The Ink Stained Wretch #248 8/5/26

Here we go with another of the insipid, idiotic, and ignoble piles of immaturity that are these newsletters! This week we sketch out friendly, neighborhood Spider-Man, kvetch about caricature bots, and preview the NCS Reuben Award Weekend... on with the ‘Wretch!

Click here if you are interested in this original sketch

I know, I know... I am supposed to finish up with my “Lord of the Rings” series with a sketch of the four Hobbits. I’m just too lazy to draw a four person sketch. So, in honor of the premiere of “Spider-Man: Brand New Day”, I drew Tom Holland! One guy in a pair of Underoos.

I was never a Marvel kid. I appreciated the characters but didn’t read many Marvel comics. That was more of a function of my father bringing home mostly DC comics like Batman, Superman and the Flash for me from the grocery store he managed than any disinterest in the Marvel mags. As a result I don’t have the affinity for Spider-Man that some people do. That said, I do appreciate when comic book heroes get the right treatment on screen, and Spidey has fared better than most. I mostly liked the Sam Raimi/Tobey Maguire films (number three was a little off), and the two Andrew Garfield movies were good. I have to say they mostly hit a home run with Tom Holland. He brings the perfect blend of wide-eyed, naive kid and the intensity of being a true super hero when needed. Purists maybe complain that there hasn’t been enough of the “everyday life problems” like struggling to pay rent or whatever that they seem to so cherish with Marvel characters, but I don’t see where that adds much to a good story. Still, it looks like that aspect of Peter Parker’s character is going to be a big part of “Brand New Day”, so everyone can enjoy the fact that he has cockroaches in his apartment if that matters to them.

My only real complaint about the MCU Spider-man is the whole “Iron Spider” thing. That’s the part where Tony Stark (Iron Man, for those who have been living under a rock for the last 18 years or so) takes Peter under his wing and gives him a series of high-tech suits/armor that might as well make him Iron Man. For me, that takes a lot of the fun out of the character. After the events of “No Way Home”, Peter is now on his own with no access to Stark tech and back to the simple bodysuit costume. I’m looking forward to seeing the movie (if I ever get the chance).

A week or two ago I was asked for a statement from “The Daily Cartoonist” editor Alan Gardner about a story he was running on these robot armed caricature machines a caricaturist from Australia named Brett Bower had just started promoting. Here’s a link to that story, but the short version is Brett has these robot machines that do “caricatures” of subjects in just a few seconds after taking a photo of them. Here was my statement:

“There have been ‘portrait drawing’ kiosks like photo booths for years in tourist centers and shopping malls. This is the same thing with more gears and hydraulics. Real artists still produce superior work and provide a superior experience.” He adds acerbically, “get back to me when robots can joke with the models and the crowd, make on-the-spot observations and comments, and more importantly create a drawing that doesn’t look like it was done by a six year old with an Etch-a-sketch.”

Even the robot arms are nothing new. They are already being offered by a couple of other companies.

This isn’t even A.I. These are basically just gimmicky printers that run the photo through a filter and belch out a line drawing. Here’s an example of the “art” they produce:

Brett claims these same robot arms also produced the much better but still obviously A.I. examples at the beginning of his promo YouTube video, but I can guarnatee you that is not true. Robot arms like this are not capable of the finesse with the end of a pen tip it takes to do the thick and thin line variations needed to produce that sort of line art. Those were done with a full blown printer. I’ll believe those arms are able to create that look when I see it. The horrible, simplistic drawing you see above is what these bots produce. When you pay for a soulless mechanical robot arm to produce a product, you get a soulless, mechanized result.

At its best live caricature is a performance art. The artist entertains the crowd and the subjects with jokes and conversation while producing real caricatures. These bots might as well be Hewlett Packard laser printers spiting out PhotoShop filtered pics. The HPs would be equally entertaining.

Brett is getting roasted online by his fellow caricaturists for jumping on this bandwagon, and frankly he deserves it. He claims these robot caricaturists in no way replace real human caricaturists, and this is just a different product he offers. That’s just spin, in my opinion. These caricature bots just further dehumanize and devalue what real human artists do, and all to put a few more dollars in his pocket. You can’t tell me many of the events that go with the robot arms wouldn’t have hired a real artist(s) without the “Bot” option. I’m sure Brett’s claims these mechanized artists don’t replace human ones is a real solace to the artists who didn’t get hired for the gigs the robots ended up doing. There was no market out there for robot caricatures that wasn’t being fulfilled by human ones. It’s doubly sad when actual artists willingly participate in the slow killing of the market for human-created art just for a few extra bucks.

The Lovely Anna and I are on the way to Columbus OH today to attend the National Cartoonists Society’s annual Reuben Award Weekend. This year celebrates the 80th anniversary of the NCS, and much of the programming is being done in partnership with the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum. It’s one of my favorite parts of my year, where I get to see a lot of good friends and peers, and meet some new peers and future good friends. I’ll have a full recap next week!

That’s it for this week’s “Ink Stained Wretch”! As always, if you liked what you saw please share it with others. Remember I’m always looking for feedback, questions for the mailbag, and suggestions for future Sketch o’the Week subjects. Just reply to this email with any of the above! And always remember... it’s crackers to slip a rozzer the dropsy in snide!