Ken Provost sent me this…
Thank you for the lovely piece about Dan Spiegle. He was one of the best comic artists ever and didn't receive sufficient accolades and attention because he didn't work on Batman or the X-Men. I really like how you seem to have felt privileged to have so many opportunities to work with him.
I hope this question doesn't seem insensitive but as you are well aware, we are losing the comic book makers of his generation. No disrespect is meant to the many fine writers and artists who have come along since that generation's heyday but I can't help feel there was something different about the men and women who made the first thirty years of comic books. I would think you were in a unique position to observe what that was and I wonder if you could write a little about that. Thank you as always for the blog and the fact that yours doesn't keep nagging me to buy things, especially things based on my past browsing history.
Yes, there was definitely something different about the folks of whom you speak. For one thing, most of them got into comics because they loved doing that kind of work. Some got in to make a living while they aspired to something better and then were unable to get out. But no one started writing or drawing comic books because they thought it would make them rich or famous because even as late as the seventies, that did not seem possible. It would have been like getting a job as a guard in a men's prison because you thought it would make you a millionaire, plus it would be a great way to meet cute chicks.
At Comic-Con as you probably know, I've had the opportunity to interview a lot of comic book writers and artists of comics' early days and one recurring theme for me is a certain amazement that they have followers. Nick Cardy was practically moved to tears several times when he first came out to San Diego and had grown, adult professionals lining up to say to him, "I discovered your work when I was ten and I followed it and you were a big influence on me becoming a professional artist." Nick was especially stunned that people were asking for his autograph or offering him money to do commissions. All those years he was drawing Aquaman, he never dreamed it meant so much to so many.
One thing I've come to believe strongly about those writers and artists is that it's a mistake to leap from "I didn't like that guy's work" to "Obviously, that guy was just hacking it out for the paycheck." I would guess that was true of less than 5% of the talent in the generation of which we speak. There were a number of people whose work I didn't like but I came to see that it was not because they weren't trying to do good work. Some of them were trying like hell, spending hours on a page and redoing it and redoing it to make it better. They just weren't very skilled. And some of them were just egregiously miscast or misinstructed by their editors.
When you become aware of how poorly they were paid and how badly they were sometimes treated, it's amazing that so many of them drew and wrote so well and worked so hard at it. Very few guys who were paid the minimum did the minimum. At times, I find myself wondering not "Why was this one artist so bad?" but "Why were so many of the others any good at all?" That is still to me the defining question about the generation we're losing.
