One stop on our whirlwind weekend was the MoCCA convention (Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art), a combination of lecture series and fundraiser and indie comic dealer room. Our particular interest was in watching some graphic animated shorts in the “cartoons from hell” seminar, but we also stopped, inevitably, in the dealer room.
It was a graphic (ha ha) demonstration of the rough pyramid of talent that applies to every creative field: for every comic artist with real skill and something clever or engaging to say, there’s ten who are merely adequate draftsmen going through the motions, and for every one of those, there’s ten (or more) who never learned to draw—or lay out a page, or lay out a panel, or much of anything comic book-y, really. And that last category, in indie comic books, hides behind the fig leaf of a self-ironic postmodernism. I lost track of the number of titles in the vein of “Bob’s Crappy Comic,” or “Learn to Draw!” or “Pretentious Art Comic.” (And for those who are truly on top of the self-ironic pile, titles like “Bob’s Absolutely Terrific Comic”—plastered across low-grade monochrome scribbles.)
Talking about the artistic process itself is usually—not always, but usually—a strong indicator that the artist has nothing to talk about. When what the artist has to say is “This all sucks, but I’m really sophisticated in that I am able to realize it,” he really has nothing to talk about, apart from the semi-expressed urge for attention.
