Artist August: Chris Samnee [Art Feature]

You should know who Chris Samnee is. It’s almost becoming harder and hard to talk about artists I love thanks to the internet giving a wider platform to any artist who can use it, but Chris Samnee is an artist I’ve wanted to talk about for a while. I’m pretty sure I first discovered Samnee through his work on “Ultimate Comics: All-New Spider-Man” #6 and #7, but it was when he took over from Paolo Rivera as the artist of “Daredevil” that I really took notice. See, I liked “Daredevil” a lot during the time Rivera and Mark Waid worked together, but there was a shift in tone when Samnee came aboard. I think it was most noticeable during the Ikari arc, around #23 to #27, as you could see Samnee’s skills as a storyteller come to fore, unburdened by a meticulous script to adhere to.

Because of this, I really think it was Samnee that spearheaded Marvel’s shift towards allowing creators, especially artists, the freedom to express their love for the characters through their specific style without having to conform to a house style. The rippled out to books like “Hawkeye” and eventually “Black Widow” and “Elektra”, but I really think it started here because of Chris Samnee. Not only is Samnee an almost unparalleled storyteller, but he has an art style that really stands out in modern comics in how much it recalls the styles of artists from the golden and silver age of comics. It’s almost like Chris Samnee bottled nostalgia for pulp style comics and the heavily inked pages and brought it to a modern storytelling sensibility. Samnee is perhaps the prime example that masterful inking is just as impressive as masterful pencilling.

Chris Samnee’s work can most regularly in “Daredevil” where he and Mark Waid are continuing a modern classic of a run. He can be found at his website, where the sketches below have been taken from, tumblr and twitter.