Your New Favorite: George Gousis
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Mar 3 2010, 6:03 AM
Since I've been writing comics, I've had occasion to search through a lot of sketchblogs and portfolio sites and DeviantArt pages and whatnot looking for collaborators, and I've discovered tons of excellent cartoonists that I otherwise might never have known. So I thought it might be nice to introduce the rest of world to a few of my favorites.
This week: George (or Giorgos) Gousis
Gousis is a Greek artist who's only just starting to get work stateside... you may have seen his story"Curse of Silence" in Popgun v.3, "Curse of Silence" in Outlaw Territory, or his Zuda comic "Bow and Arrow Detective Agency." He also apparently does quite a bit of illustration work for the Athens equivalent of the Village Voice.
Apart from his great sense of shadow and color, I like Gousis's work its wonderful sense of the absurd, and the dirty details that make stones feel pock-marked with age and walls feel like their just about to start peeling wallpaper.
You know how at a certain point in sci fi they moved away from the previous standard of ultra-clean and smooth and realized that adding a little dirt and grime to their space ships would lend more "realism" to their stories? (i.e. Firefly, or Battlestar, or, hell, Star Wars, even.) Gousis's work, to my eye, has a similar quality of being grounded in a mundane, almost squalid world. This works great when he's illustrating something squalid (like the 2nd page below), but just as well, in a counter-intuitive way, when he's illustrating something like the image of Sir Edmund Hillary scaling Mt. Everest--it's the details in the mountain that sell the transcendence in the sunrise behind them.
Similarly, his sense of the absurd (on display in, say, that image of the alien mugging a man and his duck) animates even otherwise mundane sequences. Good stuff.
But enough jibber jabber! Art!
Check back next week (or thereabouts--I know I skipped last week, sorry about that) for another New Favorite!
Previously: Ming Doyle, Connor Willumsen, Chris Brunner, Evan Bryce, Ed Tadem.
Since I've been writing comics, I've had occasion to search through a lot of sketchblogs and portfolio sites and DeviantArt pages and whatnot looking for collaborators, and I've discovered tons of excellent cartoonists that I otherwise might never have known. So I thought it might be nice to introduce the rest of world to a few of my favorites.This week: George (or Giorgos) Gousis
Gousis is a Greek artist who's only just starting to get work stateside... you may have seen his story"Curse of Silence" in Popgun v.3, "Curse of Silence" in Outlaw Territory, or his Zuda comic "Bow and Arrow Detective Agency." He also apparently does quite a bit of illustration work for the Athens equivalent of the Village Voice.
Apart from his great sense of shadow and color, I like Gousis's work its wonderful sense of the absurd, and the dirty details that make stones feel pock-marked with age and walls feel like their just about to start peeling wallpaper.
You know how at a certain point in sci fi they moved away from the previous standard of ultra-clean and smooth and realized that adding a little dirt and grime to their space ships would lend more "realism" to their stories? (i.e. Firefly, or Battlestar, or, hell, Star Wars, even.) Gousis's work, to my eye, has a similar quality of being grounded in a mundane, almost squalid world. This works great when he's illustrating something squalid (like the 2nd page below), but just as well, in a counter-intuitive way, when he's illustrating something like the image of Sir Edmund Hillary scaling Mt. Everest--it's the details in the mountain that sell the transcendence in the sunrise behind them.
Similarly, his sense of the absurd (on display in, say, that image of the alien mugging a man and his duck) animates even otherwise mundane sequences. Good stuff.
But enough jibber jabber! Art!
Check back next week (or thereabouts--I know I skipped last week, sorry about that) for another New Favorite!
Previously: Ming Doyle, Connor Willumsen, Chris Brunner, Evan Bryce, Ed Tadem.
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