Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog

Toth should have pitched in more to the comic book series himself, I'm sure he would have been more than welcome. I think they may have cajoled a few covers from him.

I love Alex, but the sad thing, if you average his page output since the sixties, I'm not sure he did as many as 8 pages of story at peak per month. Sure, he was doing other work, but he was doing a lot of thinking too. I would have loved to have a full monthly title in comics from Toth-- was it in him?

I was a bit underwhelemed with Rudes try (I think I liked his Space Ghost better), and tended to think Marc Wheatly? was the most fluid story teller when this series was running in comics about half way between now and when the TV show was airing

Compared to what typically passed for comic art back in the 80s Rude's work was like finding hidden treasure. This Jonny Quest story is far from Steve Rude's best work, and I wouldn't even say it's accurately representative of his work at the time. Check out any issue of Nexus from the same period and tell me what you think then. Consider also that this story was done 20 years ago while Rude was still in his 20s. As of now, I'd say Steve Rude is one of the best draftsman in the business, and I think he's learned a lesson or two about storytelling since then.

those comic pages were absolutely horrible.

i don't know who Steve Rude is(should i?), but the lack of variety in shots, absence of continuity in direction of action, needless camera titlting, and unnecessary downshots would leave him with a C or D as a grade from any accomplished comic artist.

how could anyone defend those pages?

"And what kind of remarks are these: “Fake!” “Shame on you!” “I give up!” “You don’t care!” And the constant condescending “kiddo” throughout. There’s a difference between brutal criticism and being a condescending asshole, I don’t care how accomplished you are. And there’s a difference between suffering a few lumps and receiving abuse."

Toth calls everybody "Kiddo".

Fair enough. The camera thing was pretty trivial and as stated, I also agree with the majority of the criticisms.

I also agree that the teacher doesn't have to be unimpeachable, and it wasn't really fair of me or Rude to try to bring up Toths own failings as a defense.

However, I don't feel that most artists need a "kick in the ass" in this manner. It doesn't have to be this way. The tone is condescending and unnessarily angry. I don't subscribe to the idea that a teacher has to be a drill sargeant. I've learned more from teachers who treated me with respect because I'm less likely to be defensive when I don't feel as though I'm being personally attacked. One of my toughest teachers in school was also the one who treated me the most like a peer. I didn't feel threatenned by his criticisms however harsh they were because they didn't feel as though they were about me personally---they were about the work, and I was much more inclined to listen.

Toth sounds like John K.

Every artist needs a good kick in the ass every now and then, regardless of his professional standing. I completely agree with Toth's critical tone. His harshness is borne of his frustration with Rude's storytelling choices in the face of Steve's obvious talent. It's not a case of a bitter old man belittling another artist -- Toth truly seemed concerned with seeing the sequential art form elevated. At least, that's what I took away from it. He wanted Rude to strive for perfection.

As for the criticism itself, I think it's valid overall. It stresses the importance of making the storytelling perfectly clear, which is especially important in a kid-oriented title. Too many shots with obscured faces or with characters facing away from the reader? Yeah, that's a problem. Too many panels with tiny heroes or confusing camera angles? Another problem. When Toth starts to nitpick, that turns more into matters of personal preference. He's dead-on in his major criticisms, though.

I found Steve Rude's response disheartening. He challenges specific complaints rather than addressing the overarching problems. Of course Toth would get pissed when Steve brought up the issue of whether something's a camera or a scanner... that wasn't the point of the critique! Also, Rude makes the (common) mistake of looking for the same flaws in Toth's work that Toth called him out on. It's not necessary for a teacher to be unimpeachable. No-one's perfect, and as I said before, Toth wanted Rude to strive for perfection. Nobody ever reaches that, Toth included, but that's what you aim for.

"one-off Charlton book nerds could ever sweat over"

I think what you're talking about here is a reference I made to a pretty obscure Toth book published in the 80s that you don't know existed, which makes me a big comic book geek, which I'll accept. But if you like Toth's work (and believe it or not I'm a huge fan of Toth's work), you might be interested in this:

The Black Hood was an otherwise atrocious book published by Archie comics under their Red Circle imprint. Three of those issues carried some of the last (and possibly the last) short stories Toth ever did, and some of the few to be entirely written, drawn, and lettered by Toth. They're nicely plotted, beautifully and ecconomically drawn stories. He knocked out a few covers as well for them, and I mentioned one of them because this was the work he was doing not too long before he wrote this scathing criticism of Rude. The stories are great, its obvious he had fun doing them even if his writing is a little wobbly, but the covers were hack work (and even hack work, from Toth, was pretty fun to look at). The point being: shouldn't he expect at least as much from himself as he does here from Rude? At least a little humility and understanding would be nice, but then, that's not Toth. But then, to be fair, Toth was pretty hard on his own work if you check out his copious hand written annotations on http://tothfans.dynu.com/

As for being kind: lets be kind where kindness counts: the guy left a fantastic body of work, and I honor that, but I don't honor this behavior. Its true he wasn't as recognized as he should've been. The fact that some of his last stories were buried in some obscure comic that you never heard of is a case in point, so I honor him by actively seeking his work out wherever I can find it and covetting it in my little comic book nerd hole, and you pretty much have to be a comic book nerdophile to even be aware of the scale of the man's accomplishments since so little of his work is currently in print.

You should see the story he did for Hotwheels. No really.

Man. Toth was awesome.

I miss him already.

Toth was so stubborn in his criticism, that even when Rude pointed out a basic fact--"that gadget you thought was a camera wasn't a camera it was this other gadget I researched" Toth exploded! He couldn't see beyond what he'd narrowly decided on the first pass. He paid no attention to the context of the story---a continuation a story already begun by another artist, and treated it is as if this half of a story was independant of the previous half. Rude tried to explain this to him, but of course, he wouldn't have it.

As for Toth having personal stock in the characters: Jonny Quest is very much Doug Wildley's baby. Toth had a hand, but Doug Wildley, who wrote and drew the first half of the story that Rude is drawing in this example, is inarguably the creator of Jonny Quest, so I don't think the venom here was for proprietary reasons.

And what kind of remarks are these: “Fake!” “Shame on you!” “I give up!” “You don’t care!” And the constant condescending “kiddo” throughout. There's a difference between brutal criticism and being a condescending asshole, I don't care how accomplished you are. And there's a difference between suffering a few lumps and receiving abuse.

I remember a teacher who during a crit put up several pieces on what she called, "the wall of shame". Sure, some people were shamed into working harder, but others were shamed into being afraid of experimenting or making mistakes. I I don't believe humiliating students or seasoned professionals for that matter, is necessary or desirable to encourage them to improve. Maybe that's how Toth learned, but look at the magic it did for his interpersonal skills.

And you know those pages that his editor Shelly Mayer literally "tore up"? That was commissioned work. It was more than insulting, it was Mayer saying, "you're not worth the little money we pay you." And believe me, it wasn't much. It's aggressive. Its vicious. And being subjected to that behavior time and time again might have served as art boot camp for Toth, but it also turned him into a very angry, very bitter, and very lonely man.

I'm just so sick of this, "if you can't take the heat" attitude because it's not realistic or necessary. It's important to strive to do your best work, to listen to criticism from those who are qualified to give it, but I don't think it's necessary to eat shit to do it.

I would also like to contest that there are "accepted rules" of storytelling and design. Yes there are design PRINCIPALS of balance, color, and contrast, but there are no hard and fast rules that determine how you'e supposed to tell a story. There may be conventions, like the 180 degree rule, but it's not a rule in the same way the fact that two compliments make a neutral grey is a rule. It's more of a theory of perception, and it's not measurable or proveable in so strict a sense. In the beginning of film, any cut in the middle of a scene was considered too confusing for the audience. What if no one decided to break THAT rule? For this reason, Steve Rude's assertion that the 180 degree rule isn't necessary in comics is a genuinely defendable position.

Toth at the end was a bitter old jackass, sadly. A major failing of Toth's was his inability to work with others, since he was such an arrogant prick. Being kind would serve his memory better than any one-off Charlton book nerds could ever sweat over.

Brutal criticism works for some people. Others crumple when faced with it.
If you really care and really love what you do and want to excel at it, you'd be willing to suffer a few lumps for it.

Besides Toth is just giving Rude the same treatment his editors gave him in his past. Look at this quote from his biography. I already posted this on the other board.

"Shelly was the first and only really creative and knowledgeable comics editor I've worked for in all these years in the field. He was rough. He'd tear up my pages if I got too cute, too arty in telling the story. He'd tear them up on the spot and tell me to go home and do 'em over again. I tried to put in all the elements that I thought were important. But they weren't important. And Shelly was the one who pointed that out to me. He didn't care how pretty the pictures were if they didn't develop the story. "Stop trying to be another Michelangelo," he'd say, "and just tell the story. Just tell the story." And every time I walked out of his office, I'd learned something--whether I wanted to or not. The direction of action; staging; the importance of dialogue flow, how it should run through a page, panel by panel; what the eye should read first and what you want the eye to see first.

But Mayer quit to devote himself to his art and Alex did much of his early DC work for editor Sol Harrison. Harrison was a tough task master who instilled in Toth the second part of his lifelong mantra: "simplify, simplify, simplify." Shelly wanted him to "tell the story: and Harrison insisted that Alex learn what to omit from his art. "Wellll, Alex," Toth once quoted Sol Harrison as saying, "it's all rrightt, but you still don't know what to leave out." - http://www.bpib.com/illustra3/Toth/toth.html

How was Toth brutal? Sure he makes both pointed and tart remarks but in every case they are defensible from the perspective of the accepted rules of design and visual story telling. And he did play more than a trivial role in JQ so his passion is understandable. Toth wasn't critiquing some fanboy's portfolio at a comiccon, but one of the most successful comic illustrators of the last two decades. It's to the benefit of us all (Rude included) that he spared the kidd gloves.

To be fair to Toth, the stuff that stood out to me most was: his criticisms about people doing things off camera that were important story ellements---What's Dr. Quest looking at, we should see their bonds more clearly when they're captured; when Jonny and Hadji are holding those boxes they do appear to be weightless, and Jonny isn't really carrying his box but more putting his hands on it; the overhead with the helicopters does have poor perspective, and many of the overhead shots are unnecessary and seem to be more of an excuse to dazzle the viewer with Rude's ability to foreshorten the figure; there does seem to be preponderance of shots of figures from behind which handicaps the storytelling unnessarily--it takes away from the choices the artist can make with expression and gesture; the female figure really needed to have her face established, even if this WAS the second half of a story. She's off panel entirely too long and there doesn't seem to be reason for it. It's not as though she's supposed to be some mystery presence, she's a prominent part of story. I do think that cartoonists should be clearer about balloon placement and be aware of balloons as a part of the composition.

On the plus side: I think he makes too much of the 180 degree rule, as Rude points out--comics aren't film. Those gadgets seem pretty well referenced--Toth had mistaken some other sort of gadget for a camera which it apparently wasn't. The landscape also seems to work fine. He gets very nit picky here about the degree of weathering on the ruins. That's a pretty arguable point, and not really that big a deal, especially for a fantasy environment---believe it or not, Jonny Quest isn't known for its realism.

So it looks to me like Toth for the most part had some pretty good points, but it's hard to see them through all the other unconstructive and unnessary brutal remarks.

FIRST: Toth "faked" environments all the time. I could point out many many occassions where Toth didn't exactly stick strictly to reference. There's even a Dell 4-Color story where what is clearly identified as a dinosaur seems to be an iguana. And yes, this is an early story, but even in his later career there were some pretty awful instances of just sloughing off the burden of reference for whatever happened to pop into his head. There's a Black Hood cover he did in the 80s where the protagonist is being menaced by a bunch of thugs packing a random assortment of knives and what appear to be rayguns, without apparent rhyme or reason.

And, speaking of context, lets not overlook Rude's principal defense here: this was the CONTINUATION of Doug Wildley's first half, so all those criticisms about lack of establishing shots, and "where did this character come from and why are they important" have to do with context. He was judging half a story. As are we when we look at these pages. If we saw the first half of the story maybe we'd judge these pages differently.

Now this doesn't mean that all Toth's crticisms are invalid, but Toth was a pretty ill-tempered guy, and I think he took pleasure in cutting people down. What little that's constructive here is buried beneath a lot of unnecessary invective that makes it difficult to take the genuine criticism seriously. There was a recent Toth tribute in The Comics Journal and they seemed unable to come up with anyone who could say anything possitive about the guy personally. He wasn't generous or kind. He was kind of a jerk. That doesn't mean he wasn't a fantastic artist--but this isn't fair to Rude, who's also a very talented artist and storyteller. It's easy to say Toth's criticisms are "dead-on" without really looking at them critically yourself simply because you consider him a master craftsman of superior talent to Rude. Maybe this is true, but that doesn't mean Rude isn't a formidable artist himself deserving of a little more respect.

Not to criticize the dead but many many people
already know he had that "I have been overlooked"
king-in-exile attitude, and could be impossible to
deal with. Not suffer fools? How about just human
beings. But what a giant of an illustrator, even as his
own story lines seldom rose above the mediocre.
DRAW, sure. But WRITE is equally important

Oh man, I can't IMAGINE being on the receiving end of such copious and cutting notes. I agree that he made very sound points, and I'm as much of a fan of Toth as the next person, but his bedside manner sure was lousy. So much for constructive criticism! Thanks for posting this Johnny.

I don't feel that Toth was overly harsh in his crit at all. Everything he said was on point. And making excuses for your mistakes is bad form as far as I'm concerned. Those pages were really poor quality, especially for someone like Steve Rude.

Rude replies here:

http://sporadicsequential.blogspot.com/2006/09/...

http://pwbeat.publishersweekly.com/blog/2006/09...

Toth had a very strong opinion indeed, and he would not abide fools. And by fools, I don't mean Steve Rude, I mean 90% of the other so-called visual storytellers out there who are fully willing to show you every vein on a superheroe's bicep, but can't clearly explain in pictures what said superhero is actually doing.
Thanks to the Toth fan site and a few really good books, his wisdom lives on.
Thanks for posting this, not enough artists have been exposed to him.