We(Lemmy users) are adblock users and are tired of capitalism that ruined Reddit.
All of us didn't come here to look at ads again or to entertain capitalist dreams of embedding ads everywhere.
My recommendation is clear, let's ban watermarked comics and work towards ad free community.
At the end, music don't have watermarks and neither do art. So why should comics have watermarks?
Linking to the source should be the primary way of attribution.
Most mp3s have the artist name in the metadata or title. And, even the most rudimentary platforms show this information front and center. It is not an ad. It is a feature we desire. We want to know who made it, so that we can understand its context, its subtexts, and yes, find the artist for more of their work.
Image files typically do not make use of these mechanisms, and certainly the platforms we view them on rarely do. The general convention is to 'sign' or watermark it instead.
It is as simple as that. To remove the signature of a webcomic is like stripping an mp3 of all metadata and making the filename a random string. It's fundamentally an inconvenience to everyone involved. No one wants this.
(This is not to mention that the wholesale removal of attribution and complete divorce of creator and creation serves the ultimate goals of corporations. They've done it with food (where does your milk come from), furniture (who made your chair), and now with art (who made this comic?))