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Strip Search - Elimination #7
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I mean, not that it isn't a joke that has been used before but, "chooses to follow their dream instead of listen to those telling them to quit" isn't remotely new ground either.
Both comics based themselves in pretty well known concepts. I liked Lexxy's more personally, but that's mostly because I found the idea of roller-skates that were actually living dinosaurs to be hilarious.
I am also a bit puzzled at how awkward people found the back and forth between Monica and Gabe to be. Personally it all seemed to fall well within the realm of playful ribbing to me, but maybe that's just more a reflection of how my friends and I joke around with each other than anything else.
I know I'm a bit late to the party, but I just wanted to address this real quick.
Mindcraft may not be a "joke", but it is funny. It is also poignant. Emotional. And touching.
Penny Arcade comics have the benefit of YEARS of back story. We know Gabe and Tycho. We have watched them grow. The setup is established, so therefore, we already have a feel for who Gabe used to be as a person.
THAT is what makes this comic funny and poignant at the same time.
We start with an absurd situation - trying to explain to your kid how to avoid bad things on the webs.
We move into touching frame where Gave is starting to realize the horror of the world being exposed to your child.
The last frame is a poignant plee, made much more powerful because we have witnessed the transformation of Gabe from ridiculous caricature that cared only about himself, to a loving husband and a caring father.
Is it a gag strip? Is it laugh out loud funny? No, but humor is present. But instead of a punchline, we get <emotions>. Why does it work? Because we have been conditioned to expect PA strips to go - set up -> context/set up -> Punch.
That's how you tell a story. That's how you tell a joke. The most effective forms of that is when what you get at the end is not what you expected at the start. When you open a PA strip, you don't necessarily expect a heartfelt father to son moment that almost anyone can relate to.
You expect dick jokes and game jokes.
That's why my favorite episode of Futurama is Jurassic Bark.
Monica's strip stumbled because the setup wasn't immediately clear. Look at this thread. Look at the number of people that said "I didn't get it on first viewing". That includes half the judging panel, by the way.
I don't think your strip has to be funny to win. I think that if you go high concept, then your work has to be perfectly executed, with no room for mistakes. Monica's had a small error. Lexxy's did not. Lexxy's strip won.
As for people saying that Lexxy's art looks unfinished - we now have two comics to judge her by. A lot of her shading and line work is similar between the two. I think it's pretty clear at this point that we can call it an artistic decision that you may or may not enjoy. But even within the same strip, her shading is consistently "incomplete", and characters are purposefully left not full. However, the lines that are there are clear, convey what they mean to convey. Her characters are shockingly expressive, and small details abound to add life to her figures. Look at the blood dripping out of the mouth of the T-Rex in the last panel. The hat popping off the T-Rex as it chases the camera-man in the background.
As for the content - Lexxy takes the "bad idea / defective / non-useful" product meme, and makes it into a lethal, alive, death dealing monster, and adds a T-Rex eating people on top of it all. It's a fun twist on an existing theme.
And if you think this is the first time someone has made a metaphor for doing what you love, despite what others tell you...well then I guess you aren't very well read? Monica takes a meme (yes, it is also a meme, see every Motivational Poster ever), illustrates it beautifully, and uses a silly Robo-Roller skate metaphor to get the point across. And I would absolutely buy a print of it. However, like Maki's Ukulele Mermaid strip, it has a stumbling block. Maki's was that he said more than needed to be said. Luckily, his opponent was worse. Monica's comic's flaw is the set up, and her opponent was better.
Simple as that. Perfectly executed but simple joke > flawed high concept. I'm sure if someone is able to pull off a perfectly executed high concept strip, it can beat a simple gag joke. We have yet to see an example of that, so we'll have to wait and see.
Monica's was definitely the closest we've seen so far.
In my main experience of reality shows based on creative skill, the judges are not "being the asshole judge" while the person is trying to create the thing that is going to be judged. The judges are mostly kept out of the room until the contestants are done making their things. There may be shows where the judges are constantly spraying the contestants who are concentrating on a creative project with confrontational and unhelpful comments, but most of the ones I've seen don't do that, probably because there is already enough stress on the contestants and it can annoy audiences when the artists aren't given a fair chance to concentrate before the harsh comments begin.
I kind of like the reversal here, though. They add pressure because otherwise, we would just be watching 90 minutes of silence.
The time for criticism, I think, has been a part of why I love this show. They are honest, positive, and very rarely harsh. And the whole post-shame hole visit just reaffirms that the heckling is all in good fun.
And so far, the dominant feeling in the house is that the elimination competition was fun. Monica is the only contestant so far that seemed to get really rattled and just want it to stop - which is pretty much exactly how she acted in the interview.
The bottom line is, in life, you have to deal with hecklers, haters, and generally just annoying or oblivious people. How you handle that, how you manage your temper when pressed, those are things that reveal depth of character.
Either you didn't read any of my explanations, or you didn't understand them. This is exactly what I explained. Her thunderdome art is extremely gestural... that is to say, conveying movement, form and emotion in a few simple lines rather than relying on contour. The point that some people are trying to make is that the thunderdome is the only time she seems to work this way. Comics she creates outside of the thunderdome have much cleaner line art, and are less gestural.
Instead of examining the differences between two 90 minute strips, examine the differences between those strips and every other piece of art she has ever presented to the public as something other than a sketch, including her tumblr viral comics.
It's obvious that, given the time, Lexxy often chooses to close lines and use gradients. Are you claiming that if Lexxy had more time, she would not have polished her thunderdome comics so that they more closely resemble her viral tumblr art?
Some critics are saying that Lexxy chooses to prioritize other aspects of her art over techniques that are commonly associated with the kind of polish you see in print comics, and that her choice not to use gradients and closed lines are based on not having enough time. Some of the other artists work fast enough that they can make greater use of gradients, precise line art, hatching, or color in the time allotted. This does not mean their comics are necessarily better, only that they choose to work in such a way that they have time enough to employ these techniques that they know are often associated with polish. They manage their time differently. Not necessarily better, just differently.
Personally, in Lexxy's first Thunderdome, I prefer her art to Tavis's piece. I think she makes good time management choices. That said, I believe that if she had 3 hours, she might choose to clean up her line art and put in some gradients. Do you disagree?
Lexxy has said herself that when she saw Monica's comic, she thought she was going to lose. Why do you think that might be?
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I just wanted to weigh in on this "Mike ruined Monica's chance of winning" theme. Maybe I just have thicker skin than some of you but I took it as good natured heckling. The fact that Monica started shooting back insults was hilarious and I think showed it wasn't really bothering her. She chose not to answer his questions and obviously was annoyed with them to start so she just started throwing back insults which is funny shit. To take that back and forth and accuse it of being unfair to Monica or mean of Mike is going too far imho.
My friends and I joke around by making fun of each other all the time. Sarcastic or seemingly mean spirited jokes during a serious situation lighten the mood for us. If you found it tough to watch I don't think that is wrong of you, just how you interpreted it. For my part I do not think she took it the way some of you guys are.
As for it being unfair... He has heckled all of the contestants and it has made people uncomfortable before. Just last episode Abby threw back some insults after Mike asked the same questions, she just did it in her sassy sarcastic Abby voice so no one cared. It would be 100% unfair if he asked Monica 2-3 questions saw a negative response and decided to stop because every other person on this show has gone through the exact same things. It would be like a Basketball crowd seeing a guy miss a free throw and decide to stop booing because they negatively affected his performance (probably a bad analogy because I don't think Mike's intentions are to cause bad performances but whatever.)
It doesn't have to be that way, and it's not the way it was on other shows of this type I've seen. They stop the people periodically and interview them about their creative decisions and a mentor comes in and gives them advice on what they might be doing wrong. We also see the other contestants reacting to the work they are doing and offering their support or criticism of what they're seeing from their opponents. All in all this gives a much more in-depth view of the decisions the artist is making and allows the contestants to voice opinions on the creative work of their peers. Which we have gotten almost none of on this show -- no cartoonist criticizing or explaining why they like the comic that someone else is drawing or has drawn. All the contestants can comment on about each other here are the social challenges, never the comics (which is what they are actually experts on, and might have interesting things to say about). In this show only two cartoonists are present when any comic is drawn, the person drawing it and one other person who is under too much pressure to have a chance to see what the other person is doing and have a chance to give their opinion if they might do something differently (due to the creative deadline being so short compared to other shows of this type).
I completely agree with you here. I also do not hold this against her at all. Timing is an issue and putting out a comic that is more well thought out and funny with rougher art is better then putting out a less though out comic that is less funny with cleaner art imho.
That said I loved Monica's comic but I am in the "it took me two reads to get it and 3 reads to appreciate it" group. The first time through I missed the medals and thought he had gotten a job having to do with rollerskates tbh. Once I read it a second time it clicked for me and I thought it was adorable. I actually wanted Monica to win heading into this episode... but I liked Lexxy's strip more. Lexxy's comic made me laugh out loud the first read (it was when my mind made a human saying "roarrrrr" sound effect behind a goofy infomercial voice saying "Dino-Skates!!!!!")
Frame 1 tell the artist to draw a comic
Frame 2 ask artist a deep question
Frame 3 artist flips off person asking the question
Frame 4 artist gives the person asking the question her answer in the form of a comic, which she began drawing before he even asked the question in frame 2.
See?
Well he could do something besides incessantly as the same question repeatedly, especially after the "so I could fuck your mom." You know, maybe ask another question? Asking the same question over and over again is only good television if it leads to a great response, which clearly wasn't the case here.
Mike doesn't need your hero worship. He can be just a regular dude who makes mistakes sometimes, it's ok for him to be human.
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Its also possible for us to disagree with you and not be wrong... tbh, fwiw, imho etc.
I agree with you about the funny! In fact, remember that after Thunderdome #2, Katie acknowledged that she had picked the joke she knew she could do polished art for over the other joke she might have liked better... and she said that doing so was probably the wrong choice.
Lexxy chooses to execute more complex comics instead of reserving time for polish, and so far that has been the right choice... but that choice explains why some people might think the art doesn't look polished.
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To someone, somewhere, this is a true statement (very probably to Rob Liefield). The silliness of making objective statements about art can't really be overstated.
edit: re Monica, I...did not get a counter-trolling banter vibe from her like we did from Abby. Her responses made me physically uncomfortable because she clearly was taking herself and her work and the whole process *super seriously* while Mike was trying to make jokes. It was a little weird to watch.
I was extremely impressed with the depth of Monica's piece. Just as I was impressed by Abby, I didn't think Monica had this level of artistry within her. Jerry likes to use "High Concept" and this time it applies for sure. Not only did Monica have good writing and tell a deep story, she also drew a very beautiful strip in a short period of time. I know Lexxy says she has trouble with time management, but if you compare Monica's strip to Maki's it is startling how much more there is to her's.
In the end however, Lexxy's comic had me laughing while Monica's had me smiling. This was Lexxy's first challenge all over again, only this time in reverse. Monica should feel very proud of what she produced. She made it so far by being the last to compete in the elimination contest, however she deserved to get as far as she did because her comic was only second to Erika's comic out of all the eliminated.
Lexxy, you have some real talent. I took the elimination challenge myself and, like most people, I drew a dinosaur roller skating ( http://t.co/cUrZGJogci ). You came up with something completely out of the ordinary and made it hilarious. You really do have the soul of a comic strip artist. I remain a big fan of Lexxy's particular style of drawing her strips, they are extremely expressive while staying simple. Similar in some ways to Family Circus or some of the older newspaper strips.
Of course, Monica's response to Mike's apologizing was basically "Why are you apologizing? It wasn't a big deal."
Like, seriously this is so much forum ado about nothing. It was playful ribbing on the part of Mike, which occasionally can go a little too far. Mike speculated that maybe it had, so he did the right thing in offering an apology. Turns out he hadn't gone too far and there wasn't the need for an apology. Not really a big deal.
serious
I was really looking for Lexxy to go home after seeing her kickstarter make about 80,000 for the comic she talks about in this episode, a comic that she will be working on exclusively from now on.
Making comics isn't always about being funny. I think it should have been a tougher choice than the judges made it out to be, but hey, part of webcomics is catering to your audience. Lexxy knew what the boys liked (humor), and I guess if you read PA, you would know that they are more wont to go the humor route than the pulling-on-heartstrings route. Also, they obviously have a (metaphorical) art boner for her, and her element of apparent surprise (they not knowing she had "this" in her) is definitely working to her advantage.
As for the banter, I loved that Monica wanted to be left alone, and she blatantly made it obvious. I'm surprised that none of the others of them going into the Thunderdome (with the possible exception of Abby) didn't have this approach, but I understand that most are concerned with risking their chances of winning over a tasteless rebuttal and pissing off a judge.
Also, some of you saying that "she'd have to deal with this IRL; she should have handled it better." Nah. Most artsist get their work done in the privacy of their own areas at home or in a studio (with the exception of people who stream live/have public studios/do public art, etc). For some people, the process is a very intimate thing. I probably would have handled it in the same way; WITTY banter takes more concentration that I can afford while drawing/concepting if I'm under a tight deadline.
I don't agree with your assessment of what Mike said afterwards. He is always very nice and re-assuring in the after interviews. He would have felt bad if his comments threw her off but that doesn't mean he shouldn't continue commenting...
Ok, you got me on that one. There's one double line in the strip and I didn't notice it.
This sort of quibble was exactly why I brought up the Calvin and Hobbes strip. Because the whole strip is glutted with intersecting lines like that.
Er, you're comparing two close-up views with a distance character. Drawing a further distant character requires more vagueness since detail is lost by the human eye at that distance. Too much detail makes the character look like a very tiny close up person instead of a far away character that you can't see all the details on.
This isn't even addressing that no, Waterson doesn't always connect the shoulder to neck in an unbroken line, or clearly delineate limbs, as seen with the first three panels of Hobbes here.
Now see this I noticed for myself, but you didn't say "the blacks aren't filled" in your original statement, which I could have agreed with, you said "the gesture lines are all kept in!" which is where I disagree with you. The gesture and form building lines are clearly cleaned up.
I don't need to compare with Lexxy's regular style, I know what that looks like.
Look, I understand that the art she presented is not perfect. I see how she could have done better. But the economy of line she's using is spectacular. The amount she's able to say with so few lines is really astonishing to me. Calling it the worst art style in the elimination chamber, as some people have, is mind boggling to me.
It's like people who think that good writers are the ones who can write 1,000 page novels. Writing a lot is easy, writing a little and still communicating effectively is what's difficult. I would argue that being able to visually express a story with minimal lines is a feat to be treasured.
FYI, to anyone who likes this kind of comic art, I'd suggest taking a look at Ape Lad's work if you haven't already. (And notice he deliberately doesn't fill his blacks, ahhhhhhh!)
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Origin ID: jazzmess
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Try not to take the comparison too literally. I wasn't trying to say that Lexxy's elimination comics are on par with Bill Waterson's published work (although she does have a spark of wonder in her work that reminds me of him. But don't be offended by that either, many of the comic artists I like remind me of Waterson in some way, since it was through him that I first loved comics).
Rather, I was trying to point out that the "sins" of Lexxy's work are repeated by admirable artists on purpose. IE Waterson had the time to not leave intersecting lines in his work, he left them there because they are part of the style of the work and not a mistake.
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Look, I love E. E. Cummings and I love Neil Gaiman. Just because I respect Cummings' innovative and artistic disregard for the conventions of punctuation doesn't mean that I'm going to assume it's deliberate if Neil omits an apostrophe. It's not about a series of hard and fast rules, it's about an established consistent style. It's about intentionality.
Ugh, now I'm just wishing that you hadn't dragged me beyond the abstract. I feel like a huge jerk pointing out specific things in a work that the artist can't change. I guess I can simplify it to a single question: do you think that, given an extra hour to work on the comic, there's nothing about that linework that Lexxy would change?
When it comes to outside-of-the-contest art, considered without reference to context, Lexxy is my favorite by a huge margin. Her Witch of Space drawing is a goddam amazing piece of narrative illustration. Her other style is a factor... it's a factor because it ties into that same question, the question of deliberateness. If you spend a lot of time examining the Calvin and Hobbes strips you like so much, you might be able to see that there is a method in the messiness. The lines that sloppily intersect are consistently the same kinds of lines. If you notice, Hobbes' stripes cross his outline almost every strip, but other contours are preserved. In general, the lines that make up stripes and hair are allowed to intersect or break up other lines with messy overlap, but the contours of individual limbs are usually solid and do not jut into one another... though they may be fuzzed or overlapped by lines that represent hair, stripes, or fuzziness.
See, this comic 100% perfectly illustrates my point. Waterson leaves the line deliberately broken in those first three panels because it is proximate to Hobbes's furry cheek. A consistent style dictates that fuzziness causes proximate broken lines to eliminate tangents and indicate fuzziness. Now look at panel four: the shoulder contour IS unbroken there, because it's IN FRONT of the fur. Understand? Look through the comic, and you'll notice that that gap exists every time that the fur is next to the shoulder, and it absolutely never exists when the shoulder is reaching in front of the head. For instance, look at this one. . When Hobbes is leaning forward and his shoulder is not proximate to his whiskers, the shoulder is drawn with a solid contour. When standing upright, it's broken out to indicate the fuzziness. I can guarantee you that if you gave Waterson extra time to work on the comic, he wouldn't have "fixed" those things.
That's the difference between something that's part of a style and something that is an artifact of a limited time crunch: whether you think that every line was a deliberate decision that the artist would not have changed even if they had unlimited time. I love Ape Lad's comics and I am completely and totally certain that those blacks are purposeful. Why? Because he uses the exact same method for filling blacks in hundreds upon hundreds of comics, regardless of how much time he has to spend on one. That style of filling in blacks is in no way caused by any kind of limit on time.
To try one last, desperate gambit to see if you can understand intentionality... it's the difference between Abby's shoulder tangent and her boob outline. The shoulder tangent was a mistake that she realized needed to be fixed. The boob was a deliberate artistic choice that she absolutely would not have changed even if she had a year to work on that standee. The shoulder tangent was an artifact of a time crunch. The lack of a boob outline was part of her style.
Again, I am not claiming that Lexxy's art is bad. Instead, I'm trying to explain why others might see a lack of conventional polish.
I have stated elsewhwere in this thread that I think the lack of conventional polish is a conscious time-management decision, and one I think has served Lexxy well. But people who strongly prioritize conventional polish might say that they feel this art style is the weakest, merely because it lacks conventional polish. I think this art style is the second or third strongest, but that doesn't mean I'm going to deliberately blind myself to its weaknesses.
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You wrote a 649 word forum post about this, and I disagree with you on nearly every point. I count anything that causes this much debate as good TV.
And that's a disingenuous comparison, because it ignores the format.
I tried to look up who came up with the six word story, "For sale: baby shoes, never worn.", but it turns out it's only an urban legend that Hemmingway wrote that (or at least that there's no proof it came from him, aside from the word of a playwright). But let's assume that some novelist, or hey that maybe some playwright, did write it in response to a prompt, are you going to say "The fact that this story has no characters can't be deliberate, because all his plays have characters!", completely ignoring that the story had a required format of six words?
No need to get so desperate in your quest to show me what bad taste I have.
Abby's leaving out of the boob is also something that I aesthetically preferred and thought Mike, "the professional", was wrong about. Actually that whole business is this conversation in a nutshell. Mike says it should be one way, Abby thought it should be another. Neither of them is wrong on an aesthetic level, because it's a discussion about personal preference.
And to be honest? If I like the art, then "intentionality" can go hang. As stated numerous times I prefer the unpolished to the overly polished. I think nowadays too many things are overpolished to the point of sterility (see the overabundance of photoshop on every face in a magazine so that people begin to look like they're made of plastic). I tried to find a Youtube of it and wasn't able to, but a while back I remember seeing a feature about how Pixar had invited a veteran Hollywood lighting specialist to come down and give a class to the animators. The specialist set up lighting for a scene using all the familiar lights used in modern film. When that was all done, he pointed to someone "outside the frame" of where he had set up the lighting, someone half in shadow and only getting part of the lights from the set. He asked the animators which was more interesting, the ultra-lit set, or this one person only half visible in reflected light. It was clear to everyone that the person without the super slick "perfect" lighting was the interesting thing to look at. This is a sentiment I approve of wholeheartedly.
Edit: Actually, thinking back to the art courses I took back in college, I was very interested in learning how to draw what the eye sees, so I made strangled efforts towards perfection. Then one day the teacher made an assignment where we were to draw the same object 20 times and each time different. Because I used many unfamiliar techniques for the alternate versions, some of my drawings had a looser and more improvised feel than my normal attempts, as well as being less perfectly representational than I would have liked. The professor praised me for this, and said he was surprised when he saw that piece was from me. Less clean does not automatically mean less good.
But then it sounds like we agree. You're saying it's a conscious decision for the format - that's all that I'm saying. Yes if this were a 24 hour comic instead of a 90 minute comic it would come out differently.
But it's a 90 minute comic and what was left in and what was taken out were chosen based on that format. I personally think the decisions were made well, others feel that the decisions were made badly. In my opinion, Lexxy has the second best elimination art so far in both of her comics (Katie's being the all time best).
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If you really think I'm trying to show you "what bad taste you have," then your reading comprehension is as bad as your art theory. Nowhere have I said the word taste, nor have I ever implied that you have bad taste. Instead, I'm trying to get you to understand and acknowledge a concept. I'm trying to explain to you how to perceive a quality in art. And obviously, I need to try again to help you understand what I mean by intentionality, because you've just proven that you've completely misunderstood the meaning.
Intentionality: being formed intentionally, having the ability to represent ones own ideas.
So if you say "If I like the art, then 'intentionality' can go hang," you're saying that what the artist would prefer has no relevance to you at all. Their ability to represent themselves in a way that makes them happy is less important to you than your own pleasure. Now, I know you're not actually trying to say anything like that... but I do wish you'd try to actually understand what I'm saying, rather than assigning me whatever straw man point of view you've decided to argue against this time. Let me try, once again, to break this down for you.
If you asked all the artists "If you could draw a comic for a contest, would you include full linework, gradients, neat hatching, and colors?" different artists would give different answers about what they would do if they had the ability to express themselves without time limits. Abby uses hatching, but not gradients. Erika doesn't often use full color. Katie uses hatching and gradients and color, sometimes.
Some of the artists are able to check off more of the items they would include if they had unlimited time than others. The more of the things on their list of ideal polish stuff they are able to include, the more polished the final product looks.
In general, popular conventionally published comics have strong, consistent linework, solid blacks, and either gradients or hatching. When people say that the art does not look polished, they are referring to the fact that the art lacks one or more of those qualities that they have come to associate with the kind of polish they see in traditional publishing.
So Katie, who manages line art, gradient, and color, looks more "polished" than other contestants, by both the "ideal personal expression" standard and the "conventional polish for traditional publishing" standard. Both standards are reasonable to consider or discard. Bill Watterson also manages to produce work that met his high personal standard for consistency and the standards expected by traditional publishing.
Lexxy includes neither everything she would include if she had unlimited time nor everything that is expected by traditional publishing. Thus by certain metrics it is easy to see why some people might, objectively, consider this art style to be less polished.
If you explicitly prefer unpolished art, that's fine. But If you keep comparing Lexxy's level of polish with a finished Calvin and Hobbes strip, you're going to keep making yourself seem like a silly goose. You keep, essentially, saying "Don't take the comparison too seriously, but look here is why I think they do exactly the same thing." That's folly. Then, when people point that out to you, you say "stop taking this too seriously! Also, here is another completely polished and finished comic, the laugh out loud cats, that I think Lexxy's comic is comprable to."
This has absolutely, positively nothing to do with good or bad taste. It's about being able to identify the qualities that might make someone OTHER THAN YOURSELF think of a work as polished, and then evaluate a work based on those qualities, so that you can better understand the opinions of others, even if you don't agree with them. That's not taste. It's a specific skill that can be taught, one that I'm increasingly certain you have no interest in learning.
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Here is where this discussion loses me (not you specifically, just this line of criticism of Lexxy's strip in general). If you did a poll of all the artists who went up to elimination I'm guessing all of them would love an extra hour to work on their strip. Everyone is putting out the best strip that they can in the time frame given. There is a lot more to a comic than just the linework, and Lexxy's work hits all of those marks. Monica's art is more polished but it fails just a little bit on clearly relaying what is going on in the strip (Monica's twitter, in reply to a request for a print, indicates she would like to redo it). There is not a single strip I have seen that could not be better with extra time. Even Abby and Erika's, who both finished before the clock.
If this is your main point, I'd say that this is a question you can use to label any work of any artist ever as unfinished. There's always room for improving your artwork, and pretty much every artist I know struggles with accepting when a work is complete.
If, for example, I go and look at something I drew and thought was good - I could pick out ten or twenty things that I'd change if I spent more time on it.
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To everyone in general "This isn't the style Lexxy normally uses, so therefore it must be somehow lesser" is a bust. Drawing well in multiple styles is indicative of great skill, and being able to form a style to suit a specific set of requirements even more so. If it's a style you dislike that's fine, we all have different tastes. YMMV.
It looks a lot to me like the negative comments about Lexxy's art are a stylistic preference rather than any actual flaw in the artwork which I think serves the purpose well.
You're taking that sentence out of context. I was using it to VERY SPECIFICALLY draw a comparison between the Calvin and Hobbes strip that Cambiata keeps wanting us to look at and Lexxy's strip. Given an extra hour to work on that Calvin strip, I don't think Watterson would have changed it. That is part of why most people would consider that art polished and finished-looking.
POLISHED. Not "better," not "greater," just "more polished" or possibly "more finished." That is the specific criticism I have seen the most often, and I'm trying to explain why people might call Lexxy's work "unpolished" or "unfinished-looking."
One of the most important skills an artist can have is knowing when to call a work finished. I'd say that a work is finished and polished when an artist says "this is complete. I am making a conscious decision to stop working on this, because I don't think putting in more work would make this better." Waterson's work and Apelad's work are very, very clearly 'complete' in this way, so I think it is profoundly silly to compare Lexxy's thunderdome comic with these pieces, and yet Cambiata does it over and over and over again.
Not a single person has said "This isn't the style Lexxy normally uses, so therefore it must be somehow lesser." Instead, they have said "There are certain qualties I associate with "finished" or "polished" work. Lexxy's comic does not have them, but {PERSON'S} comic does." Then, by examining all the comics in question, and comparing them to things like Calvin and Hobbes and the Laugh Out Loud Cats, I can determine what qualities people associate with polish. Then I can try to explain what those qualities might be to people like Cambiata, and teach him how to percieve them if he wants to learn, which he does not.
I think being able to convey things in a rough, unpolished, gesture style is a great skill. I think that Lexxy's rough, unpolished, gesture style is better at conveying her ideas than the more conventionally polished art of some other artists. But that doesn't mean I think her unpolished style is polished. That's silly.
Triwizard Drinking Tournament - '09 !Hufflepuff unofficial conscript, '10 !Gryffindor
Nerd blog at culturalgeekgirl.com
I don't disagree with you in the specific that Lexxy's art could have more polish, but I do also believe that every artistic work could use more polish and the argument is thus pointless. Even the great Watterson would change his art given an infinite time sink and the patience to use it.
I was trying to simplify my discussion with Cambiata specifically to a single. It did not end well.
I disagree that all great artists would change their art if they had a choice. In fact, poor George Lucas has demonstrated that the ability NOT to do that makes a good artist even greater. That said, I will try to explain a little bit further with the 'how finished is it' line of reasoning I wanted to bring up.
True, but we're talking about how "finished" or "polished" a strip is, not how "good" it is. This was explicitly established much, much earlier in my conversation with Cambiata, but I understand if you've lost track of it. I'm only still here because of insomnia.
Bear in mind that I'm trying to explain how someone could see Lexxy's work and think "that looks unfinished" or "that looks sloppy," while not thinking the same thing about Calvin and Hobbes,
Cambiata kept implying that, since Calvin and Hobbes had lines that deliberately overlapped or didn't connect, every line of Lexxy's that overlapped or didn't connect must be a deliberate part of her style. I was trying to get him to either confirm or refute this particular implication, and I was going to proceed from there.
My argument was going to be that people are used to seeing very clear, contiguous outlines in comics, with strong contrast in the form of blacks or colors. If people see line breaks that don't look deliberate, or blacks that aren't solid, they see those as signs of lack of polish. I think that some of Lexxy's lines look like something she would have fixed if she had time (like Abby's shoulder) rather than something she made a choice to do (like Abby's shirt). If people unconsciously value these strong outlines and solid shading, and consider them an indicator of conventionally polished art, they could perceive Lexxy's less solid outlines and blacks as a sign of "incomplete" art.
Lexxy has more gestural lines than many of the other contestants. Her blacks aren't very solid. She didn't use colors or gradients. She didn't draw much in the way of backgrounds. She didn't use hatching or greyscale. All of these factors could contribute to people saying Lexxy's thunderdome comics look unpolished compared to some of the other works.
Some people had specifically said they didn't understand how someone could say Lexxy's art looks unpolished or unfinished. I was trying to explain that to them. I also specified repeatedly that I don't think "more polished" means "better."
Triwizard Drinking Tournament - '09 !Hufflepuff unofficial conscript, '10 !Gryffindor
Nerd blog at culturalgeekgirl.com
I understand, and you are doing a good job of that. You just happened to have a good (out of context) quote to play off of to address the others who were complaining that her work looked unfinished.
Also, I was still half asleep so I definitely had lost the line of discussion.
It a completely unrelated vein, I'd like to mention that a lot of us have been ragging on the music in stripsearch, because of that guitar song that played all the way through the SS Grand Prix episode. I'd like to say that the music in the elimination episodes is all fantastic.
Monica's strip confused me at first, I didn't get the joke, then I realized that there wasn't really a joke there. My favorite part was the imagery of the dinosaurs breath in the cold night air as he decides to go for one last run before hanging up skating forever. That is just what I took away from it of course.
As for all of the banter during this elimination? I don't understand what y'all are so upset about. My roommate and I were in tears the entire time. When Monica whispered "Your striped shirt is stupid" and nonchalantly popped another piece of candy into her mouth, well- It doesn't really get much better than that.
They do pretty well for the time given. All alone. Mike and Jerry work together and bounce ideas off one another. They workout the three panels, then Mike draws the same characters he's been drawing for 10+ years. It's a good thing Mike didn't burst into flames...
You see? Cambiata has agreed that it's not perfect, but says he still likes it. Cultural Geek Girl is only trying to explain why it's not perfect. I expect that you would both agree with this summarization: The work is unpolished and would probably have been improved upon if more time had been given, BUT it's impressively well-drawn for 90 minutes and perhaps there wouldn't have been so very much that needed changing. Right?