"that doesn't excuse being a dick. "

I'm not saying it does. I may have been explaining myself poorly. What I meant was that with their reputation, I wouldn't expect them to react positively to being contradicted. you know: "Don't poke the bear".

"Who cares why the characters moved?"

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Well, me, for one. This is an action sequence. The action should flow from panel to panel without the reader having to presume a lot of off-screen action.

The action in panel 3 could not have followed directly from panel 2. The Moth must have inverted himself so that he could come through the window feet first, and the armed goon must have crossed the room AND turned around in order to be hit like that.

Likewise, the action in panel 4 could not have followed directly from panel 3 unless the characters reoriented themselves. In order for the Moth to spring on the goon upside-down, he would have had to have his back to him, contrary to what we see in panel 3. Why would he reorient himself like this? Why not just spring on him rightside up? I also have no idea why the Moth is spraying the back of that goon's head with gas.

None of these objections make the page unreadable, just awkward. Regardless of how pretty the character illustrations are, the storytelling on that page is flawed. Could you find examples similar to this from Kirby? Probably. You've certainly got thousands of pages to mine. However, the mere fact that Kirby drew them wouldn't suddenly make them good storytelling.

I have indeed seen some of Rude's paintings. Really great stuff, in my opinion. But paintings don't require storytelling, and that's what's being discussed here.

I went back and finished reading through all of Toth's critique again, and aside from the fact that he sometimes uses the word "Fake" to mean "bad storytelling", I think he's pretty much right 99 percent of it. From having seen Toth do similar stories, hell from having seen a lot of the great strip artists doing similar stories, I can tell why he's annoyed (or upset.)  Steve Rude is very talented, and if he was as committed to his storytelling as Toth was or as Toth urged him to be, he could've reached Toth's level.  I don't think he has, artistically.

Though to be fair, I'm much better at theory than application myself when it comes to art, composition and storytelling.

I've had a few critiques like this of my writing and after the initial towering inferno of rage I was able to sit back and analyze what they said and learn from the critique. Not that I always agree, I got a recent critique that said I must have been going for a safe ending to a story and instead accidentally ended up with a very dangerous and nasty ending because the actual ending was one the critiquer disagreed with. I still find that offensive, that the critiquer would say that my artistic point of view was incorrect because it conflicted with theirs and thus the story was worthless. Very annoying.

One thing though, there is a reason to give this kind of vicious and brutally honest critique: to get people to listen to it. Often you'll be nice and kind and helpful with your critiques but when you get another piece (story or art) from that person to critique you realize they are making the exact same errors and all of the work you did on the previous critique was wasted because they didn't listen to it. You spend hours on a critique, put a lot of thought and care into it and they ignore it and want you to do another one. Why? Because they liked the positive stuff you said about the first one (and they tuned out the negative stuff) and want to hear it again. When that happens I think the Toth critique would be very beneficial as it would shake them out of their complacency.

I know it helped me.