Totally agreed.  I dig when Campbell does likenesses, and those are definitely a great tool for comic book artists because without them, a lot of the faces end up looking the same (I know I'm guilty of that!) .  So no issue with that.  But the Greg Land stuff seems so scattershot and inconsistent, famous people are minor characters for ONE frame.  In Wildsiderz, the teacher actually LOOKS LIKE the character actor who would play a teacher in that movie!

What I like about that, and what I picked up well before even hearing about the book, is the idea boiling the likeness down so that it can be recreated on the fly without a specific reference image.  That's how I was trying to work before, basically turn the real thing into an "animation" model.  This is why my ink drawings in the last couple of years have gotten thicker and blacker, I start with the thinnest Micron pen size I can get and then go over and over with thicker ones until I get something stark and simple.

And I was thinking the same about locations as well.  One of my big influences was Masakazu Katsura, who did these great mangas with ridiculously detailed photoreferenced backgrounds, they looked like big screen movies on the page-- which means that given the time that he made them, he must have been ripping off a BUNCH of photos.  But damn, the result.  It really gives you that you are there feel.  Nowadays with digital cameras, you can take your own reference all over the place (I still do even though I don't draw locations much anymore)... and what I like to do (or try to do) is combine locations together, I have crummy collages in Photoshop of similar but different locales smushed up next to each other so I can get a place that's LIKE a real location, but different and that I can't directly copy.  Basically, trying to design my workflow to make that sort of thing impossible.

I mean, this is all academic at this point since I couldn't even tell you the last proper comic book page I drew, but this impulse is still pretty strong inside me.