Not Good Enough

But is ‘good enough’ good enough?

All the same, thought Bardelys, continuing the thread he had taken up yesterday, even though the story was more important than the rendering of it, or the style with which it was told, that wasn’t to say that the rendering was not to be considered at all. Crap rendering would repulse the audience so they’d stop following the tale before its heart could hook them in. And bad rendering would make the audience feel as though the story they had just heard was less than it was. Finally, for some reason, audiences tied the style and rendering to the talesman or artist directly — but thought of the story as something else, more loosely connected to the talesman, or not connected at all. They will take the story for granted. Especially a great story told by a master, will seem so perfect, so inevitable, that the audience wouldn’t be able to conceive of it being told in any other way. The talesmen who stood in the audience would know, and (to the extent of their own mastery over talesmanship) they would applaud the creation, structure, and organization of the tale they’d heard. Not so with the laymen in the crowd; they hadn’t ever been taught what talesmanship is, they’d never been trained in the art. But the laymen would consider they knew a well-turned phrase, and certainly knew an ill-turned one. In this they were all experts.

Looking back on Steve Ditko’s career, Bardelys compared his layouts and rendering for Charlton mystery/fantasy short tales in the late 1950s and the middle 1970s. In both periods, Charlton paid bottom-level page rates, and deserved no great time or effort from their artists. But Ditko in the late 1950s worked diligently and delivered masterful jobs, both in terms of layouts and storytelling, and in terms of rendering. In the 1970s Ditko was an even more accomplished storyteller. But his rendering was slipshod, even bad. Even ghastly. There was one story Bardelys could recall, set in Argentina, that had to rank as the worst job he had ever seen from Ditko’s pencil and pen.

What was even more appalling (or odd) was that Ditko’s black-and-white inking techniques were starting to bleed over into his color jobs. Ditko had wrestled with technique and form all his career; he was one of the most intelligent and thoughtful comic book artists ever. Ditko used a different technique depending on the final form of the work as it would be published. He had drawn with increasing simplicity through the 1950s into the 1960s, growing more and more aware of and reliant upon the colors to carry the image across. Some of his earliest work had not displayed this confidence; he had cluttered his compositions and over-rendered textures and faces. The resulting welter of lines muddied and interfered with the cheap, crude coloring methods that the comics used in the period. Ten years later, Ditko drew more simply, and the vibrant colors carried as much weight as the linework.

When he began to work in black and white, for Warren Publications Creepy and Eerie, for fanzines and independent publications like Wood’s Witzend, Ditko had to design and draw without the colorist. He tried wash work, he tried ben-day or zip tone overlays, and eventually settled on hand-drawn cross-hatching, dots of ink (black or white) and similar textures.

But his work for Charlton continued to be in color (in the garish, botched colors that Charlton’s presses turned out, the shame of the industry), and yet here was Ditko using the same cross-hatching and stippling techniques, as though he wasn’t aware of it.

The result was far from happy.

There was another shift in the technical side of the industry that came in the 1970s that Ditko took a long time to get used to.

Comics were drawn in a larger size than they were printed. Mechanical techniques were used to shrink the images down to the final printed size. This indeed had been part of Ditko’s earliest learning experience. Part of the reason why his early work was so detailed was undoubtedly because he was making it look gorgeous in the original. Reduced and printed on cheap pulp paper, the blacks smeared, the fine lines were lost, the finest lines merged into one another. Ditko, like every new comic artist, had to retrain his eye so that he could ‘see’ what the page would look like when shrunk to half its size, and reduced in resolution through the cruddy printing technology.

In the middle 1970s, the industry changed the degree of size reduction. Where before pages had been shrunk to half their original size, now they were shrunk to two-thirds of their original size.

As a result, artists had to change the way they ‘saw’ their originals. More detail was called for now. And it seemed that Ditko took a long time getting used to this change.

Bardelys, who loved Ditko dearly as only a Ditko fan could understand, was grieved when he saw his master’s ugly work. He was shocked when he saw that Charlton story set in Argentina; he remembered, when he had first seen it, going back to the first story page to make sure that it bore the credit ‘inked by Steve Ditko.’ Even so, he pored over the panels, in a vain effort to see another hand there. He invented excuses to himself: Ditko had been ailing; it was a rush job, given Ditko at the last moment; Ditko had only had a weekend to lay it out, pencil it, ink it; or else it was only the inking that had been rushed, the pages had come from the letterer late, deadline was the next day, and Ditko had only had one night to ink all 5 or 6 pages. Ditko had been under a disadvantage there: his pencils were light, no more than breakdowns, because (as Ditko once wrote in the 1980s in a letter to Ron Frantz) he didn’t want to rough the bristol board surface with any more erasures of the underlying pencils than need be. Thus, when the lettered roughs came back, and Ditko faced that one-night deadline, he had been forced to draw as much as ink at the same time, with every line fatal and forever, and no time left to white out and redo anything.

All this Bardelys told himself, excusing his hero. He loved Ditko, he idolized him even when he pitied him and called him wrong. But to think of Steve Ditko as a hack, handing in a crappy, ugly, ineffective, laughably shoddy piece of work — Bardelys recoiled from the prospect, he couldn’t bear it, and invented these fantasies so as not to condemn the great man.

Take then, that tale of the Argentine as example. A shock tale, a horror tale, a tale of terror. There may or may not be a philosophy hidden under it, but foremost, it was a tale told to frighten children who read it, for children of a certain age dearly love to be frightened. The rendering of such a tale is important, and becomes a part of the talesmanship, more so, much more so, than in a tale that is longer, that develops a greater arrangement of structural and architectural masses and forms, that may express its characters and moods through many example anecdotes. In a short tale such as this, the drawings themselves must give us to shudder, they must make our skin creep and tingle. The master of the great house, whose doom is the comeuppance decreed by just and cruel fate, must be despicable not just in what we see him do in diagrams — he must be hateful to look upon in his posture and his face and expression.

It lay well in Ditko’s power to do all this. It was nothing he had not done a hundred, a thousand times before. Whatever the reason why he had failed to do so, the lesson, as Bardelys took it, was clear.

The rendering is not nothing. In some tales it is the equal of the story itself.

There must be a balance, Bardelys reflected, between the talesmanship and the styling, of every tale. This balance will vary from tale to tale, and depend upon the qualities and aim of each tale itself in its aesthetic aim, its length, its audience, and so on.

Sometimes, therefore, Bardelys was driven reluctantly to conclude, ‘good enough’ just wasn’t good enough.

(Composed on keyboard Friday 8 August 2008)