Artist - Thomas Ott

Thomas Ott (1966) is a German artist from Zürich. He received training as a graphic artist at the School of Design in Zürich and has been a free-lance comics artist and illustrator since 1987. From 1998-2001 Ott attended film studies at the University of Art and Design in Zürich. He currently lives and works in Zürich and Paris. Ott is also the lead singer of The Playboys.

Ott is another "dark artist", which I seem to be gravitating to as I look through my artists' list. What makes his work unique and totally pimp is that he uses scratchboard. The level of detail and value/shading that he is able to create is phenominal. Most of his scratchboard comics are wordless with images powerful enough to provide the narrative.












"Swiss cartoonist Ott employs neither dialogue nor captions in his stories; words appear rarely, usually as chapter titles or signs in the background. Appropriately, Ott uses the early silent cinema as a motif... In keeping with the silent movie motif, Ott uses black, white and grays, enveloping his realistically drawn characters and settings in an expressionistic mood. The characters initially display understated emotions, and their situations seem familiar. Ott's storytelling moves at a slow but steady pace, making his protagonists' extreme reactions more believable when they, and the readers, are caught in Ott's imaginatively conceived, masterfully executed traps." – Publishers Weekly