I’m fascinated by the on-going process whereby old commercial comics are being reclaimed by revisionist critics. I’m thinking here particularly of Dan’s writings on Wally Wood and Hal Foster, not to mention the Art Out of Time/Art In Time books. I’m wondering if every journeyman artist can so easily be recuperated.

Al Williamson presents an interesting test case. On the pro side, one could argue that Williamson was to Alex Raymond what Alex Toth was to Milton Caniff and Noel Sickles. Toth took the Sickles/Caniff style and whittled it down to a powerful blunt instrument.  Just so, Williamson absorbed Raymond’s already elegant line-work and refined it to the nth degree.
 
Like Toth, like Ditko, like Kane, Williamson belonged to the first generation of fan artists, enthusiasts who came into comics not through the ranks of newspaper work or from commercial art but rather as youthful mimics fueled by boyish passion.

Yet, while I have a sweet tooth for Toth, Williamson leaves me cold. Williamson’s work is too slick, too cool, too professional, boring. One could argue that Williamson didn’t so much refine Raymond’s style as create an expert but sterile pastiche, creating “fan art” in the bad sense.

Readers can decide the issue themselves by looking at the recent book, Al Williamson’s Flash Gordon: A Lifelong Vision of the Heroic.

A hint of what I mean when I say that Williamson is too professional can be seen in the curious advertising art he did in the early 1970s when Flash Gordon was recruited by Union Carbide to sell the wonders of “plastic materials.” Like Mr. McGuire in The Graduate, Flash bought into the idea that plastics are the future. You could do a very sick underground comic about what happened after Flash visited the planet Bhopal. Maybe Ming the Merciless was the real hero all along…

Labels: Al Williamson, Alex Toth, Art in Time