Posted in: Comics, Recent Updates | Tagged: ibraim roberson, marvel, MVL

In Praise Of… Ibraim Roberson And Jim Charalampidis

Ibraim Roberson is an artist I first noticed on Max Brooks's Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks before jumping to a few X-books such as New Mutants and X-Necrosha.

His style is a misture of a sketchiness signalled by a variety of shifting weights across a line, but it's laid down on a clean grid of perspective points, with strong levels of detail in the minutea that both ground his work but also give the appearance of an architectural drawing. And for figures and select backgrouns he adds an ink wash to be coloured later that separates and defines the characters on the page.

Last week we saw his work on the Super Soldier Annual with Jim Charalampidis on colours and created something rather special between them. Here are a couple of pages, ink and wash, and with colour. Look how Charalampidis takes touches of Roberson's wash work and carries it onto the structures and background.

And when Ibraim uses it on backgrounds too, how detailed and dusty the buildings look.

And when you need to show how grimy and blood soaked a place is, without transgressing Marvel's editorial guidelines, it's also very handy. The blood looks driven, engrained in to the walls here, through decades of use.

And you get scenes like this where the colourist and artist are working hand in hand. Check the weight and angles of the face top right, the colour on the lip, the flow of the beard lines and the knocked ut image of a trussed Cyclops. Oh and the movement of material across Emma's bottom of course.

It's a team that seem as solid together as Frank Quitely and Jamie Grant. It's not painted, it's not just line art, it's a very attractive fuzzy bringing together of the two forms that's rather pleasing on the eye, in a Mucha-like fashion.

Anyway, thought this was worth mentioning. We'll see Ibraim's work in Uncanny X-Men to come. I do hope he's bringing Jim with him.

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