YMMV / So... You're a Cartoonist?

• Bile Fascination: The comic can be hilarious, but for none of the reasons Preston wants. The comic can get incredibly pretentious, and the art is often very awkward, resulting in goofy-looking expressions in something meant to be taken seriously.
• Don't Shoot the Message: Preston's views on homosexuality, race, and feminism come off as this. While he isn't wrong to oppose hatred of them and say that it's wrong, his methods of doing so come off as hypocritical (calling football fans "gay" for liking a sport with manly men), victimize the group in question to show him saving them (beating up a pervert who had few other characteristics), show a rather poor understanding of the group (attempting to stick up for people of different races, claiming he should be offended), or simply end up shoehorned into the comic. It doesn't help that he sometimes considers engaging in Slut-Shaming of skimpily dressed female characters, attacking their outfits without caring about their characterizations.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Persistent Pam got way more popular than he expected, even though she was intended to be a one-off character.
• Informed Wrongness: One comic story involved a girl who was drawing her writer friends’ story, and being unhappy when they focus more on Shipping than giving it an overarching plot. So she ignores their latest instructions and draws something completely different… the reader is meant to side with her against her writer friends when they’re initially displeased with her, never mind that in such relationships an artist can’t just change an entire plot on a whim.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "STOP DOING SEXIST CRAP!"
  • "Who wants to go to McDonald's?"
  • Remixing his art into a Loss edit.
  • The comic where Preston’s bear avatar beats up a guy taking pictures of a Power Girl cosplayer, especially after it was revealed◊ the guy was the cosplayer’s boyfriend who had gotten her permission first. This frequently ties to the Loss or even Chokeposting edits, usually as a hilarious Curb-Stomp Battle cut.
  • With the reveal that Dobson had an NSFW account mostly posting inflation fetish art, many drawings of his avatar will show him with an air pump.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: These days the comic/artist is more widely known for his blocking negative reactions to the comic, and for an incident on Twitter in which Dobson responded to Zelda Williams’ alluding to her father’s death (on the anniversary, no less) with a comic panel that read “Calm thy tits.” Dobson deleted the tweet and said he hadn’t realized what she’d been referring to, but critics pointed out it was still callous to respond to someone going through a hard time in such a flippant manner. To date, there was no apology.
• Seasonal Rot: The later comics had weaker artwork and became much more about Dobson preaching rather than making entertaining comics. Dobson himself admitted multiple times that the fact that his comics, while getting high views, did not make him much money, so he saw no point in putting in as much effort as he used to.
• Shallow Parody: Andrew Dobson dislikes Batman, and he did a strip explaining why.◊ He lamented that the Batman he grew up with was a shining example of heroism, but it has been tainted by Frank Miller's work, turning him into a fascist figure that plagues the mainstream comics. There are problems with the parody, though:
  • The one cartoon Dobson mentions, Batman: The Animated Series, was released in the '90s, long after Frank Miller's work, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, was released. In fact, the episode The New Batman Adventures E19 "Legends of the Dark Knight" does a tribute to the work.
  • Andrew Dobson says that Batman, who has been popular since the 2000s, has killed with no regard for the innocent and is generally an insane psychopath. He blames this on Frank Miller's works, The Dark Knight Strikes Again and All-Star Batman & Robin, the Boy Wonder. While Dobson is correct in that the Batman from those stories is a psychopath, he hasn't killed, and these two stories are out-of-continuity with the mainstream titles and were reviled by both comic critics and Batman fans alike. The comic never mentions the popularity of The Dark Knight Trilogy, The Batman, or Batman: The Brave and the Bold, which were popular with the mainstream audience.
• So Okay, It's Average: His artwork in more recent years has a more noticeable dip in quality. But it isn't terrible, either.
• Strawman Has a Point: This happens pretty often. A good example is in his bingo strip. Several of the squares he dismisses as trolling are legitimate points.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley: Dobson likes to put a lot of superfluous details, such as wrinkles on the faces of his characters. This wouldn't be too bad if Dobson was using more realistic designs, but the designs are clearly meant to be cartoony looking, so the added details make the characters look incredibly off instead. His teddy bear mascot, in particular, sometimes looks downright off-putting as a result.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Many times Dobson tries to present his Author Avatar as being wronged, but instead the reader is more likely to side with the straw man.
  • One strip has him get turned away from a comic shop by people laughing at him looking for manga. However he entered the store, whose lights were off and had a clear "Closed" sign, expecting it to be open because the door was.
  • One infamous strip has him berating a girl at a con for drawing comics right to left in the Japanese style, while she happily tells him that's how she prefers it. Instead of being Surrounded by Idiots, Andy comes across as nitpicking.
  • This was the main reaction to his unfinished short story about a young man trying to be a professional comic creator. Kevin James (No relation) doodles at work, gets fired for being late, does nothing to find a new job until he's about to be kicked out of his apartment, begs his mother for bill and rent money, and we're supposed to feel sorry for him.
  • The above mentioned Bingo strip.

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