I definitely agree with
@Smug Freiza that the measured criticism on recent pages is much more interesting than the lengthy denunciations of
@FROG - which seem to backfire anyway, since he said he loves them a few pages ago.
With that in mind, I thought I'd go over a few interesting critical points made by some of our friends here who also have Youtube channels, not to trigger any slapfighting between them (although that is fun) but more to try and really stick Frog in the guts with some valid critique.
Critic 1: Big Daddy, "Story over Art"
You may remember the recent backroom aborting of Wenger's Dragoon Knight Aldrake project, that Frog recounted here following Wenger's failed one-man mutiny against Frog, after Frog had noped out of promoting the awful-looking book on his show.
Shortly after this humorous course of events, Big Daddy chewed it over on his stream and pondered whether Dragoon Knight Aldrake might have been a great book, just with shitty art.
Now having read a few pages of it on
http://aldrake.com/ (still up if you're interested) I can confirm that's it's definitely not a great book, and the writing is actually even worse than the art. It is like something written by a mentally ill bum - and not in a good way.
But putting Wenger aside, I think the broader point made here does have validity - Boudica noted above that MAUS won a Pulitzer. But I myself note that MAUS has shit art. Would MAUS be acceptable for promotion by Frog? It's an interesting question. Could there be a CG MAUS out there, a Pulitzer-worthy CG story, being ignored due to its shit art?
I don't know of any personally. I can only confirm, with absolute certainty, that Wenger is definitely no Spiegelman, and Aldrake is definitely no MAUS.
Critic 2: Testefy-HD "Make a real company"
Testefy has mentioned on several occasions that his main criticism of Frog is that he should have started a proper company and attempted to build a real alternative to the Big Two.
I sympathize with this view to some extent. As a 'What If...' scenario, I sometimes wonder what would have happened if Frog had teamed up with Chuck Dixon and Peter Simeti and started an actual comic book company. Would it have been a beacon to other exiled mainstream creators? Could it have turned the tide, and cashed in massively on the suicide of The Big Two, by drawing all the fleeing creators and customers out of them, and into this new company?
The advantage of a company over a hashtag is that you actually can and should gatekeep your company. If your brand is tied to a hashtag, you have no control over anything that the hashtag decides to put onto you, as someone who uses it.
Frog is moving towards publishing now, but to be honest I don't think he has much of a plan or vision for it, beyond helping out people that he likes.
This issue draws attention to what I see as the bigger problem, which is that CG is shit for consumers. We have this concept of paypiggery that has sprung up to describe Frog's fawning obsequious fandom, and the paypig is really the opposite of a discerning consumer. A paypig is more like a sucker, a fool with money to burn. It will eat what it is fed with minimal complaint.
But for the discerning consumer, CG is just a mess. There isn't even a website (meaning its own website, not IGG, Youtube and indeed Kiwi Farms here), nor is there a CG catalog or anything like that, to actually see what's on offer. The only attempt to do something like that, the War Campaign CG-Only magazine, imploded. So wandering around Youtube and IGG is the only way for a consumer to find out semi-randomly about the projects.
As a consumer, why would I do this when I can go to Cinebook:
www.cinebook.co.uk
Where I can enjoy an elegant website, with interesting catalogs, allowing me to browse beautiful Franco-Belgian comics, at excellent prices.
When I look at Cinebook I don't really see how CG can compete in any way, in terms of being better for the consumer.
This brings me to...
Critic 3: Mecha, "This is no mainstream alternative"
It's interesting that Mecha complained about being uninterested in Chaplin, but is interested in SuperCats. I'm quite the opposite - I'm interested in the Chaplin book more, for the historic locale of early twentieth century London, while I don't have any interest in reading a story about a little Singaporean girl and her cosmic cats, no matter how well it's been drawn.
In my opinion though, SuperCats is much more deserving of the criticism levelled by Mecha at the Chaplin book. The Chaplin book is an officially licensed product about one of the biggest, most iconic celebrities the world has ever known (Chaplin became a truly world-famous celebrity in a way that was totally unprecedented before the invention of cinema) and the author is apparently something of a Chaplin expert. Will it be a good story, I don't know. But it has enough factual and historical substance to make it interesting to me, in the same way that the presence of small cats has given Mecha interest in the little girl book about Chinese SuperCats.
So it's subjective, but I think we can both agree that neither of them seems like the silver bullet that will kill off the "Were-SJW" once and for all.
The reason I linked Cinebook above is also because I sympathize with Mecha's view that CG is neither fighting nor winning against the mainstream. You can see with Cinebook how there is a world of excellent comics untouched by SJWism, but this world is like a strange foreign planet to Frog's audience, who have been reared on a diet consisting mainly of anti-SJWism, superhero fetishism and Frog's own emulation of McFarlane that I would call McFarlanism.
I think these three approaches have significant flaws to them, but my post has gone on long enough, so I'll pass the conch at this point. I would end on saying I largely agree with Razorfist, that trying to be like Image and McFarlane doesn't seem like any kind of route to real success in my opinion. Aside from the speculator boom-and-bust aspect, there's also the fact that Spawn's momentum died with that crappy movie in the late 90s, and McFarlane made much of his fortune licensing mainstream IPs to his toy company. Is he massively successful? Yes. Did he build a movement or change comics, no. But I would be interested to hear other people's views on Frog's McFarlanism.
