Why is art right or good? because we set up a system of rules that we use to decide what is good. What entertains us, what we like, what impresses us. With representation it’s often the craft that makes us think, “wow that’s so cool, it looks real”. Just look at how Thomas Kinkade or any current comic book artist is judged.
So take all your rules, all your knowledge and chuck it. Then figure out what to do. With every line say “Is this really right?”. When you speak you should always try and say the right thing, so why shouldn’t that happen when you draw too. I get jealous of the pristine clarity cheesecake artists can bring to their work. It is what the perfect ink line is all about, or the rendered up photo.
Taking away all the icons of drawing in making abstract comics, I’m left with every line, is it worth it? Is every shape worth it? With this you begin to understand why the Abstract Expressionist where all alcoholic and killed themselves. You begin to doubt the very things that you think make you an artist, and you come around to it again as you sit with it the craft of it, practiced over and over again, allows you to pay attention to the actions you take on the page.
That aliveness, the vibrant presence of the artist in the moment transfered into paint is what makes abstraction good. It’s what makes representational art good to, it’s why Rembrandt is a better painter then Norman Rockwell, all the cultural assumptions of Rockwell, all the amazing craft and then your left without the presence of the guy staring out at you from the canvass. Sitting with your work and trying to be in it and of it as you do it is a weird standard and thing to bring to comics.