*McCloud S, Making Comics, Harper (New York: 2006) *Eisner W, Comics and Sequential Art¸ WW Norton (New York: 1985) I hope that sharing these pictures might encourage you to try out the game, to see how visual art might bring new perspectives to textual art, and also to see that you don’t have to be an artist to enjoy and learn from drawing! It’s probably best that I avoid the usual self-depreciating remarks about my drawing, because, you know, obviously. I thought I’d write this post to explain and stick the images all together in this post so you can follow if you’re interested. I have been tweeting the results so far, which will probably have made no sense if you follow me on twitter. It is an exercise in economy of expression as well as encouraging you to try out ideas and images that you might not usually use. The point is to try and think of the best and clearest way to encapsulate whatever crazy notion your partner has sent you now in a single frame. There are a number of ways that you could play this game with the written word – perhaps inverting it, such that after each 100 words you write your partner sends you an image which has to be incorporated into the story. Expect surrealism, especially if you do it with my Dad. You draw that, they take a look, and tell you what they do after. Then your partner tells you what your figure is going to do next. In the first frame you draw a figure, standing about, not doing much of anything. You start out by drawing 16 equally sized frames. If you’re into comics then McCloud’s work is really worth checking out. The game is taken from p56 of Scott McCloud’s fantastic book Making Comics** (you can check out Scott’s website here). Use of shadows, close ups and long shots, framing those things central to the action or pulling the camera so that the horrible image is just of screen: these are all things that can be achieved textually as well as visually.īoth because I love comics and to explore this notion of sequential art, I have been playing a game with my father ( an actual real artist). I moved her to a balcony so that she was looking down on them. In a story I was working on this week I wanted to show that the central character felt superior and more powerful than those she was watching. We make choices.Įven the core visual ideas in comic book writing can translate to broader fiction. And even there, we can’t describe everything our characters see and feel. We are so used to selective framing in story telling that when a story comes along that tells in “real time” we notice it as unusual. When we write prose, we are selective about what we show the reader, drawing their attention to key elements or ideas and skipping things that are less important or might drag down the pace. Of course, the same is true of any piece of storytelling. Comic book writing is not just about drawing the picture but also about choosing which picture to draw. With so little space to tell the story, each image in each frame must successfully catch the essence of the action whilst establishing the drama, tension and mood. It breaks the left-to-right convention.“Sequential Art” is the rather lofty term that Will Eisner used in his seminal work Comics and Sequential Art*to describe the process of arranging pictures, images and words to narrate a story. The panel can be diagrammed like a sentence. Eisner analyzes one of his Spirit stories in which the hero wishes he could fly, is struck by a stray bullet, and achieves his goal en route to the earth. The repetitiveness of comics form a language with its own grammar. Fortunately, the structures of illustration and of prose are similar. The reader must have both visual and verbal interpretive skills. "Reading" includes written words but also pictures, maps, circuit diagrams, and musical notes. Comics began as short features but evolved into "graphic novels" and become part of the "early literary diet" of young people. Daily comic strips, first appearing circa 1934, are the main forums for sequential art in today's world. "Comics as a Form of Reading" is a philosophic introduction to the modern form of sequential art.
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