Making Comics: Storytelling Secrets of Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels

By Admin-SBC • April 27, 2008

Making Comics: Storytelling Secrets of Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels
by Scott Mccloud (Author)
Average Customer Review:
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Book Description: Scott McCloud tore down the wall between high and low culture in 1993 with Understanding Comics, a massive comic book about comics, linking the medium to such diverse fields as media theory, movie criticism, and web design. In Reinventing Comics, McCloud took this to the next level, charting twelve different revolutions in how comics are generated, read, and perceived today. Now, in Making Comics, 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. Comic book devotees as well as the most uninitiated will marvel at this journey into a once–underappreciated art form.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com
Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics was published in 1993, just as “Comics Aren’t Just for Kids Anymore!” articles were starting to appear and graphic novels were making their way into the mainstream, and it quickly gave the newly respectable medium the theoretical and practical manifesto it needed. With his clear-eyed and approachable analysis–done using the same comics tools he was describing–McCloud quickly gave “sequential art” a language to understand itself. McCloud made the simplest of drawing decisions seem deep with artistic potential.

Thirteen years later, following the Internet evangelizing of Reinventing Comics, McCloud has returned with Making Comics.

Designed as a craftsperson’s overview of the drawing and storytelling decisions and possibilities available to comics artists, covering everything from facial expressions and page layout to the choice of tools and story construction, Making Comics, like its predecessors, is also an eye-opening trip behind the scenes of art-making, fascinating for anyone reading comics as well as those making them. Get a sense of the range of his lessons by clicking through to the opening pages of his book, including his (illustrated, of course) table of contents (warning: large file, recommended for high-bandwidth users):

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Every medium should be lucky enough to have a taxonomist as brilliant as McCloud. The follow-up to his pioneering Understanding Comics (and its flawed sequel Reinventing Comics) isn’t really about how to draw comics: it’s about how to make drawings become a story and how cartooning choices communicate meaning to readers. (”There are no rules,” he says, “and here they are.”) McCloud’s cartoon analogue, now a little gray at the temples, walks us through a series of dazzlingly clear, witty explanations (in comics form) of character design, storytelling, words and their physical manifestation on the page, body language and other ideas cartoonists have to grapple with, with illustrative examples drawn from the history of the medium. If parts of his chapter on “Tools, Techniques and Technology” don’t look like they’ll age well, most of the rest of the book will be timelessly useful to aspiring cartoonists. McCloud likes to boil down complicated topics to a few neatly balanced principles; his claim that all facial expressions come from degrees and combinations of six universal basic emotions is weirdly reductive and unnerving, but it’s also pretty convincing. And even the little ideas that he tosses offâlike classifying cartoonists into four typesâwill be sparking productive arguments for years to come. (Sept.)
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From School Library Journal
Adult/High School–A follow-up to the author’s Understanding Comics (Kitchen Sink, 1993) and Reinventing Comics (DC Comics, 2000), this volume uses the same graphic style and narrator to explain the technical aspects of creating comics. From the layout of each frame and the placement of words and characters to creating facial expressions, symbolism, and more, this highly detailed resource is for serious artists wishing to gain further technical knowledge. Every concept is broken down into its individual elements and thus is probably more than most casual readers would want to know. The book is well organized with a specific table of contents and an annotated bibliography and suggested reading list.–Corinda J. Humphrey, Los Angeles Public Library
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

This book is not just for comic artist..
What I like about this book is the fact that it is not only instructional for comic book artists but also for all artists. He writes and draws to enhance what he is teaching so that it is not even noticed by the reader that he is being taught. I have met Scott and he is as entertaining and funny in person as he is in his book.

Great if you’re starting in comics or want to know where you might be going wrong
Great book for beginning comic artists. You will not be taught technical details for how to draw or lay out panels, but you will be shown how to pace comics, shown some basic face anatomy in the context of emotion, given a few inspirational tips on choosing characters, and so on. Probably an interesting read even for people who aren’t sure that they want to get into comics.

Another eye-opener
Scott McCloud takes the insights that made him a celebrity in Understanding Comics and takes them further away in Making Comics, this time focusing in the craft itself. Much of his knowledge is useful not only to comic creators, but to people interested in visual and audiovisual arts, and sometimes to artists in general. His concepts and diagrams (”mmmmm… diagrams.”) are clear and powerful. Scott McCloud: a theorist who likes to be understood.
I loved the much needed notes sections and the activities and exercises he suggests, which take the book one step even further from a great theoretical book.

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