Thursday, June 24, 2010

High Standard of Drawing

Friday Comic Book Day.

For those of you, who enjoyed the Caniff inspired work of Dan Heilman yesterday, here's another artist who wore his influences on his sleeve. For me, George Tuska did his best work between 1952 and 1955. Before that, he had developed his own version of Milt Caniff's style, which was much lighter and used alot less shadow work. Then, in the early fifties, he started adding shadows and weight to his work. This story may very well mark the point Tuska changed his tune. It's Tuska doing Caniff by the way of Toth (who was the major stylistic infuence at Standard. In the mid-fifties he returned to a simpler and more design concious version of this style when he started doing newspaper strips. But this remains a high point. Unsigned, and in some places it might as well be by Toth, but the faces and compositions scream Tuska to me.







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