Thinking in Comics

• In Event: 56.044 - Visual Thinking in Action Through Drawing and Comics

Abstract

Purpose: To the casual reader, it might be assumed that making comics is fairly easy to just pick up and do. Even lacking the particular drawing skills, the basic storytelling chops come naturally. Or not. The purpose of this workshop is to pull back the curtain on the process of making comics and show how working in comics is ultimately less about specific skills and instead requires a different kind of thinking altogether.
Theoretical Framework: Comics are often compared to film storyboards. This is true to some degree in that in each, the author determines what goes on in each frame. But where storyboarding is a succession of same-sized frames, comics makers must take into account the page as a whole unit as well, and thus consider how the individual elements fit and work together from the very outset as they design a page (Groensteen, 2007, p. 21).
Methods and Sources: Considerations for the spatial composition of the page, including things like size, shape, orientation, and overall location of each visual element (Miller, 2007, p. 83), and of course text, if included, as well, means that comics operate as a kind of meta-drawing – the author is always keeping in mind both the individual drawings and their relationship to the whole composition. Even the most straightforward of layouts is not strictly linear, as connections across the page and within each panel are more rhizomatic in nature (Groensteen, 2007, Sousanis, 2015). Making (and reading) comics means constantly negotiating various relations: between words and images (which do you read first?), between images and their neighbors, and between individual images and the whole page. Both author and reader move back and forth between the parts and whole arrangement in constructing meaning.
Results: Thinking of comics as meta-drawing shifts the perception of them as requiring a certain style of highly illustrative drawing, opening space for more spare, schematized or diagrammatic (Smolderen, 2014) approaches that are more readily available to all regardless of artistic training. Smolderen writes, “The purpose of the diagram is not to transmit visual information (in the realistic, photographic sense of the term) so much as to stabilize visual signification” (p. 9). In the rise of graphic medicine (Czerwiec, Squier, et al, 2015) and “applied cartooning” as a degree program at the Center for Cartoon Studies (Bennet & Sturm, 2015), we see comics being approached by non-specialists of all sorts to convey their stories and work through their ideas. Drawing allows us to externalize our thoughts to generate a conversation with ourselves (Suwa & Tversky, 1997). Comics as meta-drawing expands this to include text as well, and introduces another dimension to explore our thinking and make unforeseen connections.
Significance: This participatory demonstration will highlight visual examples from the presenter and other comics makers to provide an understanding of different approaches to making comics and set the stage to quickly immerse participants in hands-on practice.

Author

• Nick Sousanis, San Francisco State University