Frank Robbins Appreciation Thread

[Ijiwaru Sensei]

I know a great many on the forum don't really care for Frank Robbins' work, but I have always enjoyed it. So what follows will be a few words of praise and quite a few images from Robbins' work.

 

Art and Artifice says the following about Robbins:

Robbins brush work is beautiful, black, curving stuff. Robbins fills his solid patches heavily, and the dry brushing he adds for texture is a school all in itself. Robbins best work in the comic book format is so "alive" with movement and a beautiful light/dark balance that it sad his work is so often dismissed by comics fans as "wrong."

 

Frank Robbins artwork is unique in a number of ways and there are many admirers of his style among comic book professionals. His style would shift slightly between his comic book work and his strip work for newspapers (he originated the adventure strip Johnny Hazard and drew it until it stopped in 1977) - - the somewhat more 'realistic' approach to his comic book pages reflects the larger size available for him to work with and the inherently different demands a page requires versus the three-panel newspaper strip.

 

Robbins inventively utilized panel sizes for both page placement and for what he put inside of them. His figure anatomy was well within comic book conventions, but he was obviously not bound by it in any meaningful way as his figures turn, twist and jump around like animated characters in contrast to the stand and pose style. This difference comes off as if he intended to deliberately inject a dash of humor into his depictions of humankind. With Robbins there is not long dwelling upon abdominal muscles – something you can certainly find in abundance elsewhere. He drew dramatic, theatrical images, but he bent his figures and graphic forms into the demands of telling the story efficiently.

 

Robbins head modeling is formulaic, but it is a formula unique to his style and stylized exactly. Its obviously derived from classic comic strip styling (e.g., Milt Caniff) but Robbins is not stiff in this regard but absolutely rubbery in how he gets human expressions across a face. His characters are not particularly contemplative but expressive and unrestrained in showing emotion.

 

His story writing skills were employed in Detective Comics during the 1960s and 1970s, and though they were not anything that went beyond the adventure format of the Batman character of those days, his plots and stories made sense. . . . He was very, very good at making a 12 page (or far shorter) story "work." Whether as the writer, or artist (or both) he could fit within whatever number of pages he had to make do with.

 

 

 

[comicstock]

Frank Robbins was a fine storyteller. His run doing Batman was excellent and under-rated.

[Senormac]

If I can't say somethin nice.......

I'm not sayin anything at all......

 

 

But the word _ _ _ _ does come to mind

[FlyingDonut]

This is fated to be a pretty short thread.

[goldust40]

Robbins inventively utilized panel sizes for both page placement and for what he put inside of them. His figure anatomy was well within comic book conventions, but he was obviously not bound by it in any meaningful way as his figures turn, twist and jump around like animated characters in contrast to the stand and pose style. This difference comes off as if he intended to deliberately inject a dash of humor into his depictions of humankind. With Robbins there is not long dwelling upon abdominal muscles – something you can certainly find in abundance elsewhere. He drew dramatic, theatrical images, but he bent his figures and graphic forms into the demands of telling the story efficiently.

 

I love apologists for bad artists who desperately try to blame "comic book conventions" for their subject's inability to draw adequately. His art is anything but efficient in telling a story - it's clumsy and confusing. And claiming that he drew "dramatic, theatrical images" is just hot air. Most of the time his characters look like windswept rag dolls.

 

He was a decent writer though, fwiw.

[ArAich]

[Wrightson fan]

I have to invoke the "Thumper Rule" on this thread.

 

[the_Greatest]

This is fated to be a pretty short thread.

 

 

 

Captain America was my favorite comic book. Then I believe I paid .25 and opened up #182 (?), which had just a beautiful cover.

 

[goldust40]

This is fated to be a pretty short thread.

 

 

 

Captain America was my favorite comic book. Then I believe I paid .25 and opened up #182 (?), which had just a beautiful cover.

 

 

Ditto.

[THE_BEYONDER]

Captain America was my 2nd favourite book (FF being #1) until Frank Robbins came on board.

 

I appreciate that Frank Robbins never worked on the FF.

[redneckley]

I can't draw so he is better than me. That being said, not my favorite. Sorry.

[joe_collector]

Robbins inventively utilized panel sizes for both page placement and for what he put inside of them. His figure anatomy was well within comic book conventions, but he was obviously not bound by it in any meaningful way as his figures turn, twist and jump around like animated characters in contrast to the stand and pose style.

 

[joe_collector]

Captain America was my favorite comic book. Then I believe I paid .25 and opened up #182 (?), which had just a beautiful cover.

 

Hey, you stole my trademarked Frank Robbins story.

[Zonker]

Yeah, I don't think comics fans will ever forgive Robbins for what he did to Steve Englehart's Captain America run. But we should blame the editor for that assignment.

 

On the DC side, he had the misfortune to follow Mike Kaluta on The Shadow and Neal Adams on Batman. But at least he was allowed to ink his own pencils at DC, so you got an unapologetic Milt Caniff look that was at least appropriate to a couple of strips whose origins were in the 1930s.

 

I'll try to find time to post some Robbins retro-Golden Age Batman and Shadow pages later.

[Senormac]

I think he destroyed....uh, worked on DC's The Shadow book too. Issue 4 and 6 maybe?

 

ooops....yea, what zonker said

[Ogami]

my apprecaition of Frank Robbins is that he was better than Sal Buscema. And I would have rather had him on Spectacular for the seventy-three years that Buscema was on the run.

[joe_collector]

my apprecaition of Frank Robbins is that he was better than Sal Buscema.

 

Not while they were both working, as the Captain America run we're talking about replaced Sal with Frank, to the reader's eternal regret.

 

Don't bring POS Moderns into this discussion.

[Zonker]

The reference provided by the OP has several Robbins pages scanned. Here are a couple of the better examples, IMHO. His place was with film noir-ish period pieces, not the bright, day-glo Marvel Age super heroics.

 

[MisterX]

Actually, the weird thing about Frank Robbins is that he went from a very Milton Caniff style of drawing (very clean, very realistic, very researched) in the 40s & 50s on Johnny Hazard to his more abstract stuff in the late 60s/early 70s.

 

Those old Johnny Hazards are pretty cool. He's certainly not "flashy," which is one of the reasons I think he has so many haters.

 

Maybe some folks over in the Gold Comics forum will appreciate him more!

 

I get the feeling that as a lot of comic book artists age, their style gets looser and perhaps more economical. I also get the feeling they cannot help but break-away from whatever style established them when they were younger. Look at Frank Miller, Jack Kirby, Alex Toth or (dare I say) John Byrne.

 

For the record, I liked Robbins' Shadow run at DC. Some of those Kaluta pencils hold up, and some do not. You get the sense Kaluta was still learning the ropes.

[the blob]

my apprecaition of Frank Robbins is that he was better than Sal Buscema. And I would have rather had him on Spectacular for the seventy-three years that Buscema was on the run.

----------------------------

 

really he wasn't, at least in the 70's. sal was a poor man's john buscema. adequate, sometimes good. better than some of the artists at marvel. by the mid/late 80's sal was pretty horrible, true. was robbins still alive then?

 

i will admit, however, that those batman pages are not bad. i guess he needed to be doing the right sort of book/story. or have the right inker?

 

but heck, frank miller did some pretty mediocre work too before he learned to stylize everything to the point of being able to cover up his problems with faces, anatomy, etc. and have us focus on the story. (that's why i think it's kindah funny that some BA and CA books get a little bump because miller did the cover)