Comin' Atcha

My favorite artist of all time has to be Jose Louis Garcia-Lopez. He's just awesome. I had so much trouble figuring out which picture to use as the example of his work, because just about everything he does is amazing. The only reason I chose this picture of Superboy is because it's a very similar pose. My goal is to have all of his work someday. Anyway, as a comic artist myself, I try to pull ideas from him. One of his most characteristic traits is how he has figures behave in perspective. What this means is that characters on the 2-dimensional page look as if they are in 3-d environments. Theoretically, most any good artist does this, but Garcia Lopez does it in sometimes very extreme, and other times very subtle ways (other artists to look at would be Jack Kirby and Neal Adams).

I just did a page yesterday, and this panel is very much in this style. In this case, the hand that breaks the panel walls helps lead the eye into the next panel (to see the context, you'll just have to buy the comic!). Generally, though, having figures whose hands or feet are coming at the reader pull the reader into the image. It's like characters are literally popping off the page.