What is "Oldschool Adventure"?

Artist are often asked to write an "Artist Statement" to define their work and the recurring themes that permeate them. I know I was asked to go thorough this process more than once during my course of study at SCAD. On some level it is a process of critical self analysis. You tear apart your work and evaluate what it is about your work that makes it unique. You critique what you were trying to do and where you were successful and how you failed to achieve these goals. You find out what your natural tendencies are in terms of rendering technique and subject matter. But probably more insightful, you start looking at the things you avoid drawing and why.

So how do I define myself and my work? I defined my work simply has "Oldschool Adventure". A phrase I coined while I was working on my thesis project (part of which has evolved into The Pirate Musketeers ) in graduate school. "What is 'Oldschool Adventure?'" you ask. Quite simply it is a style of art that follows closely to the illustrative traditions set not in the comic books, but in the adventure strips that appeared in the newspapers from the 1930's to 1950's. It is work that is directly inspired by Hal Foster, Milton Caniff, and Alex Raymond. Though I have coined this phrase to help define my own work at present I believe current artist like Mark Schultz, Steve Epting, and Jay Potts epitomize the spirit of these strips more than myself. I plan to do a series of post to further define "Oldschool Adventure" as a style of sequential art, and how it applies to my own work. I also plan to explore in more depth the fore fathers of this illustrative tradition in sequential art. I'll try and touch on why artist choose to follow in this tradition, and even include a few in my "What I've learned from..." post. Until then, I leave you with a panel of mine that I believe was one of the first to really define my rendering style and begin to create a look solely my own.

- Anthony Summey