In all this talk about criticism, it occurs to me that one ancient form of getting a feedback is being thoroughly neglected. In the age before the internet, young artists would try to get feedback by approaching professionals in conventions and elsewhere and showing them their work, or by sending it to editors. This was a way to get a feedback from someone who actually has a certain scale by which he could measure your work, even thous this scale was often off the mark, it was the best you could to pre internet.
Nowadays we actually have a chance to send our work specifically to an author we admire or an editor of a magazine we like, thus being sure that the scale is much more aligned to what we imagine good comics are like. Why do we not do that? Did authors and editors have a bad reaction to unknown people filling their mailbox with stuff they don't feel like checking out? Or did we get so tangled into this circle of audience feedback and amateur reviewer feedback that we forgot that all about them?
VeryCuddlyCornpone wrote:
But this blew my mind. Wow, I feel kind of like when somebody pointed out that the crows in Dumbo were racist caricatures. When I was little I thought he was just French because he was overly romantic
I can really imagine Chuch Jones enjoying his vacation in Paris and thinking "why do these french fancy themselves heart-breakers? They all stink to high heaven!" You know I'm just realising that Jones is the inventor of some of the the most annoying characters in Loony Tunes cannon... I wonder...
I see what you're saying, schoob. I agree. Unfortunately I don't think we'll ever see that sort of a day unless we avoid places like dA and bring more traffic to places like concept art. It's too easy* now for people to just complacently plotz along at their own juvenile garbage, never questioning, never being questioned, never striving, receiving only pats on the back when they do something that seems good enough on the surface, never receiving criticism that isn't chased down by pompous internet white knights defending some nebulous definition of "artistic expression" that apparently is mutually exclusive from "hard work." Most people do this for fun, and for them, fun means doing whatever you want, whenever you want, staying up late at night when your parents go to bed and eating the chocolate chunk ice cream while watching the R rated movie that's on HBO that your parents said you couldn't watch even though it's a school night, never following any sort of rule because rules are inherently unfun. For them, the joy is not in improving and working on a solid piece of art that stands up to scrutiny, it's being able to approximate something adequate that people will, for one reason or another, enjoy seeing. Hence all the nightmarish porn that gets drawn, hence all the crappy dramas that masquerade as "anime" because the artist stole some stock expressions and copied stylistic techniques without understanding the foundations that make those things work, hence all the low-effort sprite comics that just read like a chat log of two eleven year old boys playing with a two dimensional dollhouse.
I'm thinking, if your hobby is gardening but you are shoddy at it nothing will grow and you'll either give up or try to get better. If your hobby is carpentry but all your chairs break apart, you won't say "that doesn't matter, I'm doing this for fun anyway." It feels like, if you're satisfied with sub-par, you may as well choose a passive hobby, like watching tv or hanging in front of the supermarket, instead of the active one.
To me, getting better at something you're doing is one of basic mechanisms by which humans function. You don't need a reason to get better, you just want to "because it's there". You function by moving forward, when you stop moving, something's not quite right.
On the other hand I always thought that it's in comic's inherent nature to attract hobbyists and amateurs. Comics are instantly more accessible than prose, and easier to produce and put out there than video, they are perfect for one-man operation, in general it seems like they're the most socialist medium out there. They are perfect means for any tom, dick and harry, to express himself on a whim and without much complications. I'm thinking, if we insist that everyone withholds for publishing until they reach the proper level, are we perhaps robbing comics of something that is inherent to them?
I guess for that reason I'm not really bothered by a bad comic if I recognize in it an expression of one's self. Even those boring auto-bio comics where nothing ever happens, which I used to hate that much.
On the other hand I'm that more annoyed by a certain mercenary spirit that exists in webcomics. Do you have a feeling, reading some comics, that they are specifically tailored from everything that's popular in webcomics at the moment, as means of getting someone internet notoriety (which in internet terms equals big salary). Did you notice how many Cyanide&Happiness copycats there are? Or how something like Go Get a Roomie is made of scrap parts of Wapsi square and Girls with slingshots? When I see those comics, I don't hear "wow, creative expression is so easy, even I could do it!", I hear "wow, these guys are popular, I wanna be popular too!"
I have the same anger for those porn webcomic sites that pop up, collecting porn by (relatively times ten) well known webcomic artists. There's about two three porn comics on internet that are any good, that actually genuinely have inspiration and personality. Everything else is awfully forced, apparently just means for someone to finally get some money from this webcomic gig.
Yeah webcomics are a perfect medium for every average joe to creatively express what's deep inside him. Sad thing is that it appears that many people just aren't particularly deep.
The bottom line is, I think, that we should appreciate wealth that this socialist nature of webcomics and comics in general brings, even if it comes at the expense of average quality. To me, the fact that the comic is interesting often trumps conventional categories of quality, and interesting works are easiest produced when you just let people loose. If you desire to work in an elitist medium, I kinda think that you were mistaken to pick the medium that started it's life by being reprinted in thousands copies and distributed all over USA.
And I think that the scene is not valued by it's average, but by it's pinnacles. Long term, webcomics will be evaluated by Gunnerkrieg Court, not by a fact that there's ten thousands accounts of Comic Genesis.
Just, you know, if a comic is bad, don't shove it into my face. Don't compete for my attention if you have nothing to show.
I read the review in question, and I think it's great that the novel got discussed in a webcomic review. Whether or not you agree with El Santo, he admitted that his opinion's unpopular and spent a reasonable amount of time defending it, and I think he deserves some credit for that. It's a tricky webcomic to review, and it would've probably been easier and less polarizing for him to have reviewed a more pedestrian one instead, so it took some cojones for him to cover Ulysses Seen the way he did.
My problem is that, if I remember well, he decided that the book was crap without actually reading the book, only from reading the comic that adapted the book. It didn't occur to him that the comic might be a very crappy adaptation - which it is. Fucking John Huston couldn't adapt Joice up to snuff, but a few internet hobbyists think that they can? Like hell! Anyways, what was important to him was to talk about how appaling reputation the book has among folks who were forced to read it in high school, who are as we know the most objective book critics out there. It's obvious that this reputation formed his opinion of the book rather than reading it or even holding it in his hands.
Other than that, I am usually appalled by how close-minded people are when approaching that book. I feel like folks are usually not giving it a proper chance, being intimidated by it's volume and pacing, simply unwilling to step back from the kind of literature that they're usually enjoying. It's not a book that's constantly entertaining, it's not a book where you "get" everything right away; I should think that a book can have many other qualities. That perhaps shouldn't adress him since he hasn't even read it, but the way he rejected the book just kinda projects the close-minded, douchy high-school mentality to me. Dunno what he's like elsewhere because he permanently put me off from reading him, it takes that little to alienate someone.
(Also hating that book is a very popular opinion. Dunno where that guy was in recent years, apparently not on internet)
