Caine and Gangle go outside and touch grass. I was thinkin too hard about their Parallels as self-destructive “failed” artists and this was the result.
Brad Bird once said that you can’t create the illusion of life if you haven’t actually lived one, and that’s a line I think about a lot around the Traumatizing Digital Circus. This comic was inspired by: the purpose of making your own art in a world where AI image generators can churn out endless content for you, the way 3D software makes it easy to create infinite spaces but hard to capture authentic hand-drawn human touches, the way all my college art teachers were skeptical of the students’ desire to make anime-inspired stylized 3D visuals right up until it became the new trend in the animation industry—- and how easy it is to get so lost in the technical aspects of art & the consequences of failure that you lose sight of what art is even supposed to be for.
[also: a special thanks to the windows error message generator, this Blender grass tutorial, & all the different poets who wrote about grass— though I’ll let you guys figure out all the Tolkien/biblical/& poetry references.]
