Review: Making Comics

Making Comics is Scott McCloud's third installment of graphic comics instruction, and a definite must-read for students of the form. Scott takes you through the basic artistic theories and guidelines that go into creating a comic. Mind you, this is NOT a step-by-step "how to draw" book -- while there is some instruction on the matter, the author largely assumes that the reader already has that skill and is ready for more tips on details that will bring his storytelling capabilities to the forefront.

In contrast to my somewhat harsh reaction to Reinventing Comics, I really, really enjoyed this book, probably because it relies less on giving debatable opinions on the future of comics and more on what already works, WHY it already works, HOW it works, and produces solid examples, both through McCloud's own drawings and published works of other noteworthy authors.

As a student of film, it was fun to find a lot of ideas in McCloud's book that I was familiar with already but applied to a different medium. For example, deciding how to frame a shot will have similar emotional implications in both forms (super low shot empowers the subject, super high empowers the viewer, etc.). The idea of producing an establishing shot in each new scene to give the reader an idea of spacial relationships is also prominent in each medium (and sometimes challenged).

One of the most insightful chapters deals with facial expression and the importance of really nailing it so the reader instantly understands what is being communicated. McCloud deconstructs the human face into its various muscle groups so the reader can understand how it functions, and then shows how different basic expressions combine to form more complex emotions that communicate more than one thought at a time (see excerpt included in this post). I've seen cartoonists draw a page of expressions of different characters as a guide for themselves, but never have I seen the mathematics behind them like McCloud so successfully shows here.

Understanding Comics showed us how comics are digested by the brain, their roots in history and the arts, and how to dissect them. Reinventing Comics showed us how comics have more potential than the popular world gives them credit and where the future should take them. Making Comics shows us the artistic implications in building a comic and what certain choices will mean for the reader's experience.

I highly recommend this book as another great demonstrator of comics' unique form and contributions to the artistic kingdom, and as an entertaining way to gain insights to the intricacies of the medium. Pick it up!

Review: Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return

At the time of this post, I haven't yet read the predecessor to this graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi, but the story stands on its own well enough that there were very few occasions where I wondered if I was missing something that was perhaps in the other book.

Satrapi describes her experiences growing in 1980s Vienna, having been sent there during her adolescence to be distanced from war-torn Iran and its fundamentalist, oppressive government. She deals with the emotional pain of realizing that her family remains in danger while she is on her own, becoming a new person as she is exposed to much more liberal schools of thought than what she has hitherto been used to. Eventually she returns to Iran for a few years, to find herself defying her government, gaining greater insight to the motivation of her country's leaders, and fitting in less and less in the setting.

The story succeeds in delivering a great coming-of-age story while giving a Western audience greater access to a foreign culture. I'm not entirely sure how the telling of this story in comics form strengthens it as a whole, but I do have a few simple thoughts:

• The simple drawing style of Satrapi, utilized in a very Western medium (yes, there are Eastern comics, but the style and form differ), really helped me get drawn into the story more. I often find it a little more difficult to relate with foreign cultures when simply reading text about them or sometimes even seeing a movie. The author's cartoons succeed in helping me relate with the Middle Eastern protagonist and neutralize any undesired alienations I may feel long enough to help me understand her own cultural discoveries in faraway places.
• There are several times where I think it was easier for Satrapi to show rather than tell. One example is a page in the story where she describes how one begins to spot the different female body shapes under the many robes and veils they are required to wear, and illustrates how certain hairstyles result in a corresponding veil mold for others to see. It was much more effective to see this than have to read and trust that my imagination was doing the description justice.
• Obviously there is something to be said for pacing and juxtaposition in the graphic storytelling. I personally loved one page where Satrapi is showing a figure drawing class she was taking, with a female model who had to remain completely covered due to a mandate by the powers-that-be(were). She slightly exaggerates the size and pose of the model to really accentuate the lack of shape the student artists had to work with and thus proclaim how ridiculous a scenario she'd found herself in. Pair this with her words, "We learned to draw drapes really well," and we're given a fantastic commentary on liberal arts vs. fundamentalist conservatism.

All in all a great read, and, of course, an excellent example of comics wielding greater potential than perhaps what pop culture America readily sees. If you enjoy autobiographies, Middle Eastern/European cultures, and discussions of clashing ideals (and the birth of new ones), then this book is for you.

Review: Reinventing Comics

There are bigger, better, more in-depth reviews of Scott McCloud's Reinventing Comics out there, so I will keep this relatively short.

While most people feel that this follow up to Understanding Comics is either excellent or terrible, I rather think that it STARTS as excellent, and slowly goes downhill so that, by about 2/3 through the book, you're ready for it to end.

Scott begins very strongly. His first couple chapters really captivated me, because he spoke to my heart -- bringing up issues in the study of comics as art, how this movement to take the medium more seriously is important in developing art awareness and thus bring about greater empathy in society. I really was fascinated by his description of how the current business model for the comics industry has come into place and the impact it's had on the prominence of the superhero genre and commercialism of the form. This is all in the first 1/3-or-so of the book, and I loved every bit of it -- it really made the entire book worth reading.

However, as he begins to describe the road to the Digital Age and where comics need to go from here, he begins losing his footing. He rapidly covers the development of the Internet, oversimplifying its history, and then knowingly jumps into predictions and theories that he is aware will soon be outdated due to the rapid rate at which technology moves forward (the book was written in 2000). Some of his predictions are spot-on, some are way off, and his conclusions are questionable.

McCloud challenges the notion that a physical comic book will always be more appreciated than a digital comic, stating that the desire to actually hold a comic in ones hands merely exists because that is what we're used to, and that as we embrace digital comics we will soon abandon that sentiment. This fails to address the concept of ownership that prevails in western culture. How many of us prefer to own a physical CD than just a hard drive loaded with mp3's? There's something inside us that will always want a copy of our media that we can rely on, that is unique and "mine." I don't think this notion will change in a matter of decades.

Another strength he attempts to declare is that digital comics have the potential to allow the reader to see an almost-infinite canvas all at once, not having to limit panels to what can fit on one page at a time. While I certainly see his point, I think this is flawed reasoning. First of all, the reader is limited to what he can view on his monitor. If you create a comic that is large enough to cover the roof of the Pentagon and tell your readers to have at it online, they still will only be able to read portions at a time, and an attempt to see it all at once would result in an image severely scaled-down in order to accomodate a realistic canvas size for a home computer, rendering it impossible to really distinguish images and text. Secondly, is it not an inherent part of the medium to have pages that you flip through? I believe the physical flipping of a page, feeling a slight breeze as it passes your face, sending a wiff of ink and freshly-cut (or musty-old) paper to your nose, is part of the experience, psychologically and emotionally.

I certainly am not against digital comics -- I have been getting more and more into webcomics lately -- but I am rather skeptical of any movement that would suggest that the best path for the medium of comics as a whole is a series of 1's and 0's, that we need to get over this need for a physical comic book -- which is a Marxist idea of unlimited accessibility and lack of individuality in creation and distribution.

As the book went on and on, I found myself more and more ready to put it down. McCloud's easy flow with which he seemed to write his first book was lost in the last half of this sequel, leaving me clueless as to where he was going or how we even arrived to some of the topics he started bringing up, making me have to re-read previous panels so much that by the end I had given up.

I definitely recommend this book due to the excellent illustrations McCloud made (both visually and intellectually) in the beginning, but be aware that it won't leave you as satisfied as some of his other writing may.

Review: Maus: A Survivor's Tale

After letting it sit in my reading list for about 5 years, I finally took the time to read both volumes of Art Spiegelman's Maus, critically acclaimed and widely recognized as a highly influential work in bringing about an awareness of a graphic novel's capabilities as substantial literature. If you're even remotely considering giving comics a chance to be taken seriously, you need to read this book for its artistic and historic significance.

The true-life story of Spiegelman's father surviving as a Jew in WWII Nazi prison camps (including Auschwitz) is not a new one (there are many holocaust survival tales out there), but is nonetheless important, insightful, and engaging! Yes, be prepared to experience the emotions of horror and sadness as the author recounts some of the hell wrought by Hitler and his goons, but also prepare for some thought-provoking questions that will give you something new to mentally chew on.

For me, some of these new questions/learnings were:

• With all of these tales about holocaust survivors, we tend to put them on a pedestal and laud their bravery and tenacity, among other amazing qualities. But what of those who DIDN'T survive? Are they less deserving of praise/recognition, any less brave/strong? It seems like there is a simple answer at first, but how does society generally, really respond to this question? Maus reminds us that, while willpower and strength played a part in the ability to survive the terrors of WWII prison/labor/death camps, perhaps the largest factor that determined who lived and who died was mere luck of the draw.
• Does holocaust survival really "end" with the end of the holocaust? What of post-holocaust life, recovery, and endurance? And how does the holocaust affect the next generation -- the survivors of the survivors? Maus certainly gives some interesting insights into this and makes this horrific part of world history more personal, while at the same time more impacting as we see the lingering effects of mass murder and torture still raging in the world over 50 years (at the time of the book's writing) after it was stopped.
• What is the purpose of writing about the holocaust? How does it affect the author, and what does our (as a nation) reaction to it influence its message (specifically in a negative connotation)?

Perhaps one of the more refreshing visual aspects of this work is Spiegelman's simple-yet-effective art style. While more commercialized comics publications emphasize a very detailed, pure drawing style, Maus keeps it to the basics. Certainly the author has an eye for art, as displayed in his pacing and layout techniques, but he uses cartoons like you'd see in the morning newspaper to address a very serious topic. I'm positive there are several reasons for this, but here are a couple that I thought of:

• Basic cartoons with minimal lines generally make it easier for the reader to associate with the characters therein. Don't believe me? Imagine if Garfield were told with photographic realism. Putting yourself in the shoes of Jon Arbuckle would be much more difficult, psychologically, because the detail doesn't allow for your mind to fill in the gaps and be quite as interactive. If Jim Davis used photographs instead of drawings, his readership would likely be very different. (I hesitate to say that the readership would drop, because I don't think a higher level of photorealism is bad -- it just expresses itself differently and would probably affect the thematic and narrative content of the comic).
• Similarly, given Spiegelman's desire to use animals to represent real-world people, more simplistic line art makes such otherwise-fantastic scenes easier to take in. If he'd drawn the fur and bone structures more realistically, and thrown in various gradients of shading, the reader would constantly be aware of how ludicrous it is to have cats and mice walking upright, wearing clothes, and reenacting scenes from the Holocaust. It's just more effective this way for this particular story.

I recommend Maus to literally everyone -- its subject matter is far-reaching and accessible to many age groups, and it's an important case study in the argument for comics as art. Go give it a read!

Review: How to Make Webcomics

How to Make Webcomics is a collaborative effort by webcomic creators Scott Kurtz of PvP, Kris Straub of Starslip Crisis (and, my personal favorite, Chainsawsuit), Dave Kellet of Sheldon, and Brad Guigar of Evil Inc., and is essentially what the title implies: a "how to" book that gives in-depth insights as to how to create and manage a successful webcomic, both as a form of storytelling and as a business.

As webcomics are an increasingly important part of the comics medium, I've included this book as a link on the sidebar. Webcomics, as noted by the above authors, are a unique subcategory of comics in general. Not only are they generally more accessible than comics in other media, but they also lack the collaborative properties of comic books and graphic novels. Webcomics are generally a solo act, so the artist's persona comes out stronger than in other cases.

Also of interesting note is the fact that a webcomic's overall themes and feel -- the mise-en-scene, if you will -- extend beyond the borders of each daily strip. HTMW discusses the importance of web design and blogging in an effort to support an artist's strip and give something "extra" to the readers, while keeping the tone of the characters and plots he or she has developed.

I found the artistic portions of the book to be very insightful. The business parts were also useful, but I found them to be less convincing as I knew that, at the time of the book's writing, at least one of the authors didn't follow what he was preaching. However, given that any one of them knows countless times more about finding success in this field than I, it's certainly not useless information. Aside from this (and an insane abundance of typos), the book was a great read and I welcome it whole-heartedly into my library. And, yes, I will be citing it as a reference in future posts.

Review: How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way

How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way by Stan Lee and John Buscema is pretty much what the title suggests: an instructional book on illustrating comics in a certain manner. When a "how to draw" book is mentioned, you might think of those simplistic books you used to pick up from the library as a kid that helped you learn to draw potatoes in five different scenarios or stoic animals. This book, I assure you, is a little more advanced.

HTDCTMW teaches the reader all the processes of illustrating a professional comic book, emphasizing the ability to draw different scenarios and breaking them down into their basic shapes/components. Stan Lee emphasizes the need to be able to depict a story that one could follow without words, if necessary. The authors even take it a step further and show you how to ink, which is an underappreciated art form in the comics industry/readership (including yours truly). Some argue that, for advanced artists, the information contained is a little dated (it is over 20 years old) if you are aspiring to get into the comics biz, but almost anyone would point you to this if you were asking for a book to help you hone your artistic talents specifically for comic book creation.

I include this book in the sidebar as recommended reading because it shows the many tools comic book artists have to work with, and also gives insight into what an artist must remember as they strive to communicate effectively through the comics medium. It distinguishes between drawing real life and drawing for a superhero genre, the sorts of melodramatic elements that must be considered when doing so. The beginnings of the book also break down a comic page into its various elements and define what exactly they are (the "gutter," a "splash page," etc.). I plan on citing this book in future posts.

If you can endure Stan Lee's zany narration, give this book a peek. I received it as a present as a teenager, and though I haven't attempted to enter the comics industry, I have kept the book as a reference for understanding -- and I've had professional artist friends borrow it from me to specifically gain a better understanding of such notions as proper proportions in human anatomy and superheroes.

Review: Mythology: The DC Comics Art of Alex Ross

Mythology: The DC Comics Art of Alex Ross came to me about five years ago as a birthday present from my brother. It's great at what it shoots for: a showcase of Ross's work for DC over the years. It makes a great coffee table book, as it's very segmented in format. It's not meant to necessarily be read cover to cover (though I have done so) as the primary focus is the over-sized illustrations that "wow" the reader. The art itself is meant to be studied and taken in, with less emphasis on the written text.

I bring this book up, however, for a couple reasons. For one, Ross is one of the most unique comic artists you will find out there. If you're averse to the lack of realism in some drawings, you'll appreciate the photoreality that Ross utilizes in his depictions of fictional characters. In fact, the title "Mythology" is a multiple entendre for Ross's ability to take mythological beings and ground them in a real-world feeling, increasing depth of character and relatability between the reader and the material. In so doing, Ross brings perhaps otherwise-laughable concepts to a new level of respect and provocation of thought.

Also, Mythology shows Ross's journey as an artist -- how he was raised, how he developed his talents, the process he goes through in creating his art, and the psychology behind his work. Anyone who questions the degree to which comics can be considered an art form should study how Ross meticulously conceptualizes, rough sketches, photographs models, paints, sculpts, etc. The amount of creative synergy in his efforts is astounding -- you'll see his work as much more than a pop culture attempt at commercialism.