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Cut and Paste Comic

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"Cut-and-Paste, Cut-and-Paste,
Pretty art that's gone to waste,
Done in haste,
With lack of taste,
What a waste is Cut-And-Paste!"

So you've gotten really good at drawing your character. Only thing is, you draw him the same way every time. And if you try to change the angle, it no longer looks anything like your original character.

So you draw a few more characters. And have the same problem. Pretty soon you have a cast of five, eight, 12 characters, but only one pose each. Maybe you get lucky and manage three or four poses each. Still, nothing like the range you'd need to draw your own comic, right?

Welcome to the world of cut-and-paste. If you manage to get these pictures onto your computer (or create them there in the first place), you can pop 'em into any decent graphics program (including something as simple as MS Paint) and make your comic. You can create panels, either by hand or in Comic Life, and put your characters into them, even flip your characters to make it look like you drew twice as many poses. Out comes your comic, ready to publish on your homepage.

Of course, without the skills to pull off those awesome Marvel graphics, you'll need to make up for it with an interesting premise, a well chosen setting and plenty of good jokes/drama. Believe it or not, many do just that.

Not to be confused with Identical Panel Gag, which is the punctual copy-and-paste of panels for comic effect.

Sprite Comics are a variation on the Cut-and-Paste Comic, as are most Pixel Art Comics.

Compare and Contrast Bottle Episode.


Examples:

  • The sites listed on this subpage allow anyone to create their own cut-and-paste comic.
  • Elf Only Inn, in the early strips, is set in a chat room; thus, the characters are deliberately cut-and-paste, because they reflect the players' avatars/user icons. The humor relies on the conflicts between playing styles, the conflict between Role-Players and out-of-character players, and the minutia of chat room culture.
    • When the strip starts becoming more serious, the art changes from cut-and-paste to more sophisticated art.
  • Achewood creator Chris Onstad is known for copying and pasting much of the content of his strip (as he points out referencing a series of mostly empty panels with only a couple of speech bubbles and characters, "This is usually what my screen looks like around two a.m. the day a strip is due."). Strangely, this actually contributes to the subtle comedic effect of the strip, allowing Onstad to have a high level of control over subtle elements of the art and draw attention to facial expressions and the like. In short, Achewood's art is designed not to distract from the top-notch writing.
  • Allen the Alien isn't this normally, but one of the main strips did rip the art from an earlier strip. This did not go without lampshading.
  • Ctrl+Alt+Del relied on this, particularly in regards to faces. This often led to errors such as faces being lit from the wrong direction. Fortunately each comic is now individually drawn, leading to much more dynamic designs and poses.
  • Com'c uses cut and paste for all its str'ps.
    Krixwell: That said, in many other comics, copy-paste would look odd. Can you imagine a Spider-Man comic where everyone was in the same body position in each panel? I can, to some extent, and it looks ridiculous.
  • Mr Square is based around apathy and randomness, so this was inevitable. Lampshaded here: In issue 193.
  • Dinosaur Comics is the ultimate example, using this as its main gimmick. Besides a few strips with minor changes (and guest strips) every single strip uses not only the same art, but the same panel layout. Only the dialogue varies.
    • This subclass - fixed-art strips - has seen a fair number of variations: for example, Birdsworth and The Adventures of Brigadier General John Stark by Eric Burns-White.
  • Furmentation: hosted here Webcomic where all characters and props are drawn once in Flash and exported into image files to be cut-n-pasted from later into premade strip templates in Adobe Photoshop. Most characters are drawn with two angles at most, and expressions are changed in post-work. Backgrounds are often gradients, but sometimes blurred and altered photos are used instead, and reused for the duration of specific scenes or storylines.
  • Badly Drawn Webcomic uses a similar idea, albeit with a smaller template. In fact, the comic seems to be so heavily inspired by Dinosaur Comics that the creator attempted to Lampshade this with Comic Twelve.
  • Freaking Awful Puns relies heavily on this.
  • ON takes a somewhat unusual approach, in that it uses software designed to make comics for schoolwork, repurposing it into something no teacher would assign.
  • Girly is decidedly not a Cut and Paste Comic, but it does have a Cut and Paste character, a little-seen character named Xerox. Apparently in the Girly universe "cutpastes" are their own race, and Xerox's daughter — Winter's half-sister Collette — is half-cutpaste, and although she can move, her range of poses are fairly limited.
    • And when she does look in the opposite direction, the lettering on her shirt reverses to indicate her image has been 'flipped' rather than her body turning.
  • Help Desk is a Cut-and-Paste Comic set in a not-Microsoft-I-swear company's technical support department. The cut-and-paste style really becomes obvious in a Crossover with General Protection Fault, a more traditionally-drawn comic.
  • Red Meat is one of the most famous Cut and Paste Comics, having seen publication in alternative weeklies all across the U.S. Moral of the story: you can get away with this if you can write really damn good surrealist humor.
  • Partially Clips is a webcomic made with public domain clipart. Each strip uses different art, but usually all three panels are the same unaltered image.
  • El Goonish Shive:
    • Spoofed in this strip, where the four middle panels are taken from previous strips, without a trace of subtlety or appropriate context.
    • Spoofed even harder in this sketchbook, Elliot maintains the exact same thinking pose for nine panels, all the while Sarah just stares at him.
      Elliot: I think my arms are stuck.
  • Basic Instructions does this, apparently having traced the original artwork from photographs. This goes quite well with the dry humor and instruction-book premise. When Scott Meyer learned his art had been used to train the image generation AI Midjourney without his permission, he saw the funny side and began joking that the stiff, traced style would cause an Assimilation Backfire and make Midjourney's output worse.
    Rick: That's hilarious! They scanned thousands of your comics to get, what, eight drawings?
    Scott: Well, that's an exaggeration. It's only thousands of comics if you count reruns.
  • Get Your War On, My Filing Technique is Unstoppable and My Fighting Technique is Unstoppable, all by, David Rees, are all created with black-and-white office clip art, most of which looks like it dates from 1975-85.
  • Day by Day doesn't make an advertised gimmick out of cut-and-paste, but it relies unusually heavily on it for a plot-based strip.
  • Powerup Comics is a Stealth Parody of bad cut-and-paste comics, so it reuses art assets in the worst possible ways. Characters have (at most) two poses, and any other actions will either be bad photoshops of those poses (like a strip where Shadow uses a chainsaw—a hand holding a chainsaw was simply pasted onto the elbow of Shadow's generic, arms-crossed pose) or won't be shown at all (like a strip where Shadow and Chug say "High five" to each other, rather than actually high-fiving). This also frequently results in characters' facial expressions looking nothing like the emotion they're allegedly experiencing (for example, Shadow crying over his ex-girlfriend while still wearing his default smug grin).
  • Hamstard, a joke webcomic allegedly by the main character of Erfworld, has a grand total of five different panels in its entire run.
    • It lampshades it, no less. "By next year, I might be able to turn all the way around!"
  • Wondermark is a comic made using art culled from the author's collection of 19th century publications.
  • This Modern World by Tom Tomorrow relies almost entirely on clip-art-looking images of various politicians, generic people, Sparky the Penguin and neon-colored aliens, sometimes with minor editing to fit the occasion.
  • Anime example: Doujin Work tells the life of a girl inspired to make dōjinshi with the assistance of her eccentric friends, only to face problems as a beginner. In the anime, one episode in fact details how the main character, despite improving somewhat, can only draw the same pose of her characters exactly the same for each panel. This becomes more so frustrating as she is supposed to form an erotic dōjin. In complete irony, the comic sells because of how bad it is.
  • Meta-Fiction features a character named Sheriff Justice Freedom, who has a giant head with the exact same expression every panel, and it's only seen from three angles (but mostly from a 3/4 view). Actually a subversion, since he's drawn freehand each time. The most obvious difference is in his beard stubble.
  • The Outer Circle has only five characters and each character has not more than four poses. The only real change in any character is that one of them recently found himself with a mullett but doesn't know why. However, his poses are still the same as before the mullett.
  • Casey and Andy admits to this from time to time.
  • Sabrina Online parodied this, with an Art Shift to a cut-and-paste style for one strip while a character comments that now the creator will be able to do an extra comic every month.
  • A sad case of Truth in Television: Several "professional" comic artists have been known to directly copy their images, not only from their own work, but from alternative sources (magazine covers, other artists' work, and porn). A sample of one artist's work, shown here.
    • No less a beloved artist than Wally Wood flatly told aspiring artists to take any shortcut available, although he never stole another artist's work.
  • This issue of The Adventures of Dr. McNinja is one of, if not the only, occurrence of cut-and-paste in the series, and the artist freely admits in the Alt Text that it's crap, and his art instructor would never let him get away with it.
  • Le avventure del grande Darth Vader (in English: The Adventures of the great Darth Vader) is an Italian joke webcomic, allegedly drawn by and about a dyslexic emulation nerd who goes by the nickname "DARTH VADER" (all capitals), wears a Darth Vader costume and owns a real lightsaber, interacting with other emulation fans mainly by means of jokes about emulation and retrogaming, slapstick and scatological humor.
  • Like Wondermark, The New Adventures of Queen Victoria does this (quite very brilliantly) with the same portraits of Queen Victoria and other characters over and over again.
  • An early example is David Lynch's The Angriest Dog in the World. It also consisted almost entirely of Beat Panels. For nearly ten years, it appeared weekly, always with the same art.
  • The KA Mics is known to do this from time to time, but has been using more original art as time goes by.
  • A Game of Fools used this pretty heavily for the first 25 strips or so. Now there's barely any at all the amount varies depending on how much time the creator has to draw each comic.
  • Spleen Tea is exactly the same art, only the text and mugshot change with each comic.
  • Prickly City by Scott Stantis will often repeat the same panel for most of a strip, and sometimes for several days in a row.
  • Hello Earthling is pretty unashamed about being a Cut-and-Paste Comic. New poses and backgrounds get added, but the three characters ambling around the same old same old seems sort of the point.
  • Penny Arcade features obvious cut-and-paste, but only when it's justified, like when the characters are just sitting on the couch playing a game and talking for three panels.
  • Flying Man and Friends is almost entirely cut-and-paste. Characters, props, and backgrounds move, and panel compositions change, but the same drawings are used throughout. In fact, you might actually say that's the point of the strip. There's certainly no effort made to disguise it.
  • The Perpetual Aquarium is a Cut and paste fan comic where almost all the characters, props, and settings are graphics right out of the Neopets website.
  • Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff does it in a very bad way. But that's the point. In fact, in order to get the desired lack of quality Hussie has to repeatedly copy and paste the images and reduce the quality each time, and then go back in and strategically mess parts of the art up.
    • MS Paint Adventures in general, actually. Though as an ersatz video game, it's quite justified in doing so.
      • Additionally, several of the flash animations in Homestuck re-use/modify images from earlier pages so as to make animating easier/faster (most notably in the deliberately bad [S] Vriska: Watch street tough maverick with nothing to lose). Indeed, Hussie has noted that his employment of this technique ties into his love of the Meaningful Echo to create a sort of "language" within the text, with the reuses more often than not being intended as a Meaningful Echo to an earlier scene with similar (or sometimes completely opposite) events. For example, Jack Noir's dog-head silhouette appearing from above main characters quickly became very effective shorthand for "Time to panic!"
      • Problem Sleuth lampshades this here.
        You copy and paste your previous poses into a new file and animate the background rapidly.
    • A few of the mspa forum adventures also based on this.
  • Subverted with Garfield; while the art does often appear to be cut-and-paste, there are subtle variations within the same frequently-used poses.
    • However now and then for a closeup it's painfully obvious the clip art has been enlarged so the lines are proportionately thicker.
    • Liz is the worst in this regard. She's almost never looking at anything. She always stares straight ahead.
  • Intentionally done in Pokey the Penguin. Most characters are exact replicas of Pokey and sometimes you can see outlines around pasted characters.
  • Although not entirely a cut & paste webcomic, God(tm) has a small section which uses royalty free clip art.
  • Not Quite Daily Comic relies heavily on this.
  • Word of God has it that the major characters in The Order of the Stick each have "common poses" that are copy-pasted rather than redrawn. However, the author does not seem to be averse to using uncommon poses when the situation warrants it, so this has not drawn much notice.
  • Marvin reuses art on a daily basis, and often uses the same panel every day for an entire week (typically someone typing at a computer.)
  • Frequently done by Steve Napierski in his webcomic, Dueling Analogs, to the point that he lampshaded it himself in a strip.
  • Done occasionally in Dork Tower, almost always with a self-deprecating joke about how the creator is being lazy.
  • Sluggy Freelance reuses art occasionally, but subtly enough that it doesn't stand out unless the repetition is itself the basis of a joke.
    • An in-universe example is when Torg attempts to create "The Greatest Comic Book of All Time". It's just a single piece of artwork reused in various ways.
  • How I Became Yours. The art style is the least of its problems.
  • Dewey Defeats Tarzan is a webcomic assembled from old public domain artwork, mostly woodcuts from 19th-century books and magazines.
  • Married to the Sea uses both 19th-century artwork and royalty-free clipart.
  • Rage Comics are the new sprite comics.
  • Parodied in Yehuda Moon & the Kickstand Cyclery with comic within a comic Road Rage which uses SUV clipart and Comic Sans to berate cyclists.
  • Parodied in a Calvin and Hobbes strip where Calvin is talking with Hobbes about his grandfather ranting about how comics were better when they weren't just a bunch of xeroxed talking heads, the joke being that that particular strip is just the same pose of Calvin and Hobbes copied four times.
  • The Mind-numbingly Boring Webcomic
  • Teahouse uses this fairly often with the backgrounds, but every so often does this blatantly with the characters, though minor changes to the latter will be made so it appears to be redrawn. Here's an example of both on one page.
  • Non-webcomic examples are DSBT InsaniT and Dreamscape, all the human characters use the same general model.
  • Johnny Optimism
  • Cheshire Crossing was rather blatant about this, to the point where a making-of feature shows the creator assembling its characters from a library of limbs and torsos in various poses that are mixed and matched according to the needs of the scene. It's almost like a Sprite Comic, and actually doesn't look all that bad.
  • Knights of the Dinner Table is drawn this way, although the number of images used has increased greatly throughout the years. In the early years, the comic used a very small number of panels over and over. In the 2010's the effect is not at all as noticeable, with at least some new panels drawn for each new comic. The art has been getting considerably more nuanced overtime — even if a panel is re-used, the expressions of the characters can change according to the situation.
  • Orbit is drawn this way, which is why the author eventually stopped making it: he said that it didn't challenge him to improve his art skills the way he wanted to.
  • Pop Team Epic (a yonkoma) leans into this at times. It's eventually and jokingly lampshaded in one strip, where Pipimi reads out an audience complaint about the manga's reliance on copy-pasting art. Popuko gives a heartfelt apology and promises not to do any more copy-pasting... in a pair of obviously copy-pasted panels (for practical reasons, the anime changes this to a joke about the series' reliance on parodies).
  • In The Bird Feeder, generally every panel of each strip is identical, apart from the characters' mouth shape and eye position.
  • Just Another Party, uses this heavily, even in the gif portions.
  • RGBots uses the same limited set of panels for strips in different combinations, but has been known to do one-offs and add new panels into the comic from time to time.
  • Two Party Opera, a political webcomic about all the American presidents, uses this pretty blatantly; all the Presidents have exactly one drawing of them, put into different settings and sometimes with the hands moved around. It's a shame since the artist is actually a pretty good caricaturist.
  • Images are frequently reused in Philler Space.
  • Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The artwork in the illustrations is reused constantly. (Explains why there is a Christmas Tree in the background when Greg is opening his Wonder Woman Underoos birthday present in June.)

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