Confessions of a Pop Fan

Friday, August 18, 2006

I FEEL WELL ENOUGH TO TELL YOU WHAT YOU CAN DO...

Marc spotted another review of Love the Way You Love. This time over at Broken Frontier. It's a bit all over the place with us, but Marc comes out nicely.

Snippet: "Marc Ellerby’s panel constructions are very manga, but his figure work is squarely in the tradition of American cartooning. This gives his illustrations a puckish, humorous quality that engages both the eye and our sense of who and what his characters are. And for all the whimsy and anti-gravity hair, the tone of the artwork doesn’t overshadow the serious aspects of Rich’s script, as Ellerby captures his characters’ emotions quite well. He does just as well with conveying their ages, portraying them as young adults who don’t look like teenagers. This gives his characters a more mature affect than his style would suggest. With subtleties like this, the reader sometimes sees Ellerby’s images struggling with the rough patches in Rich’s script. There’s room for improvement, but right now Ellerby is a more developed artist than Rich is a writer, and it shows."

Yowch!

After I read it, I wrote Marc back and noted how there seems to be no consensus on this book. In one review, I'm the greatest thing ever and Marc is a villain, in another I have tied him to the railroad tracks while twirling my moustache. Some people have loved it straight up, and others have hated it all the way through to the backlist. To me that suggests that we're doing something a little more interesting here. To be universally loved could translate to a flash in the pan, and we all know what universally loathed means.

Anyway, I'm making good progress on volume 4, and Marc is somewhere around the 1/3 mark on volume 3. He also did the cover for the "Love the Way You Love" single: