Wealth & Money Quote by Bill Griffith

Griffith’s line lands like a heresy in a culture that treats virtuosity as an unquestioned good. Calling a “full, rich drawing style” a “drawback” isn’t anti-skill; it’s a cartoonist’s hard-won suspicion of prettiness. In comics, luscious rendering can become a velvet curtain: it absorbs attention that might otherwise go to timing, clarity, and the reader’s rapid emotional intake. The more you ask the eye to linger on craft, the more you risk slowing the joke, blurring the idea, or turning a strip into an illustration portfolio with captions.

The subtext is about power and control. A stripped-down line isn’t just an aesthetic; it’s an argument about what matters. Cartooning, especially the alt-weekly/post-underground ecosystem Griffith came out of, prizes immediacy and legibility over museum-grade finish. A simplified style can be redrawn fast, repeated consistently, and weaponized for satire. It also keeps characters archetypal enough to function as symbols rather than portraits, which is crucial when your target is a system, not a person.

Contextually, this is a jab at the prestige hierarchy of art. “Rich” drawing reads as capital-A Art, the kind that invites reverence. Griffith is defending the low, efficient magic of comics: the medium’s ability to compress a worldview into a few lines and a beat of silence. The “drawback” is that beauty can anesthetize; cartoons are supposed to sting.