"If the story is well written, people can ignore amateur art in a comic" can they though..?
I was thinking on a piece of encouragement often given to beginner comic artists. Obviously, I don't think it's totally untrue as story is incredibly important to a comic, but I think it 's less common than people say.
Something that stuck out to me is that when encouraging people, one of the huge examples I see given is the original "one punch man" webcomic and mob psycho 100, because of their more amateur art styles. It always begged the question to me though: Can people only stomach it because it's "humorous"? And so they feel the art style "matches"? What if these stories were hard boiled crime dramas? Or a serious romance? Would they really have stuck through it for the story alone?
Obviously I don't intend to discourage anyone from making a comic, that's not my goal. I moreso just feel this advice doesn't always ring true to amateur comic artists who can very easily see who of their peers readers gravitate to. I think in an attempt to assuage fears, sometimes people can downplay the effect of "appealing art" as a reason for someone deciding to read a chapter of something.
Hell, I even feel the examples of comics/manga with "not great art" are still pretty decent, and are simply "lower grade" in comparison to their incredibly skilled peers in the industry. (I think of how Rob Liefeld, despite his wacky anatomy, could still construct fairly easy to read figures and scenes, vs someone still hiding feet every panel when comics often require you to show them to set the space in a scene.)
I don't think this is a good or bad thing-- just kinda how things are. I'm interested to hear others thoughts about this.