Creativity Quote by Bill Sienkiewicz

Ninety percent is less a statistic than a provocation: a working artist’s way of puncturing the romance we attach to “made things.” Bill Sienkiewicz isn’t sneering at creativity so much as calling out the industrial logic that surrounds it. In comics, illustration, and most commercial art, the decisive filter often isn’t taste or even talent; it’s throughput. Deadlines, budgets, licenses, and editors decide what exists. His blunt “just crap that got made” lands because it frames mediocrity as a production outcome, not a moral failure. The subtext is almost merciful: if the system rewards completion, you’ll inevitably see a lot of finished work that shouldn’t be canonized.

Sienkiewicz’s own career adds bite. He became famous by refusing the house style - splicing expressionism, collage, and painterly abrasion into a medium trained on clean linework. So when he says “the main point is that it got produced,” he’s speaking as someone who has watched safer, more conventional pages get shipped because they’re predictable, not because they’re alive. It’s a critique of gatekeeping that masquerades as quality control: the market will always find room for the merely executable.

There’s also a backhanded pep talk hidden in the cynicism. If most output is disposable, perfectionism is a trap and reverence is misplaced. Make the thing. Finish it. Ship it. The real competition isn’t genius; it’s inertia.