Date: 2007-06-10 16:31 Subject: Artistic Critiques... Security: Public Tags: criticism, webcomics

ARTISTIC CRITIQUES OF THE MOST POPULAR WEBCOMICS, ACCORDING TO ALEXA, AS LISTED BY T CAMPBELL AT BROKEN FRONTIER:
http://www.brokenfrontier.com/lowdown/details.php?id=869

Recently I said the artistic influence in webcomics was dim, and this is my attempt to see if that statement was justified.
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(6/19) Since this post still seems to be getting linked from places, I think it's time I added this qualifier: This is an assessment of the art styles and art quality found in the most readily-available comics. Being a comic artist myself, for about 15 years, I am aware that writing is important too, but for many reasons, I chose to focus solely on art for this article. I focus on the popular comics because I'm going over the webcomic art that can be found most easily by the casual internet observer.
In this article, I try to be as objective as possible, though I do let loose with criticism, when warranted. And there are times when I fail at objectivity as well. It happens sometimes; I apologize for this.
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Penny Arcade
Mike Krahulik draws in a streamlined, cartoony style one might compare to Kim Possible. As far as mainstream webcomics go, it truly is one of the best. My main criticism is that with all its improvement over the years, there still seems to be a moderate amount of cutting and pasting. It's a little puzzling, seeing how the comic updates 3 times a week, and Mike does seem to enjoy his work. The characters are often drawn from the same angles and distances in each strip, though this is one of the things the comic has improved on in recent years, and it does vary strip by strip.
On the whole, the comic doesn't seem to display Mike's full potential, but what's there is still pretty damn good.


XKCD
Stick figure comic. And the stick figures aren't even drawn well. Arguably, there are occasional bursts of creativity, but in any case, the comic isn't really done by an artist. Very often, the drawings add little to the accompanying text, if anything... and it leads me to consider this a "comic" only in the loosest sense of the term.


Ctrl-Alt-Del
Like Penny Arcade, only flatter, more generic, and much more liberal with the use of computer shortcuts. A lot of the backgrounds are made by using Google Images and pasting in photos, then applying the Gaussian Blur filter on them. The art is about as flat and geometric as it gets, and has absolutely no soul to it, with characters that all have the same faces and the same few facial expressions. Tim Buckley seems to insist that he works hard on his comic, but he's not fooling anybody. Over the years, the comic has kept pretty much the same look, with the only "improvements" involving making the linework look more smooth, vectory, and inoffensive, complimented by gradient shading with no consistent light source.

Just look at Buckley's wide range of talent (image taken from 4chan).

Cyanide and Happiness
Stick figure comic #2, but possibly the best of the stick-figure comics. Like xkcd, it compliments the writing style okay, and it's drawn better than xkcd as well. The facial expressions are not super-detailed, but they can make a guy laugh anyway. Still, it's a stick figure comic... By default, stick figure comics are not particularly inspiring to other artists.


VG Cats
The art in VGCats is pretty good. However, this is one of the mainstream comics that gets praise for improving its art over the years, which is something I contest. The archives include a few early comics from several years ago, which makes it seem as if there's been a lot of improvement, but quickly it gets into the style the comic had when it became known, which is pretty much the same as it is now. Truly, the only change is that everything's drawn with more vectory-looking lines, complete with thick outlines surrounding the characters, a la Penny Arcade. In fact, everything looks flatter now.

Scott R. gets a lot of praise for being good with cartoony expressions, but to me, it seems he just uses the same set of stock expressions, depending on the situation. The art is not bad, but it's just not as creative as people give it credit for. Cartoon art is more about movement and personality, and not just using templates of silly expressions.


Order of the Stick
Stick figure comic #3, and often praised as having a great stick-figure style, which is something I don't agree with in the least. To me, a good stick-figure style is when the artist uses the time he saves to really go broke on the expressiveness and body language of the characters. Rich B., on the other hand, gives his characters pretty ordinary and limited facial expressions, and uses stiff poses made from copy&paste templates. Moreover, it's an adventure comic, yet virtually the entire strip takes place on a single plane, staged like a sitcom. At best, it's a stick figure comic that looks good for someone who isn't really an artist. Again, not inspiring.


PvP
Scott Kurtz is a master of the geometric style of art, with characters that stay tight, on model, and with characters looking very much the same in each panel. He doesn't cut-n-paste like Buckley does, but he does draw over templates in order to keep things super-consistent, to the point where the characters have trouble bending their bodies and facing more than one direction. Again, this is not my cup of tea, but I know that others disagree, but when he goes on his occasional rants, he does sound as if he thinks this is the only correct way to do things. I think Kurtz is a pretty bad influence to other artists on many things, and his art is one of the weaker offenses on the list. I'm not sure what that says, really.


Perry Bible Fellowship
PBF has an art style that matches the humor perfectly, AND it's well-done to boot. Nicholas G. is also pretty versatile. People bring PBF up when I talk about how the most-read comics all have such boring artwork, and yeah, okay, you got me.


Questionable Content
Being a friend (or at the very least a good acquaintance), it's hard to be tough on Jeph, but there is a lot about his art to be critical of. First, the good points. His inking has gotten much stronger since the comic began, and I like the art style he uses now compared the the amateurish one he used in the beginning. He includes the full figures of his characters in each panel, which is pretty admirable.
Tragically, it's also a bit distracting, as the poses of his characters are extremely stiff, and they're often drawn with a backward slant accompanied by hunched-over necks, stiff arm placements, and lots of palming that makes everything so awkward and uncomfortable-looking. It looks like more life-drawing practice is in order, though with the comic updating seven times a week, I can see how there'd be little time for that. Jeph really needs to work on perspective too, and use points; he's clearly going by instinct now and it isn't working. The artwork is not bad, but it has a ways to go. Push yourself, Jeph. PUUUUSH.

When at rest, Questionable Content characters seem stuck in these two poses. I know these are supposed to be hip people, but come ooonnnn...

Megatokyo
No art style makes me feel more ambivalent than Fred's, but I'll try my best here. It is certainly an anime-style comic, and it's the one most anime-style artists look up to. I should make it clear that I do not think anime-style art should be encouraged. I say this as a guy who drew it for years. I also had a lot of friends that drew it. Most of us grew out of it.

Japan is already a pretty homogonized society, good at producing a lot of crap that all looks the same. There are some artists over there that do push the envelope and come up with some truly unique stuff, but the generic crap is what's catching everyone's eye the most easily, and it's these traits that Western anime-style artists often apply to their own style. For the most part, Western anime art takes a style that's already pretty superficial and filters out what little uniqueness it had.

And when I say "For the most part", I do mean that there are some exceptions. There are artists like Adam Warren and Robert DeJesus who can take elements from the style and still create art that's very much their own. It helps that they have a variety of influences from the earlier works from Japan, from the time when they produced cartoons that were not quite so similar to each other. The thing is, these artists have grown beyond drawing the way they do mostly to pay tribute to their #1 country, and they also learned good technical skills to go with their art style.

Then there's Fred Gallagher. While I can say his art isn't COMPLETELY generic, his influences come from dating sims and erotic games, all designed to feature characters that warm the players' hearts... This means that all the girls are given blank, naive, and melancholy expressions. While surfing the internet, some of you may have come across the term "moe", which is the word used to describe such characters. It is a Japanese word meaning "Underage girl of perpetual shyness".

With all this in mind, it's easy to see how Fred's art turned out the way it did. His characters are defiant about showing emotion. Going through the archives, every character seems to be defined by the one expression their face has in each and every panel. Girl #1 always looks befuddled. Girl #2 looks bored. Largo always has that comical look of anger. Piro is... whatever. This problem is so common among anime-style artists. They all forget how to draw like themselves, and subsequently forget how to draw humans that act like actual humans.

Like I said, Fred's art is not generic, but that leads to the other problem. A lot of what makes his art "unique" is the technical flaws, including the pillowy faces that often look like they were pasted on all the characters' spherical heads, and bad figure art. I looks like Fred spent too much time learning to draw anime-style, leaving little time to crack out the anatomy textbooks, which is another common problem among Western anime artists. It's forgivable if the artist is just getting into comics, but not so much when they're drawing a comic professionally, with millions of readers, many of which are aspiring artists.

Aside from the faces and anatomy, Fred's art is actually quite competent in many ways. Megatokyo is a comic published in the layout stage, and more often than not, he'll make it look all right, all things considered. Only 12-15 pages are drawn each month, and he's making a living off it, so I'm not entirely sure why he can't move the pages past the layout stage. The problem with this is that it can give the message to aspiring artists that this is okay to do. Fred has the ability to make an unfinished comic look somewhat presentable, while most artists do not.

He's also really good at drawing buildings, no doubt carried over from his former job as an architect. Coming into webcomics, he definitely had some innate skills, but no drive to learn things. Flaws that have been around since day one have gone completely unchecked. The art is not bad, but it is average, and people have been giving it way too much credit over the years. The art needs several more pushes to truly represent the level of professionality that people assert it to be. But it doesn't look this like will ever happen.


Least I Could Do
Sorry to sound harsh, but replacing Chad Porter was a good move. I hope he's used his extra time to learn how to draw proper head placement. Lar Desouza is pretty all right, and his character designs are strong, as are his backgrounds and his establishing shots, two things many webcomic artists are weak at. Characters are drawn from different angles, and they are capable of turning their heads in multiple directions, putting this comic ahead of many of the comics reviewed so far.

The comic has one rather large weakness, in my opinion, and that is the limited facial expressions. Unfortunately, the characters are so limited in emotion that it really gets to me. Supposedly, Rayne is the asshole of the comic, but pretty much everyone looks like an asshole, with the exact same smug, asshole smirk used nine out of ten times. It drives me bonkers. One could argue that it suits the theme of the comic, but I refuse to believe that any comic can be served better by limited expressions. Mixing it up always helps.

So, the comic looks all right; I just think that before drawing each character, DeSouza should ask himself "is there a slightly different way I can draw this face?" and keep at it like that, until it becomes second nature.


Sinfest
Really early on, when it was quite rare, Tatsuya Ishida came forth with a comic that had very clean and fluid brushwork. It caught everyone's eye, made everyone's eyes happy, and the rest is history. This is one of the few comics which became popular because of its artwork, and over the years, it's improved, and gotten more fluid. Backgrounds are more detailed as well. Grey-shading has been added, with (!) consistent light sources. Recently, Weekend strips have been in color, revealing the mad beast of a colorist that was waiting to get out of Ishida's body.

The facial expressions tend to be a little on the recycled side, and the poses are a little stiff sometimes, but the art still carries a lot of personality despite all that. You can say what you will about Sinfest, but the art is good! Gooooooooooood.


User Friendly
Talking about User Friendly is pretty pointless. Yes, the art is unacceptably bad, even compared with the worst mainstream newpaper comics like Momma and Crock. Yes, the author doesn't seem to know how to properly format and optimize a GIF, which is really ironic, considering the comic is about computers and whatever. But everyone is aware of this already. User Friendly is what it is. A bunch of nerds read it. Very few comic artists read it. It is there in its own world, without any real chance of affecting anything outside of it. So, let's leave it alone, and move on.


8-bit Theater
8-bit Theatre is a sprite comic. Like with stick-figure comics, this already limits it capacity for artistic inspiration to almost zero. BUT... it is the best-looking sprite comic out there. The sprites are used along with photo backgrounds, gradients, and other fancy techniques to keep things looking appealing. The comic can actually look downright cool at times, when the characters are performing an attack. It's a sprite comic, but you can't really accuse Clevinger of being lazy. He takes what he has, and makes it look as good as he can. And hey, that can be pretty inspiring. But to artists? That's hard to say!


Piled Higher and Deeper
This is the only comic in the list I haven't heard of. Isn't that odd? It's hard to think of stuff to say about the artwork. The panels are oddly skinny, which seems very limiting to me, and as it turns out, a lot of the panels include characters standing from a static distance... but it doesn't look too bad. Jorge Cham has nice technical skills, is great with backgrounds, and the character designs are nice as well. The downside that stands out to me is facial expressions seem a little blank at times. And the coloring is good, but -- all together now! -- The light sources are inconsistent. The art doesn't provoke much of a reaction from me, to be honest, but I think I will try to get to know this comic better, and that says something!


Randy Milholland's rendition of a Tijuana Bible. I posted it here to break up the text, and also because it's funny.

Something Positive
The strongest aspect of Randy's art is the character designs. He makes some pretty darn great character designs. The art style is geometric, but not generically so (where it looks like the characters were traced from a UPA cartoon); it's very much his own style. The early comics suffer greatly from cut-n-paste syndrome, and I actually found it really hard to get into the comic back in the day, because of this. Sometimes I hear people say the old art looks better, which is just so crazy to me. I suppose it IS "cleaner", but that's not necessarily a good thing. I think the art has loosened up in the right ways, and the characters have a lot more personality now. Yeah, he still cuts-and-pastes from time to time, making me want to crack out the whip and go "RAR Randy.. I know sometimes the situation calls for your characters to be still, but try tracing over the previous panel! It takes less time AND it looks better than you'd think! Work, slave! Work! *krak krak*"...

But maybe that says more about me...


Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
I've no strong opinions or criticisms about SMBC. It's not the greatest art, but it suits the style of the comic well. It does suffer from cramped art sometimes. In a recent strip, Santa is whipping an elf, but all the characters are kind of stuffed in the box and standing too close together, so Santa's drawn in the wrong position for someone who's just whipped someone, and it looks really off. So I suppose I'd suggest that Zach look out for that kind of thing, though it doesn't seem to come up often.

Applegeeks
Applegeeks is another comic which is drawn well, but is still a bit overrated. Comic readers have brains wired to think that shiny, shiny coloring automatically = best art ever. Personally, I find the coloring a bit generic, though sound. Ignoring the color, the art is nice and flowy, with good anatomy on the hands and nice use of perspective. The layout of each strip is all right, but hampered by too many close-up shots (thumbnail shots of the recent pages make this pretty clear). Mostly, I feel the anime is holding it back. It makes me wonder how much better the art would be if the artist dropped that crap. As it stands, all the characters have the exact same face, which is very off-putting.


Toothpaste for Dinner
By Kompressor. Uhhh, not exactly a stick-figure comic, but in the same vein. It features a bunch of clones of melty-headed guys. It's very "meta". It's not for me. No real art to speak of. How much proof do comic artists need that "THE WRITING IS MORE IMPORTANT"? I'll also mention Natalie Dee and Married to the Sea. Respectively, by Kompressor's wife, and Husband and Wife. They're all basically the same comic. Natalie Dee is a ripoff of Exploding Dog, and Married to the Sea is a ripoff of Wondermark. I believe both comics are more popular than the comics they ripped off. The lesson is that if you steal, you get rewarded. That's so great.


Dominic Deegan
The best description I ever come up with for Mookie's art is that it looks like the kind of think you'd find in the notebook of a high school student who wears Def Leppard T-shirts and plays Magic the Gathering. I know Mookie himself is a nice guy, easy to talk with, and all that, but that doesn't really matter. Dominic Deegan's art is amateurish, plain and simple.
The inking is awful. If you're doing a black and white comic, you need to vary your line widths at least a little bit, but everything in DD is just a mess of haphazard lines, and Mookie is showing no sign that he'll ever improve. All the characters have the same three expressions (happy anime smile, shit-eating grin, and HORRIBLE SHOCK). For a story-driven comic, everything is extremely flat, stiff, and boring. He has no anatomy skills whatsoever; he clearly learned how to draw the human figure from watching anime and not from actual humans. It really sucks that he's trying to draw "sexy" scenes now, because speaking from experience, nothing makes people more angry than artists with no anatomy skills trying to draw sexy.
It's like how Fred Gallagher spent too much time leanring to draw Anime correctly and not enough time learning how to draw correctly in general. Except a lot more pronounced. It goes to show how simple the pleasures of anime fans really are. If you're good at manipulating emotions, you need no other skills.


HONORABLE MENTIONS THAT WEREN'T IN THE ALEXA LIST, BUT PROBABLY SHOULD HAVE BEEN.
As I'm too tired to do full reviews, I'll keep these brief, and maybe expand on them later?

Goats, WIGU, Diesel Sweeties, Scary Go Round
Alexa dislikes Dumbrella, apparently, but I know at least three of these comics belong in the list somewhere. Diesel Sweeties is a very strange case of an artist who's proven to be quite talented going with a cut-and-paste pixel comic. While it doesn't appear to take a lot of effort to do, the characters themselves are all well-designed, and hey, he makes it work. Jeff R. and Jon R. are two fine examples of artists that have improved greatly over time. Both their comics were a bit "syndicated" looking and now they look a bit "indie", and not in the pretentious way. Scary Go Round is pretty much perfect.


Achewood
People (usually) tend to treat Achewood as the infallable webcomic... And the truth is, well... critiquing Achewood's art WOULD be kind of the silliest thing ever. It's a simple style, but it suits the comic perfectly. Could you imagine if I took over and drew the comics in my bendy style? Wouldn't that be horrible? So yeah, Achewood may be a bit "meta", but it actually works.


Shortpacked!, Real Life, Schlock Mercenary, Wapsi Square
Alexa also hates Blank Label. I guess even inatimate objects can find their boisterous press releases to be annoying, but anyway, it's a mixed bag over there. Willis is another artist who has shown improvement over the years. His style is pretty unique, though it does look rushed at times. Real Life is copy/paste crap from a non-artist that's looked exactly the same since day one. I can't say I'm crazy about Howard Tayler's coloring style and character designs. Or the stiff, leaning poses. His characters really love putting their hands behind their backs. The inking is still so wobbly. Throwing a thick outline around the characters is not the answer to everything! Wapsi started out nice, got better, then hit a snag when it almost became a talking-head comic, which would have been a tragic waste of Paul's skills. He's bounced back from that, and the comic is looking good, for the most part. You still need to watch those necks, Paul. Jin's neck is toooooo loooong in this series of comics! I know it can be hard to tell while you're into it. Also, Shelley's arms. If they're thicker than the rest of her body, that's too thick. Stylization is great, but keep a handle on it!


Penny and Aggie, El Goonish Shive, Sore Thumbs
Alexa hates Keenspot! Gisele's art has gotten less cartoony over the years, which would normally make me sad, but I actually rather like how P&A resembles its own comic now. In the beginning, it really looked like Cool Cat Studio 1.5. The inking is nice and the character are emotive. Nice! Dan Shive is yet another friendly artist held back by anime. And frankly, the eyes... I just don't like them. I feel like the style of eye consiting of a pupil and an unfinished circle drawn around it is something artists should outgrow, and I'm not sure why. The total lack of line-width variation gives off an amateurish-look too, despite being super-clean. I feel like Dan could be a better artist, but is being held back but certain... things? Owen Gieni sort of has the same problem. He obviously has a lot of talent, and I do like his cartoon style, for the most part. That anime, though... I know that originally, he drew in that style to pander... but it looks like he's grown to like it. It looks more like his own style, but even so, all the girls have the same faces. The same!


Little Gamers, Doctor McNinja, White Ninja, Dinosaur Comics, Sam and Fuzzy
Finally, Dayfree Press. Little Gamers is in the same category as XKCD and Order of the Stick and whatnot, really, and I haven't much more to say about that kind of thing. Dr. McNinja has a very unique, sort-of-realistic-yet-not style, with action scenes that makes everyone happy. White Ninja looks like it was done by an idiot savant, and I'm sure that's exactly what Scott and Kent are going for. Dinosaur Comics.. uhh... It's consistent! Sam & Fuzzy is simply great, and more people should talk about it.

Friends-locked for the time being. This will change. edit: okay, not anymore!

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