So sometimes I write comics. I have a few things coming down the pipe. You know how it is. But here’s the thing: I am a writer. I can’t draw stickman. I am useless at that side of things. So I generally need to find an artist. Now I know a few of you at least are groaning. Yeah, finding an artist is incredibly hard, we all know this. But these days there is somewhere that can really help you out in your never-ending quest:

Deviant Art (www.deviantart.com)

Oh yes, the site were half a gadzillion people post their random bits of art: photos, sketches, whatever the hell they do so long as it is visual art of some form or shape. See for every twenty million people who post their ultra-cool-awesome fumblings of fan art about some anime character that they are just like there is at least half of one good artist.

So you go to deviantart and you look up an artist you like and find their favorite pieces. Then you search those artists and do the same thing, or go back and pick a new starting point. Its a long, painful, process, I know. This is part of why I write a lot of comics with a co-writer (D.J. Kirkbride) – he is willing to do the art searches and I sit back and put my hand to forehead going “This is soooo hard! Man this suuuucks! Finding artists is haaaaard.” until he, invariably, smacks me with his big, manly, meaty paw and brings me to my senses.

But sometimes you must face the art searches alone. Sometimes you have to delve through deviantart’s winding mazes by yourself. Those times kinda suck a lot.

Now lemme explain this little bit here carefully: When you search through a guy’s favorites they are in a thumbnail form. Tiny. So you can see enough to get a sense of it, kinda, and you choose from there what you want to poke deeper at. I use a combination of line weight, panel layout, and jaw line to decide a lot of the time. That’s me. Anyway! Sometimes you see some strange shit on deviantart. I mean sometimes you’ll be searching and a bunch of the thumbnails are … well …

Strrraaaaannnnggggeeeee shhhhiiiiiiitttt!

The nudity is boring and ignorable – most times. If you’ve seen one tit rendered in charcoal on colored construction paper you’ve – well on deviantart you’ve seen fifty of them. That’s fine, whatever. Keep moving. It’s when you glance at the thumbnail and think to yourself “But if she’s sucking off that grizzly bear then how can she see what she’s doing to strip that member of the X-Men with her free hand?” that you start to worry. Because then you can fall into a huge trap. You fall into a trap I like to call the “Dear fucking hell don’t look closer!” trap. It is fairly self-explanatory. But just in case:

You can click on a thumbnail to enlarge it and go to the artist’s page. So you see that pic and you think to yourself “I have to be wrong about what I’m seeing,” so you click to make sure. You aren’t wrong. Pretty much you can count on never being wrong. The worse you think it is the more chance there is that you are 100% correct.

Today I saw, the worst I can remember off-hand:

• The afore-mentioned bear picture.
• Betty and Wilma as strippers at a Flintstone strip club.
• Santa porn (also Satan porn but whatever).
• Hag erotica.
• A duck frenching an old man.

And now I won’t link you to any of this. Too bad. So yeah those are people that I skipped over in my art search. Do I think that anyone who does porn shouldn’t get pro gigs (which assumes they don’t have them already which is not true as often as anything else) no of course not. But it’s the weird stuff, man. That stuff gets you moved right past. Because I don’t want to have to see it enlarged, and scroll through the rest of your stuff looking for the gems that show me how good you are. Maybe I miss a bunch of great artists because of that.

I’m ok with that.

So long as I don’t have to go out of my way to see some of that shit ever again I am very much ok with that.