I thought this was an interesting read...
http://www.avclub.com/articles/seth-on- ... ors,30538/ Seth on Ditko: Ditko’s work is totally interesting for his continuing desire to communicate. The big problem is, the later work is simply unreadable. I’d like to appreciate everything Ditko’s done since he stopped working on Spider-Man, but the truth is, it’s just not that interesting to me. I’d rather sit down and read some of those pre-hero monster books he did. I think that stuff’s always a lot of fun to read, and it’s great cartooning. Obviously it’s just cultural junk, but that’s the stuff I’d rather look at than Mr. A, or, God knows, all the stuff that followed it.
Seth on Gil Kane: I think Gil’s work was very nicely drawn and composed, had a nice classical quality to it, but he was not one of my favorites as a child. I think the work was kind of cold, in some manner, to me as a kid. I was drawn more to the cartoonier cartoonists, which I think is obvious, because my work has ended up being more cartoony and stylized. The comic-book artists I was most drawn to when I was young would probably be Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko. Later, I made some bad choices. I was really into John Byrne for a while. I actually think that ties into a love of cartoony artwork too; I think Byrne’s work is closer to Kirby than to Kane, for example.
Seth on Byrne and Perez: Yeah, I liked both of them at that time, and in retrospect, I can look back and see what I liked. I don’t think they were bad cartoonists, I just have no interest in them now. I’m not interested in reading what they’re doing today, because I’m just not interested in those kinds of comics anymore. And, I must say, I’m not really all that interested in the work I liked then, either—I don’t have a great nostalgia for it. I wouldn’t pull out like an old Byrne X-Men or something, though it sure had potency to me as a teenager. I do think they were both doing a kind of Kirby-inspired cartooning that was really appealing at the time. I sometimes think it had a lot to do with how they were inked. It was really slick work, and something about that appealed to my teenage mind. Slick in a different way than Neal Adams was slick. There was something about it that… I don’t know why you’re attracted to things, but they both seemed very rounded and shiny to me. That work really pushed my buttons as a teenager. It was fetishistic in some way. When I look at the bad teenage comics, I was drawing at the time, I can see a lot of the stylizations that both of them were using: those shiny reflections on metal, or the way they would use a broken line to create effects when they were drawing musculature. I sometimes think maybe Terry Austin is who I really liked; I don’t know.
