APE IN A CAPE: "Make Your Own, Then"

APE IN A CAPE: "Make Your Own, Then":

keiren-smith:

rosalarian:

gailsimone:

Been thinking about this a lot lately, pardon me if it's a bit scattered, I have to jot this down between deadlines and may mess it up a little.

I have seen, a million times, people with complaints about art or comics or film or music, dismissed online with the simple comment, "Make your own,…

I must respectfully disagree. While I am a comic book artist and writer who loves "making my own then," not everyone… can. Or wants to. Not everyone can be a producer. Consumers are important, and while they may not always understand why things in comics are one way or another, there's a lot of legitimate opinions coming from people who can't/won't make them themselves.

I guess an analogy would be… say you're not a chef. Most people aren't. You still have taste buds and you may still love to eat. You may not know how to cook a steak, but you do know what it's supposed to taste like, or at least you know it shouldn't taste like shoes. You know the difference between "I dislike eating green beans but recognize that this is my opinion and they're still food that other people enjoy" and "Shoes are not food. Why do you keep serving me plates with shoes on them? This isn't about opinion, that ain't fit to eat!"

The chef can't run a restaurant and tell every customer who doesn't like the food to get in the back and cook it themselves. They came to this restaurant for food. When the chef needs their house painted, they hire a house painter. And if that house painter unevenly coats the house in the wrong color, the chef can get mad without being told to paint it himself. We can't all be good at everything, but we can demand quality from those who make something their profession.

Is that enough metaphor? :P

Comics are a lot of work to make! Fun work, but still so much work. We can't ask everyone to do this kind of work when they're dissatisfied with what they're being offered to consume. "Make your own then" is the worst kind of dismissive, not only to critiques of the comic industry, but to the comic creators themselves! These four words make it sound like it's so easy, dismissing the hard work we do, and we should cut it out saying them.

Now, people who want to do this work absolutely should. More avenues are open to us than ever before, and if you have the ability, don't let anything stand in your way. (Which I'm pretty sure is the main thing you meant to say, but it wasn't too clear.)

What she said. Perfectly stated.

Look, I'm sorry, but I honestly don't think this is as mystical as it sounds, here.

I can't draw a lick. But there are people on 9gag and elsewhere making comic strips seen by thousands of people with clip art and stick figures.

Doing pro comics is hard, it's WAY hard. I agree with that. But I never suggested anywhere that what I'm talking about here is working at DC or Marvel or doing some huge OGN. I'm talking about making comics, which is a huge category.

A talented Tumblr artist might not be ready to draw Batman or whatever for a pro writer. Fine. So let them do, as I suggested, some other kind of comics, to learn and to get better and to gain exposure.

I didn't fall out of the sky and start writing Deadpool, I wrote a goofy column on a website that showed I had a sense of humor.  If these people are already drawing and/or writing stories, why not combine them and see what happens?

It doesn't threaten pro creators at all.