Artist Tom Richmond, who you may know from Mad Magazine, and many other places, has a great blog post about original cartoon art, “Is Digital Killing Original Art?”

Well for one thing, digital art is original art, but of course Tom is referring to actual pen and paper art.

There are still many artists who prefer to use pen and ink, rather than draw digitally and it makes the original art even more valuable in the long run. But of course, most of the art these days, I daresay, is digital.

When I see original cartoon art at ComicCons, some very old, I often think, “Is this the last of it?” But I’m sure lots will show up over time, afterall, cartoonists had 365 drawings a year, so that is a lot of work over many years’ time.

I don’t remember when I went from pen and ink to digital, but I don’t think I will ever go back to pen and ink, digital is just so easy to work with, it makes the work go faster and the end results are basically the same – except for not having original art.

I remember when digital cameras firts came out, I couldn’t wrap my head arount the idea of not having film. “How can you not have film?” I thought. “What if I need copies of the images?”

To tell you the truth, in all my life, I don’t think I ever had copies of photos made after the first one was printed. Remember you used to get two prints of each one when they were developed?

Anyway, I took to digital drawing faster than I did to digital photography, which of course we all use daily now, taking pictures with our phones every few minutes. We all know what we ate these past few years, thanks to that.

But getting back to Tom Richmond, he says, “I really do find it sad that one of the major drawbacks of the rise of the computer as a tool for art is that less and less physical art is being created.”

Sad, but it reminds me of so many other things that are gone or almost gone – the sound of a typewriter bell, pay phones, handwriting, floppy disks, card catalogs, paper maps, landlines, and Mad Magazine, ironically, where many of us know Tom Richmond from.

One reason I like my old fashioned mechanic, who I mentioned the other day.