I never noticed his hands but GOD DAMN
People usually focus on the atrocious eyebrows and some such stuff, but the hands are also something that Dobson just could never get right.
Drawing hands is arguably more difficult than drawing a face, if only cause there aren't many ways to stylize hands without turning them into weird sausage-like appendages.
You can easily break down a face to a point where this:
is a very basic shape, but still defined enough to be recognized as a face, even though it's just two dots and a line.
If you want to abstract down a hand, your understanding of the hand's anatomy and the way how to simplify that and make it look nice needs to be very good.
Hands are a great example for the saying "You need to know the rules to break the rules". It's a lot about sizes, shapes, proportions. And Dobson always just drew weird lumps with basic shapes indicating where a finger might be.
I’m betting that kind of critique the Escapist people gave him probably stung the most for him; it’s not “lol ur art sux kys faggot” so he can’t feel like he’s being victimized by trolls, and it manages to highlight exactly what makes his art so amateurish, even the positive comments (the ones pointing out how G-rated and simple the comics are in particular). Meanwhile there’s the winner and the honorable mentions running circles around him in talent and humor execution, but that’s par for the course for him; he was never on the same playing field as his peers and never would be, because he staunchly refused to grow, mentally and skill-wise. It’s why his fanbase was always children who didn’t know any better.
Kinda like the time he released some horrible fanart in a Steven Universe fanzine and literal nobodies a quarter his age blew his fridge art out of the water by comparison.
Dobson, being an artist in his late 30s with 2 decades of """experience""" on top of a professional art education, was not only being bested by 15 year old randos, it was also an infernal beacon of his failure on a professional level, cause after all his time as an artist, after all his training and education, the best he could do, the literal pinnacle of his art career, was being published in a fanzine. Alongside literal nobodies. Who all made better art than him.
And that is why Dobson is a "CareerCow".
What’s even more sad and pathetic is that I suspect the comics he submitted weren’t new; he started making Danny and Spot comics like two years before this contest, so I’m also willing to bet instead of drawing comics specifically for the contest he recycled what he had laying around for it.
Just adding insult to injury. He sent in the cream of the crop and got a lukewarm "yeah thanks but no thanks. You're not even consolation prize material." in return.
v1.escapistmagazine.com
