I am exhibiting at the Cartoon County Takeover of @theopenmarket.btn !
From 10am on SUNDAY MAY 31st
Come to Brighton Open Market, London Road, Brighton BN14JU. We are taking over the whole thing!
I'll be there with @100wordsofastoundingbeauty zines and some tasty pieces from the Poets Corner Arts Lab.
Our biggest comic project yet is launching in June and it involves a true comic legend!
We are thrilled to bring you all The Saint. Based on the first Leslie Charteris Simon Templar book, Meet The Tiger, this 52-page comic is an action-packed tribute to the modern day Robin Hood.
For a hero like The Saint we needed a comic legend to create the cover. I’m thrilled to announce that Mike Grell created the only cover we are offering this campaign.
The pre-launch page is live (link in bio because Instagram is stupid). You are not going to want to miss this comic written by @liskamage and myself, edited @simon_boing by and drawn by the amazing @dan_vanguardcomic
Advent Process Day 24
Finishing with this one because of the title - you won’t have ‘mastered’ comics with the books listed in this calendar but I hope you’ve found some good reads to spend time with in the coming months. They’ll all help you draw words and write pictures if you let them, I think.
MC is an excellent walk through many of the practical aspects to making a considered comic, written clearly and engagingly.
I could easily have listed another 24 or more books from my shelves this month, and you can find many more in the shops. There are more published every year and even the most basic can usually teach this old dog at least one new trick - but I’d recommend a careful flick through before buying even the most impressive looking of them. There is no one answer to How To Make Comics and your mileage may vary on those offered.
Merry Christmas and Happy Reading
Advent Process Day 23
Jack Hamm packed this book with page after page of tips, techniques and variations of approach that will inform any narrative comics you make
It’s not stuff that you learn, on the whole, but a book that rewards you dipping into repeatedly as you develop a physical cartooning voice of your own
Advent Process Day 22
While I may not be as big a fan of Steranko as Steranko is (but then neither are you), the man’s work is definitely worth studying for comics techniques.
He took ideas from outside of comics and blended them with concepts artists like Krigstein and Kurtzman had shown us but the production line of Industrial Comics suppressed.
He wasn’t as good at drawing as his predecessors - or a large number of his peers - but he had as good an eye for design as the best comic artists and stronger narrative composition than almost any of them
This book is not all Steranko, but his contribution is so substantial it makes it much more useful than it looks like from the cover
Advent Process Day 21
In The Studio is like a lot of the general books on comics in that it’s full of chronology, anecdotes and tidbits of gossip/art… publishers like Twomorrows have built an industry on the foundations of old fanzines* and this book by Tom Hignite from Yale University Press follows similar lines - but the chapter on Gary Panter has so many process images and descriptions, it’s well worth a place on this list
(*if you know me at all, you’ll know how much I love the fanzines and their commercial descendants… that’s just not the focus of this series of recommendations)
Advent Process Day 20
Tom Bancroft brings a great animatory perspective into getting personality into cartoon characters
It’s not a million miles from Eisner’s pantomime figures, but whereas his actors wear their heart in their sleeve, this book is about personality through physiognomy
Advent Process Day 19
John Berger essays about the practice of drawing
If you know his work you’ll not be surprised to hear this book offers insights and food for thought thought that you can transpose into considered comic work
Advent Process Day 18
I picked this up because of fond memories of Mark Crilley’s Akiko (a comic for a more civilised age, if you will)
It’s a short ‘graphic novel’ about a kid getting drawing lessons and folds a lot of actdrawimg lessons into the story as it trots along.
The insights are handy if not surprising but it’s the idea of teaching through comics narrative not through comics style that really makes it a good book to reference
Advent Process Day 17
Most-often-read of all the books I own on comics… I took it out of the local library multiple times, and then again the library at college. I eventually bought this copy from their damaged stock sale
It’s more of a coffee table book celebrating the publication history than a manifesto for a new approach, but “…anatomy of a mass medium” was key to me thinking of Comics not as a product or genre but as a medium in itself (and latterly, not as a medium but as an art form).
Without being able to pour over these pages as a teenager, I doubt I’d have found the conviction to keep making comics while studying illustration… and we all now know that Comics > Illustration!
Advent Process Day 16
A lot of Matt Madden’s comics follow the path of Oubapo - the artist deliberately working within self-imposed restrictions or rules, like writing a novel without using the letter E or such.
In comics everything is possible, so working to such constraints can be a productive way to focus the mind or figure new solutions.
99 Ways to Tell a Story, inspired by Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style, tells a simple one-page story in 99 different ways.
One after another they develop a rhythm that is compelling and exhausting at the same time. But dipped in and out of, there are a lot of different approaches to telling the same events - like Wallace Wood’s 22 Panels That Always Work, you can return to these pages many times and find new ways to apply what you see to your own WIP
Advent Process Day 15
I’m feeling my age, so a book that’s even older than me (by a lot as it was published in 1935)
Out of print but cheap on places like AbeBooks, David Low’s Ye Madde Deaigner is a superb meditation on the art, craft and thinking behind a long career at the highest levels of cartooning and caricature.
