My first 13th Dimension article of 2026! 1986: Comics’ Watershed Year — 40 YEARS LATER

[AndyFish]

While Curt Swan's art wasn't flashy I didn't find it bland, and it was my absolute best friend Paul Ryan (RIP) who really got me to appreciate Swan. Ironically, Ryan's art had a Swan quality to it. Gibbons art is very bland to me and once again, Sprang, you nailed it for me-- it was too kid friendly for my tastes. It's a crazy nit pick for me but the way he drew chairs was a great example of how it didn't work for me, he drew them using strict perspective lines as if any chair in the world is completely 90 degree angles-- they'd be the most uncomfortable things in the world. As Will Eisner told me personally when I was in his class at SVA if you can't draw everyday items that people are very familiar with you're going to pull them out of the story quickly.

[BiffPow]

he drew them using strict perspective lines as if any chair in the world is completely 90 degree angles-- they'd be the most uncomfortable things in the world.

Reminds me of something I once read that Frank Lloyd Wright said when he was asked what his idea of Hell would be:

“Being forced to sit in one of my chairs.”

[AndyFish]

That's a perfect example!

[Jczernich]

Wow, TDKR, Year One and Daredevil: Born Again all in the same year. Miller was on fire in '86, but I guess it's true what they say about "the light that burns brightest."

For me, Colan only ever really "worked" when inked by Tom Palmer on Tomb of Dracula. There's an "unfinished" quality to his work that puts a lot of responsibility on the inker, and honestly I think his style was so different from what anyone else could or wanted to do that most collaborations ended badly. Somewhat counter-intuitively, I did kind of like his team up with Tony DeZuniga on the "Phantom Zone" mini-series; there was a horror angle to that story that would normally be 100% at odds with Superman's universe, but the jarring peculiarity of the art made it work.

Andy, it's interesting to hear you didn't care for the art in Watchmen. I've never known how to feel about it, since Gibbons has what I'd almost call a "kid-friendly," Silver Age style that seems totally wrong for a story that deals with such dark themes. Sometimes I felt it worked in the same way that Will Eisner's Spirit sometimes portrayed intense violence in a "cartoony" style, but in the main I found Gibbon's art was too "bland" even for a Curt Swan enthusiast like me. I preferred him as a writer really, on jobs like "Batman vs Predator" and "World's Finest."

The whole first half of the 80s was an exciting time for me, what with books like American Flagg, Swamp Thing, Simonson's Thor, Miller's Daredevil, etc. It felt like I was being rewarded for sticking with comics into my late teens and early 20s when most of my friends had moved on. "See? I always told you this medium had potential!" But it would only be a few years before that all went out the window with the speculation boom, gimmick covers, Image Comics, the "grim and gritty" craze, etc. By 1993 or so I was gone for good. In retrospect I never did "grow out of" comics; instead they got too "adult" for me. In that sense, "watershed" is the right word for 1986 because it may be the closest thing we have to a clear inflection point between "apex of comics evolution" and "beginning of the end."

Yeah, there was some good stuff in 1993 but not to the degree of quality of the late 80's.