Everybody and everything looks like weathered stone. If IDW ever decides to follow their horrific "GoBots" miniseries with a Rocklords story, he's the obvious choice.
Hey, that can be one of his selling points. Art so bad it causes readers to REALLY absorb the dialogue.
He's improved. If you haven't seen his newer work in TF: Galaxies with the Constructicons, it's worth a look. I found I've really been enjoying the series.
Yep. Much too dark. I want to actually see the story. It doesn't always have to be a dark and stormy night.
His art is still not good. Just because someone can crap out bad art quickly doesn’t mean they should keep getting work over those artists who take more care with their art, even if it takes them longer to produce something worth paying money for. And Livio has improved in that he’s no longer drawing the wrong characters in a group any actual fan (or someone paying attention) would be aware of.
I'm just choosing these images at random by three different artists, although one is intentionally from Livio. Here I get a sense of the characters actually being there. Like an actual comic book should feel. Simplistic and cartoon-like but the appeal is still present. But I don't feel like the characters are actually there in this image, they just don't feel solid or have presence. It feels like a painting rather than an actual comic book panel telling a story. Whereas here, the characters do look solid and have presence despite being drawn in the retro art style. I'm not a fan of block coloring, but I get the homage. The overall image still looks good to me. Out of these three images, this one is most appealing. If Livio had drawn it, it would have lost all of its appeal.
If I were going for the briefest sum up imaginable, I'd describe it as inspired, majestic, atmospheric art which superbly evokes the theme of the story it's completely failing to tell. The details, the flair and artistic portrayal of "dark, twisted metal giants fighting in a dark, twisted, metal world" is nigh on unsurpassed. However I tend to read his issues frequently thinking "What... who's that? Where are we? What the hell even is that?"
Yeah, Livio's art-style made for good atmospheric cover and splash pages (when well-drawn, instead of his more typical rushed-looking productions). But when everything was done in that style, it made for poor sequential art. Not enough differentiation to guide and draw the eye around the page and fit the flow of the story.
In fairness, on the rushed look, I remember when I first picked up "Autocracy", the first of his series that I'd encountered done entirely in his style, I'd marvelled vaguely at the idea of doing a whole series of issues in a 'painterly' style which looked like it would take forever to do properly. Sadly, it looks on a number of occasions like the answer to 'how on Earth did he manage to do it properly in the time available' was 'he didn't.'. If that sounds unduly snarky, I apologise to fans of his style. I will completely allow that it can look absolutely beautiful. He has a brilliance for depicting 'light on metal' which is pretty much unsurpassed, is the only comic book artist I've yet seen to be able to tangibly draw coldness, and has been able to produce some incredibly poignant, beautiful images. However, I don't think it's suitable to sequential narrative, I concur with the above post- it's too indistinct, probably too time consuming, and also, I think, it only works at all in certain specific panel compositions; namely, there absolutely has to be a strong light source. It doesn't work at all to depict motion, or anything 'messy'- in terms of a chaotic action sequence, for instance, and the stylised proportions he tends to favour can get very gnarled up in dynamic poses. There is no artist that I'd rather see draw an image of a Transformer, standing on Cybertron on a dark night, looking sadly up at the glittering stars. However, conversely, there is no artist whose work I'd be less eager to try to decipher, if trying to follow a battle sequence, and work out what on Earth actually just happened. Superb artist, being used in the wrong way.
I'd rather see detail. Not painted shapes vaguely resembling a recognisable character. Livio just isn't capable of this kind of emotion.
Guido Guidi's artwork was his peak artwork in AHM and in that flashback comic. Wish they'd bring him back to the main ongoing now with his great artwork, instead of getting him to imitate the "80's comic art" for the thousandth time.
I just don't his artwork because it's so murky I have immense difficulty telling what the hell is going on. That said, I think that the decision to have him draw the Dead Universe sections of Dark Cybertron was pure brilliance. His art really fit the setting, you know?
He's fine for covers, but I'd rather have comics to actually be clear art enough to read and understand. Dark murkiness is not good art for any setting.
