I drew this comic as an amusing springboard to address the topic of memes and digital art. As a cartoonist active since the mid-1980s, I see memes as a remarkable subcategory of comics. In the light that comics are defined as a medium used to express ideas by pictures, often combined with words, it can be easily seen how memes are, indeed, comics. When we combine this knowledge with the historical significance of political cartoons and their impact on public opinion (like old master cartoonists such as Thomas Nast or Francisco Goya), memes make complete sense as having all the potential influence that comes from branches of the visual arts.
Where I think people mistakenly look down at the medium of memes is often because we now have easy tools to create memes, and so they are traditionally less valued by the high-brow portion of the art community. Memes, of course, usually come in the form of digital art, which also has somewhat of a "lesser-art" stigma among more traditional art institutions and critics. Additionally, meme-making might be too easily dismissed as non-artistic because now anyone--not just trained artists--can make and widely distribute their memes, which are really comics, which are really art. Therefore, art, comics, and memes, their offspring, have a long history and they are here to stay.
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I never made this connection but it makes so much sense. There's got to be a reason memes are so popular. They're the new comic strips and political cartoons, in the same way that podcasting are the new radio, blogs are the new zines and amateur journalism, and streaming is the new TV!
Yup! It is just comics with a new name and more standard digital format.
Wow that’s pretty insightful. I honestly never thought of memes as a medium let alone an art form. I always disregard it as just a part internet sub-culture. Good post, I feel like I learned something.
Upvoted and followed 🙂
Thanks Chris. Glad to hear it got you thinking. We are in the middle of a tech disruption with all these colliding innovations. It is nice to be along for the ride.
hahah that art work though lol :D
All that RAM used to create memes xD
Memes are less valued than comics because it takes more effort to draw something than type words over an existing, over-used photograph. However, after seeing all of the bad entries to a recent Steemit meme contest, I can appreciate better what it takes to create a good meme.
https://steemit.com/contest/@z8teyb289qav9z/7sgqar-daily-meme-contest-best-meme-wins-a-100-upvote
Good point you added.