Is Originality Even Possible Anymore? An Essay

                Creative, groundbreaking, fresh. These words follow behind practically every single creative artist and sticks in their head like an earworm. I know I was stuck in that sinkhole. Art is made to be shared, and when you share it, you might end up thinking about how creatively groundbreaking and fresh people will find your writing, drawings, sculptures, or whatever. Why? There’s “good” art and “bad” art, and when people want “good” art, said three things almost always seem to be on the top of their list. But there’s that one word that haunts the creative types such as myself. Originality. Yes, the desire to be original and to break trends is intoxicating. Or it can be, depending on who you are. Not just to create something new and make something good, but to not make the same thing that that guy over there made. With companies and indie creators pushing out so many fantastic and really horrible products, it’s sometimes hard to make your own project that won’t make your audience say, “Hey, such-and-such obscure person you’ve never heard of already did that, you plagiarist.” It’s not easy in the Information Age to create without the nagging sense that you didn’t come up with it yourself. Or worse, that someone took your idea. Personally, I don’t think it’s that simple.

                First thing’s soonest. Total originality is impossible, and when I learned that, it wasn’t an easy pill to swallow. My comics teacher, Jerzy Drozd, is almost always the one I look to for any info on comics. And he said that if something were 100% original, it would be outside human experience, ergo impossible to understand. Everything is based on something else, ergo nothing is “truly original” in the sense the word’s chucked around. He and his friends, Mark Rudolph and Kevin Cross, ran a podcast, Art and Story, in which they debunked the public concept of artistic originality many times. Many times.

                But still I, a young, frustrated artist at the time, didn’t want to believe that what I created would never be “truly original.” But Mr. Drozd would always say that in just doing the work, you’d learn to put your own personal spin on whatever you were doing. Still though, that wasn’t good enough for me, and I was quickly growing sick of making something up and spending a ton of time on it only to find some guy I’ve never heard of who’d done it better. So I forced previously good stories to go in strange, usually uncomfortable places in their direction, trying somehow to make them new and interesting, a thing no one had ever seen before. As was and is my want, I overthought things to the extreme. It was gonna be big, it was gonna be awesome, it was gonna change the comics industry, blow the doors off of everything. I was going to be on TV and make ten movies, because what I’d written was so fantastically, extraordinarily, and undeniably original.

Of course, when it got down to it, all my comics (and other stories, I might add) ended up sounding like perfect pieces of the 90’s comic scene: pretentious, no tangible love for the projects, and just feeling like nothing but a snatch for the quickest buck. The 90’s being the decade of some of the worst American comics in American comics history, you can imagine how “good” that was. Discouraged by the results, I didn’t think I could ever really make a good, solid, original story.

It didn’t always bother me when I wasn’t totally original, and once, I did take pride in similarities between my work and a much more well-known author. The phrase, “great minds think alike,” came to mind, and the thought made me think too hard about it.

Why? Why did we think alike? We’d never met, we’d probably never had the same list of favorite books, we had thoroughly different upbringing. Why did we have the same idea? I’d developed the same idea in isolation of one of the greats, and he’d developed it in isolation of me. So how was this possible? How could we both be original on the same subject of the same thing? Was my original stance on originality misinformed, if not, just dead wrong? At the time, I couldn’t think of a logical answer that satisfied me, so I let my left-brain explain it for me.

Perhaps our imaginations were linked. Well, maybe not linked, but part of the same world, a different kind of world than the concrete one corporeal humans exist in. Maybe there’s a whole world where our subconscious states existed. The more I thought about it, I decided maybe they lived like nomads. But like strategically travelling ones, ones that never slept. And they wouldn’t live in houses made of wood or stone like humans do. There would be lands of ideas where our subconscious states could inhabit. And just like normal people, these subconscious versions of ourselves would be drawn to certain spots. Certain people would travel back and forth amongst dozens of different interests. To bring it back around, maybe this author and I, despite having never met each other, traveled the same route in this subconscious world.

When I thought about this, I could see how, yes, my previous stance on originality had to be wrong. My teacher was right; we couldn’t possibly be “truly original,” because everything is based on something else. But looking at it like this, for some reason, made me realize that my own creative take on the same thing would make it fresh. I wasn’t copying or being copied, and anything I made probably wasn’t going to become in any way groundbreaking, but the thing that made it what I wanted was the fact that I had made it myself. Ergo, originality. 

Benefits of Fanart, Maybe?

When people hear the term “fanart,” for the most part, I think people associate the image of fanART with fanDOM. Artists who aren’t creative enough to create their own characters and just turn into drooling fanboys/fangirls who write bad fanfic, you know, that type of crowd. But just as not all fans are rabid, not all fanart is useless. In fact, I personally think drawing fanart can help an artist observe things in ways that drawing original characters doesn’t always do as well.

My favorite backup for this point is that drawing fanart can help you discover (and keep in touch with) what aspects of design you favor over others, i.e. how colors interact with certain characters or what style of clothes they wear or something. And other artists have reported that identifying the aspects of design that work well your style will, in turn, help you evolve your style. I think, too, that it’s a pretty big help if you talk about what you like about the character in at least your final rendition of the character if you’re posting your pic online.

I’m speaking from experience. On my Tumblr blog, I occasionally do Dragon Ball fanart, and I learned a lot about my personal sense of aesthetics by drawing my favorite characters. For instance, by drawing Frieza and going into why I like him so much, I realized, “Hey, I like it when characters have stuff framing them.” And now I can incorporate that into my artwork as I so please, and I seriously don’t know if I would have discovered my love of framing any time soon.

Second neat point, though it’s a touchy one: branding. By talking about how much you enjoy Charlie Brown or something, you can also, depending on what your work is, show that what people find in, say, the art of Charlie Brown may also be found in your art. Maybe. It depends on how much DNA you and your favorite stories share, of course. But let’s say for the sake of arguments that they share some. Because there’s a similarity between your work and Charlie Brown, the latter audience is more likely to take a gander at your stuff.

And here’s where it starts to get itchy. It sounds crass and sleazy as if you’re saying, “If I just draw enough Charlie Brown, I’ll get a bazillion followers, and then I’ll be richer than heavy cream.” No, I’m not saying that. What I’m saying is that your public exploration of something will probably cause at least a few people to give you a double take. And as long as you honestly, really, really do love what fanart you’re doing (it is called FANart, after all), you’d be wise to take advantage of that. If not, be aware of it, at least.

Last but not least, my final topic is also not really a fan favorite. Findability. It’s related to the second topic in that it involves an artist’s audience. By doing fanart of something popular or well-known, you make yourself easier to find. And again, that sounds like a dishonest scheme, but it isn’t if it’s not coming from a dishonest place, at least from where I’m standing. If you’re honestly into a thing that’s really popular, then do it. Draw it. You’ll gain from the experience of exploring what you enjoy, and you may experience more traffic to your site as well. Plus, the traffic might give you critiques, which are invaluable.

To summarize, in my opinion, fanart is useful for discovering the aesthetics you wish to capture or enjoy, and by sharing it, you invite similar thinkers to your site or blog or whatever, which can help you cultivate your brand and your audience.

Frieza Fanart

Thank you. =P