A Spritely Comic
Okay I’m going to admit part of why I did this is that I’m a little bitter.
Now, I don’t really believe comic strips, or at least the original newspaper comic strips we had, were all about the artwork. You didn’t have to be an amazing artist to get into the newspaper, as long as you had established an easy to recognize, easy to repeat over and over again style that people could read, you really didn’t have to worry too much about art. The writing should carry the rest of the comic. Now, of course, there were exceptions- Bill Watterson springs immediately to mind, as his art for Calvin and Hobbes has always been an inspiration for outdoor scenes in ASC.
Here comes the bitter:
Okay. I’ve just established that comics mostly run on good writing. But I can’t help but feel a little hurt when a comic that runs simply on repeatedly used pixel artwork or just stock artwork in general is just popular as heck. And yes, I do find such comics as Dinosaur Comics hilarious- you have to admit coming up with dozens of jokes for the same artwork day after day is pretty darn clever.
But.
It still hurts when you work your ass off, drawing and inking each panel by hand, worrying about things like backgrounds because that’s what few fans you have want from you even though you don’t know perspective worth crap, and you’re trying so hard to do all this while trying to update enough to keep fans aware of your strip while sprite comics just go and do their thing every day, no new artwork, just new words, and people eat it up.
So when reading this comic, remember: Each panel is lovingly hand-drawn and inked despite the artist’s shaky, over-medicated hand, labouriously and expertly cleaned up after being scanned into Photoshop so the blacks are black and the whites are white, and it’s all arranged meticulously. Think of this, and be grateful that I mostly just do this as a labour of love.
End rant.
