The first thing Neal does is say. "No you don't want to show me your work." "Yes I do." Says the confused other guy. "No you don't. I wont lie to you and I wont pat you on the back and say 'nice work, keep it up' if I don't mean it. If it is bad I will say so. Maybe you want to show it to one of the guys at DC and Marvel and they will tell you it is wonderful and you get to go home today feeling good." Even my own first reaction to this was surprise I have to admit. A few would wisely back off and a few would stick around and show their books to Neal. The outcome is most often a bit unsettling if you don't understand what is going on. What really is going on is mostly like an art student's first honest review.
Looking over Neal's shoulder, I can see him open the book hesitantly and even giving the guy a second chance to back out. Having seen this before, I know what is coming. What is coming is always the truth. You have to understand this, no matter how good an artist is that you talk to, their desire is to just say "keep up the good work" and compliment the good points. That never helped anyone. Think about it. Anyway, you see the same thing every time. A guy learns how to "Draw the Marvel way" or by copying his favorite comic book artist. Basically what the art looks like is a bad version of Jim lee or a bad version of someone else, but the key word here is. It's not that there aren't bad artists drawing professionally today. There's some real frights out there, but bad is bad and yes these people might draw better than an average person but most of these portfolios are of people who learned to draw this way and they really don't DRAW well. At least not well enough to make a living. All high schools have a 'school artist' or two or three but there are tens of thousands of height schools in the U.S. There aren't tens of thousands of jobs for comic book artists. It takes more than a love of comics and an understanding of making basic shapes together like "How to draw the Marvel way." With the spread of things like "How to Draw Manga" and other repeats of Marvel's How to book people are trying all the shortcuts and forgetting how their favorite artists learned to draw. The real masters. Jeff Jones has a great section showing the photo reference he uses to do his work on his site. http://www.jeffreyjones.us I am going to put some of Neal's up to show you. Some stuff from Ben Casey and what follows will be made more clear.
