Science & Tech Quote by Bill Griffith

There’s a sly grief hiding inside this matter-of-fact admission: technology can “bring it into life,” but it also quietly removes the messy, human middle that used to shape the work. Griffith isn’t marveling at speed; he’s clocking a shift in authorship. The phrase “my exact style” reads like a small victory for the artist’s fingerprint in a world of tools that tend to homogenize. Yet the real punch lands in the last clause: “where it would have been edited by various human beings before.” That “before” is doing a lot of work. It marks the end of an ecosystem.

For a cartoonist who came up in a print pipeline, “various human beings” means more than gatekeepers. It means interpreters: editors catching clarity issues, production people adjusting for ink and paper, collaborators who inadvertently changed timing, tone, even punchlines. Those constraints weren’t just obstacles; they were a kind of social friction that made the final strip feel negotiated with reality. Digital production doesn’t simply streamline; it privatizes. The artist becomes a one-person studio with fewer interruptions and fewer counterweights.

The subtext is ambivalence, not nostalgia for its own sake. Griffith is noticing that automation can preserve the surface of style while erasing the communal process that once tested it. The computer “using my exact style” sounds like empowerment, until you hear what’s missing: the accidental improvements, the arguments, the editorial pushback, the shared accountability. What’s gained is control. What’s at risk is the quietly radical thing cartoons have always been: a public art made through other people.