Artist Appreciation - TIM SALE

I remember encountering Tim Sale's work around the age of fourteen. Having read HUSH, I was already down to read more Jeph Loeb Batman, but when my brother lent me THE LONG HALLOWEEN to read, I asked him who drew it, and I was disappointed in the response.

"It's not Jim Lee," he said.

Ugh, fine, whatevs, I probably thought, and then I picked up the book and started going through it. 

My first thoughts were, "Well, this is DEFINITELY not Jim Lee, and I don't like it." Where Jim Lee filled the page with detail, using so many lines to portray every movement, every crease, every inch of machinery, this Tim Sale dude did none of that. It felt, like, super blah. What were there character models? Were they drawn by some little kid?

A really strange thing happened then, though, and it was that, as I kept looking through it, the art went from "bad," to "so bad it's actually good." I began to get a sense of charm out of the renderings. I kinda laughed with my sister about the art, but like...I dunno, there was something kinda...cool about it.

It didn't take long to finally be able to appreciate Sale's art (and much more than my brother, even). Sure, Lee used tons of detail to craft these very real spaces, but Sale didn't NEED to do that. No, he needed to give enough for you to gain its true essence, and then leave it at that; stamp a tone on it, and move forward; storytell like a motherfucker, and then smash those readers to the next page!

But this kinda of makes it sound like his art is just, like, childish and amusing, but it gets the job done. BUT FUCK NO, IT'S SO MUCH MORE. Look at the last panel on that page - it's the kind of thing he does a lot, and it's something I don't see a ton of in comics. It's just...empty, except for this seemingly defeated Harvey Dent, whose face isn't even fully there. I remember a lot of examples like that in SPIDER-MAN: BLUE, too, where Peter feels either left out or downtrodden. and based on the page layout, Sale always does well at positioning that panel to create the maximum beat he can, juxtaposing the head with the empty space to create this full image of defeat. I fucking love it.

He was also one of the first artists I got into who used shadows so strongly, right next to often uber-thinly inked lines. I have now seen that a lot (like in Jose Muñoz stuff, which is even MORE expressive due to the technique with which he inks said shadows), but it never fails to stand out against typical works.

Like, here is an Andy Kubert drawing from DKIII: THE MASTER RACE. This was a book that was supposed to be a huge event, following the groundbreaking previous Frank Miller DARK KNIGHT books. But, what does it look like? It just looks like anything on the shelf, and a lot of things on the shelf are pretty damn boring to look at. There's definitely skill at play here, but there is so little expression in the linework, and that makes it kinda upsetting.

Now think about that, and then look at this image by Sale, which includes a pretty expressive use of line that, ya know, is totally his. The image is just so bold. Even the kinda wonky faces - totally his. He makes them work.

But this brings up something interesting, too, and that is Sale's skill as an inker. That image from THE MASTER RACE was inked by Klaus Janson, who inked the original DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, and who therefore actually made these new pages look a bit better than they might otherwise (the coloring definitely does not help). I have a bit of respect for Janson, as his own art has an edginess we don't see a lot, either, but Sale's inking is at a whole other level.

This page, which he did NOT ink, is from early in Sale's career. His style is still obviously there, but there's something a little amiss on the inks. The lines are overall a bit bolder than he would do, thus pulling a bit from how striking his line work can be. 

Contrast this with the line weights that are more typical of his approach, and you can see how he somehow manages to capture such grandiosity by allowing for such creative variance in his own lines. 

Or here is something he is really fond of, as well: Ink wash. He takes the ink and diluted it with water to create a gray texture. The mood that he is able to get from this is...something else. Whereas his usual inking brings forth a lot of contrast in a given space (which can be heightened or lessened by the colorist), the ink washing makes everything feel a bit more broody. 

But to only call it broody would be a mistake, because it can be used to great effect in relatively light scenarios. The texture it presents is one of almost nostalgic-like watercolors, and it's used to superb effect in CATWOMAN: WHEN IN ROME, DAREDEVIL: YELLOW, and CAPTAIN AMERICAN: WHITE. All three of those books rely heavily on memory of a given place, with Matt Murdock and Steve Rogers very explicitly bringing you to the past, while Selina Kyle seeks out her family heritage in the old country which she was never able to know. 

I now am kinda just overall enthralled by Tim Sale's work. He quickly became one of my favorite artists, and, even as I have found more artists to love, I have never forgotten how much his creativity meant to me (I somehow managed to near-completely elide how good at storytelling he actually is). I highly recommend everything he did with a Jeph Loeb; there's a shit ton of it, but it's all worth reading.