The also artists

It took me a stupidly long time to really appreciate Dave Cockrum at his peak in the late seventies. I always liked his art, and always thought it was dynamic and exciting, but compared to the smooth lines of Byrne and Austin, his work was a little flat.

He was still a great artist when he returned to the Uncanny X-Men after Byrne left - he did some of the very best shouting faces in the business - but it did feel like a step backwards into a simpler line.

In the worlds of regular monthly and weekly comics, there is sometimes such a gargantuan talent that they overshadow other artists. It happened twice with  Pat Mills comics in the 1980s, (three if you count Redondo's Nemesis,) with SMS on the ABC Warriors and Dave Pugh on Slaine. 

SMS was an excellent artist, with a fine, detailed line and a very European sense of design, and could do some amazing character work. But he was working on the strip at the same time as Simon Fucking Bisley, who had been given his big break. Bisley wasn't even into his seminal Horned God stuff, but his ABC Warriors was monstrously good, you could feel the weight of all that hot metal and sweaty chrome. His art was full of slick nightmares, with an undercurrent of the darkest humour. 

Before that, Slaine was heading in a new direction with Time Killer, and Dave Pugh did some excellent work, particularly in the battle scenes, and did some wonderfully squidgy faces. But this was also Glen Fabry's time to shine, and his work was astronomically appealing to 11-year-olds. His work had such texture, such shading, such inspired posing. 

Back over in American comics, you had artists like Rick Leonardi, who was that guy on the X-Men in the late eighties. He was always producing the goods, but was frequently overshadowed by Marc Silvestri and Jim Lee, and never really getting his teeth into anything, until they gave him a shot with Spider-Man 2099.

All of these artists were exceptional craftsmen, and in other ages might have been superstars. But there is a bright side to their over-shadowed efforts, because things you don't appreciate at the time can be re-examined and enjoyed on their own merits, and I'll happily go back to Cockrum, SMS, Pugh and Leonardi to see what I missed the first time.