Hoo boy… I’ll admit I haven’t been keeping up on the comics industry as well as I could have these past several months, but that didn’t stop my social media feed from lighting up with a great deal of gnashing of teeth from several fellow travelers. The culprit? An early presentation by Adobe of a new product to be included with their upcoming AdobeMAX suite, called ComicBlast.

Okay, so basically I bookmarked this in my head since it was about a week ago and of course everything happens the day after I write this blog. Now that Dawn and I have watched what was making everyone so upset, I’m… well, I can see it. The framing is clearly “this will be great for professionals!” rather than something meant for beginners and/or children as Adobe CEO Eric Snowden (no relation to Edward)  later tweeted in an attempt at damage control.

I’m going to include some videos and y’all can judge for yourselves if you want, though it’s telling that both the “jaded pro” video and the “interested beginner” video both have questions on what exactly ComicBlast is supposed to provide for them. There are neat features but even with the idea of being able to edit and resize things afterwards, there’s a certain point where you’d be editing and rearranging so much you might as well have just started from scratch.

Also yeah, I didn’t notice the first time since the video was going (probably intentionally fast) but why does she have the algorithm-generated balloons and captions and then she imports her art which… contains hand-drawn balloons and captions in the same positions? Another bizarre thing to include was the demonstration of the lineart function which makes a serious boo boo in panel 1 by shading things such that a character who was standing in front of the giant man is now standing behind him (check frames 1:58 and 2:03 in the presentation video). An artist trying to use the feature would have to redraw that arm and leg.

But, yeah, you can handwave all of this as alpha development stuff. I think what really got folks in a tizzy was what one commenter brings up: Adobe consults professional photographers for Photoshop, etc., but what comics professional was consulted on this? It’s like the company didn’t take it seriously, and oh boy if there’s one thing comics industry professionals love, it’s to not be taken seriously.*

(*sarcasm alert)

There are certain things Dawn and I can think of that we would love to see in a helper program, and maybe there’s still time for ComicBlast to implement those. Or maybe as the last video says, Adobe will quietly take it behind the woodshed and it will never happen. We shall see.

Original presentation:

Professional response:

Beginner response:

Aftermath response: