OK, it doesn’t look weird, yet. But for once I’m ahead of the search queries to my blog and I’m enjoying that.
As per D D Degg’s article in The Daily Cartoonist, the comic strip Heart of the City has a new cartoonist. Christina Stewart takes over the strip starting the 27th of April. She’s the creator of a fantasy graphic novel, Archival Quality, which I haven’t read but do see good things about. Her art blog, on tumblr, also looks quite good. She doesn’t intend to draw the strip the way its originator, Mark Tatulli, has.
Tatulli, meanwhile, intends to keep on drawing Lio, and to focus on his own graphic novels. But, also, if you wondered why this week Heart has been looking over photo albums, we have an explanation.
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Something I haven’t seen mentioned: Tatulli aged up the kids in “Heart of the City” beginning on Sunday, April 5. Compare the title character on Saturday the 4th to her on Sunday the 5th:
https://www.gocomics.com/heartofthecity/2020/04/04
https://www.gocomics.com/heartofthecity/2020/04/05
I assume the aging was a sign of the transition to the new artist.
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Tatulli has been aging the characters a bit, although I don’t think it’s changed appreciably in recent months. I think 2018 was the last time she grew appreciably; compare Spring 2018 — https://www.gocomics.com/heartofthecity/2018/04/01 — to Fall of that year — https://www.gocomics.com/heartofthecity/2018/10/01 — when she had started middle school.
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Sorry, no offense but I don’t like the new format at all and don’t read it anymore after years of doing so. It just looks like a completely different comic strip now. At least when Dagwood changed artists he stayed the same. Who could imagine a different Blondie?
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Oh, absolutely no offense to me; outside extremely broad guidelines I won’t dispute someone’s preference for one art style over another. And if Steenz is reading stray blogs for comments about her work, she’s braved far worse than “I don’t like it”.
I do think Steenz’s style is better suited to graphic novels (her previous gig) than daily comics, which you can see in how the colorized dailies on GoComics are so much easier to read than the black-and-white originals. But that’s a matter of practicing the difference between full-color and black-and-white comics and I imagine Steenz is working to better that. (And since I read it online anyway, that difference is not really something I have to worry about.).
Comic strip art styles do change, of course. Usually this is a more gradual evolution, typically seeing characters get to be drawn more simply and more rounded off. Sometimes it is radical, though; a Peanuts or Beetle Bailey of 1951 just does not look like it’s from the same hand as their 1961 counterparts, and that without even a change in artist. The most dramatic recent changes were, I’d say, Olivia Jaimes taking over Nancy, and June Brigman taking over the drawing of Mary Worth. Both of those you can say were getting back to older art styles of the original comics, but they are also both striking sudden changes.
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