes on a dark background to make them glow heroically.
- Your details don't have to be accurate. Dale's earrings and other adornments aren't perfectly even like they were machined. They look like cheap shit cutouts.
- Phones are still shit ways to read a comic. The text height that served a newspaper strip well is hard to make out on a tiny, high contrast and over-saturated phone screen.
I'm going to try to apply the fourth point to my art. I often get obsessed with things like desks and bottles and trying to make sure everything looks machined. The reader can handle irregularities because that's not where their eyes go.
Of course these days their eyes barely register the characters since they're scrolling past everything so quickly, but people pick up the bad habits they're encouraged to have.
I'm looking at you, Naver Webtoon.