The A.V. Club talks to Jeff Smith about RASL, Bone, Shazam!, his creative process, and reacting to criticism:
What inspires me to change things is if it sounds true to me. If somebody’s just being negative… there are lots of negative people on the Internet in all fields, and comics, they’re somehow just really let loose. But I can tell if somebody just doesn’t like me. There are people that just cannot stand me, or anything I do. And why that is, just not important. I can’t even figure it out. It might be because I’m not friends with Dave Sim anymore, or because I went to Image Comics in 1995 for a year, and people hold grudges. Or maybe they just think I draw little funny-bunny things, and they just hate that. So I can tell right away. If it’s just somebody that—they just hate me, well I can dismiss that, I don’t lose any sleep over that. But if it’s somebody who clearly is interested by the books, but they’re like, “You did this one thing…” Sometimes they’ll hit something on the head, and it might have been something that was nagging me a little bit too. That’s when it’ll make me want to change it. And I will, often. I’ll go back to print and change things. And it can be negative or positive.
July 29th, 2008 at 11:43 am
Strange, I never would have guessed he gets a ton of criticism, his books have done a lot of good for the industry.
July 29th, 2008 at 12:10 pm
@ejulp:
Agree.
July 29th, 2008 at 7:32 pm
I agree too… BONE is as good as it gets.
That said, I really disliked his Shazam! though. Maybe it’s because I’m not a big Captain Marvel fan? I dunno. Was Billy Batson a really, really little homeless kid living in a condemned apartment with cockroaches in the original “Monster Society of Evil” story? Somehow, the whole thing struck me as weird. I was glad I got it from the library and didn’t buy it.
But Jeff Smith is still one of the “good guys” in the comics biz though.