I just can't even bad art. I just can't even.

deathlyillandalwaysbusy:

So I've started reading Gail Simone's run on Birds of Prey and enjoying it greatly. And you know what, if you want to draw butts in taking up 3/4ths of every panel, okay, I can actually handle that pretty well. But JESUS FUCK, ED BENES. WHAT THE HELL.
I'll give you fair warning: this is a pretty pic-heavy post. It's also cuss-heavy.

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Reblogging because funny is funny.

I quibble with a couple things, the big shot with the 'black hole' booty was never actually in the book, but the line made me laugh so hard I can't argue with it.

Bop was a joy to write, and most of the artists were pretty respectful but it DID ask them to flex different muscles. A lot of artists just aren't used to having to draw women when they AREN'T posing sexily and some really struggled with it.

Agreed, the belly window is goofy. I love that outfit without the belly window, though, with the white forming a cross on Huntress' outfit.

Ack, the bare midriff shirt thing. This is inexplicable to me. For a while, WHENEVER I asked for a woman, no matter what age, to be in casual clothes, they always, always put the women in bare midriff shirts. It just got to be so odd, in one issue, not drawn by Ed, virtually every woman in the book is wearing a bare-midriff shirt. It still drives me nuts. It got to where I literally had to specify in the script that they were NOT wearing bare-midriff shirts, and even then I still got them, sometimes.

Ed Benes…I'll be honest, I am aware that he could be way excessive (although pin-up art does seem different from interior art), and sometimes it could be annoying.  But I loved working with him for the way he drew the characters' emotions, he's phenomenal at capturing the mood and tone I wanted. With Ed and with Nicola, I can go way, way more subtle in the script, I can ask for complexities that a lot of critically beloved artists simply cannot deliver. I loved that about working with him.

I did try to poke fun at his excesses in the book a couple times, affectionately, but I think it backfired and just looked like pandering. My miscalculation.

Ed's story is kind of amazing, I find it really inspiring. Ed doesn't speak much English, and he hates to fly, so he rarely leaves his very small, very rural Brazilian village. I gather they didn't have electricity in the homes til fairly recently.

My understanding, as told to me by a friend of his, is that Ed came from a very small town, very remote, in Brazil, and that he was given a single Conan comic when he was a kid. And the only art supplies he had were scrap paper and a ball-point pen. So he taught himself to draw by drawing the figures from Conan over and over and over, all in ball-point pen on whatever paper he could find.

There's something very amazing to me about that, the dedication of the artist. Ed is quite revered among Brazilian artists, there's a whole school of people trying to draw like him. And I know that a lot of it is for the action and the sex stuff, but for me, his real value is in the acting.

I got way off the subject. Sorry.

But I thought the post was really funny and well written, thanks for the giggles on a crap morning!  And I do feel your pain a bit, and these aren't even the examples that really got to me. ;)