In reply to:
It ends up depending on the style and the individual artist's skills I guess.
Yes definately, plus the tools used and how much time that is put into it.
The worst example looks like a fixed size, monotonous airbrush tool in software, using a mouse and without masking neighboring fill areas and sometimes darken or lighten in a way that screws too much with the saturation. I also see plenty of gradient fill, but I think that it can usually look ok, as long as it is not overused.
Some of the better shadings I've seen are made with either a pressure sensitive graphic tablet, such as the ones from wacom, instead of a mouse when drawing the shading, or with scanned greyscale images and layers to copy the shading drawn on paper and using that to transform into color shading.
In reply to:
So I uend up wondering if maybe I'm in the minority liking flat colors.
I think one of the reasons why so many cartoonists try using shading is because they get inspired by the expertly colored comicbooks that are on the shelves at every grocery store and magazine shop nowdays, but there are probably many more reasons.
If you want to continue the discussion about shading, it might be appropriate to do so at the Tips & Techniques forum, but I think I understand your point of view now, and I agree with it, so maybe we should leave it for now and continue discussing BE comics, although I hope that it's OK with AlottaFagina if we also discuss other big bust comics and drawings here?