Sequential art

Reading comics and making comics

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Summer is over. It technically lasts until September 22, but summer is over when school starts. Back in May I made a list of five things I was looking forward to during the summer:

1. Sending out this newsletter

2. Riding my bike (with Knox)

3. Reading comics from the library

4. Writing and drawing

5. Being outside

Looking back I obviously should have added “prepare to be responsible for another human.” I had a nice summer. How was yours? I mostly did all of the things on my list but one thing I really enjoyed was reading comics.

Here are all the comics I read: GLEEM – Freddy Carrasco | Shortcomings – Adrian Tomine | Tokyo These Days, Vol. 1 – Taiyō Matsumoto | Keeping Two – Jordan Crane | American Born Chinese – Gene Luen Yang | No One Else – R. Kikuo Johnson | Stone Fruit – Lee Lai | Tokyo These Days, Vol. 2 – Taiyō Matsumoto | Night Fisher – R. Kikuo Johnson | Look Back – Tatsuki Fujimoto | Here – Richard McGuire | The Great Beyond – Léa Murawiec | The Con Artists – Luke Healy | Flake – Matthew Dooley | The Grande Odalisque - Vivés, Ruppert & Mulot | How to Baby - Liana Finck | Americana - Luke Healy | Masters of the Nefarious - Pierre La Police | Perfect Example - John Porcellino | Whatcha Mean What’s a Zine? - Mark Todd & Esther Pearl Watson | Are You Willing to Die for the Cause? - Chris Oliveros | Anna - Mia Oberländer | Self-Esteem and the End of the World - Luke Healy

Comics (or sequential art) tend to feature a lot of things I’m interested in: composition, space and time, typography, image making and abstraction, printing, and humor. Also, artists who make comics in book form (or graphic novels) have to consider things that seem unique to the format: what is visually revealed to the reader when they turn the page, the relationship between panels and the relationship between the panels and the composition of the spread, and spending a lot of time making something that could be consumed quite quickly (in this interview Chris Ware says each page takes him about 40 hours to draw).

I’ve started reading a lot of comics (input) because I want to make a lot of comics (output). This is the first one.

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“Did you introduce yourself at soccer practice?” “Nah, I’m just a shy guy.”

ALSO

• Every Frame a Painting is back!

• Good people making good things – Entwined: an Anthology of Creativity & Motherhood

• Old and beautiful textbooks from Japan

• On creating the backgrounds for My Neighbor Totoro

• Use code VOLK10 to get 10% off a Prixel! See how we’ve used it here and here.

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Made with love by Mitchell, Carly, Knox & Olive

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