Scan barcode
A review by mossyforest
Making Comics: Storytelling Secrets of Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels by Scott McCloud
5.0
This is an excellent book for anyone interested in writing comics and wants some tips and tricks to help them on their way. I am personally working on creating my first comic book and though I have had years of art education and lessons in how to draw I have never learned anything about incorporating that into a narrative structure. So this book was exactly what I was looking for.
Unlike most books about making your own comic this is not a how to draw book. It is very firm in it’s view that you can create comics in any way that you choose, but it attempts to cover fundamental things which all comics creators will need to consider including choice of images, creating characters and worlds and notes on tool favored by different artists.
This is Scott McCloud’s book and so is not the only way to do things but I found that it gave me plenty of food for thought and let me understand things better where I had been relying purely on intuition. Plus my nerdy heart loved the expanded noted at the end of each chapter including a whole page about pens! I could read about art materials for hours.
I will probably pick up one of his other non fiction books at some point. He uses the comic book format to explain points very effectively. The format makes sense for a book about comics but I am sure that it would also work well for other non fiction topics and my dyslexic brain found it really easy to understand (though I would disagree with it’s use of only uppercase letters, but that is a minor quibble and a personal thing).
So yes, a very useful book. I would recommend reading through it slowly and maybe doing some of the exercises at the end of the chapters (not cram it in less than a week, like I did, but I have a deadline looming).
Unlike most books about making your own comic this is not a how to draw book. It is very firm in it’s view that you can create comics in any way that you choose, but it attempts to cover fundamental things which all comics creators will need to consider including choice of images, creating characters and worlds and notes on tool favored by different artists.
This is Scott McCloud’s book and so is not the only way to do things but I found that it gave me plenty of food for thought and let me understand things better where I had been relying purely on intuition. Plus my nerdy heart loved the expanded noted at the end of each chapter including a whole page about pens! I could read about art materials for hours.
I will probably pick up one of his other non fiction books at some point. He uses the comic book format to explain points very effectively. The format makes sense for a book about comics but I am sure that it would also work well for other non fiction topics and my dyslexic brain found it really easy to understand (though I would disagree with it’s use of only uppercase letters, but that is a minor quibble and a personal thing).
So yes, a very useful book. I would recommend reading through it slowly and maybe doing some of the exercises at the end of the chapters (not cram it in less than a week, like I did, but I have a deadline looming).