The artists most likely to make you buy a comic.

You can never accuse this blog of not being clued-up. After all, it's only taken six years of its existence for it to occur to me to do a post about who my favourite Bronze Age artists were.

It's easy, of course, to make the mistake of doing this in a rational manner, informed by adult knowledge of who did what and how well.

But that would be to ignore the fact that I read those comics when I was a youth and had nothing to go on back then but gut instinct as to what I did and didn't like.

Therefore, I'm going to, as I type these magic words, try to cast my mind back to the 1970s and remember which artists' presence in a mag would have been most likely to make me buy it in those days.

As far as I can remember, these are the artists in question: John Buscema, Jim Aparo, E.R. Cruz, Jim Starlin, John Byrne, Barry Smith, Mike Grell, Dave Cockrum, Alfredo Alcala, Walt Simonson, Paul Gulacy, Nestor Redondo and Neal Adams.

It's interesting that, since then, my tastes have changed somewhat. Of those, I must confess that Mike Grell's work no longer grabs me overly much, as I can spot its anatomical weaknesses and his debt to Neal Adams that I somehow missed as a child.

Neal Adams himself, while I can still see how accomplished and creative he was, doesn't hold the same appeal for me as he did back then. There's something about the rubberiness of his figures and the ad-campaign quality of his work that distances me from the stories in a way they once didn't.

Paul Gulacy's a strange one. Somehow, at the time, I totally failed to spot that, in his work on Shang-Chi, he was totally channelling Jim Steranko. As an adult, it simply leaps out at me. The odd thing is that I don't care about that because I actually prefer the look of Gulacy's work to Steranko's. Truly, the human mind is an odd thing.

All the other artists on the list, I think I still perceive in the same light as I did back then.

As for people who don't make that list, the likes of Sal Buscema and John Romita always appealed to me but never enough to motivate me to buy a comic just because they'd drawn them.

Oddly, even though Gil Kane was one of my favourite artists of all time, his presence in a comic was, likewise, never an actual motivating force for me buying it.

Anyway, who were the artists whose work was most likely to make you buy a comic back in the days of your youngsterdom? And have your views on them changed over the years?