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Sean Rylee Gimena. It then tests this new conception in practice: two original visual demonstrations clarify the particular dialectic relationships between subjects and media, in an examination of drawing style and genre, social consensus and self-conscious constraint.
Based on Will Eisner? In Comics and Sequential Art, Eisner reveals the basic building blocks and principles of comics, including imagery, the frame, and the application of time, space, and visual forms.
Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative teaches how to control a story effectively using a broad array of techniques. With examples from Eisner? Foster, R. Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Milton Caniff, Al Capp, and George Herriman, these books distill the art of graphic storytelling into principles that every comic artist, writer, and filmmaker should know.
Author : Michael Dooley Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: Category: Art Page: View: Download » Featuring essays by, and interviews with, more than sixty professionals, educators, and critics, the book provides an in-depth view of the art, business, and history of comics art.
Readers will learn about a wide variety of genres, from editorial cartoons, political comics, and comic strips to graphic novels, superhero sagas, and alternative comics.
Other featured topics include the role of comic art in related fields such as animation, design, and illustration; lesson plans by top teachers; and essays on how to thrive and grow as a creative comic artist. Master different types of comic book stories. Write and illustrate effective dialogue. Develop ideas that can be turned into dynamic stories. Will Eisner is one of the twentieth century's great American artists, a man who pioneered the field of comic arts.
Here, in his classic Comics and Sequential Art, he refines the art of graphic storytelling into clear, concise principles that every cartoonist, comic artist, writer, and filmmaker meeds to know.
Adapted from Eisner's landmark course at New York's School of Visual Arts, Comics and Sequential Art is an essential text filled with invaluable theories and easy-to-use techniques.
Eisner reveals here the fundamentals of graphic storytelling. In this type of story, a prologue is necessary. This allows the comics story- teller to employ graphic devices to convey flashback as well as to intensify the reactions of the individuals In the following story, the joke is simple. A involved. Text alone is not enough to sustain the former hit man attempts to fulfilla contract fifty ambiance of the graphic narrative.
The telling of a years after the date he was employed to execute joke with graphics requires that the storyteller it. In doing so, he dies of a heart attack. His victim maintain absolute control of the imagery. It survives unaware that he was about to be assas- becomes neces- sary, therefore, to avoid subtlety sinated by a friend. The joke is in the irony of the in art and to depend on stereotypes and easily surprising pity he feels for the hit man, and the recognized images.
The pro- cess of writing for graphic narration concerns itself with the development of the concept, then the description of it and the construction of the narrative chain in order to translate it into imagery. The dialogue supports the imageryboth are in service to the story.
They combine and emerge as a seamless whole. The ideal writing process occurs where the writer and artist are the same person.
This, in effect, shortens the distance between the idea and its translation. It produces a product that more closely reflects the intent of the writer. In theater or film, the script falls into the hands of directors, actors, cameramen and other technicians.
In comics, the writing will be broken down into panels and pages by one or more artists. In some cases a breakdown or roughly sketched interpretation acts as a blueprint. There is a distinct difference between writing for a book of text and a graphic novel. For one thing, a type font has no involvement in the nature, structure or quality of a story. Type does not translate; images do.
Writing that is translated into graphic dramatization, whether film or comics, must adapt to the mechanics of the form. For example, writing for film or com- ics is economical, eschews literary style, and does not need descriptive passages that evoke images by analogous prose.
The idea is the dominant element. Often a writer will reinforce the translation process by supplying depth In effect, writing descriptions in the graphic not intended medium means to be reproduced, but writing for the artist. The writer supplies the rather designed to give the artist guidance. His dialogue in balloons is addressed to the reader, but the description of the action is addressed to the graphic translator.
Here, for example, is the task facing a translating artist who must deal with the following script panel one, page one of a ten- page, high-action crime story built mainly on pursuit. The detective enters from the left.
He limps a bit an old war wound and favors the leg. His craggy face is a tale of years of struggle, pain and disappointment. His eyes are cold blue steel and with a swift jun- gle animal scan, they sweep the room.
This man has killed. He is seething with rage at the humiliation of being called in so late to the case. He masks his anger but not his twitching jaw muscles.
Show middle distance shot slightly from above with Commissioner and other offi- cers standing awkwardly against the office wall. If you expect me to tidy up a mess, youd bet- ter put those clerks into storage.
The script provides the artist with an internal view of the detective in the hope that the character can be limned well enough to imply all that the writer hopes to convey. But we know that to portray things like an old war wound, eyes sweep- ing the room, seething rage, humiliation and working jaw muscles may not be possible in a single middle-shot panel.
What is the writer asking for? Is the writer willing to permit these character- istics to be divined by the reader, or is it critical to the story that they be clearly shown? The artist is faced with a translation dilemma. How important are the twitch- ing jaw muscles and the other subtle characteristics? Indeed, how much needs to be shown in one panel? It is, of course, possible to ultimately convey the detectives persona by small inferences in successive panels, providing that fast-paced action does not interfere.
Another accommodation is to insert a narrative panel that shows the subtle sub-surface characteristics. All of this depends on space. As this example demonstrates, graphic narrative writing must deal with the limitations of the medium as well as the interpretation of the artist.
Comics is a medium confined to still images, bereft of sound and motion, and writing must accommodate these restrictions. Writers must also factor into their expectations the skills of the art- ist. The artist or the writer or both are challenged by the need to convey internals.
Subtle gestures or provocative postures are not easy to depict without the continuing movement afforded by film. Another example of writing that runs afoul of the mediums limitations is the following passage:.
The detective dropped gracefully through the manhole into a space between the crates of ammunition. He would wait there until the killers brought their prisoner into a space lit by an anemic watt bulb at the end of the room. His mind rewound. It was Vietnam again. The Delta was still. He was won- dering whether the beating of his heart could be heard as he waited behind the boxes of caliber rounds.
The months of basic back at Parris Island really hadnt prepared him for this. Ah yes, in the barriowhere he mis- spent his preschool yearswas more like it. His big brother their taught him prisoner? Paulo, when you drop from the fire escape, freeze. You stay in the alley behind you devote to this? Theres a lot alert.
He peered around thein support story of the How text. Then, the cold steel mouth here. IS keep the For the story flow storyteller to translate this narrative to alive? In this case, the amount of space, integral to allocated in the break- down, will the graphic.
In such a Imagine for this purpose you are the artist and you must translate this passage into a graphic narrative: How many panels would you devote to paragraph one? In writing for graphic storytelling, the ultimate judgment of the narrative is made after the work is translated into art. The writer, therefore, must be aware of the obstacles on the way to publication. When text alone is the vehicle in conveying a story to the reader, there is little chance of a misperception. But from text to visual, there is a high probability of a difference in outcome, stemming from lack of skill to lack of time.
In this medium, storytelling is not always a straight line from the mind to the reader. Here is what often happens. In the comics medium, the continuing adventure narrative first appeared in the daily newspaper strips. This was feasible because until the s, newspapers dominated popular reading and were a regular uninterrupted family compan- ion. In those years, there was fierce competition on the newsstands and comics, particularly continuity strips, held the loyalty of readers.
This required storytell- ing skills. In , Milton Caniff in those days most cartoonists wrote and drew their own strips began Terry and the Pirates. This strip went beyond the daily joke for- mat and purported to be a never-ending story. Caniff was carrying forward the adventure theme that Lyman Young began in Tim Tylers Luck a few years previ- ous.
Caniff not only brought sophisticated art to the medium but The his storytelling, introductory albeit strip parsed for Terry out and the daily in Pirates segments, was so sturdy that it was usable laid out the cast of char- acters and set the material for the aborning comic books.
In later sequences , Caniff demonstrates his Art In his book, The brilliant of the control of R. Funnies, storytelling. Harvey Remember, a full day elapsed between each strip, credits Caniff with virtually redefining the yet he never lost his readers. As a storyteller he enhanced the traditional formula by incorporating character devel- opment into action-packed plots.
By , Caniffs storytelling had matured, as this short sequence from Steve Canyon shows. He demonstrates here a well-controlled flow of story that sustains its connection between strips.
His plots are played out with panels that are mostly standard so that they do not intr ude graphically. This enhances the flow of the narrative and forces concentration on the actors. In this story, his action-filled epi- sodes accelerate the rhythm of the strip yet allow the dialogue to retain its meter.
He uses wordless panels masterfully and composes them so that they invite the reader to participate in the acting. There is a major structural difference between newspaper storytelling strips and comic books. In comic books, stories come to a definite conclusion, a tradition that began when the early comic books advertised that each story was complete. A book is free-standing, whereas newspapers are connected to the pattern of daily life. In a daily continuity, therefore, the storyteller need only segue into the next adventure.
Caniff understood that the story had to emulate the seamless flow of lifes experiences and that the human adventure doesnt have neat end-ings.
His work shows us how to tell a story that could make itself part of the readers daily life. The success of such a shortening lies in the preservation of the essence. The major theme or plot must be preserved, and the collateral dramatization is cut to the bone. In this, the reader supplies the intervening action either by reflexive deduction or dra- wing from experience.
Ernest Hemingway narrated the shortest short story as follows: For sale, baby shoes, never used. It would not be hard to write a larger story around this core. The power of this story lies in the skill with which the selection of the touch- stone points are made. They co-opt the reader and immerse him or her in a sea of memory and experience. Cleverly, it forces the reader to write the story.
The visual here is designed to evoke a setting. With the Krazy Kat Sunday comics page, he demonstrated compact story delivery by deploying his images in a format that would influence generations of comics storytellers who came after him. Harold Foster, who for six years had produced a daily strip based on the popular Tarzan novels, switched to a story of his own.
Prince Valiant is the story of a young knight in the days of King Arthur. It is peopled with characters drawn from legend and the books of Sir Walter Scott. In comic books, the trend was to have the story told with images and storytelling depended dialogue balloons mostly on text. In the literary world, clas- sic book illustrated illustration was more highly his stories regarded than comics. Prince Valiant the text example unmolested.
Foster maintained the partnership of text narrative domi- nance of the art by illustrating the and image whole principle of the action. Its brevity early allowed episode him to employ art that told a great deal of story.
The high degree of accuracy and groping detail should toward a not be regarded as sequential purely format it tois a major ingredient in decorative; storytelling.
In this example, Sikoryak compresses Dantes epic poem, The Inferno one of the three canticles that make up The Divine Comedy , into ten Bazooka Joe comic strips in and of themselves an exercise in compression. The Inferno is bril- liantly boiled down to its essence while the structure and intrinsic character of Bazooka Joe is also retained!
But early efforts in graphic narrative literature approached this form with an almost total elimina- tion of words. In Belgium, Frans Masereel, a skilled wood engraver, pioneered in the expan- sion of this art and employed it as a narrative tool.
In , Masareels Die Sonne was published in Germany. It consisted of sixty- three plates. Masareel was joined by German artist Otto Nckel, whose wood engravings formed the basis of Destiny, a more ambitious work approximately two hundred plates. This appeared in the United States about The story here was more sophisticated and the graphic narrative more complex.
A study of the graphic novel form will reveal that a major burden of narration is assigned to the artwork. But with the proliferation of the comic book, the respon- sibility for the telling of the story is shared by text and image. The success of this mix of medium quickly succeeded and the totally graphic technique quickly gave way to the familiar graphic novel. A forerunner of the modern graphic novel is found in the work of Lynd Ward. He stands out as perhaps the most provocative graphic storyteller in the twentieth century.
In he published Vertigo, a graphic novel narrated entirely with wood-engraved images. What is even more significant is that in over three hundred pages, Vertigos only concession to text is the occasional use of signs and posters.
Ward kept the narrative focused by titling each chapter with a date. He used the entire page as a panel.
Printed on only one side of the leaf, with each image floating in open space, he obliged the reader to turn a page in order to get to the next panel. This gave the reader time to dwell on each image and gave the storyteller total reader engagement. Vertigo was printed as a conventional book and sold in book stores. It is inter- esting to note that this occurred about the time the first comic books appeared on newsstands.
Vertigo was published by a mainstream publisher. The story requires the reader to contribute dialogue and the intervening flow of action between pages.
While this permutation succeeded in demonstrating the viability of graphic storytelling, to an audience alien to comics it could not go very far beyond simply breaking new ground. Many readers found this book dif- ficult to read. Some enjoyed the magnificent effects of his woodcuts. But in the main, this experiment overlooked the reinforcement of a balanced mix of image and text. The amount of action that transpires between these scenes takes considerable input from the reader to comprehend.
There is a cer- tain visual literacy that is second. For the practitioner writer or artist , Vertigo can serve as a skeleton upon which to experiment with a story that has tighter graphic sequencing. The ratio of its importance to other elements is arguable, but it is an inescapable ingredient. The reality is that artistic style tells story. Remember, this is a graphic medium and the reader absorbs mood and other abstracts through the artwork.
Style of art not only connects the reader with the artist but it sets ambiance and has language value. Do not confuse technique with style. Style, as we define it here, is the artworks look and feel in service of its message. Certain graphic stories are best told with a style appropriate to the content, and they often succeed or fail on that account. This is usually more of a problem for the artist than the writer, since it requires an artist to adopt a style appropriate to the story.
There are some artists who can emulate almost any style, but this requires the discipline of a forger. Many contemporary artists engaged in graphic storytelling have an inherent artistic style compatible to content. In Maus, Art Spiegelman worked in a style that, because of its character, delivered story. The overall look appropriately conveyed the impression that the artwork was created and smuggled out of a concentration camp.
This is graphic storytelling. In his illustrations for Introduction to Kafka, a graphic biography of the Czech author, Robert Crumbs natural style succeeds as a narrative. It is gen- erated by the storytellers passion. It carries the storys emotional charge to the reader. A classic example of that is Al Capps long-running satirical strip, Lil Abner.
One can feel the intensity and hear the laughter of the storyteller behind the art. In this segment of daily strips Capp keeps the high- voltage story going. The reader laughs even before ingesting the story, which in this example is quite thin. The conflict, graphic storyteller has to be unmasks the storyteller. Sentiment is defined as an attitude resulting from feelings associated with emotion, idealism and nostalgia. Schmaltz stems from a Yiddish word for oily or fat and is associated in storytelling with exploitive emotionalism and excessive pathos.
Violence portrays the act of physical struggle. Pornography, in graphic storytelling, can be defined as excessive exploitation of sexual activity to titillate.
Ultimately, storytellers have a responsibility not only to the reader but to them- selves. Stories have influence. This imposes on the storyteller certain choices. What effect will the story have? Does the storyteller want to be identified with it? What are the limits of moral standards to which he will adhere? A comic is essentially visual, which makes its package the product. This is not lost on the retailer and distributor, who are the final access to the reader. This encourages the creators to concentrate on form rather than content.
The market, therefore, exercises a creative influence. The graphic storyteller, in pursuit of the market, will give sovereignty to the graphics. The graphic story- teller interested in the retention of readership will keep graphics in service to the story. An ever- advancing technology affects the communication environment. A capsule history of transmitting graphics demonstrates the validity of this concern.
The vehicles used have always been and still are in ceaseless evolution. I propose, therefore, to conclude this examination of graphic storytelling by posing the following questions:.
Over time, have the stories people tell been changed by the new methods of transmission? What has been the role of the image in human communication? How has changing technology affected underlying graphic storytelling skills? How many of the classic vehicles of communication have disappeared as a result of advances in delivery? How have the Internet and digital technology altered the audience? These questions do not have simple answers, but thinking about them can help develop a working perspective that is an abiding necessity to a graphic storyteller.
Comics is a medium that is especially linked to its method of publication. As the ever-evolving vehicles of modern communication respond to social needs by accelerating the speed of delivery and the quality of imagery, it affects style, technique and reading rhythm of graphically told stories.
Digital technology has begun to compete with print, so mastery of this tool is now worth the creators attention.
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