Is Digital Killing Original Art?

Last week I put a dozen or so pieces of my original art from MAD Magazine in my Studio Store for a “Black Friday” sale. That’s rare nowadays because after MAD stopped doing the parodies I realized I was probably done doing this kind of work for them. What I had in my flat files was the last of the MAD movie parody art, so I pulled any MAD originals from my store and seldom offer them for sale anymore. That reminded me how rare these sorts of pieces of original art are starting to become… and not just because publications like MAD are going away. The modern comic artist’s preference for all digital art is what is really making the published physical original an endangered species.

A couple of years ago ago I was at a cartooning festival and I overheard an artist I admire telling another how he now does 100% of his work on the iPad Pro. He no longer needs to even use his desktop computer, scanner, and certainly not paper, pencil, or pen, at all… everything sketched, inked, colored and uploaded from his tablet. The artist he said this to asked what programs he uses, clearly thinking this would be a great goal of his own. These artists were fairly young, looking at several decades of producing really good work ahead of them, which I will be looking forward to seeing and reading. However, one thought went through my head and would not go away…

…that artist will never produce another piece of original, physical art.

Outside of commissions that cartoonist might do on actual paper with actual drawing utensils, nothing he does professionally will exist in the physical world. None of his published work, the work that is the real fruit of his creative talent and skill, will ever be anything but images projected on a screen via electric impulses, or inks placed in small dots on printer paper. His entire career will consist of 0’s and 1’s on some electronic storage device.

Maybe no one really cares about that anymore. In the end, it’s about the finished work and not the journey that gets you there…right? That’s true, but if you’ve ever held an original inked page by Wally Wood, or a watercolor by Jack Davis, or a cover painting for a book by Frank Frazetta in your hands, you cannot help but feel something special is being lost. These pieces have a connection to the physical world that moves you in a way looking at some print cannot. Here is a piece of paper or board or canvas that the artist’s hands touched and slaved over. On it their pencil, brush, or pen, created something incredible from nothing at all… and you hold the tangible results in your hands. The brush strokes, the pen lines, the demonstration of mastery of the medium they used, all interacting with the surface of a humble piece of pulped paper or woven threads by the actual hand of the artist. They bent over that same piece of board or canvas that you are now bending over, and spent time making their magic. That original is a connection with an artist no print or RGB screen, no matter how many pixels dense it is, gives you. It’s like a time machine…a physical connection to the moments when this piece of art was created and to the person who created it.

Sorry… got a little melodramatic there. But I really do find it sad that one of the major drawbacks of the rise of the computer as a tool for art is that less and less physical art is being created. The entirety of many comic strips, comic books, graphic novels, illustrations, animations, and other forms of art are being done entirely digitally these days, and as a result no physical art exists for these works. Looking at the surface of the iPad Pro they used to created all of it just doesn’t have the same impact.

I’m not some grumpy old fart that laments “the good old days”, and thumbs my nose at the digital age. God knows I use digital tools in virtually everything I do. I would never begrudge anyone the chance to use any tool they wish to create their work if it meant they got the results they want and maybe it even saved them time so they could get more work done. In fact the techniques I use for coloring on the computer have only the printed results in mind. When zoomed in to 200% or more on the screen they look loose and sloppy, but I only care about what it looks like in print not on the screen. The results not the means. Art is art and the computer or tablet is just a tool. Art done digitally is not more or less valid that work done traditionally. The hand, mind, and talent of the artist is what really creates the work, not the paint or ink or pixels used to mold it.

That said, I think I am allowed to heave a sigh and lament that so few originals are being created these days, and I will be denied the chance to hold those originals in my hands and get that connection to those moments its creation really happened and to the artists that created it.

PS- Please don’t bother commenting on how digital art is still “original” art and that using that term is disrespectful. Collectors have been calling physical pieces of comic art “originals” since long before you were born. The term has nothing to do with digital art being less original of a creation than physical art.

-Parts of this post were taken from an earlier post about the same subject.