BillT The fall off in real quality started with the departure of Max Collins in early 1993. Shortly thereafter Mike Kilian a TMS writer was invited by Locher to do the writing. That’s when the Chase Sequence (which was the heart and soul of stories by Gould and Collins) took two fatal shots in the temple.
We haven’t seen one since, other than that ’reverse’ run, by Tracy in the Johnny Nothing saga. Locher did try ‘art wise’ in the mid to late ninties. There were a few memorable villain designs (eg. Dab Stract, Smirk, Snails, Beau Tox even top quality secondary characters like Amy Lovelaw) that is when Locher put his ’mind’ to it but that period was also punctuated with a series of flops.And having the distraction of Editorials every week didn’t help.
Story quality got worse when Locher took it over, and sadly instead of wisely patterning his style after Gould or Collins he surprisingly, copied the crippling Kilian style. Story ‘build up’ and repetition took up ‘residence’ !
He is no writer and that turn, was adding fuel to fire !
BillT The fall off in real quality started with the departure of Max Collins in early 1993. Shortly thereafter Mike Kilian a TMS writer was invited by Locher to do the writing. That’s when the Chase Sequence (which was the heart and soul of stories by Gould and Collins) took two fatal shots in the temple.
We haven’t seen one since, other than that ’reverse’ run, by Tracy in the Johnny Nothing saga. Locher did try ‘art wise’ in the mid to late ninties. There were a few memorable villain designs (eg. Dab Stract, Smirk, Snails, Beau Tox even top quality secondary characters like Amy Lovelaw) that is when Locher put his ’mind’ to it but that period was also punctuated with a series of flops.And having the distraction of Editorials every week didn’t help.
Story quality got worse when Locher took it over, and sadly instead of wisely patterning his style after Gould or Collins he surprisingly, copied the crippling Kilian style. Story ‘build up’ and repetition took up ‘residence’ !
He is no writer and that turn, was adding fuel to fire !