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How Fast is Fast?

Dick Giordano started his comics career at the Iger Studios and was such a fast inker that some of the other artists asked him to slow down.

The Iger artists were paid by the hour when they took work home. By turning out pages so quickly, Dick made it look too easy.

Later, though, when Dick started working at Charlton Comics the staff artists were paid by the page. So the faster they drew, the more they made.

Dick was “dazzled by the speed of the more seasoned staff artists.” One artist could pencil eight pages a day. Dick could “only” manage two — which was still darned fast!*

“I’m kind of fast. Anybody from my generation…is usually a little faster than the people who’ve come up recently because…the only way you could get a decent salary in the ‘50s and ‘60s was to do a lot of pages…

“You had to learn to cut through the unimportant stuff, to make only the important lines show up so you could do a few more pages.” —Dick Giordano in an interview by John Lustig, 2001

*Info in the first four paragraphs is summarized from Michael Eury’s Dick Giordano: Changing Comics, One Day at a Time

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↓ Transcript
PANEL 1, SCENE: Mitzi Muffet is standing next to a hospital gurney looking shocked. On the gurney is a body covered by a sheet. Standing on the other side of the gurney is a nurse.

NURSE: ...too late! He's colder than an Eskimo's outhouse!

MUFFET: This is awful! (Sob!) He didn't even get a chance to buy me any jewelry!

PANEL 2, SCENE: Cut to Mitzi sitting on a bed. In the background is an old man in a wheelchair.

CAPTION: "I dated a lot of men that week! At least, I think they were men!"

OLD MAN: This is just a disguise! Don't tell anyone, but...I'm really Britney Spears!