Sometimes a tradition fades away for reasons that aren't immediately obvious. The most immediately relatable for people of my age is the Saturday Morning Cartoon. They were rooted in old conventions of broadcast television, where the major networks were few and real competition was non-existent. A known demographic (kids pumped to be not in school) meant advertisers were able to focus marketing, making the whole thing financially viable. Hell, after Ronnie "I'm glad he's dead" Reagan loosened advertising regulations, they went whole hog on making the cartoons themselves into commercials.
Being a huge manchild, I kept watching these well into my late teens. I'm not about to go all "rarr they don't make em like they used to" because there were still some weird and good ones being made at that point. The ratio of good to bad, though, was getting a little worse. Shortly after this, the big networks backed off on Saturday cartoons, for 2 reasons:
1- Cartoon Am Expensive; Even a shitty cartoon costs a fair amount to make. You're looking to make up for this with ad revenue and toy sales, but kids aren't any dumber than anyone else. A kid knows a shitty cartoon is shitty, even if they can't fully articulate why. You look me in the eye and tell me you actually liked "Stop the Smoggies" and I'll call you a filthy fucking liar.
2-Dedicated cartoon channels; With Cartoon Network in the US, YTV and Teletoon in Canada and others elsewhere, direct targeting of specific niche markets removed the novelty of cartoons on one day of the week.
After a little while of this, somebody noticed that barebones talk show media produced on a shoestring budget pulled a similar amount of viewership as the cartoons. Considering the difference in production costs vs viewers, it was a no brainer to pull the plug. Consider this strike one.
Jump forward a little and see the rapid ascendance of Reality Television. The heart and soul of this genre was producing the lowest-end content for as little money as possible. The immense popularity of this kind of show demonstrated the kind of payoff you can get from throwing whatever nonsense at the wall, as cheaply as possible. This is strike two.
A few more years later came the Writer's Guild of America strike. This led not only to a further explosion of reality tv (don't need writers), but it gave us an unfortunately notable moment in modern television; LOST. An idea that obviously wasn't thought through to conclusion, and likely wasn't even expected to make it past season 1. It's the culmination of "throw everything at the wall", who cares if it makes sense or matters. And you know what, fuck me, because people loved that shit.
So here we are now. Cheaply made niche media is the current doctrine. The Walking Dead famously had it's creative head leave after the budget was set too drastically low. The drop in quality was precipitous and immediate. This made no difference, however, as it was the only "big" tv show about zombies, a niche that had experienced highs and lows, but never this level of mainstream popularity. Netflix is awash in garbage original content, going to far as the hire Adam Sandler to make things for them. Oh shit, ok, how did I get this far without Sandler coming up. It's not brave or original for me to point out that he makes cheap garbage, it's a meme at this point. Still, THEY KEEP MAKING MONEY. So keep it up, I guess, since event he biggest idiot in the world still needs to laugh and clap sometimes.
Anyway speaking of focused niche media for fat drooling idiots, here's what I've been up to with my Mad Max/Fallout/Fist of the North Star raiders comic.
So this first page turned out way shittier than I originally planned because I had no concept of how to use the tools in this paint program to do shading. Also I really have no concept of how light and shadow work in general so the learning process involved crashing into it over and over. Luckily the muddy shittiness of the colour in this one is on a separate layer, so I can go back and re-do it the way I did the ones after.
The weird empty space spots where it looks like I just stopped trying are areas where word bubbles are going in. Pretty torn on these colours, but I might just plow through this first part of the story and focus on making it look better down the line.
I think I fucked up the perspectives a bit. I'm still not great at seeing it at first, but adding the colour makes problems stand out a little bit more for me. Everything is still a little too close up and claustrophobic, I have to get better at pulling farther back.
So far I do think this is better than any other coloured thing I've done. Not a high bar to clear, but I cleared it anyway. I just have to finish five more pages for this part of the story, and it's on to the next. I'm sure the second part of the story is going to look far better than the first.
