Top 20 Comic Artists Of All Time (Part 1)

I've been toying around lately, shuffling my favorite comic artists around on paper, seeing how I would rank them and such. I came up with a list of way too many and it ended up getting harder and harder to secure a top 20.
I had about 50 artists down on paper whom I love before it was all over. You'll get to see the extras and everything, but as a theme for the next 23 or so posts, I will be going through each artist in the top 20, as well as a few bonus artists that I'm going to kick off this theme with.Let's get to it.

TOP 20 COMIC ARTISTS OF ALL TIME:

HONORABLE MENTIONS.

I decided this first post, so that I don't just ravage your senses right off the bat, should focus on 2 artists who deserve to be recognized in the top 20, but wouldn't fall in the list for certain circumstances (which I will get to for each).

First off:

GLENN FABRY (click the thumbnails for full images)











Now fans of Glenn might hate me for saying this, but his pen and ink work is shit. I can't stand looking at it, its like Steve Dillon but with down syndrome.
His painting however, is masterful. The way he works the tones and layers makes me want to cream my jeans. I don't want to sound like a wuss but when I was younger his stuff freaked me out, his excessive attention to detail (look at the skin wrinkles in the hands, the extensive face shading as well) was too over the top for my comic tastes. Nowadays however, you'd be hard pressed to find a finer cover artist in the business (I would say he ranks number 1 in cover artists, with that short list followed by Bolland, Hughes, and Bradstreet, all also unfortunately not among my top 20, but don't cry just yet). Here's to you Glenn (may I call you Glenn?) for being so special that I can't even rank you in the top 20, but instead get a post of your own along with...


JIM BURNS (click the thumbnails for full image goodness)


















I would imagine about every single one of you going "Uhhh who?!!". Well a certain sexy someone (Alicia) bought me a copy of Planet Story for like $5 at a thrift store many months ago, and I flipped though it and thought "Not bad." then I sat down and read it, and loved the art. Beautiful 13x13 full page paintings, this book was a hidden gem. Now about a month after that a friend of mine went nuts on Heavy Metals. He was into about 60% or more of all the issues I would say. I started noticing covers and galleries of none other than Jim Burns in a lot of these back issues (owning a few myself thanks to the Toronto Fan Expo). If you haven't heard of Jim Burns, have a look for his art books on amazon, or his Heavy Metal work on their official website (don't look online for his stuff, a lot of the images I found were incomparable to his work in print).

There you have it, with the honorable mentions out of the way, we can get into the real meat of my top 20 artists choices. Coming next post, we start at 20 with a very very questionable choice on my part, but someone who has a lot of talent, despite only about 5 comics worth of published work.