Periscope: Portland's storyboard and comics studio.

Everyone else has linked to L'il Rivkah, so I guess I should, too. The best adverserial response I've seen was on a comment thread on Chris Butcher's blog. It came from the always quotable Abhay Khosla , and I hope he won't be too pissed that I'm reprinting it here:

"not to be the Grinch, but if i spent long hours sitting at a desk, not getting enough exercise, worrying about wrist injuries or eye strain or back pain(all taken care of by that awesome comics health care package), nevermind the toll on sleep and relationships, trying to hit deadlines, drawing and drawing and endless drawing, dealing with editors and creditors and chasing paychecks and who knows what else, and for YEARS, and on my "vacation" if you want to call it that(where you get to see what happens to older artists a couple tables down, and... ouch), if someone whose FIRST comic hasn't even come out wandered over, after a long day of dealing with freakshow Wizard Con fans and the scraping grinding awful nosebleed noise of those things, and asked me about my PASSION, then complained my response wasn't enthusiastic enough...

...well, i'd think that was just super.

I do think she has a point, though. It's easy to fall into a rut, and when an artist lets that happen, he betrays the muse and she withdraws her favors. I've seen it happen to too many talented creators. You've got to keep learning. If you're green you're growing. If you're ripe you rot.

Speaking of passion, Paul O'Brien doesn't think there's much to be passionate about in the genre he follows. This has prompted passionate debate over at Fanboy Rampage. Lest anyone doubt Paul's ability to appreciate non-spandex work, (or my own ability to turn anything into self-promotion) one can read Paul's thoughtful criticism of an indy comic here.

There's a new Peter Bagge strip at Reason. For the past few years I've enjoyed Bagge's political strips a lot more than his character stories, and -I swear I'm not just saying this to fit the theme- I think it's because he's a lot more passionate about his politics.

Mike Oeming asked for a definition of "hack" and his posters brought their opinions to the table. Here's what I had to say:

"Hack," as an adjective applied to a writer or an artist, is always going to be a subjective term and few people are going to be able to agree on when it should be applied. The only thing you can really glean from its use is that the speaker has no respect for the work of the writer he's describing, otherwise, he'd use a word like journeyman or craftsman, which mean almost the same thing but aren't insulting.

When I use it, and I don't use it often, it's to refer to someone who clearly and repeatedly isn't giving 100%. He's got good liquor on the shelf, but he's saving it for someone else and giving you the cheap stuff. As a verb, it's applied relatively, independent of the actual quality of the finished work. Alan Moore hacking a 22 page story out overnight could easily be better than some guys at their best, and most of us would rather look at something Alex Toth hacked out than the most heartfelt thing (pick a mediocre artist) ever did."

I should add that a creator's "hack" work could even be better than their most sincere efforts. Every artist has looked at the work of someone who needs to learn when to stop. "God, If someone could just STOP him from doing that last hour of "perfecting" his work would be a lot better."