Writing lesson from Chuck Dixon

I wonder why I did not share this before.

I've already written extensively about by love for the late Argentinian artist JORGE ZAFFINO, whom I consider a true master of comics.

In the US, Zaffino worked at many reprises with writer Chuck Dixon, a veteran of american comics, with thousands of stories under his belt and mostly known as the writer who created Batman's villain Bane.

To me, the height of their collaboration was reached on the one-shot book Seven Block, first published for Epic, a now defunct Marvel Comics imprint for more mature, creator-owned material.

The book has been reprinted in black and white by IDW, but seems to be unfortunately out-of-print.

Like much of Dixon's output, it is basically a genre-piece, in this case horror (but Dixon is as well-versed in fantasy, action, adventure and more), but elevated by the impeccable execution of both script and art.

A necessary remark: for all the praise I have for the script, it must be said that the art is crucial nonetheless. The same script drawn by a lesser artist would be robbed of its power. Think of a great movie script badly acted or poorly directed.

When I re-read the book a few years back, I was surprised by the clarity in the storytelling; when I discovered that Dixon was reachable via his own website and via facebook, I got in touch and asked him a few questions specifically about this piece of work.

He was kind enough to answer, but until now I did not think of sharing this exchange with the rest of the world.

I think it provides some useful insights for storytellers and for anyone aspiring to a career in comics.

(note: The following text has been redacted in interview form for readability)

Q: Lately I've been studying Seven Block: would there be the chance to have look to the original script?

A: The original script was many, many hard drives ago. In fact, it may actually have been typewritten.

Q: I love Zaffino's art in it, but I've also noticed how well-paced it is: I've noticed most "sequences" fits neatly in one page and even when they are 2 or 3 pages long, the action is broken down so that every page has a strong dramatic unity. Did you work with that precise structure in mind and worked every scene until they reached the desired length?

A: I usually try to keep the dramatic beats to one page in any of my stories. I think it makes it easier to follow and allows me to avoid "Meanwhile back at the ranch" type captions. 

The reader unconsciously picks up on the rhythm and knows that a new scene may start when they turn the page. But each page ended on a suspenseful or dramatic note to draw the reader forward and make turning the page as irresistible as I could make it. And it was Jorge who turned those pages into the masterworks of comic art that they are. He always made me look like a genius. Jorge and I were very simpatico despite the language barrier. In the first draft of Seven Block I had the black doctor tell one of his compatriots to "go f--- himself". My editor felt this language was too strong so I removed the line and didn't provide a replacement. I simply had the doctor walk away without saying anything. That's the script that Jorge worked from. But when I got the finished art I was surprised to se that Jorge had drawn the doctor giving the finger as he walked away. He knew what the scene needed without knowing about the stricken line. 

Q: I love also how essential is the information you give to the reader. There is no use of captions, dialogue is straight to the point. With the sole exception of a dialogue between the two doctors at one point (necessary to download some info about the history and purpose of the experiment) there is no trace of expository dialogue. It sounds very casual and real. How you make sure there is enough for the reader to follow the plot?

A: My treatment of dialogue and plotting comes from studying the films of Howard Hawks. Each of his movies, regardless of genre, seems to flow effortlessly from event to event without the sense that there is a creative hand guiding everything. His dialogue rarely speaks of the plot yet informs us about character in a way that keeps the story clear and progressing. It wasn't until I read his biography that I learned that none of these things were accidents. Hawks worked very hard to conceal the fact that he was telling a story and allowed events to proceed as naturally as possible from scene to scene. Most scenes would serve at least two purposes and there was never a wasted moment.

Carlos Trillo

 Great Blog dedicated to the prolific Carlos Trillo.


The blog is full of scans from Trillo & Zaffino stories realized for the Italian Markt, which are a delight.

Here's an example (follow the link)

This is the link to the Spanish language Wikipedia page about Trillo (definetly more satisfying and complete than its counterpart in English)

Federico

Chiara odia i Social Network. Odia i blog. Odia i fiumi di inchiostro (anche se elettronico) versati per dare voce anche a chi non ha nulla da dire.

Non gli piace sostituire le relazioni personali con le relazioni tramite mezzi computerizzati.

Detesta che si possa pensare di "partecipare" a una protesta semplicemente condividendo uno status su Facebook o una foto su Twitter.

La boutade al posto del contenuto.

Io rispetto molto l'opinione di Chiara. Temo perfino che possa avere ragione.

Solo che Chiara è un personaggio inventato da me.

È basata su una persona che conosco più su altre di cui ho solo letto o con le quali mi sono scritto, ma non "esiste".

Eppure per me è molto reale. Forse per questo è anche il personaggio più facile da scrivere.

Provo a spiegale perché potrebbe avere torto.

Anzitutto se non fosse stato per internet, i blog, i social network, lei non esisterebbe. Tutto il materiale che ho potuto consultare per creare la storia di cui lei fa parte è stato recuperato (od ordinato) via internet. Tutte le persone contattate sono state raggiunte perché rintracciabili sul www.

E va bé, dice Chiara, ma io non ce l'ho mica con la tecnologia. Ce l'ho con chi pensa che questa renda "amiche" persone che nemmeno si conoscono col nome proprio. Con chi pensa che un blogger sia un giornalista.

Permettimi di risponderti.

Se non avessi condiviso la mia passione per Zaffino sul mio blog, non avrei conosciuto una serie di persone poi via Facebook.

Tra queste persone c'è Federico. Non è (ancora) un mio grande amico. A parte commentare a vicenda i nostri post, non facciamo molto altro. Lo so che questo è proprio il tipo di relazione povera che critichi, ma aspetta, prima di giudicare.

Se non ci fosse stato Facebook, non avrei avuto con lui nemmeno questo superficiale rapporto.

Federico ha gusti eccellenti: gli piacciono tutti i nomi giusti: Alex Toth, Will Eisner, Jordi Bernet, Jorge Zaffino, Corrado Mastrantuono, Milton Caniff.

E ha solo 15 anni (penso di avere a che fare con un possibile ragazzo prodigio).

Così l'ho tirato in mezzo nel nostro progetto. Sì Chiara, nel NOSTRO, perché dentro ci sei anche tu.

Per ora il ragazzo è molto umile. Dice (e io gli credo) che si esercita molto. A giudicare dalle sue prove (poco importa se si tratta di copie) direi che è sulla strada giusta, no?

The Ultimate Zaffino Post

Any one of these problems requires real work and skill to resolve satisfactorily. Zaffino at his best could handle them all and make the effort invisible, freeing the reader to get lost in the story. His technique changed over time, growing more impressionistic, but he always seemed particularly interested in creating brooding moods and capturing remarkable subtleties of light and shadow. He'd create dense lattices of cross-hatching out of the most apparently casual lines, slapped down across his forms, lighting his figures in a way I'd never seen in comics before. The technique looked maniacal in flat reproduction. God only knows what the originals must have looked like.

Steve Lieber

His work does not instruct, it questions.
John Paul Leon

It was 1994 or 1995.
I was a teenager and I liked comic books, especially superhero comics.

I purchased a past issue of Star Magazine, a monthly anthology title consisting exclusively of Marvel stories.

My attention was all for Spiderman: Sub-City by Todd McFarlane. The other “big” story published in the same issue was called Seven Block, written by Chuck Dixon, with art by Jorge Zaffino.
It didn’t look like my cup of tea. There were no superheroes in it.(1)

I’m thirty-two now. I still read and enjoy comic books. My tastes have changed a bit, though.

First influences

Jorge Zaffino was born on June the 13^th, 1957 in Buenos Aires, where he lived for the remainder of his life.

His father Jose Zaffino was an art instructor at the Pitman Academy.

It was him who enrolled Jorge in private group art classes taught by renowned Argentine art instructor Julio Juaregui and it was again his father who got him under the wing of brothers Enrique and Ricardo Villagran, in whose studio he initially worked as an unpaid assistant, at the early age of 16.

Magazines such as Creepy and Eerie, considered by many cartoonists to be the finest anthologies ever produced, introduced young Jorge to the works of artists like Alex Toth, Gene Colan and Frank Frazzetta.

Among his favourite artists there would be Hal Foster and Milton Caniff and laterin life expressed his admiration for the italian Sergio Toppi (it is also clear he was familiar with the work of Alberto Breccia and Hugo Pratt).

But the true role models for him where Cezanne, Howard Pyle, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Caravaggio and Velazquez.

  

He was almost obsessed by the way light interacts with the objects. He would copy hundreds of Rembrandts in order to figure out how it works.

Gerardo Zaffino.

Apprenticeship

After a year of washing brushes and erasing pencils for the Villagran brothers he got his first shot at drawing for the studio, doing pencils and background art and his output quickly earned him the appreciation of his fellow studio artists.

At 19 he was already producing work for Argentina's comic publishers serving as an artist for series like Nippur de Lagash, Tierra de Elfos, and Wolf. Hi style knew a remarkable evolution

 

(note the evolution between the pages left to right)

the chance for a breakthrough In the early 1980s, when Ricardo Villagran travelled to the US and brought along a few art samples by the studio artists to shop around.

In one of these occasions Chuck Dixon envisioned Jorge’s work for the first time.

I only saw a couple of portfolio pieces and a hadful of pages from an Argentie comic story, but their effect on me was immediate.

I wanted to work with this guy.

I had to work with this guy.

Chuck Dixon

Dylan Williams, who wrote an essential piece on Zaffino for The Comic Journal in 2002, tells that “Zaffino visited Dixon in America, using money he had saved from his studio work and from a series of children's book illustrations done for friends.”

This detail might seem incidental, but its inclusion suggests that affording that trip wasn’t easy and conjures up the sympathetic image of a very modest; working-class kind of fellow.

Zaffino en Dixon eventually got to work together on the three-issue series Winterworld, published by Eclipse in 1987. It would not go unnoticed.

American Breakthrough

During this period, I was working to turn the Punisher into a major leading character. One of the Punisher projects I had in the works was a graphic novel written by Jo Duffy. The Punisher character and Jo's script seemed like good matches for Jorge's dramatic and moody style. Jorge teamed up with Jo and the result was the very successful Assassins Guild graphic novel. Jorge's work was brilliant. I remember being blown away whenever Jorge mailed in a new batch of pages. Other editors and artists would sometimes visit my office and dig into the flat files to get a look at Jorge's latest work.

 Carl Potts 

After Assassins Guild, Zaffino teamed up again with Dixon on a second Punisher graphic novel, Kingdom Gone, in 1990. 

His career in the US would continue with the Marvel Series Critical Mass, where Zaffino and other artists illustrated the scripts by writer Dan Chichester.
Zaffino developed elements in his style which were already surfacing in Kingdom Gone: he dismissed his detailed cross-hatching in favor of bolder, only deceptively casual-looking patches of black.

"I think Toth always fed his simplicity," said Jorge's son Gerardo in an interview: "Although he covered the pages with lines, the composition was very simple. I remember watching his pencils and saying, 'Hey, when are you going to finish them?”

A taste of this “looser“ style can be found in projects like Hoover (with Carlos Trillo), Hellraiser, the Conan story The Horned God, and Seven Block, (these last two once more with Dixon)

Seven Block (a 45-page one-shot for Epic, the creator-owned imprint of Marvel Comics) especially stands out. Helped by Dixon's incredibly tight and lean script, Zaffino manages to create a sense of dread throughout the piece with a fearless use of blacks.

A style so stark that, when I first saw the artwork on the pages of Star Magazine, I did not like it.

I skipped reading Seven Block entirely and actually did not pick it up it for another year or two.
It wasn’t a super hero story; it utilized a palette of intense colors and was too dark, too realistic. It almost looked like the art was Xeroxed several times: gritty, rough and black.

I liked bright colored comic books where heroes where clearly defined.

Though I wasn’t that keen on the then popular  “Image” style and preferring artists like John Byrne, Neal Adams, John Romita Sr., Kevin Maguire or Mike Zeck, Jorge was another category to me.

At the top of his game

His work displayed a raw power that is unmatched. He was like Joe Kubert in that you can see his 'hand' in the work. What seems like delicate and deliberate line work in reproduction would be revealed, on close inspection of the pages, as brutal and varied ink lines that looked as though they were thrown down casually. But they weren't. Jorge worked hard to achieve that look of spontaneity. Often he would finish an entire sequence only to tear it up and start over again.

 Chuck Dixon

This is the kind of quote that works very well, but that I often take with a grain of salt.
It seems to adhere too much to the stereotypical portrait of the struggling artist. In reality not many of them, when working on deadlines, can afford that kind of integrity and trash an entire sequence.

Still, I believe Dixon is no liar here. Especially if you compare the early stuff Zaffino produced with his later art, the evolution is staggering. Jorge Zaffino clearly worked, and worked hard. The kind of sensibility his son and peers describe is clearly the one of someone CARING very much about his art.
It seems to me (and that is why I feel a particular affinity with him) that he considered every panel, every illustration as a challenge: “How do I render this?”

Artist working with a “realistic” style have to face this kind of issues: how do I get it RIGHT? How to I suggest this texture, this movement, this light? And how do I do it using only black and white?

And on top of that, there is storytelling: body language, facial expressions, clarity in composition and blocking of the scenes. Maybe is because of this that Jorge thought of himself more as an Illustrator, because he was trying to resolve a stylistic enigma first.

Basically do not consider myself a storyteller. I can give you names of guys who are, such as "Lito" Fernandez, Altuna, Frank Szilagyi. They enjoy the genre and are narrators. Because cartooning is not about nice drawings, it's about telling a story. [For me] is rather a matter of creating an atmosphere than tell a story.

Jorge Zaffino

But in spite of what Jorge used to say about his style, I believe he had an uncommon eye for composition (the balance in many of his pages is worth being studied) and an amazing storytelling craft: what happens is very clear on the page.

Bad Timing

As the 1990s proceeded, Zaffino got himself a place within the mainstream American scene, working on the ongoing series Terror Inc. for Marvel. Zaffino began the series at the height of his ability. Though his skills never wavered, his work had changed by the seventh issue.

Dixon attributes that to the monthly deadlines “Jorge wasn't built for”, while his son explains the troubles were of a more personal nature.

He spent time reflecting on his art and his personal life. "Jorge had not been well for many years, as he suffered from a persistent depression which is the reason for his producing so very little work these last years," said fellow Argentine comic artist Quique Alcatena to Comicon.com's Splash.

"This perhaps excessive professionalism brought him into conflict with deadline-minded editors, and Jorge got fewer and fewer jobs. Moreover, he was in a search for utter simplicity and synthesis in his line - he reneged from the more elaborate work he produced in the late '80s as being too cross-hatched, a fact which did not fail to earn his peers' applause, but which did not make him reader-friendly."

To some degree he couldn’t have chosen a worse period to enter the American market. The nineties were dominated by people like Jim Lee, Todd McFarlane, Rob Liefeld. It seems that the American teenagers wanted only splash pages and in-your-face gonzo action.

Even I did not like the art at first!

It is interesting the way I changed my opinion.

It was 1997. I was sixteen. I was attending Art school and by that time my taste in literature and comics was changing.

I used to play a role-playing game with some friends, called Cyberpunk 2020. The stories took place in a dystopian urban future, a cocktail that blended the apocalyptic visions of the approaching century from authors like Philip K. Dick, Williams Gibson, Rod Sterling, and movies like Blade Runner, Mad Max, Escape from N.Y., Soylent Green, The Terminator, as well as mangas and/or animes like Akira, The Ghost in the Shell with some Pulp Fiction and The X-Files thrown in for good measure.

The game master's story arcs and ideas, combined with our style of playing (we were keener on acting than on rolling multi-faceted dices to see who would win a fight) made me think that, if put down on paper, our adventures would be really fun to read.

The gruesome resolution to a very tense scene we played one day had potential for a great comic book moment. and I decided to make a comic book out of our adventures (or at least attempt to).

Because of that, I had to figure out what the art would look like.

I went through my comic books collection looking for references,and that creepy looking Seven Block came to mind. Even though I didn’t never really read that story until then, those panels had somehow grown on me.

I slipped the magazine out of the shelf and digged in to it.

And boy, was I mistaken the first time around!

The art was simply beautiful. Probably it had to do with me being an art student by then. Having to deal daily with drawing from life, I was finally able to see what Jorge Zaffino was doing with his rough, sketchy style.

What stroke me was that compared to a lot of other argentinian or italian artists who drew with a similar "impressionist" technique (i think of  (Hugo Pratt and Ivo Milazzo) where the shapes are defined by shadows and light rather than by lines, Zaffino had a "solidity" a sense of mass I usually did not associate with this style.

The only fair equivalents I could find were John Buscema (when he did Conan) and maybe Alberto Breccia, but both were a lot more "baroque", or Tanino Liberatore who (in my opinion) is a lot less skilled in composition and storytelling.

(Do not get me wrong, I love all of the above and I think they all are great artists, but on some lenghts Zaffino seemed to beat them all -still in my opinion)

Jorge had it all: a solid classic background, knowledge of anatomy and a fresh style, not caged by pointless nice artistic gestures.

"Retirement"

UBy the end of the 1990s, Zaffino was focusing more on his painting and essentially left the US mainstream scene, illustrating books published in Argentina.

His last little story for the American market (once again by Chuck Dixon) was an 8-page jewel for the short lived Batman Black and White anthology.

Here Batman and a never-so-beautifully-drawn Commissioner Gordon look new and classic at the same time. He capture them in realistic poses, without taking the magic away from them. A trick only David Mazzucchelli managed to succeed with in Batman: Year One.

Jorge died of a heart attack on July 12 2002.

I was struggling with how to turn my thinking into strictly black and white. How to create depth? How to render the form on an object or figure? Studying Zaffino's work aided me in ways I will always appreciate. He answered many of my questions, and started me on asking new ones.

Tommy Lee Edwards

This is a late tribute to an artist's artist. Someone who may be shamefully forgotten because of his (relatively) small body of work, but who has left nonetheless a long lasting impression on a lot of other artists, many of which he never met.

I discovered a handful of fellow Italians (respected professionals like Gigi Cavenago, Roberto Zaghi among others) who have the same reverence for him.

Because of the stature of Zaffino among “connoisseurs” and the scarcity of originals, it is not that easy to find originals to buy and apparently those who possess one wouldn’t give it away.

I wanted to write longer and touch on every aspect of his art, but there are at least two good reasons not to do so:

1) There are some very good posts about the artists by other bloggers/reporters/artists worth reading that examine different facets of his art.

• Article originally published in The Comics Journal #248, November 2002. The main source of this post. Some passages are quoted (stolen) directly.
•  Blog post by the Inazuma Studios
•  Blog post by Michel Fiffe
•  Funny anectode form Chuck Dixon
•  An exchange I had about Seven Block with writer Chuck Dixon
• Interview (in Spanish) with the man himself.

2) If a picture is worth a thousand words, then this gallery can count for millions. Enjoy the work of the man himself instead of reading my attempt to describe it.

------------------- 

(1): Time did justice: I regard now Sub-City as one of the dumbest things I've ever read. Worse even than MacFarlane's debut as a writer: Torment, where at least he tried to create a style and to a convey sense of, well, torment.

A new beginning

From Down the Guts

I hope this can be the first of a long series of short posts.
The idea would be to post one every day.

Did you ever feel like the world is full of possibilities that you do not even know where to start.
Your mind fills up with ideas in just a few seconds (Oh, I could do this, no, wait, I could do that, and that that, and.. oh my, I may do that as well, and once that is done...) but you end up doing nothing. Not even writing down your ideas.

Sigà sigà, so I have read, is Greek for "slowly, slowly" but may also mean "slowly but constantly" or "slowly but consistently".

That should be my mantra.

Once a day. No more, no less.

I'd like also to start some experiments with raw animation.
As soon as I have a couple of seconds of i'll let you see.
I'm doing the very irst frame as I'm done writing this.

Oh, the drawing is just a doodle I've drawn while in vacation.
The white man is supposed to be counting bills in the mwiseguys fashion.
These are waem ups for one of the upcoming projects.

Oh, about Zaffino agan.
All this time full scans of some of his work have been under my nose but I did not notice it at www.jorgezaffino.com.

I have now all "The Horned God" story. And I'm convinved I could discard my choice of using Serpieri's style on the other project in favor of Zaffino's.

This would help me focusing on one stile and one only.

Jorge Zaffino

Jorge ZAffino

I have already written about him in a previous post, but I'd like to spend some more words on this great and prematurely gone artist.

Jorge Zaffino was born in Argentina in 1960 and, according to the sites I have visited, lived there all his life.

At the age of 16, he began working as an unpaid apprentice at the comics studios of Ricardo and Enrique Villagran.

He's been introduced to american audineces with Winterworld, a fantasy saga (that from what I read seem to share some story element with the french-belgian "Niege" saga) written by Chuck Dixon.
With Dixon, Zaffino will realize the majority of his american work.
He died of an £Heart attack in 2002, aged 42.

Ok, this was his bio. But what I want to talk abut is his impact on me.

For starters, I did not like his art at first. In 1994; aged 14, I was exposed to one of his best works. It was a 45-page one-shot for Epic,the creator-owned division of Marvel comics, featuring material aimed to a mature readers, called Seven Block.

It was publihed in Itlay on the pages of the anthologic Star Magazine published by Star Comics.
For accuracy's sake, I should point out that issue 17 of StarMag (as called by its readers) dates back to 1992, but I became a regular reader only by issue 18.
I bought #17 later in a comic book shop, and my attention was all for Sub-City by Todd McFarlane, published in the same issue.

(Sub-City was McFarlane's last Spiderman story before he left Marvel to create Spawn, the shortly lived Image Comics and the succesful McFarlane Toys).

Time did justice: I regard now Sub-City as one of the dumbest things I'v ever read. Worse even than MacFarlane's debut as a writer: Torment, where at least he tried to create a style and to a convey sense of, well, torment.

I'm trerribly off-track now.

That to say that I skipped Seven Block entirely and did not read it for another year or two: no super heroes, acid colors, too dark, too realistic.
I liked bright coloured comic books where heroes where clearly defined.
I liked John Byrne, Neal Adams, John Romita, Kevin Maguire, Mike Zeck...
I could appriciate The Last Hunt of Kraven or The Dark Knight Returns because they featured my favorite heroes. But Seven Block? It looked like the art was xeroxed several times: gritty, rough and black.

Then came Cyberpunk. Cyberpunk was a role-playing game from the '90s. the setting was a distopian urban future, a cocktail that blended all apocaliptic visions of the future of authors like Philip K. Dick, Williams Gibson, Rod Serling, and a plethora of films like Blade Runner, Mad Max, Escape from N.Y., Soylent Green, The Terminator, as well as mangas and/or animes like Akira, The Ghost in the Shell and so on.

I used to play this role-playing game with my friends and we spent hours and hours pretending to be hitmen, clandestine doctors or drug dealers in the near future, where guns and women were available for a reasonable price.

Andrea S., who as game master had essentially to come up with all the plots, organized a whole series of story arcs worth of a prime-time TV series; those story ideas, combined with our style of playing (we were keener on acting than on rolling multi-faceted dices to see who would win a fight) did the rest.

Am I off track again?
Maybe, but let me continue.

The rest I'm referring to is the realization that if put down on paper, our adventures would be relly fun to read. I came to this realization after a prticular tense scene: my friends had to kill one of our team in order to save me (well they did non have to but...).
The gruesome resolution to that scene had potential for a great comic book moment.
I started putting down on paper the chronicle of what happend to us and a lot of the anecdotes that made our playing sessions memorable and started taking seriously in consideration the idea of submitting the material.

I do not know if what we had was good, but I'm still convinced it could be a fun story to read.

At one point I had to figure out what the art should look like.

The kind of story we were playing, more than to mangas or Mad Max, made me think to The X-Files and Pulp Fiction.
I also envisioned a non-linear storytelling in order to create as many plot twists and cliffhangers as possible (I would say that the thing that now comes closer to it would be LOST), but I needed a style to match.

Our characters were not square-jawed paladines, but flawed cinics who did a lot of mistakes (and yes who could also do very cool stuff).

Looking for references I went throught my collection of comic books, and that creepy looking story by Dixon and Zaffino called Seven Block came to mind. Even though I never really read that story, those panels somehow grew on me.
I slipped the magazine out of the shelf and digged in to the story.

Boy, was I mistaken the first time around!

The plot itself is very much like an episode from the first season of The X-Files. A confined location, a lot of atmosphear, little gore (it may be filmed on a shoestring budget, and I mean that as a compliment) a creepy ending.

But the art! The art was simply beautiful. Being an art student by then, and having to deal with drawing from life every day, I was the able to see what Jorge Zaffino was doing with his rough, sketchy style.

What stroke me was that compared to a lot of other argentinian or italian artists who drew with a similar "impressionist" technique where the shapes are defined by shadows and light rather than by lines, he had a "solidness" a presence I usually did not associate with this style.

I think of Hugo Pratt, Venturi, Ivo Milazzo.
The only fair equivalents I could find were John Buscema (when he did Conan) and maybe Alberto Breccia, but both were a lot more "baroque". Maybe Al Williamson, who inks in a much more polished way though, or Tanino Liberatore, who is a lot less skilled in composiotion and storytelling.

One last artist that comes to mind would be Danijel Zezelj, but im my opinion his art is a lot less lively than Jorge's.

(Do not get me wrong, I love all of the above and I think they all are great artists, but on some lenghts Zaffino seemed to beat them all -still in my opinion)

Jorge seemed to have it all: a solid classic background, knowledge of anatomy and realism, a fresh style, not caged by pointless nice artistic gestures, an uncommon sense for composition (the balance in many of his pages is worth being studied) and amazing stoytelling craft: what happens is very clear on the page.

The sketches I relized for that old project were not reminiscent of Zaffino. The project itself has been put in to an artificial coma for years now, awaiting the right moment to surface (as we get closer to the year the story itself was set).

But a similar thing happened again, when I bagan to toy with the idea of another project (with Alessandro Q).

At first I ordered some of his works on Amazon. then I started looking for news about him on the internet, only to find out he sadly passes away already seven years ago, leaving two sons and a wife.

This is may late tribute to an artist's artist. Someone who may be shamefully forgotten, beacuse of a relatively small body of work, but who left a strong impression on a lot of other artists.

On his website (still on line) you'll find some word from other artists who worked with him and who do remember him fondly.

I leave you with a drawing from his last little story for DC (once agin by Chuck Dixon) that you can find on the first volume of Betman Black and White.

This 8-page jewel is a perfect example of what I mean.

Batman and a never-so-beautyfully-drawn Commissioner Gordon look new and classic at the same time. He capture them is realistic poses, without taking the magic away from them. A trick only David Mazzucchelli managed to succeed into in Batman Year One.