20 Random One-Sentence Personal Opinions About Comics Stuff

1) I love Moebius' art, and I think he's a genius, but I can't read his comics because I find them extremely dull.

2) The Spirit is Will Eisner's best, most fully-realized and executed project despite it's "low" aspirations as plain entertainment.

3) Thought balloons are a useful part of the cartooning tool-kit and should be embraced.

4) I miss exaggeration, foreshortening and distortion in mainstream genre comic art.

5) People who write eight comics a month are not writing eight good comics a month -- of course, some people writing one comic a month might not be writing any good comics a month, either.

6) If the artist is contributing actual plot and business because of lazy writing then they're co-plotters -- if not co-writers --and should be credited for contributing storytelling work.

7) I prefer inking that doesn't simply set up a lot of heavy lifting for the colorist.

8) Sometimes I think about all the young turk professionals who shit on Jack Kirby's 70s work and I hope they lived long enough to see that material go on to earn millions while their then-hip comics are largely ignored, often for good reasons.

9) Almost no one gets Howard the Duck, unless they do, and Marvel won't let them actually write him as Steve Gerber intended.

10) If you want to study humor and/or storytelling in comics check out how Carl Barks, Harvey Kurtzman and John Stanley squeezed a plot for as much material as possible -- sometimes in only one single page -- and consider how your sensibilities might work with that line of thinking/approach (or not).

11) For a company founded on creator's rights Image sure has seen some interesting lawsuits involving creator's rights. 

12) I think beloved good guy Jim Lee really fucked Alan Moore over but it apparently doesn't matter because he's a beloved good guy and Moore's a grumpy-puss old evil wizard king who makes a lot of people feel bad about their comic book lifestyle and decisions even though he doesn't know who they are and is usually talking for himself just like I am here.

13) Despite the industry being a cesspool of unfair practices, weird professional fan behavior and the usual crap everyone puts up with in any job involving people, I'm responsible for most of the problems I've had in my career (and so are a lot of other people in regards to their careers).

14) I couldn't get through Understanding Comics but that's perfectly okay, I'm glad so many people got something out of it and found it helpful.

15) I like Frank Quitely's art but sometimes the coloring makes his people look like they're made of chipped beef or some kind of meat product that isn't human flesh at all and while I might be way off I can't stop thinking about it that way because I'm human.

16) Sometimes I'm really jealous of people who work with legacy and corporate characters because they don't have to introduce or develop them the same way that new characters and concepts require and they have a pre-built audience and it's just so fucking hard to make anyone give two shits about new characters and concepts and it's not anyone's fault it's just the way life is because people tend to gravitate to known quantities.

17) Similarly, I'm envious of mainstream writers that don't have to actually write clean story endings because everything continues or carries or crosses over, or worse, just gets dropped like wrestling storylines because shit got so messy.

18)  While both are brilliant mega-extraordinary talents on their own, José Luis García-López inked by Kevin Nowlan absolutely sends me.

19) The New Teen Titans by Wolfman and Perez was my favorite comic when it was coming out but it really doesn't hold up, which is the way it goes with a lot of things and isn't a crime or anything except for that abomination Terry Long character and a few other things I could gripe about but this sentence has to end at some point so I'll leave it at that.

20) I love comics, and love all kinds of comics.