guigar

AMA: Old-style Guigar

Added 2023-07-09 18:00:04 +0000 UTC

Q.: Do you sometimes bring your old art style into your current comics?

A.: Sometimes, I do. For example, the looser style fits the subject matter better when I do the bonus comics.

But every once in a while, an Evil Inc character seems more suited for that earlier style. Like this guy...

...or, more recently, this guy...

Oddly enough, I would have rejected trying to combine those styles a few years ago. What changed?

My kids started getting me into watching anime. And I started to see characters from the same series drawn with a very different set of character-design rules. You can argue that it's all drawn in the same style, but some characters (Fumikage Tokoyami, Minoru Mineta, Koji Koda) are drawn with a much more minimalistic approach than others.

Mind you, I had seen something similar way back in the late 90s with Frank Cho's Liberty Meadows...

... but I guess it never really sunk in. I have to admit, following anime has opened my eyes to some approaches in art and story that I would have ignored otherwise.

Q.: Is there a Webcomics equivalent of an ashcan copy?

A.: An ashcan comic is a form of the American comic book created initially solely to establish trademarks on potential titles and not intended for sale. The practice was common in the 1930s and 1940s when the comic book industry was in its infancy, but it was phased out after updates to US trademark law. The term was revived in the 1980s by Bob Burden, who applied it to his self-published comic book prototypes. Since the 1990s, the term has been used to describe promotional materials produced in large print runs and made available for mass consumption. [ Wikipedia]

So, yes. The webcomics equivalent of an ashcan is... a webcomic!