I think the one thing about Dobson's art is that, well, it's mediocre bordering on being absolutely terrible. I mean, let's consider some of the other "artists" we've covered here:
Chris-chan
Jay Geis
Sweets
KirbyKrisis
You don't even need to have an interest in drawing to see immediately that these guys have the drawing ability of a goldfish. Meanwhile, there's
Dobson. Like, if you didn't know anything about him, you would probably shrug and say meh and move on. Hell, if you were a young and impressionable youth, you might actually like it. But then you keep looking at
more and
more and
more of his work and it just feels... wrong. Off.
I had never heard of Dobson as his Tom Preston account back when I was young and religiously followed webcomics, but I was a fan of Tim Buckley, the guy behind
CAD. I literally followed that comic all the way to its "finale," but once it was finished and became a gag strip I just... slowly lost interest. Now, AD was mostly a gag strip to begin with so the loss of the narrative was certainly not the reason why I eventually stopped reading it. More to the point, it was probably just because I was older and was exposed to more quality work, and I noticed this "sameyness" to CAD. Like, aside from the artwork being spruced up or more defined, it was almost the exact same thing throughout. There's no evolution, no distinct growth, nothing. You could open a CAD strip from
2009 and then one from
2013 and, aside from it looking shinier, it's almost the exact same thing you would expect before.
This is stagnation. Despite what a lot of people say, most people don't want things to stay
exactly as they are. If that were the case, Mario games would still only involve the Mushroom and the Fire Flower and have a static 8 worlds. There has to be some new things, some changes, some improvements,
something, because eventually an audience is going to get bored and leave. There's only so many times you can do the exact same thing before people get up and leave. This is Dobson's main flaw, in my honest opinion. He is not only stagnant, but he is
proud of being stagnant and unchanging. He's said before that he's perfectly fine with mediocrity and that he has no desire for improvement. I've made a far more emotional post before about how this is irritating to see as someone who does do some creative stuff on the side, but basically, the fact that Dobson keeps making the same amateurish mistakes for years and years while claiming to be a respected cartoonist and wallowing in his mediocrity and failure, the fact that he is defensive about his mediocre art to the point where he's retroactively modified his Patreon to turn it into a paywall, turns him into a lolcow. He has the potential and the following to be an extremely popular online artist and possibly get picked up by an actual animation studio, or simply just coast on Patreon donations for a great deal of time. There are artists out there that support themselves in this way. The thing is that he knows all of this, has been told all of this,
and doesn't do it. That's what makes his artwork laughable and himself a lolcow imo.
(Oh, that and he's a reprehensible human being with a shitty attitude and entitlement issues up the ass.)
Duck Butt Lollipop fails. Can't even call it a non-sequitur, since that would imply there's any context out of which this falls. It's just Chris-Tran brand "Random Acces Humor". How someone, who's professional life has such strong ties to the internet, who also spends almost any waking moment online, is unable to understand what a meme is, is beyond me.
