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Understanding Comics (3 Points)

 In sophomore year, we had to read parts of this book so we could understand how to storyboard/make animatics better. I'm excited to be able to read the entirety now, as it was amazingly helpful before! Not sure if counts, but here is the comic project I made sophomore year using parts of the book as reference on how to create each shot. It was made with an ink brush and took ~5 days to complete (and so much ink). It was on poster paper, so it was ~30 x 20 inches as well.





What I loved about this book, is that it teaches you things about comics you never think about unless you plan on creating them. Things I understood without knowing the context behind them, finally started to make sense after reading Scott's witty, easily digestible explanation of why comics are structured like how they are. 

I think a great topical take-away was his description of word/picture combinations. We talked about wordless comics last week, but knowing when to use words to control the reader's focus is crucial to comic making. Like they say, pictures can speak a thousand words if you know what you're doing. How you text vs don't treat text can drastically alter how the reader interprets the work. Scott gives the example of having text that says "Bob was a happy baby. At 18 he went to war. At 36 he bought a house. He died at 72." He shows different instances of how the art drawn with that same text can alter the meaning of it: i.e. it could be showing exactly what it's describing, it can be picturing a single character saying all of that as dialogue (character exposition), or it could be depicted entirely in symbols which takes away most of the story and makes it less personal. Using these techniques to make the reader feel a certain is incredibly important to how you want to portray the tone of the work. Really glad I know this for future references.


Bonus: One of my classmates took one of the panels of the book and made it into a sticker of one of our professors. He wears track suits and whenever we asked him a question he would respond with "check canvas".





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