Scott McCloud Previews Making Comics
This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on Dec. 6, 2005 Sign up now!
By Heidi MacDonald -- Publishers Weekly, 12/6/2005
Although the ink is still drying on the "Best of" lists for 2005, it's not too soon to start talking about the graphic novels that are going to make some noise in 2006. One of them will surely be Scott McCloud's Making Comics, which completes his trilogy of books deconstructing the form that began with Understanding Comics and continued in Reinventing Comics. Both have become required reading; Understanding Comics has become something of a standard text not just for cartoonists, but for Web designers and other visual storytellers as well. McCloud's theories on semiotics and imagery have become part of the standard way of talking about the medium.
Making Comics isn't due till September 2006 from HarperCollins, but McCloud was willing to give a little preview. As the title indicates, the book is concerned with the practical techniques of making comics and will be divided into five chapters, starting with "Writing with Pictures."
"It's the choice of moments, choice of frame, choice of word, choice of image and choice of flow," McCloud explains. "The choice of moment is something that's completely invisible—you never see the panels that weren't drawn. All of the books [on making comics] you'll find on the shelves are talking about what to do after you've already made that decision: how the action is being framed and from what angle, how to draw a face and a dress and a battleship.
"The second chapter is 'Stories for Humans,' " he continues." It's three things: body language, facial expressions and character design, the whole business of creating a human being on the page."
The third chapter is "Words and Pictures," with no further elaboration, while the fourth will cover an aspect of comics that McCloud feels is particularly lacking in American comics: world building.
"American comics fall on their ass again and again trying to create a world and let a reader enter the world," he says. "The through line of American comics is the primacy of the figure. But if you look at Herge and Moebius and David B., the one thing that they all have in common, the European house style, is a fascination with world building. Tintin may run down a hill, but the things that surround him are handled with equal democracy of form."
The book winds up with an examination of "Tools and Techniques."
McCloud says he's "obsessed with this book because a certain portion of the 14-year-olds reading manga in B&N are going to try to make comics. There will be a tidal wave of talented new artists getting into art school and trying to do it on their own. I'll be greeting them at the door, smiling and giving them a book."
