Get into comics… The Cash Money Way! Part 3: Understanding Comics
PORTLAND, OREGON - There is no secret to drawing comics. Draw all your female characters with odd proportions, have them wear skin-tight outfits with their boobs hanging out, then have all the dudes have their teeth clenched, make sure they have a dark past that has come back to haunt them, punch a few dudes.
Done and done.
Everyone goes home with an Warner Brother’s animated series with Mickey Rourke in a villain role for your sequel.
[lights cigar with $100]
[puts feet on desk]
[gloats]
Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art
Written & Illustrated by Scott McCloud
The first of McCloud’s Comics trilogy (Understanding Comics, Reinventing Comics, Making Comics); this volume is devoted to giving folks an under-the-hood look at how comics are created and how they (in theory) work. It is presented in the form of -wait for it- a comic. I know! “The mechanics of comics in comic form? Oh, that is simply RICH. That is the epitome of irony. The acme of droll.”
Understanding Comics holds to the very best rule: “show, don’t tell.” It conveys a strong set of comics fundamentals while always noting the fact that, basically, there are no “rules” in comics, but Here’s What Actually Works.
McCloud is now far more famous for this work than for his actual comic, Zot!, and Understanding Comics is lauded my many greats and legends of the comics industry. Sadly, all of the warm reviews and high-falutin’ talk created our own literary Frankenstein Monster when McCloud released his follow-up piece, 2000’s Reinventing Comics, the whackaloon rantings of a man drunk with POWER and an apparent total ignorance of the very basics of the then budding Internet economy.
THE MADNESS, a crazed second work. Proving what fickle bitches we are, comics readers (most notably the recently weird-turned-pro world of web comics) turned on him en masse. A POX ON HOUSE McCLOUD!
But, then in 2006, McCloud released Making Comics and, in a landmark ruling from Geneva, all of Comicdom agreed to pretend Reinventing Comics was never created and we went back to hailing McCloud as God’s Gift because all comics readers really, secretly want to be comics writers, he had us dead to rights, creating a piece of work that I have “grudgingly deemed very apt” and was “dismayed at how informative” and on the whole found it to be “the most tooth-gnashingly useful tool anyone interested in comickering on any level could possibly get their hands on.”
In all seriousness, Understanding Comics and its final sequel are more useful than any art class I’ve ever taken, and I’ve taken a few. Certainly it is way better than any of those “Draw the Boom Anime Babes” books.
They leave the mechanics of comics laid bare in a fashion where you will be able to easily recognize How They Work next time you flip open a comic – whether it be a sharp layout, a clever use of timing within a frame, or spotting a poseur without grasp of the basics!
If you like Understanding Comics, you might also like these comics (but don’t take my word for it):
TUNE IN NEXT TIME WHEN YOU HEAR YOU ME SAY: “But Cash, I only like to read detective novels where the mysteries are solved by a cat.” “What about a graphic novel where mystery is solved by a bat… man?”
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[...] to mind, which I will run happily if I can ever find a decent embed). And much like Cash’s Understanding Comics piece, I thought I’d share a couple of the more thoughtful anime I’d come [...]