Toth rude to Rude
I used to be a comic book editor, years ago. Telling artists where they are going wrong and why is a very hard thing to do. I also edited a critical magazine about comics, and my greatest regret about having to hand it on, when the comics themselves needed my full-time professional attention, was that I had agreement from my favourite comic artist ever, Alex Toth, to do a lengthy interview and cover.
That’s preamble to a link, to an Alex Toth critique of a Steve Rude art job. It’s devastating and very accurate, and effectively shows how much of a gap there is between someone easily in the top 10% of comic artists and someone at the very peak. I wish I’d been capable of such an incisive commentary on the artists I worked with.
I’ve no idea otherwise about that site, or what the D&D-style ID bits are for on the comments.
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FT's alext on October 9th, 2006
Thanks for linking to this! I don’t know much about comics art, but what he says seems — well, true. The last page could apply to almost any artform, I think.
FT's alext on October 9th, 2006
But I should say what I mean by that: the idea of 100% commitment, the never-being-satisfied approach seems to me one way of defining the quest for ‘art’. i.e. it’s not the creation of a specific type of work (some things ‘are’ art, some things ‘aren’t'), nor everything created by a specific type of person (an artist is that by virtue of their work, and not vice versa), but something more like a process, and a process always in search of something… Yet rather than being a pure aestheticism, in search of some mystical or ineffable non-being, Toth insists that this idea of art is not opposed to function: it’s all about telling the story. This breaks with one of the major post-romantic theories of art (but not I suspect with the ideas of any great practitioners of art, to use an awkward expression) i.e. that art is that which exceeds or transcends those sorts of considerations.
FT's Martin Skidmore on October 9th, 2006
I see Toth as more like a John Ford, say: someone who didn’t see a distinction between telling a successful story and making a great work of art - that you did the former as well as you could, and worked really hard at it, and in doing so you not only pleased an audience, you also created a great movie/comic.