Digital Threat To Art

Is handmade cartooning on its way out?

Avatar -  a fine example of what digital art can do to art

A Casual look at the number of internet sites that offer free softwares to make cartoons, it seems so. Digital Art had been threatening to push fine artists out of business for over a decade now. Is the same fate now awaits for cartoonists as well. In 2007, when comiXology launched as an online community for readers, it grew into a niche equivalent of iTunes. With more than 20,000 titles by dozens of publishers including Marvel and DC, Comics by comiXology has become the dominant platform for finding, buying, and reading comics on Web, tablet, or smartphone. The underlying technology is licensed, too. Branded apps from Marvel, DC, BOOM! Studios, IDW, and others use it and are linked. If you are reading comics on a tablet, you might as well be reading Comics. Similar to iBooks, Comics (free) functions as store and reader. The Store is easy to navigate and search, much faster than rifling through bagged copies in storage boxes. Select a specific comic and the display shows a coverflow of the series, price, credits, summaries, and a few preview pages.

A Digital cartoon- human hand cannot do such a fine job

Saving shelf space is the obvious advantage of digital comics. A single issue takes up anywhere from 10 to 20MB. In terms of physical size, an iPad single page is slightly smaller diagonally than paper,—9.7 versus about 12 inches. It’s hard to imagine using a smaller tablet to read comics, or one of those Macrocephaly smartphones. Virtually all smartphones would be eliminated too were it not for Guided View. With digital comics you don’t have to worry about wear and tear. On many occasions I’ve dug out my old comics from the 90s only to have them disintegrate in my hands. With digital comics, no bags and boards are necessary (just a good computer). You don’t have to worry about an issue being out of stock.

Second reason for the burst of digital cartooning is the Social Media. Social media world has become such an integral part of our lives that sometimes it gets tough to imagine how life would be without Twitter and Facebook.