I never said that non-furry comics should be let off the hook as far as careful planning goes. My criticism also applies to people who add elves or robots or a catchphrase-spouting black guy to their comic just for the hell of it. People can do whatever they want in their comics, but I won't respect them for it if their expressions aren't accompanied by some sort of logical thought.jekkal wrote:... So gag-a-day's need lots of thought into why you want to have two girl snakes talking in a bar about how eating mice makes their butts look so big?
Thought is needed, yes. I didn't say it needed MUCH thought. If you want to argue that most comics need to put some level of thought into their work, by all means I would agree with you. But if someone is fascinated by dogs, dragons, or ponies, who would argue that they can't make their entire cast a series of such?
We draw what we care about, and to think that we can only limit ourselves to humans or that furry work somehow must be held to a higher standard than nonfurry work . . . it's just foolish thinking.
(edit: I will freely admit to doing the ZOMG ELVES thing in an old comic. I have since improved my writing abilities.)
I ought not to mention that I neither find the sample gag funny nor approve of such stereotypical and vaguely misogynistic characterizations of women. I could, however, point out that a good gag artist might specifically choose snakes to represent certain female characters in his comic in order to allow a new reader to associate certain personality traits with the characters in question. Are they vain/deceptive/smooth-talking? And, of course, the artist can roll with these associations, or choose to take an animal and then overturn these personality conventions for another effect.
another edit: My own comic features some anthropomorphic characters; it's something I've been thinking about and planning for a while. One of the major themes in AM is this idea that the fantastical has become horribly mundane, to the point where an accurate fortune-teller is pretty nonchalant about his abilities, or a badger in a suit can wander down a city street and not be gawked at.
So, then, throwing in an animal-like character enforces this by creating a contrast between what the comic-reader thinks ("whoa, hey! he's having drinks with a fox!") and what characters within the comic's universe see ("this guy is an imposing jerk"). And, you know, I could do this by dressing up human characters in odd costumes or having them be of a different race, but the human/animal contrast is far sharper.
I can't deny that drawing anthropomorphic characters can be fun. But justifying their presence in a story is important.
