DIY strip show
BY Jordan Himelfarb
Aspiring cartoonists without the gift of good draftsmanship, fret not: Web 2.0 could hold the key to your future success. Bitstrips, a new online comicmaking application, allows users to manipulate stock images to create surprisingly diverse illustrations.
Bitstrips was originally designed to make the “incredibly inefficient medium” of cartooning less laborious, explains Jesse Brown, one of five Canadians behind the site. But Brown soon saw the tool’s potential to democratize this most “elite and exclusive art form,” which asks authors to be equal parts Proust and Picasso. “We thought, ‘Hey, what if everyone could make good-looking comics?’”
The answer, as contained in the 50,000-plus strips on Bitstrips.com, is a mixed bag: the puerile intermingles with the profound, wits with illiterates.
Still, the tool is useful. Besides providing ham-fisted illustrators with immediate access to decent graphics, Bitstrips has the option of letting artists rearrange each other’s work, creating an unprecedented forum for conversation in cartoons.
So are web comics the Deep Blue to traditional cartoonists’ Garry Kasparov—a digital rival to be reckoned with? “We do not see these as a replacement for hand-drawn comics,” says Brown. “As Bitstrips become more ubiquitous, the talent of pen-and-ink artists will only seem more special.”
