My investigation of comic art and commercial illustration goes back more years than I care to mention, and yet I continue to be clobbered by the work some of these Web-based artists are doing. Who are these people?!!! In the “old days,” alternative-media or “underground” art was weird, cluttered, and often ugly, but the imagery at many of these sites—like Bolt City—is flat-out beautissimous!
Maybe I just need to grasp that this is a generation of artists who have mastered digital techniques and use the Web as an efficient tool for distribution and self-promotion. It’s a medium that simply wasn’t available until recently, if you factor in the explosion of high-speed connectivity. Any previous generation of creatives would have jumped all over it, too.