#405: Meeting Scott McCloud, The AI Slop Problem, Hands Sketchbook & More!

+ Hiding Cards around NYC & Morris is not impressed with your shit.

…from back in New York City, welcome to issue #405 of New York Cartoons.

It’s good to be back in NYC after spending most of September in Japan and Hawaii. I have some pretty fun sketchbooks from the trip I’ll be sharing with premium subscribers soon. If you haven’t upgraded yet, consider going paid to unlock the entire archive and get more posts.

I’m finishing up the first of several posts, writing about my time in Tokyo with my new friend, Yoshi, the Snoopy artist in Japan. He’s crazy. I think you’re going to like him. For my birthday, he piled my arms with new Japanese paintbrushes and inks to bring back to the US, so stay tuned for some reports on that over at Process Junkie.

My comedian friend’s wedding in Hawaii was, as expected, ridiculously funny and very blurry. I’ll be sharing my Waikiki Wedding Sketchbook soon!

Meeting Scott McCloud

I was stumbling, bleary-eyed, through LAX at 5:30am on Sunday morning when I walked past Barneys Beanery. I saw a man with grey hair and glasses eating his breakfast, minding his own business. I stopped dead in my tracks. “That can’t be him.” I thought. “I’m hallucinating.”

Sure enough. I googled just in case I was going crazy. It was him; the author of possibly the most influential book on comics ever written (Understanding Comics) was just sitting there crunching away on some bacon. I have had this book on my desk since before I took over doing a daily comic strip in my 20s. It is one of the most dog-eared books I own.

I decided to go up and bother his bacon time. I shook his hand and thanked him for his book and all the work he has done for comic artists. He was very gracious and friendly. I walked away before realising there was a chance —albeit tiny— that he wouldn’t immediately throw away a New York Cartoons card if I left one with him. I turned on my heel and walked back to bother bacon time once more. He was happy to take the card. I have no idea if he scanned the code or if he’s reading this.

All that is to say, if you haven’t read his book and you’ve ever been curious about the mechanics and power of comics, you should absolutely buy and read his book. (Try to buy it from somewhere other than Amazon if you can.)

Illustration by Zohar Lazar for NYMag

Via New York Mag:
The AI Slop Problem is Only Going To Get Worse

Writer

Max Read

explores the fact that the AI Slop Problem is only going to get worse. It’s pretty grim stuff; if you haven’t been following it, now is the time to catch up:

On Facebook, enigmatic pages post disturbing images of maimed children and alien Jesuses; on Twitter, bots cluster by the thousands, chipperly and supportively tweeting incoherent banalities at one another; on Spotify, networks of eerily similar and wholly imaginary country and electronic artists glut playlists with bizarre and lifeless songs; on Kindle, shoddy books with stilted, error-ridden titles (The Spellbound Quest: Students Perilous Journey to Correct Their Mistake) are advertised on idle lock screens with blandly uncanny illustrations.

If it were all just a slightly more efficient form of spam, distracting and deceiving Facebook-addled grandparents, that would be one thing. But the slop tide threatens some of the key functions of the web, clogging search results with nonsense, overwhelming small institutions, and generally polluting the already fragile information ecosystem of the internet.

Read the full article here.

Speaking of Drawing Books I recommend…

This week on Process Junkie, I share the one drawing book I re-read every single year without fail. Take a squiz below:

The one drawing book I read every year without fail...

This past weekend was the amazing cartooning festival known as CXC (Cartoon Crossroads Columbus.) You can see my review of last year’s CXC below, and watch my presentation on the benefits of Substack for creators below:

This week’s Sketchbook pages are from the first drawing exercise for Process Junkie, which you can try if you feel like it.

Just. Hands.

They are, famously, the hardest thing to draw, which is why I want you to sign a contract with yourself before you begin: This page is never to be seen by anyone. Not even me— don’t share it; it is for your eyes only.

Go nuts! Don’t hold back. Draw your own hands. Draw different peoples’ hands from the TV, from pictures on social media, and from people watching in a café. Whatever kind of hands you like to draw, don’t draw those; challenge yourself. Draw hands in positions you have never drawn before. Fill the whole page.

Then, once you’re done. Scrunch up the page and throw it out. Know that there’s zero commitment for these to look ‘good’ or ‘right’. Just have fun with it. They can be cartoony hands. They don’t need to be super realistic or rendered with shadows and highlights. Just… draw hands. Fill every part of the page.

“Not impressed with your shit.”