Making Comics F2017

Making Comics – What we did Fall 2017

Making Comics Syllabus F17(PDF)

Before Class 1 – I was in São Paulo Brazil for talks – so
1. EX: write a brief reflection of what your interest in in comics/what brought you to this class; then list three favorite comics authors (and maybe what comics you’re reading now if any); next – say a few words about what you hope to get from this course; finally – say a bit about your experience (if any) making comics and drawing. If you’re feeling ambitious, I’d like you to post a sample or two of something you’ve made along these lines and from one of your favorite authors.
Intro
1. EX – Grids & Gestures
Cutouts and Cartoons – in which we reflect on Grids & Gestures, play with cutouts, and think about cartoons…
1. Norton Juster’s The Dot & The Line animated by Chuck Jones https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgqUya0kGPA
2. Heider & Simmel Experimental Study of Apparent Behavior https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9TWwG4SFWQ
3. Molly Bang Picture This
4. EX: make 3 new grids & gestures comics over the week, and post them here along with brief reflections on each and/or on the process as a whole
Form & structure
1. EX: Relationship Cutouts
2. EX: Cutout Comics
3. EX: How you got here X2
Form, Structure, Shiga
1. First, we will look at the comics you made over the week and spend some time talking theory on form and structure in comics and then…
2. A visit with cartoonist Jason Shiga
  1. Cool article on Jason’s comics as computer: https://boingboing.net/2015/03/25/jason-shiga-comics.html
  2. Interview with Jason on his career: http://www.tcj.com/interview-with-jason-shiga/
  3. Jason’s video on making an interactive comic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9Er7kmcPcI
Matt Madden
1. look at Matt Madden’s 99 Ways to Tell a Story and try some of the constraint-based exercises he invented
  1. Matt Madden’s blogpost on Tic Tac Toe Jam Comics making game
  2. Matt Madden’s list of other comics-making constraint games
  3. Matt’s 20-Lines drawings
  4. Oubapo site
  5. Paul Kirchner’s The Bus comic with intro and here https://imgur.com/a/S3k3C#0
2. EX: create a short comic that makes use of the spatial nature of comics to do something unusual in the storytelling that could ONLY be done in comics. We’ve talked about the idea of simultaneity in comics, looked at examples of panel breaking and the role the very structure of the panels can have in the storytelling, as well as the strange play with time in Here and How Things Work Out (your readings for this week posted on Day 4). Play around with it, have fun with it and see what you come up with! [You may opt to create some sort of hexaflexagon comic as an alternative if you are so inspired!]
3. EX: 99 Ways to Tell a Story + 1 – After exploring Matt Madden’s 99 Ways to Tell a Story, pretend that you are adding one more page to it. Take his original concept page – the base one – and make your own variation in a way that he didn’t already do in the book.
4. EX: 3 Ways to Tell a Story – Playing off of Matt Madden’s 99 Ways book, make a one-page comic of your own run of the mill story. Then, do THREE more versions of it (for FOUR in total), 1) where you play with STYLE 2) play with STORYTELLING (sequence, structure, etc.), and 3) distort FORM (things that may no longer even be comics by our definition). Push yourself to be inventive and really question the very structure of conveying a narrative.
Wordless Comics
1. Readings
  1. Laura Sneddon on Wordless Comics (w/great examples)
  2. David Berona on Peter Kuper’s The System article
  3. David Berona on Woodcut novels & resurgence of wordless comics
  4. Peter Kuper excerpt from The System, Morrison & Quitely wordless X-Men, Korgi wordless
2. EX: 99 Ways to Tell a Story + 1 – After exploring Matt Madden’s 99 Ways to Tell a Story, pretend that you are adding one more page to it. Take his original concept page – the base one – and make your own variation in a way that he didn’t already do in the book.
3. EX: 3 Ways to Tell a Story – Playing off of Matt Madden’s 99 Ways book, make a one-page comic of your own run of the mill story. Then, do THREE more versions of it (for FOUR in total), 1) where you play with STYLE 2) play with STORYTELLING (sequence, structure, etc.), and 3) distort FORM (things that may no longer even be comics by our definition). Push yourself to be inventive and really question the very structure of conveying a narrative.
Word-Image, Poetry Comics – in which we discuss word-picture relations in comics and comics-poetry.
1. Comics Poetry readings:
  1. comics-poetry anthology inkbrick
  2. Julian Peters comics adaptation of The Love Song of Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock https://julianpeterscomics.com/page-1-the-love-song-of-j-alfred-prufrock-by-t-s-eliot/
  3. Alexander Rothman on “What is Comics Poetry?” http://comicsbulletin.com/comics-poetry-essay-alexander-rothman-editor-chief-ink-brick/
2. Visual-Verbal Metaphor examples:
  1. The “Rabbit” page, with Key: http://spinweaveandcut.com/rocky-mt-comics-conference-and-rabbits-at-glc/
  2. On the genesis of my “Rose” page: http://spinweaveandcut.com/rscon5-visualizing-references-and-behind-the-scenes-sketches/
  3. A bit about the evolution of my own process http://spinweaveandcut.com/my-evolution/
3. EX: Create a short wordless comic (1-3 pages) that plays with some of the ideas we looked at in last class in discussion and in the various wordless comics we explored. Think about what you substitute for dialogue, think of ways to use text or invented text, how to give enough clues to create clarity while remaining wordless – and so, available to someone not speaking your language. Let’s make it wordless, but not silent – that is people are talking, etc… Check out the articles I posted for last week, specifically this one on on Berona’s analysis of Peter Kuper’s The System. http://ireadpictures.com/david-a-berona-on-the-system-by-peter-kuper/He offers 5 ways that authors do things in wordless comics that i’d like you to think about and try to incorporate into yours.
4. EX: Think about the airline safety manual cards we looked at in class (you can google these easy enough), the shoe-tying exercise we did, or any picture-instruction manual (IKEA, etc) and create your own one-page instruction manual that plays with things these do, subverts them, enhances them, or some variation that you come up with. This is using wordless comics as informational guides. Pick any mundane (or complex) thing you feel like (and yes, cookbook recipe format is fine). Pay attention to the things they allow and see if you can make something functional, useful, and engaging. Have fun with it!
Script-Telephone – in which we look at comics scripts and play telephone games and such…
1. EX: So, in Step One, someone wrote a list of 10 words/phrases. In Step Two, the next person drew something that represented each word from Step One. For this final Step, make a comic using all the images you received from Step Two – you will not have access to the original 10 words. This will be a short comic, 1-2 pages, making use in some way of all the images and the comic should have words and pictures. We’ll see what comes of this… [This is probably the only exercise I did with a class where I felt it really flopped. They did not all think this, but I did. I think it needed a few more constraints to really work]
2. EX: Try your hand at a short piece of comics poetry as observed in class and on inkbrick.com. You may invent your own comics poem, or adapt an existing poem or song, but we want to stress that you push away from doing a straight representational piece and really think about the use of the form and the specific interaction of words and pictures to get your meaning/feeling across.
Timing/Telephone/Thumbnails
1. in which we play a game of telephone from page to script and back again… And later think about timing, page turns, and such.
2. EX: Script-to-page translations – I provided scripts to one page from an existing comic. Everyone tried their hand at laying out the page and then comparing to each other’s and the actual comic
3. EX: Visual Metaphor Comic
  1. In class we looked at how comics scripts become comics pages – textual description translated into visual depiction. For this assignment, I want you to try a piece where words and images co-generate one another. First, have a look at “This is Information” by Moore and Gebbie that we read a while back and then look at the following comics or pages by me:
    1. Show of Hands http://spinweaveandcut.com/show-of-hands/
    2. The Rabbit Page: http://spinweaveandcut.com/rocky-mt-comics-conference-and-rabbits-at-glc/
    3. Maxine Says: http://spinweaveandcut.com/in-print-maxine-says/
    4. Seeing Red/Feeling Blue http://spinweaveandcut.com/on-view-seeing-red-feeling-blue/and the Rose page from Unflattening: http://spinweaveandcut.com/rscon5-visualizing-references-and-behind-the-scenes-sketches/
  2. You are to make a one page multi-panel comic where you select a single thematic element (along the lines of what I’ve done in the examples) to use literally/metaphorically throughout as a way of linking the piece together. A short way to think about is to talk about one thing in terms of another (i.e. talk about games by talking about rabbits, talk about democracy by talking about hands, comics as roses, etc.) Keep your metaphor running in some way for each beat of your narrative. Take this in whatever direction you need to – and have fun with it!
4. EX: Visual analysis/Annotation
Architecture, Shape of Form, Chris Ware’s Building Stories
1. We looked at Building Stories in class and discussed different ways Ware organized the page to make meaning.
2. Readings
  1. my comic bi(bli)ography http://spinweaveandcut.com/bibliography-final-version/
  2. R Sikoryak’s iTunes Terms & Conditions adaptation https://www.drawnandquarterly.com/terms-and-conditions
  3. pages from Sikoryak’s Terms & Conditions by scrolling here: https://itunestandc.tumblr.com
  4. my comic “A Life in Comics” http://spinweaveandcut.com/greene-anthropocene/
  5. Bonus, from our metaphorical comics – check out my climate comic The Fragile Framework http://www.nature.com/news/the-fragile-framework-1.18861
3. EX: Make a short comic about yourself by using at least three instances where you directly reference the style from 3 different artists (comics or related) that you admire or were influenced by as a way to tell your narrative. Play with it, see if it gives you any ideas about your own drawing process, your style, composition ideas. It’s a chance to learn a bit about your own comics making by adopting the look of others. See my example “bi(bli)ography” and R.Sikoryak’s “iTunes Terms & Conditions” adaptation – all of which i linked to above..
22 Panels That Always work
1. Introducing Wally Wood’s 22 Panels that Always Work as an activity, with further discussion on architecture, diagrams, and Chris Ware, plus Kevin Huizenga, and have a look at some experimental comics from Polystyreneand others…
2. Reading: Paul Gravett on Chris Ware & Building Stories
3. EX: Thumbnails to page
  1. Choose from either the “zither/flow” exercise we thumbnailed in class, or the 3-page fight scene or conversation ones we mocked up focusing on page turns, and flesh out one of these three in-class assignments as a more fully mocked up page – and post both your original thumbnail sketches along with the more realized version.
4. EX: Autobiographical Influences comic
Guest/Recipe Book
1. Cartoonist Tyler Cohen joins use for a visit http://www.primazonia.com/about/index.html
2. EX: Final Project Proposal
3. EX: Recipe Book Contribution
  1. Imagine that as a group we are creating our own Making Comics Textbook, for which each class member contributes a short, single chapter highlighting some element of comics creation that you feel is particularly important, is unique to your own way of working, was helpful to you in learning to make comics – something that stands out and you’d like to explore a bit in depth in terms of organizing it in such a way to benefit others from your experience. This can include visual examples, process artifacts, the sorts of things you would want to see to learn for yourself. In addition to book-like formats, we can try other formats – doing it as a video, in comics form, and something online – that provides links to related resources.
Odds’n’Ends
1. EX: 22 Panels Exercise
Penultimate
1. Mini-comics resources
Final Project sharing