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rudecyrus
Nov 6, 2009

fuck you trolls
lol "I don't think I'm being egotistical"

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Tesseraction
Apr 5, 2009

I just love the low-key owning of Mookie by talking about how his art has improved given................ everything we've seen Mookie achieve with his latest travesty.

I don't think Monsieur Garth is doing it on purpose, by the by; it's unintentional, and that makes it funnier.

Regalingualius
Jan 7, 2012

We gazed into the eyes of madness... And all we found was horny.




So, basically this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ul6UcvNX4o8

Codependent Poster
Oct 20, 2003

That guy's comic art is pretty decent. I've seen worse published in actual Marvel and DC comics.

girl dick energy
Sep 30, 2009

You think you have the wherewithal to figure out my puzzle vagina?
Yeah. Y'all don't need to reach about mediocre and completely typical comic book art.

Regalingualius
Jan 7, 2012

We gazed into the eyes of madness... And all we found was horny.




It’s better than anything I’ve ever made, at least.

Tesseraction
Apr 5, 2009

I want to clarify that Garth is way more talented than Mookie in every way, so his post was hilarious because it stomped Mookie.

I was in no way suggesting he shouldn't be proud of his ability.

Joe Slowboat
Nov 9, 2016

Higgledy-Piggledy Whale Statements



I think the guy is wildly overselling his extremely standard and deeply uninteresting American Comics style, but it’s perfectly competent art.

Lunatic Sledge
Jun 8, 2013

choose your own horror isekai sci-fi Souls-like urban fantasy gamer simulator adventure

or don't?
perfectly competent is a high bar for webcomics

Codependent Poster
Oct 20, 2003

Yeah I'm sure I could nitpick it, and it's pretty generic, but the guy might as well be Van Gough compared to Mookie

Beelzebufo
Mar 5, 2015

Frog puns are toadally awesome


Codependent Poster posted:

Yeah I'm sure I could nitpick it, and it's pretty generic, but the guy might as well be Van Gough compared to Mookie



TheHan
Oct 29, 2011

Grind, you poor fool!
Grind straight for the stars!
Did this guy even like Star Power? Or superhero comics?

Garth posted:

Before Star Power, I wrote stories too and I’ve got several of them bubbling up inside, waiting to be told. They’re stories that just can’t be told with Star Power. Star Power is big and loud and fast and frankly a little ridiculous, the way all superhero stories are. I’m yearning for stories that are more intimate, slower paced, more serious and adult.

the yeti
Mar 29, 2008

memento disco




Of all the things to notice, what jumped out at me immediately is that mookie drew that as if the one character batted the other with the side of the hammer

RandomPauI
Nov 24, 2006


Grimey Drawer
And what was Star Power?

oriongates
Mar 14, 2013

Validate Me!


Lunatic Sledge posted:

perfectly competent is a high bar for webcomics

Yeah, it's important to keep in mind that the standard superhero comic is produced by 3-4 people working together and some of them still look worse than that. Being able to produce art like that consistently for a webcomic represents a lot of skill and dedication. That guy is a legitimately good artist

It may not be Kill Six Billion Demons quality, but that's because Abaddon is some kind of comic-making eldritch horror wearing human skin.

EDIT: You know what, I'll even defend Mookie as an artist. He takes a lot of shortcuts and a lot of his work is uninspired, but from from a technical standpoint he still has a lot of skill. Drawing is loving *hard* to master.

A lot of the things that get mocked are just stylistic choices, not defects.

Mookie's two biggest flaws are that he basically got to a point where he basically likes what his art looks like and hasn't put much effort into it since then, probably because he considers the writing more important. It's just unfortunate that the second big flaw is that his writing is pretty terrible, especially for the pacing of his comic.

oriongates fucked around with this message at 03:21 on May 19, 2020

RoboChrist 9000
Dec 14, 2006

Mater Dolorosa

oriongates posted:

Yeah, it's important to keep in mind that the standard superhero comic is produced by 3-4 people working together and some of them still look worse than that. Being able to produce art like that consistently for a webcomic represents a lot of skill and dedication. That guy is a legitimately good artist

It may not be Kill Six Billion Demons quality, but that's because Abaddon is some kind of comic-making eldritch horror wearing human skin.

EDIT: You know what, I'll even defend Mookie as an artist. He takes a lot of shortcuts and a lot of his work is uninspired, but from from a technical standpoint he still has a lot of skill. Drawing is loving *hard* to master.

A lot of the things that get mocked are just stylistic choices, not defects.

Mookie's two biggest flaws are that he basically got to a point where he basically likes what his art looks like and hasn't put much effort into it since then, probably because he considers the writing more important. It's just unfortunate that the second big flaw is that his writing is pretty terrible, especially for the pacing of his comic.

I would normally agree with what you said in this post, but I don't know. I feel like the fact that despite having done DD daily for a decade, that his art basically didn't improve at all after a point and that now it's actually arguably gotten worse, just, like, yeah.
I can't help but feel that most people, no matter how cocky or dumb, would improve even if just by accident at whatever skill or craft they are engaged in if they did it daily for years on end. Mookie did DD daily for years on end, and at best he stagnated, at worst he got worse.

Who What Now
Sep 10, 2006

by Azathoth
Was Star Power ever published or was it a webcomic?

Mx.
Dec 16, 2006

I'm a great fan! When I watch TV I'm always saying "That's political correctness gone mad!"
Why thankyew!


self-published if that counts

Invisible Clergy
Sep 25, 2015

"Behold, I will corrupt your seed, and spread dung upon your faces"

Malachi 2:3

oriongates posted:

EDIT: You know what, I'll even defend Mookie as an artist.
The hottest take on a forum full of hot takes.

Invisible Clergy posted:

Any time anyone defends Mookie, I'm just gonna quote Synthbuttrange's post.


As FuegoFish once said, this comic is to art what the poo poo I just took is to sculpture.

oriongates
Mar 14, 2013

Validate Me!


RoboChrist 9000 posted:

I would normally agree with what you said in this post, but I don't know. I feel like the fact that despite having done DD daily for a decade, that his art basically didn't improve at all after a point and that now it's actually arguably gotten worse, just, like, yeah.
I can't help but feel that most people, no matter how cocky or dumb, would improve even if just by accident at whatever skill or craft they are engaged in if they did it daily for years on end. Mookie did DD daily for years on end, and at best he stagnated, at worst he got worse.

I don't think you can make any objective argument that his actual artistic ability has gotten anything but better.

Maintaining a consistent style is a skill and it's usually a desirable one. Webcomics are just usually an exception since they often start at the most amateur level of the creator's skill and they last far, far longer (ideally) than almost any other continuing artistic work by a single artist. Most long-running webcomics hit a point where the creator is pretty happy with their style and then they try and keep that style consistent...because having a consistent, distinctive look is actually an advantage and because sometimes its better to keep your style simple for the sake of maintaining a consistent update schedule.

Mookie reached what he thought of that point quite a while ago. And frankly, his style is fine. It obviously isn't to everyone's taste, but that's just subjective and it's going to affect any comic. For example, I hear a fair number of complaints about Girl Genius's faces, but I actively admire Foglio's expressive, exaggerated facial style.

And really, I think if the comic was otherwise good, then we wouldn't actually hear much complaints about the art. The problem is that the skill that Mookie is actually terrible at is pacing, visual communication, character writing and plot construction. Problems which are exaggerated by his stupid attempt to challenge himself with a "no-dialogue" comic.

That makes the comic fun to mock, which means people start actively looking for more things to mock, so the visual look starts getting nitpicked in ways that are honestly a little over-the-top and unfair.

Invisible Clergy
Sep 25, 2015

"Behold, I will corrupt your seed, and spread dung upon your faces"

Malachi 2:3
Who bought Mookie an account?

oriongates
Mar 14, 2013

Validate Me!


Invisible Clergy posted:

The hottest take on a forum full of hot takes.



As FuegoFish once said, this comic is to art what the poo poo I just took is to sculpture.

Honestly, I couldn't give a gently caress about that tracing. He's not stealing another artist's work and actually taking a literally photorealistic scene and stylizing it to match with your cartoon art style without making the clash blatantly obvious is difficult.

There are professional, paid for comics that largely use real city shots with nothing more than a photoshop texture thrown over it. Comics that people are paid to produce and that you pay to read. Because free-handing buildings and landscape shots is hard and time consuming and usually not worth the effort if they aren't something crazy or weird like an eldritch cityscape.

What mookie did with that panel doesn't even merit a finger wag.

Libra
Jan 5, 2011

Nnno, the art is genuinely abysmal. Not even close to servicable.
I dislike this comic and I also dislike this thread, and I agree that people try way to hard to hate on this harmless comic man, but the art is indefensible and he has absolutely not improved.

Stagnating is not the same as finding and maintaining a consistent style and I don't think he has the basic fundamentals of illustration down.
It's more like he's built up a small library of shapes that he can repeat and brute-force into a comic. A sort of manual copy and paste.

Invisible Clergy
Sep 25, 2015

"Behold, I will corrupt your seed, and spread dung upon your faces"

Malachi 2:3
Well said. He also heavily uses the computer's copy and paste after he eventually figured out how to do so, and this is a significant contributing factor to why his art's development has been so severely arrested.

Mx.
Dec 16, 2006

I'm a great fan! When I watch TV I'm always saying "That's political correctness gone mad!"
Why thankyew!


I agree that the art is fine. He's trying in his own Mookie way. And it works with his writing.

It wouldn't be so fun to make threads about if it wasnt the way it is. It would be just another forgettable mediocre webcomic

Beelzebufo
Mar 5, 2015

Frog puns are toadally awesome


oriongates posted:

Honestly, I couldn't give a gently caress about that tracing. He's not stealing another artist's work and actually taking a literally photorealistic scene and stylizing it to match with your cartoon art style without making the clash blatantly obvious is difficult.

There are professional, paid for comics that largely use real city shots with nothing more than a photoshop texture thrown over it. Comics that people are paid to produce and that you pay to read. Because free-handing buildings and landscape shots is hard and time consuming and usually not worth the effort if they aren't something crazy or weird like an eldritch cityscape.

What mookie did with that panel doesn't even merit a finger wag.

I don't disagree that Mookie's normal style is fine even if Snout's face is often off model. However that park panel was not ok. First, the image is not an incidental background but is the entirety of the frame, and that page serves no purpose other than to showcase a (fraudulent) display of the artist's talent, not just in drawing but also in composition, which he actually just stole from someone else's work (the photo). It's not like it's freehand drawn from a reference, just directly traced (which is why the bench and the background building look so out of place). Second, the inconsistency of the backgrounds in Mongreltown is a failure of Mookie as an artist. His visual storytelling and attention to detail is really bad, and the frequent use of white voids or shots where the only thing visible are Snout and whatever set-piece he's dealing with (tree, bush, entranced to death canyon, market stall) and nothing else attest to this. Here, Mongreltown has effectively lost any sense as a setting and doesn't even feel real anymore, because Snout is walking through what are distinctly different cityscapes with each panel, so the impression is actually that Snout is traveling the world in a montage. Newspaper strips have more flow between panels than Mookie does.

Beelzebufo fucked around with this message at 07:18 on May 19, 2020

Maxwell Lord
Dec 12, 2008

I am drowning.
There is no sign of land.
You are coming down with me, hand in unlovable hand.

And I hope you die.

I hope we both die.


:smith:

Grimey Drawer

Mors Rattus posted:

Apparently, he's not just deaf, he can't read, either.

Like I said- Snout's major handicap is not his hearing loss. It's that he's incredibly stupid.

oriongates
Mar 14, 2013

Validate Me!


I agree entirely that his visual storytelling is garbage. I'm only pointing out that his actual ability to draw isn't nearly as bad as most folks seem to indicate. Presumably, this no-dialogue story started as an attempt to change that. The original DD compensated for a total lack of visual storytelling by just filling the space with word balloons, perhaps he realized that and is trying to improve by forcing himself to try and communicate through gesture, expression and panel flow. Which is one of the biggest problems: he's mediocre at best when it comes to those things and his attempts to compensate through exaggeration are really bad.

I'll also agree he's not very imaginative and rarely uses that artistic ability to depict anything very interesting. But that lack of imagination is much more apparent in the writing than the art. At least he'll occasionally put something on a page that isn't a close-up of Snout's face...but the actual plot has been nothing but a pile of wet cardboard and cold oatmeal from start to finish.

But tracing and stylizing a photograph isn't a sin and being constantly on-model is overrated. This comic has a ton of stuff that can easily be critiqued without turning it into Cinema Sins where we hunt for the slightest continuity error.

Maxwell Lord
Dec 12, 2008

I am drowning.
There is no sign of land.
You are coming down with me, hand in unlovable hand.

And I hope you die.

I hope we both die.


:smith:

Grimey Drawer
Generally speaking using photographs as *reference* is usually considered fine and dandy, but you wanna be clever and transform it a bit more than that. Basically it's not the crime, it's if you get caught.

Codependent Poster
Oct 20, 2003

Yeah, no. Tracing a photograph and then boasting about how proud you are of it is lovely as hell. It doesn't take any skill and then he goes and posts on twitter about how awesome it is, because he's trying to trick people into thinking he drew that himself.

Mx.
Dec 16, 2006

I'm a great fan! When I watch TV I'm always saying "That's political correctness gone mad!"
Why thankyew!


post your favourite dominic deegan page (if you can get past those dang archives)

Invisible Clergy
Sep 25, 2015

"Behold, I will corrupt your seed, and spread dung upon your faces"

Malachi 2:3
Without hesitation:

Since everyone's apparently saying nice things about Mookie now, let me be the first to say his semi-recent decision to break the archive of the original comic into chapters instead of just one unmanageable undifferentiated mass is a good and nice thing for him to have done. It makes it a lot easier to find comics sometimes.

Cat Mattress
Jul 14, 2012

by Cyrano4747

I'd feel bad for them if he weren't so full of himself.

Also if I didn't remember the comic made like half its readership flee in terror and boredom when it ran some Mookie-drawn filler, twice.

Synthbuttrange
May 6, 2007

Cat Mattress posted:

I'd feel bad for them if he weren't so full of himself.

Also if I didn't remember the comic made like half its readership flee in terror and boredom when it ran some Mookie-drawn filler, twice.

lmao at mookie's stint murdering the comic completely

Invisible Clergy
Sep 25, 2015

"Behold, I will corrupt your seed, and spread dung upon your faces"

Malachi 2:3
That's amazing.

Safari Disco Lion
Jul 21, 2011

Boss, if they make us find seven lost crystals, I'm quitting.

Codependent Poster posted:

Yeah, no. Tracing a photograph and then boasting about how proud you are of it is lovely as hell. It doesn't take any skill and then he goes and posts on twitter about how awesome it is, because he's trying to trick people into thinking he drew that himself.

If he wasn't ranting on Twitter about people being uncreative lemmings and poo poo and then basically talking up his own artistic growth and poo poo about that one page, I'd have much less of an issue with the tracing, I'd just think it was dumb and make fun of him for it. But his attitude around it actively makes me think less of him as a person.

the yeti
Mar 29, 2008

memento disco



Mookie has a style in the same way that every deviantart poster who doesn’t practice anatomy or perspective says they do.

Beelzebufo
Mar 5, 2015

Frog puns are toadally awesome




no wait



or how about

Beelzebufo fucked around with this message at 11:54 on May 19, 2020

Invisible Clergy
Sep 25, 2015

"Behold, I will corrupt your seed, and spread dung upon your faces"

Malachi 2:3
Both excellent choices.

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Ague Proof
Jun 5, 2014

they told me
I was everything

Synthbuttrange posted:

lmao at mookie's stint murdering the comic completely



#Flattenthecurve.

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