You don't even need the stick figures if you're especially clever about it.
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ASCII art exists. MAD Magazine even had a feature in a few issues from the 1960s-1980s which were comic strips in which the art was made of characters typed on a typewriter, in a very early precursor to ASCII art.
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Fumetti (photo comics) use photographs instead of illustrations.
There are lots of ways out there to be creative without generating slop.