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Notes -
One of my earliest memories is of walking through an airport, and seeing the cover art of a book: one of the volumes of Mike Mignola's Ffafhard and the Grey Mouser. Cliches for the experience abound; I would say Amagari-Fault-style "this hole was made for me" comes close. It was the first time I experienced art as art, and the impression was indelible. It was several years later when I found a couple volumes of Hellboy in a book store, and devoured them, and couldn't get over the artwork. Mignola's my favorite artist, always has been and always will be.
Angelus Novus (and Klee's other work) is a huge part of where Mignola's art came from. The influence is obvious and unmistakable in how the lines work. The dick-fingers and dick-toes and Dungeon-Soup-Barbarian facial expression are obstacles, but there is significant power in the lines themselves, power that I could personally describe in objective terms at some length. Klee is not my favorite artist and never will be, but I will argue that he's not an example of an artist who only exists in the artist's statement.
Huh. That's a little frustrating because I can spell out, if not necessarily in complex or deep or particularly informed, how Mignola's art works at fundamental Technical and Arc points, in ways I can't gather from Klee's; I can show how several other artists, especially in the comic world, either descended from Mignola or evolved in parallel, in ways that I can't from Klee's work, or even (what seems to me like) Klee's better work.
But that may be, and may probably be, a limitation in myself. I don't have the abilities even basic artists develop breaking the composition into its underlying shapes and motions of lines.
I guess I'd have to ask whether that power is relevant because Klee achieved it in his works, or because he influenced it such that others could fulfill it later?
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