The Secret Origins of Comics Studies by Matthew J. Smith & Randy Duncan

Author:Matthew J. Smith & Randy Duncan
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2017-09-18T16:00:00+00:00

Throughout, the focus is on the techniques artists would need to create their own comics, yet they illustrate their arguments with sophisticated close readings of examples drawn from the canon of historical and contemporary “masters of the comic arts.” And they consistently display an interest in comics as a medium that contrasts sharply with other how-to books, such as Nat Gertler and Steve Lieber’s The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Creating a Graphic Novel (2004), which is more narrowly focused on business and craft concerns.

A more interesting and productive contrast might be made with Carl Potts’ The DC Comics Guide to Creating Comics: Inside the Art of Visual Storytelling (2013). Potts worked for several decades as a trainer of new comics artists for Marvel, became a consultant for DC and other publishers, and developed his ideas about visual storytelling from a presentation he gave on the subject at the 1993 Comics Arts Conference. Unlike Eisner, Spiegelman, McCloud, or Abel and Madden, Potts maintains a strong focus on superhero comics (reflecting his particular set of experiences in the industry), with an emphasis on the ways that the visual presentation of the material “affects the audience” (2013, p. 33).

Much of his vocabulary for discussing visual storytelling derives from established filmmaking practices (close-ups, zooms, tracking shots, montage), rather than the development of a medium-specific vocabulary. For example, Potts describes the comics artist as fulfilling the roles that might be served in film by the director, the cinematographer, the casting director, the lighting director, the set designer, the editor, and so forth (2013, p. 33). As with the traditions of classical Hollywood style, Potts argues that comics technique serves the story best when it is essentially invisible: “The creators’ choices and execution will appear seamless—seemingly self-evident as the best way to execute the stories!” (2013, p. 24) For Potts, visual storytelling in comics is less an art than it is a craft—a means of engaging and entertaining a mass audience with stories that are immediately accessible and comprehensible. By contrast, most of the examples that Abel and Madden draw upon come from the alternative comics tradition; their examples reflect their belief that the most innovative and interesting work was coming from artists who enjoyed some degree of freedom from the major publishers.

Perhaps the most distinctive feature of Abel and Madden’s work is a focus on permutations of basic story types or the different possibilities that an artist might explore in translating a core action into a single panel (2008, p. 153). Madden has taken this idea of permutation even further in his 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style (2005), a work inspired by Raymond Queneau—a French novelist and poet who was active in the Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (Oulipo) movement. Here, Madden introduces what he calls a “template story” involving a man working late, checking the time, and looking for a snack in his refrigerator and redraws it to explore a range of different narrational techniques, visual styles, and genre conventions. As

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