Whisper by Steven Grant and Rich Larsen
Far too long ago now, in the early ’90s when the comics business was fat & I worked on all sorts of books for all sorts of companies, I was a guest at a convention in Michigan. In a highly unorthodox move, the convention organized a “writing comics” panel & filled it with every comics writer in attendance, an approach that packed the stage with some 14 or 15 writers. The panel had no specific agenda, and when the introductions were over we threw it open to questions.
Inevitably, up piped someone – there’s always someone – who asked in a voice deeply embittered by the world’s failure to acknowledge his genius why, since so many comics are clearly crap, was he unable to get any editor anywhere interested in buying his stories instead of using the worthless shlubs they regularly used?
Obviously, none on the panel numbered among the tired, unimaginative, untalented hacks he was referring to. Obviously. (I should mention the non-exclusive emphasis of the panel, the show and his question was on work-for-hire superhero comics. Full disclosure and all that.) As it happened, we were running a system where the first person to answer one question became the last to answer the next. I’d answered first the previous question. With that many people on the panel, it was a long time coming back to me. I was a bit numb by the time it did.
My fellow panelists rambled through the standard answers. The “for public consumption” ones. Pleasant, inoffensive if occasionally stern platitudes with which everyone replies to questions like that, responses designed to gently shuffle the querant out the metaphoric door while maintaining the delusion of hope and allowing the respondents to feel as though they haven’t been total rat bastards. Above all, don’t offend the fans, since your livelihood depends on them. It’s not like the panelists were trying to con anyone, it’s just you stick around a business, any business, long enough, you pick up the pleasant lies they feed the customers and on some level it’s often easier to tap into those lies than to come up with something else. You believe them, at least for as long as you need to believe them. It’s a survival reflex.
All in all, I also prefer not to crap on other people’s dreams. But if a dream’s strong enough there’s no way to adequately crap on it. In college, I had a fiction writing course where we critiqued each other’s stories weekly, and the teacher repeatedly asked that we should be gentle and positive because the writer’s ego is a fragile thing and it would be terrible to drive someone away from writing with harsh criticism. I always thought that was a terribly wrong approach. Anyone who wants to write will do it regardless of what anyone else says. Sooner or later they may – may! – end up with something someone besides their mother or their best friend likes. (Bias puts blinders on us all.) Anyway, to get back to the panel, I’d just about gone comatose when whoever sat next to me said, “Steve probably has something to add” and shoved the mike in front of me.
I didn’t have anything to add.
Punisher by Steven Grant and Mike Zeck
Then, just like that, I did. I was bored, I was tired of hearing the same old crap, figured sooner or later someone ought to lay the facts out, and was acutely aware I was the end of that particular road. I took a deep breath, and launched into the following tirade:
Why won’t an editor consider your work instead of the crap he accepts?
1) Your work may not be as good as you think it is.
2) It’s not actually an editor’s job to find new talent. It’s the editor’s job to get his books out. While most editors do try to look for new talent, that’s something that gets relegated to after all the required work is done, and the required work is never done.
3) Because editors have to get their books out, they usually prefer to work with talent they know can get the job done, professionally and on time. Professionally doesn’t necessarily mean great. It means publishable. New talent always represents a risk.
4) Every editor has parameters for the material his office produces. You may not understand those parameters. Just because you want to do something doesn’t mean what you want to do fits editorial needs.
5) Everyone’s taste is different, and any editor may actually like the books he’s producing, and he may think they’re good comics. Even if you don’t. He may think the talent producing them is top notch talent. Even if you don’t.
Finally:
6) Even bad work is harder than it looks.
Let me repeat that now: even bad work is harder than it looks.
I know. I’ve produced a lot of bad work. I hope I’ve produced some good work, I produced projects I think are good work, but – and far too many people in comics can’t get this simple concept through their heads – I’m not the one who gets to decide these things. Unfortunately, I also can’t afford to pay attention to anyone else’s assessment. There are projects I’ve written that I thought – in some cases, still think – were very, very good that were almost universally vilified, when anyone bothered to pay attention to them at all. I’ve done projects that got raves that I thought, still think, were just utter crap. Then again, I knew what I intended, and, generally, how short I fell. Readers/critics knew what they wanted. The problem is the two sets of criteria don’t necessarily, maybe even rarely, match up.
The fact is that what I consider the bad work was never easier than the good. In my experience, good work takes much less effort to produce than bad. It requires less forced focus, usually builds more organically. But that’s deceptive. If you go by those criteria, you can easily trick yourself into believing that effortless work is good work and that’s nothing like a universal principle either. From a creative standpoint, any rigid criterion for distinguishing good or bad is both handicap and crutch. Creating comics is less a question of good and bad than a question of success and failure. Failing to produce good work isn’t hackwork. Hedging your bets is. Counterproductively, hedged bets are frequently what readers and critics respond best to.
Distinguishing good comics from bad is something of a fool’s errand, partly because they remain mostly a commercial enterprise (it’s around this point in these discussions that art/alt comics fans write me off as “a superhero guy” and that’s supposed to invalidate my arguments, but, trust me, I’ve been around this insanity we call comics enough to know that a) if you ain’t self-publishing, you ain’t the person who ultimately decides whether your work is publishable, and whatever market your publisher is targeting is still intended to be a commercial market, and b) if you don’t know the ratio of sharp-to-crap is roughly the same in art/alt comics as in “genre” comics, you haven’t been paying attention) and commerce is always something of a distorting force on creativity, kind of the way gravity naturally distorts spacetime in Einsteinian physics, and partly because so very few people are able to differentiate what they like from what’s good. There’s an embarrassment factor there; nobody wants to believe they like crap. Let me put it bluntly: there’s nothing wrong with liking crap. Everybody does, hopefully not exclusively. What’s wrong is declaring crap to be good because you like it. That’s how you end up with the recent spectacle of Fletcher Hanks and his incoherent inanity being dug up from its grave after 65 years and marketed as surrealistic genius, or Jerry Siegel & Paul Reinman’s ugly, clumsy Mighty Comics misreproductions of Stan Lee & Jack Kirby’s pivotal Marvel work recategorized as “camp.”
Then again, I had a TV production professor in college who refused to allow anyone to discuss television in terms of good and bad. He had a term for it: buttermilk. He liked buttermilk. But some people like buttermilk and some people don’t. Does that make buttermilk good or bad? It’s not a question with an answer.
I grew up reading bad comics. What choice did I have? It was the ’60s. The early ’60s. Until underground comix got widespread later on (and, man, did I devour them when I found them) it was a rigged game. Someone recently asked me if I started out as a Marvel or DC fan. DC, no question. Marvel wasn’t even around then. But y’know what? If you were a 7 year old in the vanilla Midwest in the early ’60s, less a new decade than a drab runoff from the gray ’50s, DC Comics, specifically the superhero comics edited by Julie Schwartz, were it, man. There was nothing better anywhere that a kid my age back then could get their hands on that similarly promised, even at their most insipid, that things might possibly someday be more than the, as GK Chesterton put it, “cold mechanic happenings” the world back then seemed to be made of. A few years on, that wouldn’t be the case, but then The Flash, Green Lantern, The Atom, the Justice League, they were the closest you could come to the strange. They were pretty much the only door to genuine excitement available in the day, and walking through that door eventually got me here.
But good? I liked them, so, sure. I’d have said good. I’d have insisted. Look back now, what you’ll likely see is character-thin and plot heavy, straitjacketed into structures developed and preferred by Julie in the science fiction comics he edited. For all his reputation for infiltrating scientific fact into his comics, and he did, he cheated. A lot. Deathtrap escapes hinge on semantics, heroes miraculously develop exactly the (temporary) power needed to stop the threat du jour. In maybe the most egregious bit of stupidity in all Julie’s titles, world-hopping quasi-astronaut Adam Strange, collaborating with the Justice League, reasons that if kryptonite, a piece of Superman’s homeworld, will stop Superman, then a piece of a super-powered alien’s homeworld will lay the alien low. What the hell?
Mystery in Space #75 by Gardner Fox, Carmine Infantino and Murphy Anderson
It’s easily the worst Adam Strange story in the run. Fans of the day declared it the finest Adam Strange story ever. (If you reasoned out “Justice League!” the odds are with you.) Hell, the whole of comics history is punctuated with widely praised material that wasn’t very good. Comics fandom itself is built on twin delusions that ’40s comics represented a “golden age” and ’50s comics (aside from EC Comics) a Carthagenated wasteland only marginally redeemed by the late return of superhero comics. Neither is remotely accurate. While hardly devoid of good comics, the “golden age,” once the cherrypicking stopped and much material became available, turned out to be a vast dumping ground of utter swill, while ’50s comics are a gold field for those willing to go panning for it.
Green Lantern/Green Arrow #87 by Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams
As mainstream comics go, the most influential of the late ’60s may be Denny O’Neil & Neal Adams’ Green Lantern-Green Arrow, which briefly staved off cancellation in a decaying market by launching a short-lived move toward “relevant comics.” This was pretty quickly crushed by the urge to “make comics fun again” (i.e. avoid controversy) but it came back with a vengeance in the ’80s as GL-GA fans broke into the business and launched their own variants. Not too long ago, out of morbid curiosity, I asked various contemporaries in comics if there were any comics they loved when younger that they find embarrassing to read now. Almost without fail: Green Lantern-Green Arrow. Yet it was still a huge breakthrough in its day and its influence continues to ripple through the medium.
Killing Joke by Alan Moore and Brian Bolland
The list of highly touted bad comics go on and on. Few stories, even Batman stories, are as bad as Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke, an empty exercise in cruelty that depends on sleight-of-hand, Alan’s always splendid use of language and Brian Bolland’s phenomenal art to keep audiences from seeing the joke not only doesn’t have a punchline, it doesn’t even have a joke. That didn’t stop it from becoming, with The Dark Knight Returns, one of the two lynchpins of virtually all subsequent Batman interpretations. Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman is among the most lionized series in comics history, but its champions conveniently overlook the almost literal deus ex machina endings diminishing many early arcs, with hero Morpheus appearing from left field at the climax to terminate all storylines with languid boredom and a wave of his hand. That’s not a quality you traditionally find in good endings, in any medium. (Ever see that SCTV fake ’40s crime film that features a crusading DA trying to take down a mob boss that ends with a courtroom-standoff-at-gunpoint abruptly broken up by news “the Japs” have attacked Pearl Harbor, whereon all players throw down their weapons and rush out together arm in arm to sign up for military duty as Patriotic Americans? Same principle.) On the alt side, I’ve always wondered if fans of Craig Thompson’s breakthrough graphic novel Good-Bye Chunky Rice, which helped trigger mainstream publisher interest in alt comics, were unaware it was sentimentalized treacle, were willing to ignore it, or if that’s where its main appeal lay.
I cite these as bad comics not only because they all changed the course of comics in some way, but also because they were each, in their way, quite good. (With Sandman, it fully merited its reputation the moment Neil dropped that annoying gimmick.) If this seems a contradiction, welcome to comics. I’m not suggesting they shouldn’t be read, or enjoyed. I’m not even suggesting badness is an especially good reason to not read a comic book. There are worse things for a comic book to be than bad. A problem with discussing bad comics is that while there are a few really bad enough to be memorable, there are very few really bad enough to be memorable. Many are good enough to be momentarily enjoyable, like eating a Twinkie. Some, like those mentioned in the previous paragraph, are good enough to have altered the business.
Most bad comics are simply forgettable, and it’s more trouble to try to remember then than they’re worth.
As we grow up reading comics, we end up expecting maybe a little too much from them, or end up expecting things the medium maybe just isn’t built for. It’s a medium of shorthand, of tricky balance. As much as many have wanted comics to take their place among the literature of our time – some have even tried making “comics literature” an accepted term – it’s not really a literary medium. It’s not movies either. It’s that words and pictures thing that confuses everyone. It’s a pop medium, a commercial medium, a strangely hermetic medium, where, sure, we may adore Will Eisner and Harvey Kurtzman and Jack Kirby and whoever else someone has put forth at one point or another as developing the “rules” of comics, but, really, it’s a medium without rules, where no theory ultimately holds sway. It has boundaries – no sound, no real movement, space limitations – but no orthodoxies, no matter how many publishers, editors, critics, readers, artists and writers have tried inflicting them. No matter what theory, what orthodoxy anyone produces about what comics should or shouldn’t be, someone else produces a comic that shatters it. A lot has changed in comics since I began reading them, but, as they were long before I began reading them and despite all the many, many efforts to gain respect for comics and have them declared “legitimate,” we remain an outlaw medium. Virtually anything goes here. This is the wild west.
In that context, terms like good and bad have considerably less resonance, given there’s no authority of any merit and “badness” has never been much of an impediment to sales, popularity or, frequently, enjoyability of a comic. What does it really matter if a comic is ultimately good or bad, by which we really mean, let’s face it, appealing or disappointing? Allow me to suggest we replace thinking in terms of good or bad altogether with a different and arguably more useful (if equally subjective) yardstick:
Is the comic/graphic novel in question interesting?
That’s what we all really want from comics, right? That what I wanted when I was 7, certainly, it’s what many comics I read delivered whether I ended up deciding I liked them or not, and it’s what I look for today, along with (I suspect) everyone else who still reads comics.
Anything else, however welcome, is gravy.
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Click here for the Anniversary Index of Hate.
Whole bunch of things to talk about here…but I think I’ll start off by maybe defending Fletcher Hanks. (I had a little bit of this conversation with Steven by email, but promised to continue it in comments…so that’s what I’m doing!)
Obviously folks can like or dislike Hanks’ work, but you’re sort of suggesting that his comics are obviously or clearly not good, and I don’t think that that’s exactly right. It seems to me that his comics are valued when they’re valued by people looking at them in the context of fine art, or specifically outsider art. They do seem to make sense to me in that frame…and the weird stiff art and beautiful color sense seem to fit nicely into conceptions of “good” within that milieu.
I guess the point would be that goodness takes on meaning within a context. Hanks’ comics may be bad from the standpoint of mainstream comics standards (they don’t make sense, the narratives are rudimentary, the art is weird), but that doesn’t mean that people who like them are simply being arbitrary. It could mean that they’re looking at them from another perspective (though, of course, it’s totally reasonable to question the merits of outsider art categories, or to argue that Hanks doesn’t fit into them, or isn’t as realized as Henry Darger, or what have you.)
Anyway, here’s my old piece on Hanks and outsider art — which seems to be blessed with even more typos than usual. Oh well…such is blogging….
” I always thought that was a terribly wrong approach. Anyone who wants to write will do it regardless of what anyone else says. Sooner or later they may – may! – end up with something someone besides their mother or their best friend likes. ”
Is this really true?
Even among established writers, there’s definitely famous examples of writers who get discouraged: J.D. Salinger apparently continued to write but refused to publish after getting bad reviews of his last published story.
It’s apparently believed Emily Dickinson didn’t publish her work because of a lack of encouragement, wikipedia says “Literary critic Edmund Wilson, in his review of Civil War literature, surmised that “with encouragement, she would certainly have published”.”
Yes, these writers may have continued writing, but you wouldn’t hear about the ones that didn’t and never became famous, would you?
I do hear this sort of thing a lot though. I guess by established writers who romanticize it as a calling?
Yeah…I don’t really think it’s true. There are some folks (like Emily Dickinson) who can push on without any feedback or encouragement, but that’s pretty rare. I know I stopped writing poetry because it was clear no one wanted to read it. If you’re not making any money, and you’re not getting any positive notice, I think lots of folks would stop who might otherwise continue.
The eulogy for a million blogs, Noah.
I would suggest the approach I describe is the unromantic one. The romantic notion is there are a million hidden geniuses out there who would’ve outflowered Shakespeare if only someone had given them a kind word. I’m not suggesting needless cruelty, & I am possibly romanticizing by assuming the critic in question knows the difference between bad writing & a radical but fruitful shift in approach, but there really is a difference between people who want to write & people who want to be writers. The latter are the ones who stop. It’s not that hard to tell bad writing, & even good writers are more than capable of it. Everyone gets feedback, & the only feedback that’s any good for you is honest feedback, positive or negative. You’re not under any obligation to accept any of it, but a writer doing something really wrong (by which I don’t mean wrong in a “mainstream writing” sense, but wrong in that it undercuts their purpose) will not be helped by someone being “nice” about the work. Being negative & being cruel are not the same thing, but if you can’t take being negative you’re probably better off doing something else anyway, because negative is largely what the world at large rains down on writers. Unless they happen to be at the rarefied heights where the slightest criticism unleashes a torrent of virulent defenders. And y’know what? That’s often not that good for one’s writing either.
It’s a strange, strange business.
Frankly, no matter how good your writing is, approbation is usually so hard to come by that anyone who writes for approbation is an idiot.
As for Hanks, Noah, we began this discussion on email. Leaving aside reservations about “outsider art” (having watched its inception/invention contemporaneously, it always struck me as more politically than artistically motivation, since it played on many political themes of the day) I question whether Hanks fits the category. Just because he was largely unknown to our generations doesn’t make him an outsider. A guy who worked steadily for several years (I’ve no idea of the circumstances of his departure from the field) at a circulation considerably larger than any I’ve ever enjoyed, in framework (artistically his style isn’t even all that different, though I’m more than happy to accept his art is better – prettier, certainly – than many of his contemporaries) essentially identical to what surrounded him. But it’s never been his art I quibbled with. It’s his writing that’s the house of cards. Yes, I understand the auteurial approach to Hanks’ work, & that’s fine, but imagine Hanks’ stories if they were drawn by, say, Paul Reinman. How fascinating would you find the writing then?
I think Hanks’ stories are pretty solidly weird…and in any case, it’s the whole package I enjoy, art and writing together. (Though I do share some of your skepticism about outsider art, as the linked article says.)
I think the point is not that there are lots of folks who would be Shakespeare but that they were discouraged. Rather, the argument I’d make is that stick-to-it-iveness and talent don’t necessarily have anything to do with each other. Similarly, I don’t agree that there’s a generally agree upon “good writing” that is clear and consistent enough that great writers will always be encouraged and bad ones discouraged. It seems more like it’s a crapshoot, really.
You’re absolutely right there’s no correlation between talent & stick-to-itiveness, but I would venture in general the more you write the better your writing will become. Which is not to say it’ll necessarily ever become genius or even good but in general it’ll become better & sometimes good enough for a town this size. The point is that them what wants to write write, Not necessarily publish, but write. Those who want to be writers more than they’re actually interested in writing are the ones most likely to be shied away by criticism. But, really, it’s sort of inane – romantic – to come into something from scratch & think you’ll be a master from jump, not that savants don’t occasionally pop up. Anyone who doesn’t think they’ll get criticized is starting with the wrong attitude anyway. I’m not just talking about “commercial” writing. In fact, the further from commercial your work strays the more you ought to be prepared for scorn & derision, because there are plenty of people out there who just love to excoriate anything they don’t think has “commercial value.” (Not, mind you, that I recommend anyone think about commercialism when they write. I don’t.)
But, as you say, it’s a crapshoot. It’s always a crapshoot. But I hold the view that once you hit a certain socio-economic level, you get what you want, regardless of whether you acknowledge it. If you stop writing because someone criticized your work, it’s because you want not to be criticized more than you want to write. You can call it fear or whatever, but it’s still ultimately your choice. More people should read John Bunyan: “But if thou shalt cast all away as vain, I know not but ’twill make me dream again.”
Okay; I think you win by quoting John Bunyan. I’m pretty sure that’s a first for the blog.
” If you stop writing because someone criticized your work, it’s because you want not to be criticized more than you want to write. ”
I agree with this to a point, but I was reacting more to the idea that I thought you were making that you shouldn’t mince words with a new writer, because they can’t be discouraged? I think there’s a difference in giving criticism meant to be encouraging and just bashing them without diplomacy?
I think most people try to be diplomatic when giving feedback to new writers. Also, how the hell does someone know they are the final arbiter of “good” versus “bad”?
Jim Shooter claims the DC editors thought that Marvel books were crap, quoting shooter:
“DC editors thought Marvel’s art, especially Kirby, Ditko and Ayers’, was “crude” and child-like. Mort mused that maybe kids related to it because it was like their own scribbles in their school notebooks. ”
Top publishing editors in comics, allegedly clueless about what’s good or saleable or not. If you bash a new writer, are you sure you know what you are talking about?
When you bash a long-established writer, or praise them, are you sure you know what you’re talking about?
Like most people’s, editors’ viewpoints are frequently colored by their own circumstances, not to mention egos. I’ve no doubt Mort absolutely needed to believe the books he put out were the best comics that even COULD be done, & anyone who did anything differently were inferiors, so there’s no way he could see what Marvel was doing as anything but substandard trash. When I was working with Marvel in the ’80s, it was a very common view over there that they needn’t pay any attention to anything being done at any other company or worry about the talent there, because if the talent was any good they’d be working for Marvel already. It was not uncommon to hear Will Eisner dismiss everything done from around the time of A Contract With God on (not sure he paid much attention before that) as innately inferior to his own work, which I’m sure from his point is a valid criticism. But that’s a lesson people need to learn as well: whatever criticism you get, you can’t absorb it whole. You have to put it in perspective & do the hard detective work of figuring out what’s valuable criticism & what isn’t.
Or you can go the Hemingway route. Famously, Ernest said he never paid attention to good reviews because then he’d have to pay attention to bad reviews too.
Noah: nice to know my pretentious ejikashun can still get me out of sticky wickets…
“When you bash a long-established writer, or praise them, are you sure you know what you’re talking about?”
I would distinguish between feedback and criticism. Feedback is designed to help the writer grow and develop, criticism presents a point of view.
Posit a developing writer who writes like Geoff Johns. Assume I dislike the comics of Geoff Johns.
As a critic, I might argue “This is ugly, derivative, nonsense.”
When giving feedback I say: “This reminds me of the writing style of Geoff Johns, and people seem to like this sort of thing. You seem to capture the style well.”
” But it’s never been his art I quibbled with. It’s his writing that’s the house of cards. Yes, I understand the auteurial approach to Hanks’ work, & that’s fine, but imagine Hanks’ stories if they were drawn by, say, Paul Reinman. How fascinating would you find the writing then?”
Separating out the writing and the drawing in Fletcher Hanks seems more than a little irrelevant. His interest lies in how peculiar and idiosyncratic a cartoonist he was – not artist, not writer, but cartoonist. That said, even if you have to break him down to component parts, there are an awful lot of conceptually resonant images just in the describable action — not nearly as interesting or resonant as they are as drawn by Hanks, but, then, that’s why they’re comics.
As a critic, I might argue “This is ugly, derivative, nonsense.”
When giving feedback I say: “This reminds me of the writing style of Geoff Johns, and people seem to like this sort of thing. You seem to capture the style well.”
See, by my understanding of the words, both of those constitute criticism. But #1 is what you’d call a review & # 2 is what you’d call a critique. I’m not sure telling someone he captures a style well when you think that style sucks does anyone much good.
But as a writer ultimately I have to go with whoever it was said “All feedback is noise in the system.” Creatively it is. Not that the noise can’t sometimes be used to good effect.
Sorry, the first two paragraphs of the last message should be in quotes, as they’re from pallas…
Re. Hanks: so, there’s common ground between HU and Comics Comics, after all?
Domingos, I’m not entirely 100% for Hanks…there are probems. But in any case, there’s no lack of common ground between HU and CC I don’t think. The HU best of list wasn’t smashing CC’s paradigms, I don’t think, as just one example.
My candidate for the worst-ever 1960s comic was “Neutro” #1 (1967). It’s so bad it’s almost like it’s a parody of a bad comic.
The writing is padded to the point it is comically repetitious, and the art is by Jack Sparling.
It doesn’t just suck, it SUCKS! It sucks so bad, I think it easily beats out “Tod Holton, Super Green Beret” #1, also published in 1967.
I remember the cover of Neutro but never read it, as Jack Sparling was one of my least favorite artists of the day so I shied well away from it. Never got the chance to appreciate the density of the text. One of my worst comics memories was finding out Sparling had replaced Gil Kane on Green Lantern in the late ’60s. (My least favorite artist of the ’60s, though – & there were a lot of bad artists to choose from – was Tony Tallarico. Sparling appearing on a book was an impending death knell, but Tallarico was a bullet to the head.)
I would mention more comics I thought were just plain bad, but I’m probably not one to talk, having produced my fair share of them.
Is this Russ Maheras?
Steven — Yep, That’s me!
Tony Tallarico — Arggh! The artistic mind reels!
Here’s just a tiny sampling of “Neutro” #1
For the second interior page shown, multiply it by six, and you’ll get some idea how Neutro’s powers are described over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.
Many panels have zero backgrounds, and if Sparling cranked this out over the weekend, I would not at all be surprised.
I’d love to know who the (ahem) writer was, but I’m afraid that little tidbit is probably lost forever.
Oops! Here’s the link: http://offthebeatenpanel.blogspot.com/2011/09/neutro-1-dell-1967.html
Wow.
I’d swear that’s the same concept as that manga thing Stan Lee was involved in a couple years back…
I really don’t hate that art. The lack of background on the splash page makes everything look disconnected and vertiginous; it’s an effect I rather like. The weird monkey-lizard things are cute, the evil scientist caricatures are pretty enjoyable…I dunno. I’ve seen a lot worse.
Huh. Yeah, I agree with Noah. Sure, it’s kind of jagged, and the faces aren’t great, but the lizards are cute. It doesn’t make me want to lay my head on the desk and weep for humanity.
You gotta read the whole book from start to finish, and you’ve got to compare it with the quality of the major companies from that era.
I think you younger folks have been desensitized to crap because since the 1980s, you’ve been bombarded with it.
I said it before and I’ll say it again, there are hundreds — perhaps thousands — of professionals post-1980 whose work would have been rejected from even the better fanzines in the 1970s. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, even Marvel and DC had pros getting regular work who wouldn’t have even gotten past the receptionist at those same companies during the 1960s.
That’s why I limited my original window regarding “Neutro” #1 to the 1960s.
“I think you younger folks have been desensitized to crap because since the 1980s, you’ve been bombarded with it.”
HAHA, because comics previous to 1980 weren’t 99.9% crap!
Derik — The skill-level crap bar was quite a bit higher pre-1980. The black-and-white explosion of the mid- late-1980s was one of the crap catalysts.
I was actually thinking that I’d rather look at this thing than most superhero comics today. Part of that is the computer coloring that they use now though.
When I was a kid, I always wondered how Sparling’s characters managed to wrap their immensely pudgy sausage fingers around anything. I’d like to see one of those “evil scientist caricatures” use an iPhone. It’d be high comedy.
Hey, no dumping on Jack Sparling! I loved the loose, energetic rendering of his “Space Man” comics.
Here are some of the lead baddies in the Cold War-era “Space Man,” whose space ships resembled the onion-shaped domes of the Kremlin: http://s3.amazonaws.com/resourcel/1258696465_Spaceman%20%281963%29_4_p7_Comic.jpg
OK, kind’a ho-hum: http://goodcomics.comicbookresources.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/buddy13.jpg
1944 Sparling, with snake bondage! http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_uKUJj9VMJpA/S_2bFi-1akI/AAAAAAAAIRw/nswGuwIwRek/s1600/pg19.jpg
(From http://comicbookcatacombs.blogspot.com/2010_05_01_archive.html )
Nekkid cheesecake from Sparling: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-irbAwcblIzI/T5uCqVkQ2wI/AAAAAAAAWUM/40Zo-Rlj8CM/s1600/Sick%2B3.jpg . Much more at http://ripjaggerdojo.blogspot.com/2012/04/charlton-cheesecake.html .
Note; no “immensely pudgy sausage fingers” to be seen!
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Steven Grant says:
…(My least favorite artist of the ’60s, though – & there were a lot of bad artists to choose from – was Tony Tallarico. Sparling appearing on a book was an impending death knell, but Tallarico was a bullet to the head.)
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Oh, Lord, yes! Did I have a hate for Tallarico! Who, as “Castle of Frankenstein” magazine, in a mention attacking his renderings (I believe “ridiculous” was used), also went by Tony Williamsune.
Some info (and competent art): http://www.tonytallarico.com/anthonytallaricosr.html
As this article informed me, art “in the style more usually associated with Tallarico” was only inked by Tallarico, and pencilled by Bill Fraccio, who better merits the scorn: http://martinohearn.blogspot.com/2012/06/tony-tallarico-with-and-without-bill.html
But, did Tallarico alone do this one? Pretty awful: http://www.misterkitty.org/extras/stupidcovers/stupidcomics122.html (Check out the girl’s digits in “Assignment: Top Secret”)
R: I’m not arguing the 90s weren’t filled with crap comics, too, but we can’t deny that most comics at any time were crap.
Noah — I’m with you regarding today’s coloring. It almost neutralizes the power of a given artist’s style. It gives everything a “soft focus” and almost nothing “pops.”
Derik — I can’t argue that most stuff from any era isn’t any good. I’m just saying the basic skill level bar is lower now.
My sense is that Russ is right…and it makes sense. Comics have a way smaller audience now compared to back then. If you’ve got skills and want to work in a commercial field, why would you choose comics? Nobody’ll see it and they treat their talent like crap. Not much incentive.
I think the situation is comparable to, say, the expansion of baseball. There are many more teams than there used to be, so the talent level bar has dropped. That doesn’t mean there aren’t great players anymore, it simply means there are professionals on probably every team out there that years ago would not have made the cut.
The big difference with comic talent, however, is there are no unions, so the pay level is entirely supply and demand. Some editors/publishers can lowball their talent because they know if an experienced artist or writer balks or makes trouble, there are lierally 100 others waiting in the wings to step in.
Derik, I have to agree with Russ on the subject of crap. Maybe not in the ’40s when half a million publishers published & just getting bodies to fill the pages was a pain & a half, but by the ’60s, the field had shrunk pretty severely, & most of the companies left, while they were more than happy to publish crap & probably figured it was exactly what comics should be, on a craft level generally demanded a certain level of quality in their crap. Basic things, like reasonably good anatomy in the art. Sure, there were REALLY crappy exceptions (ibid) but in general there were at least minimal demands of quality put on even crap.
In the ’80s, particularly as a result of the b&w balloon, though it was trending that way by then already, & due to the influx of a number of distributors looking for ANYTHING at all to sell, a gazillion new publishers & self-publishers came into the field, with the result that the main standard for comics stories was that they filled a sufficient number of pages. Due to rampant speculation by hordes of people not wanting to miss out on being able to cash in on the next Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a lot of that really bad work sold really well, for awhile, with the notion getting in the heads of even Marvel & DC that nobody really much gave a rat’s ass about quality so there was less pressure on them to worry about it. Plus those books created a whole new peninsula of writers, artists & editors who called themselves “professionals” & they migrated to other companies as well, with the marketplace lessons they’d learned. Sure, there was as great a ratio of crap published in the ’60s as in the ’80s, maybe a greater ratio as the really good stuff in the ’60s was arguably not as good or at least as numerous as the really good stuff in the ’80s, but the general quality level of crap in the ’60s was, as I’m sure Russ meant, enforced at a much higher level than it was in the ’80s.
Or maybe I was just more forgiving of comics in the ’60s, when I was much younger. I concede that’s always a possibility.
As far as having skills & wanting to work in a commercial field, there are good reasons to prefer working in comics to other fields, whether you’re a writer or an artist. Money is generally not one of them, but on purely aesthetic & emotional grounds, comics can be considerably more rewarding, personal & far less pressure & demand than, say, advertising, or television, or writing novels, or commercial photography, etc. I wouldn’t argue against doing comics if you like doing comics. I would argue against it if you don’t care about comics but want lots of money, or fame, or whatever else. I would probably argue against being exclusive to comics, as it’s always safer to keep your fingers in various pies, esp. if you’re a freelancer. Working in several fields isn’t exactly having a safety net, but working in only one – unless you’re very, very lucky – can be like not even having a tightrope.
Steven: That last para kind of sums it up. The nostalgia tends to blind comics fan, especially for certain time periods.
Or maybe it’s just about where one places the bar for “crap.”
holy crap, i think that Neutro looks amazing! there really is no accounting for taste, i guess. reminds me, weirdly, of Mazinger Z or something Japanese.
It reminds me of nothing so much as a Jack Chick pamphlet, the same sort of action pictures with caption boxes narration.