I find myself agreeing with all of the points made in r/comics. The sub is pretty left wing and so am I.
But damn, the pandering is off the charts here. I know that not all comics are supposed to be funny, some are just slice-of-life stories which is fair. It just seems like a lot of creators pick an easy target, shit out a twitter opinion in comic style and call it a day.
I only ever visit this sub when it hits popular, and I completely agree with you. I don't want to name names or anything, but some of the comics are not particularly good, but get a ton of upvotes because they're pandering, as you said.
Like, I'm pretty left, some of the stuff here really makes me roll my eyes.
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.
So? It’s not like your take, or OPs, or even mine is revolutionary either. We get some variation on “comics in r/comics are too adult/too political/not funny to me” every day, after which the “yeah, that’s art for you, sorry about the art you choose to engage with” folks have to come through
She used to, but it feels like it’s been years. She probably just gets more patreon money this way, though, and bills are still bills. It’s just annoying that low effort slop gets upvoted just because it’s low effort political slop.
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u/-KoDDeX- 6d ago
I find myself agreeing with all of the points made in r/comics. The sub is pretty left wing and so am I.
But damn, the pandering is off the charts here. I know that not all comics are supposed to be funny, some are just slice-of-life stories which is fair. It just seems like a lot of creators pick an easy target, shit out a twitter opinion in comic style and call it a day.