@Jabra:
Curious. I guess I still have this warped impression due to that one editor who said that Oda went back to the drawing board because he thought Saubody wasn't exciting enough or something.
That would have been done at the start of the process when he was still doing the rough draft, not at the end when the art was all finished.
I just wish I could witness the entire process myself. Like I imagine Oda sitting on his desk, with his assistants in spitting distance. But that's probably not how it works .
I can't speak for Oda's specific setup, but every place I've worked at, and every group of artists I've ever hung out with, its generally each artist holed up in their own room or cubby with the door closed and headphones on so they can focus on work, then ocassionally every few hours they come out to stretch or get food and to see what everyone else is doing.
Given the super connected nature of assistant work, assistants probably all share a general area usually so they can glance over, but would still have their own supplies and areas. And since Oda has to oversee things, he maybe checks more often than not but if he trusts his team then he wouldn't be looming over their shoulder or anything.
It's talkative and friendly during break time. During work its usually all focus.
@FolhaS:
How about Rob Liefeld?
I heard that he was a valued artist at Marvel and such, despite his art short-comings, because he always turned stuff on time, so he was reliable.
He's only a penciller so its not quite the same, but yes. A company will appreciate someone always hitting deadlines more than they will appreciate it being good.
Stuff running late gets you charged more at the printer, it pisses of the distributor and stores, and immediately puts you behind on the next issue.
If you're already a big name and your name alone moves copies there's a bit more leeway, but yes, publishers will prefer a mediocre artist that's always on time over a great artist that's always a week late.
More insider stuff
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Here's the trick. Once you know your craft well enough, you can cut corners in ways people don't notice with a wide variety of tricks. Stick to closeups so you're doing less clothes and hands, back of the head so you're not rendering a face, silhouettes, reuse backgrounds… and an artist that knows balance will use those tricks throughout an issue so the audience can't tell. If you do pages out of sequence, and so do like, pages, 1-4, 7, 8, 12, 17- 20 first, and do a good job on them, people are less likely to notice 5, 6, 9, 10, 11, 13-16 are sloppier because you spaced out the time focus. Wheras if you go straight in order, people are going to notice if the first 10 pages look great and the last 10 pages look bad.
Or when you're doing color pages, if you start with a cream colored paper, that'll save you some time on rendering skintones and some level of shadows, and that time can add up. Whenever you see an author do a color spread on unusual background paper, it was almost certainly a choice for time rather than pure style. You can't do that every time or it becomes obvious, but one time in twenty and it just looks like a neat flourish.
There's lots of tricks any seasoned comic artist picks up on eventually.
Like, I have zero inside knowledge on this, but unless Oda always does his pages entirely in sequence, I guarantee you the opening title page for chapter 1015, the one with Senor Pink on the stork? That was one of the last things Oda did that week, or they were running behind when they started doing the final art stages and had to catch up and do a page fast. Very few characters, no background, not much to the composition, minimal filled in blacks, that's a page that was done in 20 minutes just to get it done.
I have no idea if Oda usually does the title pages first or saves them for last, but there is no doubt in my mind that particular page was sacrificed so he could spend more time on something else that week. Like say, the page where Kaidou is looming over a defeated Kinemon. Or the page that it was declared "Luffy is going to win!" that had 10 panels on it, 25 characters, a fairly elaborate background, and some real thought in the composition of the top panel
I'm literally trained to look for these things, my work means I'm always trying to find shortcuts myself, so I tend to notice this stuff instinctively, but to a casual reader its just... there, and you don't notice it at all. Like it was always super jarring to me when Hunter Hunter had an all-assistant page with nothing from Togashi on it, but most readers couldn't tell the difference so it was fine.[/hide]