Another installment of this month’s Comic-Fire! between Eric Millikin and Justin Pierce.
This week it’s a debate question for the artists among you. A deeply complex question, one for all of the ages. Well, perhaps the information age anyway. Enjoy.
This week’s question is:
Line-art or CGI? Discuss.
Not to be too fickle with regards to supporting technology, but I gotta go Pierce this time. CGI comics look…um…bad. To me. Well, they do now anyway.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that digital creation isn’t a positive thing. Line art can be made just as well, if not better, with a tablet than it can on paper. But when I think of good digital creation I think of the recent works of Scott McCloud or Demian5’s bits of genius. And neither of them are characterized by the sort of 3D rendered complexity that Millikin is talking about. Quite the opposite.
In short, cartoons=rule.
Sorry, I will vote for Pierce’s view on this one.
Why? Because this is the second time in a row I could not READ Millikin’s argument without cleaning it up first using a graphics program that came with my computer — this is an excellent example of tech-toy overkill.
Yes, CGI and all the other possible wiz-bang art tools are nice, but visual (and text) legibility should not be sacrificed in order to be impressive.
Be honest now: suppose for a moment that you wanted new a cell-phone that takes pictures, but the model offered does it while making the actual phone itself hard to use… would you really want it, or would you look elsewhere for one that lets you talk like you could before?