“I hate hearing that being fast is why most artist got the job. Makes me wonder if the material could have been better if it was not rushed.”

“Rushed” is a word some fans use to try to sound smart, but the effect is usually just the opposite. As I have noted many times it is impossible to look at a finished piece of art and deduce how long it took to produce. Some artists are fast, some are slow, but which is which is usually not evident in the finished product. A good artist can whip something out in no time, and it will look terrific. A poor artist can labor for hours and produce drek. And the opposite.

For a while, it became something of a mantra for some fans to describe my work as “rushed”—usually with no idea how long it took to draw. A classic example was when DC delayed the release of OMAC (due to a promotional error), resulting in it being released months after it was finished, along with several other johs that had been in the pipeline for a while. A flood of so much all at once clearly indicated I was doing too much, and OMAC was declared “rushed”.

The poster of the above comment made a very basic mistake: “fast” and “rushed” are not automatically interchangeable. Fast can be rushed, but not always.

Decades ago, I penciled an issue of AMAZING SPIDER-MAN, 17 pages, in just under three days. Never have I heard that job called “rushed”, tho it was the very definition of the word. Similarly I did a JLA job that tumbled out of my pencil at a rate of six pages per day. Something else that no one has ever called “rushed”.

Bottom line, it is, again, impossible to tell how fast something was drawn, and being drawn fast is not the same as being rushed.

“I’d be finished by noon,” I said.

•••

Reminds me of a story Ralph Macchio tells. Shooter one day decided he didn’t like a particular cover, and ordered changes. Since the book was already crowding its deadline, Ralph didn’t really have time to get the changes made. The issue went to to printer as it was.

A few weeks later, Shooter came into Ralph’s office with the finished book. “See? Isn’t this better?”