Well that's not completely true but it got your attention. What I can't stand is the type of comic art that he represents. Mr. Land is a photo realist, and I don't think photo realism works well, or at all, for storytelling with sequential art. Photo realism in art terms is a school of art where the idea of the art is to make the image look like a photo. Not like real life, like a photo, including all lens distortions and all other visual quirks of the photo. The idea is that the act of making the image not what the image is of is the art. This style of art is usually done by taking a picture tracing it onto a surface and then rendering the image using the photo as reference. Now many of Mr. Land's detractors dismiss what he does as "just tracing". And while it's true that there is tracing involved in photo realism more often than not there's a bit more to it. You have to know how to draw to make this technique work, anybody can light box a picture onto a bristol board, but trust me if you don't know how to draw it will look like a kindergartner did it. There is also composition and "costuming" so I will not accept the "just a tracer" slight. I won't however defend him on his dubious choices of reference material. Just Google Greg Land and you'll know what I'm talking about. No the reason I don't care for Mr Land is not because I dislike his skills or choices but because, I think Photo realism makes for poor reading comics.
Although there is a great history of photo realistic or classically realistic art in the history of comics, most notably in the old newspaper adventure strips by the likes of Foster and Raymond. For the most part comics in my opinion have worked best with cartooning as their art. Now I don't mean strictly simple cartooning like the daily comics, Neal Adams, for example, is fairly realistic but his work is still technically cartooning. My favorite type of comic is one in which your neither looking at the pictures or reading the words, but sort of experiencing them both at the same time. If you've ever been totally immersed in a comic, especially a manga, you know what I'm talking about. But photo realism, I've found does the opposite. If anything it distances the text from the art, and you end up in a pattern of read the text look at the picture.
Also, photo realistic art has a trouble expressing character emotion. I have found, as a reader and as an artist, that to express things visually in a comic you have to "push" things a little farther. In other words if a good expressive comic where to magically become a film we would be cringing at the melodramatic acting. Cartooning does this well you can push things from a huge expression up to a wild take and still read as real. But if you do this with Photo realism, Or even painterly realism you go outside of what looks right. Realism has to work in subtle shades that make expression difficult to non existent. Unless you are an extremely exceptional artist most of the time it's just flat, after all that was the intent of the photo realism movement . In all fairness, expressiveness is not "required" in fact many artists such as Chris Ware actually choose to make their comics anywhere from less expressive to outright flat, though these artists are usually cartoonists, and they usually have some sort of alternative agenda. But in "mainstream" comics, where the practice of photo realism is more common, they tell standard narratives where expression and emotion are not only a good thing but a required thing for readers to engage.
And finally, and this is really only for "genre" comics, it interferes with the suspension of disbelief. We buy into a lot of weird shit in a super-hero comic book. And I have found I at least tend to ask less questions of it when it is good old fashion cartoon artwork. When a work is realistic, one starts to notice just how silly guys in tights fighting giant robots and gorilla's look. A good example for me is Kingdom Come. Now Kingdom Come is a great comic but Alex Ross' stunning realism does not help it a bit, in my opinion. Because as awesome as the events in the story where, you saw a guy in tights smacking stuff, and a lot of it just looks silly. I think if it where handled by an artist like George Perez, it would have been more effective, but maybe I don't know anything, it won a hell of a lot of awards.
Now to be fair since I've been slagging on High Realism especially Photo Realism in comics. There are times when it does work. A great example is "MARVELS" also Illustrated by Alex Ross. For those of you who have never read "MARVELS" it can be best summed up as the history of marvel comics as seen by a Daily Bugle photographer. Due to the concept of a ground eye view, extreme realism is a good way to go. It grounds the story in our dreary real world and makes the colorful super hero world seem great and foreign. True, some things still look cheesy, Spider-man's socks for example, but since it, operates on a "what if they where real" premise and actually, in a rare case, never tries to get you to suspend your disbelief.
So, there you go a very long answer as to why I don't like Greg Land, it's got nothing to do with "tracing", or with plagiarism accusations from fan-boys, or even the fact that he outright admits to sourcing his images from porn (which I think is pretty awesome not the using porn part but that he responds with a mas chingon "yeah I do... do something"). It's a much simpler thing, I don't think his art style works for good comic book storytelling.
Art by Greg Land and Mike Weringo Invisible Woman (C) & TM Marvel Comics
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