Okay, i've only ever seen his name connected to Legion. Was this a psuedonym for someone else? Believe it or not, i liked his art with the right inker.
Basically, im just looking for info on him. Thanks.
No, Janes is a real person. He was interviewed on pp. 132-35 of Glen Cadigan's The Legion Companion.
In the interview, Janes reveals that he left the comics industry when he left the Legion in 1980. He says he had fallen behind and was burned out from drawing the regular Legion title and the Secrets of the LSH mini-series. He went into advertising and designed posters for Bruce Lee movies. He also worked in animation for series such as Spider-Man, X-Men, Batman: The Animated Series, Gargoyles, and a number of others. He was the main model artist on Fantastic Four.
Don't have the companion, but many thanks. I was starting to think that for some unknown reason it was like a pen name. Shame that he got out of the business. With the right inker his stuff was enjoyable to me.
After the long period of Staton and Sherman/Abel (as opposed to Sherman's wonderful art on his own), Janes's style was a breath of fresh air. Looking back, it was still awkward in places and no match for what came after (Broderick and Giffen), but Janes was leaps and bounds above what preceded him.
There are some uninked pages in the Legion Companion that show how badly he suffered under some poor inking (mostly Frank Chiaramonte.) I really disregarded him before that point, although the issues that Bruce Patterson inked showed he had some good stuff.
Patterson was the inker i was thinking of, but i couldn't pull up the name. Haven't seen those issues in a long time. He came in after the period that had some rough stuff, such as, and i hate to say it, but the Ditko stuff. Some artists fit a certain period, and Ditko seemed past the time his stuff worked for on legion. I think it could have worked elsewhere in DC, but not for Legion.
Janes did have a good sense of proportion and body structure, and his stuff was very welcome after the few years before that, though. Would love to see him contribute something new some time just to see how much his artwork has advanced since his time with the legion.
Janes always seemed a bit bland to me. While Ditko was a bit old-fashioned for the time, it was fun, although he often had ill-fitting inkers IIRC.
Patterson and of course Giffen kicked the book forward.
Janes to me was a continuation of late 70s/early 80s bland, and was not any measurably different, IMHO.
I stopped reading the Flash - and almost the Legion - because of Janes' art. This was back when Iris West (XS' grandmother) was killed.
