Comparing learning new skills to experiences learning art

@darthmongoose Kate Holden
Thu, 09 Feb 2023 11:50:38 +0000

@darthmongoose wrote:

TheLemmaLlama:

I assume this is advice for people who are learning to go pro; certainly it makes sense to focus on the essential skills for hitting the baseline targets first if your aim is to get in asap.

If somebody is asking "how to learn" something on a forum, I generally assume that they care about becoming proficient and turning out a consistently solid product for other people to enjoy. If the person only cares about indulging their own desire to experiment for their own pleasure, why even ask for advice? Like if that's what somebody wants to do, I'm not stopping them, but they should just go and have fun, experiment and learn as they go.

A little baffled that you think visual storytelling is an "easier" skill. In my experience, it can be very easy to throw around artsy visuals and deep-sounding vague words or quotations in a comic to give the shallow illusion of depth while making a thoroughly incompetent comic. It's all too easy for people to think they're "flying above" people like me by turning out some scruffy looking sketchy comic with edgelord themes and misused literary quotes and thinking they're the next Alan Moore when actually they've made an unreadable mess, because they just weren't willing to put in the legwork or the empathy for the audience's experience necessary to create a comic for anyone else's enjoyment. With comics industry friends, we tend to call this kind of comic "smelling your own farts."
Yes, it's fun making a comic just for yourself and basking in your own brilliance and superiority over all those poor silly hacks with their Pop Trash, but if somebody asks me for advice on how to get good at making comics, I'm not going to advise being one of those people, since a big prequisite is "either be rich and well-connected enough that you can still live and get work while making this crap or don't have any interest in building an audience", and I feel like if somebody cares enough what other people think to ask my opinion, and isn't so well-connected they can just phone up Brian Talbot or whoever to ask, they probably want to know how to make a comic that can reliably build an audience.

I don't need to tell people how to have fun making comics; I just tell them how to make comics people will like.

Also a little low-key insulted that you think I don't care about clever themes or technique, when I have an English Lit degree and my comic is a feminist deconstruction of shounen manga dealing with themes like finding redemption and making amends having been empowered by a patriarchal society? Just because I like to make competent comics that are easy to read, doesn't mean I don't care about the higher level part of my craft like high level metaphors, deep themes or artistic experimentation. I just think that basic accessibility and having appreciation for the core principles of sequential art as a form is absolutely vital as a foundation to stand on when experimenting with how far the form can be pushed. And I like to think that the fact I can build an audience of 2500 subs on a comic about a terrible unsexy sword girl dealing with a friendship breakup in Fantasy Manchester with 5 main characters, a ten year timeskip, a needlessly complicated magic system and no good elevator pitch proves that if a creator builds up enough skill in making work accessible, they can have their cake and eat it; make original, interesting, challenging works that also build an audience.