Rom 22 was the first Rom issue I ever had. I wanna say my mom bought it for me at my behest while we were in a Seven 11 store while I was staying with her in Florida so I was about 10 at the time. That issue just blew me away especially with the panel seen above. I had never seen anything like that before in a comic book. I wasn't able to get any issues on monthly basis (who does at that age?) but I was able to get my hands on a few random ones here and there over the course of the next year and I loved them too.
Rom 4 was the first back issue I was able to get when I finally discovered the first ever comic shop I had ever been to. This was probably when I was around 11 or 12. That comic shop was barely bigger then my living room but at the time it looked enormous to me.
This was another issue that just blew my mind Sal's art was just so dynamic you could practically feel the heat from Rom's battle with Firefall. . . .
You could almost feel the impact of the punches . . .
Eventually I was able to start finding more back issues as I was able to work out getting Rom as it hit the shelves every month this started at around the time the series was in it's early 40s. The art work had undergone some changes but it was still awesome. So at this time I was around 12 or 13 and at that point in my early comic collecting days I was never really concerned with who the writers or artists were or they're back grounds. It's the same as when you're at that age and you watch a movie you're not really focused on the credits especially when it comes to the director or producer you just know if you like the movie or not.
So after having enjoyed Rom for close to 3 years by the time Dikto came on board the art work all of a sudden started to look something like this . . .
. .and this. At that time Steve Dikto, Sal Buscema, Bill Mantlo and Akin & Garvey were really just names to me. I judged their work purely at face value, this is important to keep in mind. It's all about what you find aesthetically pleasing when that electrical impulse travels through your optic nerve and hit's your brain. Much in the same way when you see a nice pair of boobs or a chick with hairy arm pits you don't need Rom's analyzer to determine if you like or don't like that sort of thing you just know the second your eyes see it. At that age comic book art works the same way.
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And when it came to Dikto's work on Rom and everything else contemporary that I saw his work in, hated it. If I'm looking at something he did in the 50s or even 60s obviously I'm not going to trash his work any more then I would the art work in Action Comics or Detective Comics #1 because that was the level of art at it's time. So if you liked Dikto's work on Rom or at any other time in the 80s and 90s from some sense of nostalgia that's fine. But I had no such biases about the art I was looking at back then so it was all about what did and did not please my eye. And to my eye, Dikto's work looked dated, clumsy, very "undynamic" and vastly inferior to the artists who's work I was diggin back then which took away a LOT of the joy of reading Rom for me. Yes Bill was still the writer but comics are not books or articles they rely heavily on art to tell a story and if you hate that art it most certainly takes away from the experience of reading that issue.
Folks, I can't explain this in any more basic terms then this. As a former art student and artist myself I understand beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But I also know what people like or dislike more often then you think has more to do with who did the work as opposed to the quality of the work it's self. That's one of the first things you learn as an art student when you study art history. And I'm sorry but I just don't believe anyone who tells me that they would still like Dikto's work from the 80s and 90s if the name Dikto wasn't attached to it. No doubt, had some no name artist been associated with that work no one out there would have any trouble saying it straight up sucks.
