Not a Fan

This may be a somewhat paradoxical statement to make but these days it seems as if the only way for an individual to meaningfully contribute to mass culture (as an illustrator specifically, but I suppose it applies to other mediums as well) is to use preexisting cultural icons as a "launching pad".  There are notable exceptions of course.  But for every Steven Universe or Worm there are seemingly a thousand Divergents (ha! Wordplay...) or Teen Titans Go's  that capitalise heavily on your preexisting knowledge of characters and concepts.  And even these aforementioned exceptions seem to owe quite a bit to what came before (terms like homage and pastige are liberally thrown about when Steven Universe is mentioned; derivative when in less favourable contexts).  Before you know it, they themselves have been assimilated into the this monolithic ecosystem, there to be similarly emulated.  I'm not just taking postmodernism here (I don't think) but the marginalisation of the creative process as a whole within the paradigm commercial viability.

What I'm leading up to with all that drivel is this.  I don't think it's much of a coincidence that this is by a great margin, my most popular drawing on Deviantart. It's an alright drawing I guess, but I definitely have stuff that I consider to be superior.  It was my real attempt first attempt to tell a whole story in a single panel.  I've always loved those promotional drawings that sometimes accompany a manga chapter.  I mean, it's usually just the characters at a beach or eating sushi or something, but you also get some really creative ones.  Anyway, I did this mainly emulating that and it became super popular (relatively speaking) and I think for better or for worse fed into the pursuit of that same success through similar ideas.

This, considerably less successful, probably due to the maturity filter I added, came about as a result.  It's something I'd always wanted to do, but I also think it was fast tracked in the way it was due to it's potential for likes and comments.  It's also reflective of my growing tension towards this line of artistic reasoning as it's less fanart, and more of a "what if?".

Further down this avenue is this.  This was done on an A3 page and was sort of when I first really committed to using french curves again.  Not as easy as I assumed and anyone who cares to look closer at it will notice quite a high number of mistakes and overall unpleasant bleediness.  At any rate, on fan forums, as some might know, Sasuke and Itachi are commonly referred to as the Uchiha Bros.  I'm not really sure if it's specifically supposed to reference the Mario Brothers but I just kind of ran with the idea (It's actually funny how many parallels one can find between the two sets of brothers, especially if one has played the Mario and Luigi RPGs).

Wow! 2012!

This felt more more acceptable to pursue, as it wasn't just interpretations of preexisting characters but a kind of deconstruction of multiple characters with what were essentially "new"  characters ( as postmodern as it gets).  A world where jutsus and chakra are kept in floating golden question mark cubes technically hasn't existed before.  Same goes for Mariachi and Sasuigi.  Still, that the above are no where near as well-received as the relatively straightforward Street Fighter example kind of proves my point (or it could just be that their not as good or as clever as I think).

About late last year, I did these sketches,which are of Batman characters reimagined as characters from Jojo's Bizarre Adventure.  I toyed around with it a bit since then, adding Hirohiko Araki's influence to varying degrees but it never quite gathered steam. It's a fun and silly idea, but I get kind of bummed out at the thought that no one is interested in seeing any of this and that they'd rather I draw another bloody picture of Heath Ledger.  I could spend the whole day thinking up a design and attacks for Platinum Bat (Bruce Wayne's stand, obviously) but people would still rather see a genderswapped Disney drawing from Sakimichan (Not to take anything away from her and the success she's enjoyed.  She's obviously very good and puts plenty of time and effort into her drawings but it's not the most stimulating of content).

I mostly just frustrated I guess. This negotiation of "fanart space" I'm undergoing seems to be the only way I can move forward and reach people while still maintaining some creative integrity.   Fanart's enjoyable but it's a little disheartening that the most popular independent artists make most of they're money from copying other works.  It's even more disheartening that this is what people seem to want.