It's part of the comic bloggers union contract that we have to do a certain number of posts bemoaning the state of comic art today, and specifically the prevalence of "
tracers" and "
photo-realists" and "
cut & pasters" and...
Well, I'm here today to remind everyone that it's hardly a
new phenomenon; we had such practices even back in the pre-Photoshop days.
Back in
1975, in the first issue of
Charlton's Space: 1999 magazine, in a story with
no credited artists, the
very first panel portraying our cast is, well, you be the judge:
Lordy. Let's
literally cut and paste phootgraphs of our actors onto the art, shall we?
And it's not like our unnamed penciller was incapable of giving us
more-than-good-enough likenesses:
But several times in the story, out pops the, um, technologically-enhanced "
art":
Although, in fairness, while such photocopying/tracing makes for abominable-looking comics art, it never produced anything
as awful as this...