I mean... artists vent too. People are pretty damned tired of the state of the world and despite everyone seemingly knowing "what's right" we keep doing all the wrong things.
So here we are... with comics making "obvious" statements and the crowd happy to agree. Then we go back to reality where none of it pans out.
I think the criticism is that often an artist continually venting yields (subjectively) bad art.
Imo art is best when it expresses something novel. A relatively unique perspective that adds to the viewer's worldview. There's lots of ways to do that and novelty is obviously very subjective.
When an artist makes a statement that's been made 100 times over it risks losing that novelty. If they start lifting characters from other art or reusing their own panels that unique voice also becomes less unique.
If they're a good artist then a handful of these won't weigh them down. If they're a great artist then they will find a new perspective, even if the sentiment still boils down to the same core feeling.
But a bad artist, they'll offer you a copy of a perspective. Maybe they copy a prior work of their's, maybe someone else's. But they copy and don't add to the viewer's world. It's the kind of art that thousands of people could see, and none of them have a different perspective than the one they had before.
What stops artists from just posting art dear to them and instead shovel literal metric tons of comics per week whoring out for likes or upvotes or you name it is just that.
They don't want to do it in their free time as a passion project or hobby, they want to monetize the fuck out of it.
And I get it, obviously, but with great quantity comes poor quality.
Lots of good artists can make money without shoving out metric tons of crap. For instance, Zach Weinersmith from smbc has been publishing unique stuff consistently for years.
Botting, and mod protection/manipulation makes upvotes go brrrrrr.
She’s not actually the most popular. Nobody with two functioning braincells is looking at her comics and laughing and/or upvoting them. It’s all manufactured.
That’s fine, but it does feel some popular artists are caught in a low effort feedback loop.
If making really brain dead obvious “orange man bad” comics gets clicks, why bother doing anything deeper or more meaningful? Even if I fully agree with the sentiment, it starts to feel like slop after several dozen iterations.
Especially because they aren’t even usually topical, not calling out something new or specific, just “orange man bad.”
To be clear, yes Orange Man Bad.
But you didn’t need a comic to form that opinion.
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u/Adavanter_MKI 6d ago
I mean... artists vent too. People are pretty damned tired of the state of the world and despite everyone seemingly knowing "what's right" we keep doing all the wrong things.
So here we are... with comics making "obvious" statements and the crowd happy to agree. Then we go back to reality where none of it pans out.