One of the webcomics I read and very much enjoy is Surviving The World.  Part of the reason for this, I confess, is that the author, Dante Shepard, seems to share many of my viewpoints.  Beyond that, he has an amusing way of expressing himself.  His webcomic is a little different in that it’s a “photo” comic.  Basically, Dante takes a picture of himself in front of a blackboard which has something amusing written and / or drawn on it.  Sometimes it is several such pictures, depending on how much he has to say on a particular day.

In spite of his unusual style, I still qualify what he does as being a webcomic.  It’s panel-based and expresses an idea in a brief, (typically) amusing form.  However, in going through Dante’s archives, I found somebody who disagrees.

I read the article linked above and was a bit put off.  The author, Jules Rivera, essentially states a comic is not a comic if it’s not reasonably well-drawn.  This, in my humble opinion, is bullshit.  They are trying to define art in a very narrow way, discounting stick figure comics as being too lazy, photo comics as, well, not being drawn, and “poser” (CG-program created) comics as being too unlife-like.  The last option they list for “unconventional” comics is to (surprise!) hire an artist such as the article’s author.  So not only is Ms. Rivera trying to give a narrow definition to a kind of art, she appears to be doing so to promote her own work.

Let’s take this from the top.  Ms. Rivera first denounces stick figure comics as being lazy.  I don’t know if this is a fair accusation or not, but I don’t think it is significant.  I don’t know the authors of the webcomics she specifically points out–XKCD, Cyanide and Happiness and Order of the Stick–and I suspect neither does she.  The artists could be well-talented folks who chose to use stick figures on purpose.  Not out of laziness, but (for example) to prove they could make something interesting without heavy duty artwork.  XKCD–one of my favorite comics, by the way–is terrible according to Ms. Rivera because not only does the author have the audacity to use stick figures, but it also does not have a regular cast.  So what?  Every comic strip has to have a cast now?  Where exactly is that rule written?  Cyanide and Happiness, not one of my regular comics but one I enjoy from time to time, is “even worse because it’s far stupider than XKCD.”  This is a matter of taste, nothing more, but she makes the intelligence level of a comic sound like a requirement for it to qualify as a comic.  I think soap operas are pretty stupid, but that doesn’t mean they’re not a form of entertainment or a kind of television program.

After trashing stick figures, Ms. Rivera gets into photo comics like Surviving the World.  She will only qualify a photo comic as a web comic if special effects and some sort of non-photographic artistry has been applied.  Again, I call bullshit.  It doesn’t need special effects to be an art form or a comic; it’s the content and presentation that matters.

Finally, she trashes Poser comics.  This category is where artists use a 3D-modeling program like Poser to create their scenes.  The problem is that many of them do not work very hard at texturing their models, so they end up looking very plastic and not very lively.  Again, I ask, so what?  Ms. Rivera even goes so far as to say that even if everybody painted their models well, “With enough people using this tool, the result would be a crop of comics that all look the same…”  I disagree.  Think about how many times you’ve seen your favorite actor or actress in a movie.  Patrick Stewart has been both Captain Picard in the Star Trek universe and Charles Xavier in the X-Men one.  Both productions are interesting, even though there is no mistaking the actor is the same man in both.  Will Smith has been in a wide variety of movies, but that doesn’t make any of them less interesting.  So what if the same face and body are in a variety of storylines as different characters?  Ms. Rivera finishes her above comment by asking, “…I wouldn’t be a very responsible comic artist if I advised that, now would I?”  Yes, you would, Ms. Rivera, as long as you made it clear the use of those same models over and over again was different and (preferably) interesting.

After putting down all of these art forms, Ms. Rivera extols the virtues of hiring an artist.  I would like to do this, but I don’t have the money.  I have many webcomic scripts which I think would be interesting to see online, but I can’t draw very well.  I am looking into ways to get around this, but so far I haven’t found one.  I admit, I wouldn’t want to do my story lines as stick figures, but the option is not without merit.

And that, my dear readers, is the point:  Merit.  A webcomic–or any given art form–can have merit regardless of the techniques used to create it.  Many comical folks have made fun in one way or another of the horribly expensive paintings hanging in museums which have nothing but splotches of paint on them.  Are these somehow less artistic because the artist threw paint at the canvass rather than using careful brush strokes?  Was the artist being lazy or making a point?  (Or perhaps both?)  I refuse to declare something artistic or not artistic just based on how much effort may have gone into it.  I am more interested in the message it presents.  If I get that, and I find it entertaining, nothing else matters.  And nothing else should.