My thoughts on tools today are kinda fuzzy. To some extent, I think the most important aspect is results. For instance: one of the hallmarks of pleasing, quality, professional inking is a fluid flexible line whose weight varies to indicate volume. A brush, or the right dip pen, will give you these results. A technical pen or a marker will not. Even as mighty an artist as Alex Toth (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Toth) inked with markers late in his life, and although his draftsmanship remained exquisite, the quality of his ink line suffered.

However, I've now seen graphic tablets that can duplicate the flexible line of a brush. When the tool gives you equally good results, you can't complain that it's “not how the old pros did it”. Or look at me using computerized graduated grey fills in Space Kid! -- I don't think I'm “cheating”, really.

And yet, if there is, say, a program that will drop a pre-rendered cityscape background into your panel -- no matter how good it looks, that somehow strikes me as “improper”, because it isn't dependent on your own artistic skills and judgments. Fuzzy thinking, perhaps, but that's pretty much how I feel. If a tool allows you to exercise your own artistry and get good results, then it's a good tool.