After watching the special features on the DVD for The Lego Movie, I find out about so-called "brick films," which are stop-motion animated films made by fans using Lego minifigures and set pieces constructed from various Lego bricks. The movie itself, though it was 100% CG, tried to capture the look of a stop-motion brick film made by a fan (as opposed to the traditional CG look of various Lego TV series like The Clone Wars, Legend of Chima, and Ninjago which use non-Lego-brick backdrops).
So I look on YouTube and find a wealth of them. Some are pretty funny, actually.
Finding out about brick films made me wonder if there were brick comics. Because I had an idea long before the Lego movie to make a comic book by snapping pictures of toys and Photoshopping dialogue balloons on. This isn't original to me; Knights of the Dinner Table magazine used to run a similar strip years ago called "Fuzzy Knights of the Dinner Table" which was pictures of stuffed animals sitting at a dinning room table playing D&D and speaking with Photoshopped dialogue balloons.
It turns out there are quite a lot of brick comics. Some have been running for years. "The Brick House" and "Tranquility Base" seem to be two of the oldest and most respected.
But, I can't help thinking about sprite comics. These are comics made by splicing graphics from video games (particularly 8 bit and 16 bit oldies from the late 80s to early 90s). They lack respectability because it takes almost no talent to slap one together.
So, now I come to my point. I wanted to ask the artists here... Do you think "brick comics" qualify as real comics? Or are they just cheap ripoffs perpetrated by talentless hacks who can't draw?
Replies
If you go with a typical definition of comics, which is art and words arranged in a sequence to tell a story, then the type of art doesn't really matter. Comics are created with digital art, painted art, drawn art, photograph art. Brick art seems like a valid contender as a medium.