Ok, time for a serious talk. When Usagi switched to IDW I was defending the decision to publish it in color (it's Tom Luth after all, he worked on almost every single cover and promotional picture), but enough is enough. I could warm up to Usagi not being black and white. I could ignore some shortcuts and shortcomings in oftimes clearly rushed lineart. I did not care for Kenichi changing fur color from white to brown to even further push how Jotaro is not his actual son. I could even pretend not to see the constant use of lazy gradients. But I can't ignore it all at the same time.
Look at the picture in the OP. There is a clearly visible straight grey line which is an obvious fuckup made during the digital coloring. How do you even miss that? But that's just the cherry on top. The background is bucket filled with a single color, which even shows through the parts where Stan did not ink the hair fully! Even accounting for scanning issues, the lineart seems very off, sometimes lines fail to connect when they clearly should and everything looks super choppy and samey, lacking the usual flow of smooth thin and thick lines. Either Stan ran out of his high quality supplies or traditional art tools (nearly irreplacable in the digital age) and is using a subpar ink and/or pen, or his skills have deteriorated. And looking at the examples of shoddy art in not only the newest issue (Usagi's palms and fingers look maimed in half of the panels - I cannot recall them ever looking this awful before) but also in quite a few of previous issues (Chizu has never looked so bad) I'm afraid that the latter may be the case. The art simply looks way worse than during the "classic" stories, like Grasscutter or Mother of the Mountains. It just breaks my heart, because I enjoy the writing a lot and I love the fact that the story got it's shit together and finally pushes over a decade old plot points forward, but the art took a nosedive. So yeah, discuss the newest issue and such.
