Nathan Fox Makes A Compelling Case For A Golf Comic

When I go visit my parents at their house, I inevitably end up watching some TV with my dad, and it's almost always tuned to his favorite channel: The Golf Channel. It presents an... interesting portrait of the sport, one that's focused on hitting balls out of impossible spots on riverbanks, commentators wearing matching polo shirts, the amount of titanium in clubs (at least, according to ads) and grand-prize SUVs that somehow magically sit atop water hazards.

It's enough to make someone who only occasionally dips into the world of golf forget that the sport is mostly played on stunningly gorgeous, well-manicured courses, and that the act of being an in-person spectator or player can be a strange sort of communion with nature. Artist Nathan Fox, known for his work on Dark Horse Comics' Pigeons from Hell, his covers for Vertigo's FBP: Federal Bureau of Physics, and one widely shared Wonder Woman redesign, managed to capture that sense wonderfully in some recent commissions of the Masters tournament for Golf Digest.

A post on the website of Bernstein & Andriulli, the agency that represents Fox for illustration work, explains the artist's process:

The breadth of environment was a little bit more than Nathan expected. In order to capture the whole experience he found himself working in ways he didn't anticipate. "I think being there compared to what I could find online: it had a huge effect on my color palate, and some of the choices I made," Nathan explains. Not only did he shift the colors he would have used, he shifted his working process slightly. For this assignment he found himself working directly off his sketches, which is atypical for his process.

The results are undeniably beautiful. It kinda makes me want to read a full-on comic about golf, or, even more shocking, go play a round.