Super Meme Maker Comic

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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