ARTISTS WE LOVE: CLAY MANN With a flare for details and compositions, this artist drew Luis back to the mutant titles
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Back in 2011, I had stopped being a regular purchaser of the Marvel mutant books. The stories were inconsistent, the art was pedestrian, and the mutants overall seemed to be an afterthought. As I scoured the comics aisles, I started to pay attention to a new alternate reality story titled Age of X. This was for one reason, the art of Clay Mann. Clay had been illustrating at Marvel off and on for about five years up until that point. The only thing he was missing was a consistent breakthrough run. (Runs in comics are everything.) Age of X would catapult him into the comic artists stratusphere. Clay’s work was reminiscent of early Jim Lee crossed with some Travis Charest. His line work was impeccable, his crosshatching skills were Lee-esque, and his pages overflowed with detail and composition that were a staple of Charest’s work. All of these phenomenal pencils inked by his brother Seth Mann. True superstardom would arrive for Clay in 2016 when he started pencilling for DC Comics. His work on the Poison Ivy mini-series marked a sort of reintroduction to comic fandom. With a new series of characters to work with, Clay’s work was better than ever, all culminating with a career-defining run on both Heroes in Crisis (the best drawn mini-series of the past decade) and Batman teaming with Tom King. His new highly-anticipated collaboration Batman/ Catwoman drops in early December, and I for one can’t wait. Clay Mann and Jorge Jimenez are hands down at the pinnacle of comic art today.
Notice how “Heroes in Crisis” is. worked into that top photo Also, Madeline cropped this Poison Ivy illustration to fit her layout
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Art Department Weekly • October 27, 2020
