Here's an age-old debate of art and comics.
On the one hand, we have:

Consistancy
Pros:
The work is always of the same level of quality.
It can be depended on to always be just as you like it.
The style will always be easy to recognise.
Another artist able to mimick the style could help out.
Pages will generally take the same amount of time and effort, easy to schedule.
If it's something you pay for, you won't feel cheated by 'weird' issues.

Cons:
If the quality is really consistant, there won't be bad pages, but there are unlikely to be really stand-out amazing ones either.
As time passes, it may start to look dated.
Sticking to the same formula all the time could lead to things going stale.
May run out of ideas or storylines due to unwillingness to shake things up.

Experimentalism
Pros:
The reader can always anticipate exciting twists and changes.
Constant evolution means that things don't get stale.
Tends to lead to faster improvement. New ideas and techniques are used a lot.
Keeps up with the latest ideas and revisits old ones too.

Cons:
If the style keeps changing, an assitant artist would have trouble keeping up, so you're on your own.
Readers can't expect to always get what they want/ what they feel they paid for.
Pages can be amazing, but can also fail spectacularly.
Trying new things takes longer than sticking to a practiced formula, so it can mess up schedules.
Can be easily swayed to change by fashion or new technologies.
Harder to keep a steady fanbase if the comic keeps changing.


Personally, I fall on the 'experimental' side of the line for the most part. BUT I probably wouldn't want to be nearly as experimental if I was say...being paid to draw my comic. If I were to produce a short, stand-alone book to sell, I'd want the quality to be consistant throughout, from beginning to end, so you wouldn't read it and notice a marked difference in style between the beginning and the end. With my webcomic, on the other hand, I feel a page is most satisfying if I've tried something new, no matter how minor that thing may be, and I'm always looking for evolution and improvement.
Thoughts, anybody?

I did penis for years without missing updates and using the same art style and writing. Does that mean I suck or I rule?

I guess that's what I wanted to discuss. Whether people prefer one philosophy or the other. I don't think it's possible to say 'this way is best'. If your aim was to produce a consistant comic, and you did, then you succeeded. Some people hate when artists and writers change their style, epitomised by the 'Oh, your old stuff was better' type criticism, but others are highly critical of artists who don't change, improve or evolve over time.

I agree Darth.
I like to try changes in style. Not TOO drastic, but I do like to experiment. You should be able to fit that into your work somewhere, it keeps you interested and fresh.

Experimenting is good either at first or when you are coming up with a concept. But when people do it all the time, it's kinda a turn-off. I think you should pick one and stick with it for your comic. You can always improve upon and perfect your style but stay with the same general feel.

I sorta see the style of a comic to be like the characters or the setting. It has to fit the comic and be reliable and predictable. There's no problem with it evolving and improving, but if you jump around to different media, different types of shading, different "feel" all the time, it feels more like a jumble of art in a mixed gallery than it does like a consistant story. I don't think you run the risk of going "stale" as long as the story is interesting.

There's another advantage to consistancy, BTW... If you want a certain page to illicit a very different effect, you can change the style for that one page and have a HUGE impact. (If your style changes for every other page, a change like that cannot have the same effect.)



I guess, overall, I side with more of "evolution" than experimentalism/consistancy. Pages should "fit" together and flow, but if you compare a new page with one of the older ones, it's nice to see a noticable improvement/difference.

I agree with usedbooks. I don't really like it when I'm reading a comic, flip the page, and it's a completely different style from the last page I was just looking at. It throws me off and I spend more time thinking "wtf just happened to the art?" than actually paying attention to what's happening.

That said, though, I love looking at the very first page of the comic and then flipping to the last and seeing how much the artist has improved over the course of the comic. (This, of course, usually only applies to comics with a lot in their archives.)

I have no problem with experimenting over the course of the comic, I just personally prefer that it stays within the bounds of the original style. By that I mean, if you started working in, say, colored American superhero-style, and halfway through the comic you decide "I want to see how this would do in black and white manga style!", it just.. bugs. Lol.

I'm all about moderation. I think you have to have a certain level of consistency to your art when it comes to style, but I also think it's really cool to see the evolution too.

Has anyone ever Read "Questionable content?" You start from the beginning of that series and by the time you get to the end, you REALLY see a LOT of evolution as far as style and quality of the art goes.

Over the year that I spend a lot of time developing my own comic strip, I went through a lot of experimental changes with how I did the strip. It was so different infact that I actually had to go back to the orginal strips that I posted and redo them in the style I'd settle on so they had an acceptable level of consistency. Otherwise the readers of my comic would have being going "What the hell? The quality keeps going up and down"

But aside from art, you also have to find a balance between consistency and experimenting with the story too. I think it's important to change things around every now and then. It tends to get stale if it's the same kind of joke everytime or the same kind of problem, fight scene the character always gets into. Maybe some strips should explore adding other elements to their story, Maybe a little bit of humor now and then, add a little romance, or maybe work on adding more depth to characters with more serious story moments(nothing drastic obviously). Again, everything in moderation.

While people may file their story here under certain cateogories like Comedy or drama, doesn't mean they can't try something like adding a little humor, romance, drama, to make it a little more rounded. That's what I'm hoping to accomplish with my own strip eventually as time goes on.

I think it's near impossible for comic art not to evolve in SOME form. Even with the Gunnm mangas...the art starts out amazing and ends amazing...but I still noticed that it improved and even changed in style a bit.

I'm bad at keeping VP consistent...even though I try. I mean, the way I do shading and parts of my art style tend to change. =/

....though...I might do some major experimental comics soon. Ahem...

I know I DO hate it when comics suddenly shift from full color to nothing but pencil.

SarahN
I think it's near impossible for comic art not to evolve in SOME form. Even with the

I know I DO hate it when comics suddenly shift from full color to nothing but pencil.

I did that. But I fixed it up later. now it's all inked black and white.

I'd much rather see a consistant style refined over time than something that changes with each page.

I admit, if an artist doesn't improve at all in a long period of time (especially if their art isn't that great to begin with or that they consistantly make the same mistakes over and over and don't learn from them) it kinda annoys me. Or when artists take short-cuts with backgrounds or difficult poses without trying to tackle them head-on... A person can experiment with these things while keeping within a style. You don't need to go batshit insane and do something totally new to learn how to do perspective or anatomy~ just work with the style you've got.

So yes, I like artists who experiment to improve and refine their style but not artists who can't stick to anything for more than a few pages.

You shouldn't just add something into your story because it's fashionable or cool or "you just felt like doing it that day". You can always make a short-story comic of it rather than introducing it to a long running comic and ruining the consistancy~ That's what I'm going to do anyways. XD My comic has a pretty solid style that's quite restrictive at times so in the near future I'm going to do some shorter comics with different styles just for fun. :D

wyldflowa
I'd much rather see a consistant style refined over time than something that changes with each page.

I think that sums it up for me too.

Experimentation is important though. I think you should be constantly trying little new things, and not too many of them at a time. It really is a good thing when you can click the "first" button on your comic and see how much you've improved.

Non-pros like us should never rule out experimentation. We certainly aren't at the level where we can stop and say "My art's good enough". Even some of the best pros consider themselves to still be learning and improving.

i hope that i grow and learn and improve as i go... but i do make an effort to be consistent in my comic. If I want to experiment with a new style, I'll do a different comic. I hope to try all sorts of things, eventually. But one style per comic seems about right.

I've really tried to evolve over time. And I really did my best to make sure when I did my crazy experimental changes I did them on chapter markers or book endings. So far I haven't had pissy responses to it which I'm thankful for because I'm always loving to experiment with color and ink but since I'm always trying to push to print I need to keep in mind some level of consistency as well. I don't have too much freedom to change from page to page but chapter to chapter I think is fair.

I think people start out more experimental. Then you get something of a fan base and expectations begin to effect your work and you start to pigeonhole yourself. Looking back at my earlier stuff, I think there was a lot more experimenting back then.

I dont really think most people really think about it though, most comic artists are probably just desperately taking any good idea they have for the next deadline, like me.

:D

I experiment pretty frequently, mostly because I get bored of the same working patterns. Sometimes it increases my readership but sometimes it drives them away.

I can change my style drastically. From decent to sucky to good to sucky to decent to good. I'm an inconsistent type of artist but I do try to keep a certain level of quality in my style and constantly looking for style improvement. I find that art style can be like a trend.