Comics and Graphic Novels: Technique

Comic book, graphic novel illustrator and SVA graduate Shawn Martinbrough, known for his cinematic, high contrast noir style; demonstrates how to set a mood, design characters and locations, stage action and enhance drama, and discusses important topics like page layout, panel design, and cover design. This is the definitive instructional book on noir comics.

Best-selling Marvel Comics writer, Brian Michael Bendis shares writing tools and techniques he uses in clear step-by-step lessons, teaching everything they'll need to take their ideas from script to dynamic sequential art. Bendis exposes the most effective methods for crafting comic scripts, showcases insights from fellow creators, reveals business secrets all comics writers must know and challenges readers with exercises to jumpstart their own writing.

New edition of DIY guide to zine-making, covers all the bases for beginners and hits on more advanced topics like Creative Commons licenses, legality, and sustainability. Part history lesson, part how-to guide, all fun.

Longtime SVA comics instructor, Klaus Janson brings his over 30 years of experience as a major force in mainstream comics to the most critical step of comic book storytelling: penciling! Covering everything from anatomy to composition to page design.

SVA instructor and iconic comic book artist Klaus Janson demonstrates an array of inking techniques, covering such topics as using textures, varying line weights, creating the illusion of three-dimensionality, and working with light and dark. This one-stop book is packed with a wealth of his time tested techniques, practical advice, and professional secrets.

Essential resource for comics creators looking to make intriguing, action-packed comics. Offers a unique behind-the-curtain look at the DC Comics creative process. Carl is a longtime SVA Cartooning instructor and has written comics for D.C., Marvel, and independent publishers.

Drawing Words and Writing Pictures is structured as a course on comic creation that centers on storytelling and concludes with making a finished comic. With chapters on lettering, story structure, and panel layout, the fifteen lessons offered - each complete with homework, extra credit activities and supplementary reading suggestions - provide a solid introduction for anyone interested in making their own comics. Additional resources, lessons, and after-class help are available on the DW-WP website. Based on classes they taught here at SVA.

A companion to Comic & Sequential Art: the principles examined in that title are applied to the process of graphic storytelling. Eisner shows artists, film-makers, writers and designers how to craft stories in a visual medium. Based on Eisner's SVA class of the same name. Pro Tip: Eisner had a profound influence on filmmaking. Read the early Spirit comics and then watch Citizen Kane and you will see what I mean.

A poignant and instructive guide detailing the tenets of artistry and story-telling inherent in the graphic memoir medium. With over two dozen professional examples and a deep-dive into his own genre defining work, Tom encourages readers to hone their own signature style in the best way to represent their journeys on the page.

Demonstrates how to conceive and draw original characters that reflect diverse racial, ethnic, and gender identities, featuring work by the artists represented in Saturday AM magazine, a recognized global brand that unites the two biggest trends in Young Adult graphic novels/comic books: diversity and manga.

The ultimate guide to visual storytelling! How to make the audience ""feel"" the story while they are ""reading"" the story. Using his experiences from working in the comic book industry, movie studios and teaching, Marcos introduces the reader to a step-by-step system that will create the most successful storyboards and graphics for the best visual communication. After a brief discussion on narrative art, Marcos introduces us to drawing and composing a single image, to composing steady shots to drawing to compose for continuity between all the shots. These lessons are then applied to three diverse story lines - a train accident, a cowboy tale and bikers approaching a mysterious house. In addition to setting up the shots, he also explains and illustrates visual character development, emotive stances and expressions along with development of the environmental setting to fully develop the visual narrative.

The follow-up to Framed Ink from Marcos Mateu-Mestre, Framed Ink 2 provides insight into another compositional tool --the energy within the working frame.

Eisner presents the principles of graphic storytelling in this guide, which is based on and shares its title with the comics course he taught here at SVA. Readers will learn the basic anatomy, fundamentals of story craft and how the medium works as a means of expression. Pro Tip: Eisner coined the phrase sequential art as applied to the comics medium and was the first to approach comics as an art form.

The final volume of Will Eisner's instructional trilogy explores the critical principle of body grammar in comics storytelling. Designed and outlined by Will Eisner before his death in 2005, this posthumous work, reveals the secrets of Eisner's own techniques and theories of movement, body mechanics, facial expressions, and posture: the key components of graphic storytelling.

Williams is a leader in digital penciling and inking; and here, in clear, step-by-step directions. Creating a template, sketching on the computer, penciling, and inking digitally are all covered.

Accessible but extensive step-by-step lessons. Highly recommended by multiple cartooning instructors.

Builds on the foundation established with the first book in the series.

Focus on drawing perspective for landscapes, interiors, and other animated backgrounds to fit comic-strip panels.

The ways of expressing a story in art are many and varied. The use of perspective, creative page layout, continuous action flowing from one panel to the next, a collage design, the use of shadow and light, and intersecting panels are all techniques for telling a story. The avenues of expression are as varied as the artists and cartoonists who express them and the book takes you on a journey to explore those approaches to artistic expression through the eyes of 42 artists.

99 Ways to Tell a Story is a series of one-page comics that tell the same story in ninety-nine different ways. Inspired by Raymond Queneau's 1947 Exercises in Style, a mainstay of creative writing courses. Here is a chance to see the full scope of opportunities available to the storyteller, each applied to a single scenario: varying points of view, visual and verbal parodies, formal reimaginings, and radical shuffling of the basic components of the story. Matt's amazing series of approaches will inspire storytellers to think through and around obstacles that might otherwise prevent them from getting good ideas onto the page.

In this "second semester" follow-up to their widely acclaimed 2008 Drawing Words and Writing Pictures, Jessica and Matt generously bring their breath of knowledge and depth of expertise to bear on advanced topics such as story composition, coloring, and file formatting, This is a vital companion to the introductory information in their first volume and together make for the most thorough and comprehensive comics instruction available in book form.

In exquisite detail, Mateu-Mestre lays out distinct approaches to drawing in the book's chapters--The Ballpoint Pen, Graphite Pencil, The Digital Way, and The Gray Scale--outlining the benefits and challenges of each, and specific digital editing techniques that can be applied to one's work in all the mediums.

McCloud focuses his analysis on the art form itself, exploring the creation of comics, from the broadest principles to the sharpest details (like how to accentuate a character's facial muscles in order to form the emotion of disgust rather than the emotion of surprise.) And he does all of it in his inimitable voice and through his cartoon stand-in narrator, mixing dry humor and legitimate instruction. McCloud shows his reader how to master the human condition through word and image in a brilliantly minimalistic way.