Making Comics

Published Nov. 4, 2019 by Drawn and Quarterly.

ISBN:: 978-1-77046-369-1

(1 review)

Tutorial, Graphic Novels, Memoir:
The idiosyncratic curriculum from the Professor of Interdisciplinary Creativity will teach you how to draw and write your story

Hello students, meet Professor Skeletor. Be on time, don’t miss class, and turn off your phones. No time for introductions, we start drawing right away. The goal is more rock, less talk, and we communicate only through images.

For more than five years the cartoonist Lynda Barry has been an associate professor in the University of Wisconsin–Madison art department and at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, teaching students from all majors, both graduate and undergraduate, how to make comics, how to be creative, how to not think. There is no academic lecture in this classroom. Doodling is enthusiastically encouraged.

Making Comics is the follow-up to Barry's bestselling Syllabus , and this time she shares all her comics-making exercises. In a new hand-drawn syllabus detailing her creative …

Tutorial, Graphic Novels, Memoir:
The idiosyncratic curriculum from the Professor of Interdisciplinary Creativity will teach you how to draw and write your story

Hello students, meet Professor Skeletor. Be on time, don’t miss class, and turn off your phones. No time for introductions, we start drawing right away. The goal is more rock, less talk, and we communicate only through images.

For more than five years the cartoonist Lynda Barry has been an associate professor in the University of Wisconsin–Madison art department and at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, teaching students from all majors, both graduate and undergraduate, how to make comics, how to be creative, how to not think. There is no academic lecture in this classroom. Doodling is enthusiastically encouraged.

Making Comics is the follow-up to Barry's bestselling Syllabus , and this time she shares all her comics-making exercises. In a new hand-drawn syllabus detailing her creative curriculum, Barry has students drawing themselves as monsters and superheroes, convincing students who think they can’t draw that they can, and, most important, encouraging them to understand that a daily journal can be anything so long as it is hand drawn.

Barry teaches all students and believes everyone and anyone can be creative. At the core of Making Comics is her certainty that creativity is vital to processing the world around us.

1 edition

nicknicknicknick@bookwyrm.social reviewed Making Comics by Lynda Barry

4 stars

1) "how old do you have to be to make a bad drawing?"

2) "Structure and plot have a spontaneous core that is too easily forgotten when we believe we must know what we are drawing before we can begin. If you open the way for them, monsters will surprise you and this is a reason to draw them. One of the hardest things to remember is to keep certain doors open to unknowns. When you are lost, there draw monsters."

3) "If I asked you which character was drunk, who would you choose? Who just got fired? Who is feeling bloated? Who is experiencing painful urination? How can such specific mood-states show up in faces made by eight different hands? No one intended to make any of these people, yet here they are with specific dispositions. Who creates a comic? The person who draws it or the person who …

1) "how old do you have to be to make a bad drawing?"

2) "Structure and plot have a spontaneous core that is too easily forgotten when we believe we must know what we are drawing before we can begin. If you open the way for them, monsters will surprise you and this is a reason to draw them. One of the hardest things to remember is to keep certain doors open to unknowns. When you are lost, there draw monsters."

3) "If I asked you which character was drunk, who would you choose? Who just got fired? Who is feeling bloated? Who is experiencing painful urination? How can such specific mood-states show up in faces made by eight different hands? No one intended to make any of these people, yet here they are with specific dispositions. Who creates a comic? The person who draws it or the person who sees it?"

4) "Changing methods every week will make this daily practice a companion. In the way certain friends make you see the world in a different way, and the way certain companions make the world more alive, the daily diary will wake you up."

5) "It can be helpful to build a story in fragments that tend to knit their own connections. When you read your story over you may be surprised by things that seem to link up with no conscious intention on your part. This is an alternative to the method of outlining a story, planning our characters' actions, and knowing the ending before we begin. It doesn't matter how great the plot is, if the only thing moving it forward is logic and duty to the outline, deadness sets in. Stay alive!"

6) "Everything good in my life came because I drew a picture. I hope you will draw a picture soon. I will always want to see it. XOX LB♥"