But his science has grown more subtle over the years.
Later stories may appear less savage, but this is only because Mackay has grown more subtle.
His eyes were flat and more heavily shadowed, and what had once been a pronounced limp had grown more subtle.
From The Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle on, Julien Temple has often used it, though the fiction has grown more subtle recently.
Dion is one of the exceptions, perhaps because his immediate concern is... What's more, he has an agenda, though it's grown more subtle, more generous and less didactic over the years.
The debut disc, Yellow Magic Orchestra, was infused with a skittish wit that never quite left them even as their music grew more subtle and intricate (the Japanese press coined the term "Technopop" to describe it).
Once ranked as mere splatter horror (a label possibly derived from "Scanners," his 1981 opus about exploding human heads), his studies of man's rational yet futile efforts to measure or control dark impulses -- like his latest, "A Dangerous Method" -- have grown more subtle and character driven.
His great achievement is not the complex fictional universe he has shaped over the last two decades but the people who inhabit that universe, especially the reluctant believers like Patera Silk, an unorthodox priest whose faith grows more subtle with every shock to traditional dogma.
Exaggerated in Greek archaic Doric work, it grew more and more subtle in the 5th and 4th centuries bc.
But his stories have grown more elegant, subtle, shapely and reflective over time, to the point where some of the recent works are perfect specimens.
