Once again, I've posted an article on a relevant anniversary. Today (if you happen to be reading this the same day it's posted) is Vince Colletta's birthday.

I'd been doing this site for years before it even occurred to me that I might someday write an article on Vince Colletta, whose practices as an inker form the very definition of "hack". His work was not merely shoddy — it was made so by his attitude of not caring what the final product looked like, as long as he could do (and get paid for) a lot of it. For his practice of erasing pencils rather than take the trouble to ink them, I once called him an "anti-artist".

Unexpectedly (since this is very much a mainstream opinion among comics readers), I once took some flak for this in the site's Forum. But it wasn't honest criticism (which I would have welcomed, for its potential to stir up interest). It was just a troll, hoping to pick a fight. He revealed himself by (among other things) attributing my motives for not having written an article on Colletta to personal animosity, citing a highly fanciful supposed dispute with him, apparently (he was hard to pin down) involving my wife and possibly one of my daughters.

(In the unlikely event you were wondering, I never had personal contact of any sort with Colletta during his lifetime. Not that its non-existence would deter someone whose only motive was to start a flame war.)

(He failed, by the way. In fact, I wound up throwing him out. While I was at it, I threw out a sock puppet he'd brought in to support him, in the spirit of "and you little dog, too." And I deleted his thread, which had no real posts anyway, in the spirit of "and the horse you rode in on.")

But that got me thinking. I don't have to like or approve of anything to write about it. In fact, sometimes not liking it makes it a better topic to write about.

A case in point is B'Wana Beast, which appeared in only two issues of Showcase before not graduating to his own title. Definitely in a class with The Maniaks, Dolphin and Tommy Tomorrow, as one of Showcase's failures. In fact, not having completed even his scheduled three-issue run, he was Showcase's most notorious failure.

But a notorious failure is, ipso facto … notorious.

And isn't notoriety, irrespective of any other factor, such as quality, worth writing about? That's why he has an article here.

Vince Colletta wasn't just a lousy (in my perhaps non-unanimous but still entirely mainstream opinion) comic book inker. He was a notoriously lousy comic book inker.

Therefore, henceforward, nobody can ever again say I've neglected him. At least, not honestly.

— DDM