The Quackcast this week was about the idea of defining or understanding the artist by looking at the creation. It's a fascinating topic, and I had a few thoughts that were left on the cutting room floor.

The cutting room floor, in this case, is my emptyish brain wot has scattered thoughts rattling around that t'weren't said aloud.

First thing is to say definitively is that I do not believe it's possible for a piece of art to define the person who created it. A human being is just too multifaceted to be defined on that basis. For one thing, We are many things, each of us. Our desires and priorities are many, and they often contradict each other. Add to that the fact that we all change over time, so a piece of art created at a given time is released and the human creator moves forward, most likely changing in many ways over time.

This raises the second thought - that an ongoing work or series of works, like a long-running series of novels, or newspaper cartoons, or many songs or plays - or of course, webcomics released over an extended period of time - THAT might have a better chance of revealing something about who their creator really is.

But not necessarily!

Even in a webcomic, where there is often not a financial pressure to continue, there is still the fact that many of us are playing to an audience. I know I am - I mean, I'm making what I want to make, but there is the knowledge that I'm working in some kind of genre (or a combination of a couple of genres), and trying to make something that will give the readers a certain experience. That absolutely comes into play in books, or movies, or albums of music, or standup comedy.

They might be quite authentic to the creator, but we can't ignore the fact that the stuff is being made to be enjoyed, or understood, or to get some kind of reaction out of an audience. There is probably a proper name for this, and an academic way to define it - but I don't know what it is.

Having said that, even works of art that are created for an audience, or being cranked out in great quantities, or trying to make a certain point or be successful or whatever - even those things can be revealing about at least SOME aspects of their creators. I think it's the stuff that the creator isn't even thinking about - the accidental revelations along the way - that stuff can show some part of the person behind the curtain.

I heard some famous producer/showrunner say about TV Talk show hosts that over time, doing a show like that every night, that they can't help but reveal who they really are over time. I can see the analog for standup comics, or people who write TV shows, books or comics or YouTube videos over a long period of time - it would be impossible for real bits of those personalities and worldviews to leak out over the course of time.

I definitely see certain running themes in my own comics - and there's probably stuff that I have no idea is even in there!

How about you?


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