Les Jones

Comic Books > The All New Adventures of The Slug

I've been to a fair share of art museums, but the most inspirational artwork I've ever seen was at a tiny gallery in Sante Fe. It was a bad sketch of a female nude. Asking price was a paltry $180.

It really wasn't very good. It didn't even have the phony caché of being expensive. But it's one of the few pieces of art that made me want to be an artist. "Wow!" I thought. "If I could learn to draw just that well I could get a women to pose nude for me, and I could get someone else to pay me $180." (What do you mean art should serve a higher purpose? You and your old-fashioned ideals.)

I had a similar thought when I saw The All New Adventures of The Slug. Here's a guy who figured out how to enter the world of online comics with almost no discernible drawing talent. (I don't think I'd hurt his feelings by saying that, either.) Meanwhile he gets to comment on the vagaries of being an artiste, and a Web artiste at that. Here's his take on micropayments for Web comics:

I've been approached by S.Progresso on joining his micro-payment hive mind collective effort. I sort of like what he has in mind. The latest page is free, as are the archives. Instead what he plans on doing is hiring troops of russian mail order brides to break into peoples homes, steal their kidneys and charge them for dialysis.

It's very appealing, although I'm not so sure I agree with the part about making the archives openly available.