I find that incredibly fascinating; that a book, which I have always thought of as rather dialogue-driven, narrates so well visually, too. Mind you, I’m not blowing my.own horn here, a lot of water has run under the bridge since I finished Sortmund, and I’ll be the first to point out its flaws.

Once again, it’s mostly to Rod’s credit that he got it. What follows is a rambling meditation on the comics form, which fell out of my head after reading his post:

You often hear the question from non-comics readers, “How do you read these things?” People don’t know if they’re supposed to read text or image first, where I suppose we trained readers take both in at a glance. So yes, Rod is not just a reader, he’s a professional drawer; he knows the language of comics, as his review also shows.

But everybody can read comics, it’s just a matter of the visual grammar used in the individual work that might pose an obstacle. There are different kinds of visual shorthand that make sense to readers accustomed to the genre, form, or even culture in which the comic is created—but may be incomprehensible to beginning comics readers.

Take the banner image at the top of this site, which is my own joke on those clouds of dust that follow people running in gag cartoons and strips (only in my drawing, the cartoon-me isn’t moving, so oh man, I just ruined the joke). It may originate in animated cartoons from the ’40s, where Tom & Jerry, et al would leave a cloud behind when they broke into a sprint.

Or, remember when DragonBall appeared in the West? Didn’t take anybody long to figure out what those instant nosebleeds meant, but I’m sure we all had a short, head-scratching moment before the shoe dropped. That. That’s how untrained readers feel about comics all the time.

Provided of course they only pick up manga, or superhero comics. Those things are like being thrown into Advanced Mechanics class when you just want to learn to drive a car. No, everybody can read comics, across language barriers. It’s mostly the idiomatic trappings that cut off new readers, or the required trivial knowledge of, say, Wolverine’s past as a mercenary in WWII. That was all the cape-bashing for this post, I promise.

Everybody can read comics, and most of us do on a daily basis. If not daily strips in the newspaper, then instructional infographics. They help us not going into the wrong toilet, finding the emergency exit, or using chopsticks in Asian restaurants, etc. Of course, polemics aside, what we think of as comics tend to be a tad more narrative, or even expressive, than the assembly of a Billy bookcase.

Instead of just using framing for clarity and focus, cartoonists use it in a narrative manner, to convey setting, ambience, mood, tension, or release. The same goes for layouts, pacing to time the page turn; light, shadow, colours. Those are the elements of grammar used by the comics creator.

And intuitively so—making comics, we play on the heartstrings of the reader no less than the Don Drapers of the world, or any other propagandist. The most important part of that is not letting them feel it when we play them. Or making them like it (and by “them” I mean “you,” but ignore that for now).

Even when you learn to recognise the techniques and slights of hand, a story well told suspends that cold rationality, because it is more interesting than the mechanisms that switch the backdrops and make the puppets move.

At their finest, comics are not the even balance of text and image that some people would claim; they are visual narratives, using text only for emphasis, or for elaboration. For those things that absolutely must, or cannot, be told, not shown. Most of the time, however, the words just fly out of the characters’ mouths in abundance, like the celebratory pomp of an Olympic opening ceremony (that was a pun on “balloons”. You’re welcome).

Circling back on our starting point: Aside from the fact that Rod works with visual storytelling for a living, I think the language “barrier” became a reason in itself for him to read the images more intently. I’ve had some great experiences personally, trying to wrench meaning from foreign-language comics. You become more inquisitive as a reader when you approach the work as a puzzle to be solved.

Rod speculates briefly on how his comics horizon might have expanded if he were not an English reader, or if he had learnt more languages and been able to read more works untranslated to his native tongue. I’m in the same situation by proxy, so to speak, teaching myself only english so I could read the US comics I was mostly interested in, in my pre-teens.

I’m not sure anymore if we should regret it so much. We share another language.

Do you have to want to be a cartoonist in order to make comics?

Or can making comics be more like singing along to a song when we are alone for no reason other than it gives us something (almost undetectable) that not singing doesn’t?

Or can making comics be more like using a salt and pepper shaker to show your friend just where your car was in relation to the other car when the accident happened?

What if people thought of making comics as another good way to sort certain things out?

Lynda Barry, on her tumblr

This week and three weeks on I’m back at Holbæk school of arts teaching comics.

Today was the first of our recurrent music interpretation assignment: students make comics from a given tune, today with the added challenge to only use clippings from discarded encyclopedias and art books.

This found footage approach lets the students work with storytelling and graphic representation without being inhibited by their (perceived) drawing abilities.

Using ready-made imagery allows them to focus on the layouts, and the “lyrical” nature of the assignment relieves them of linear narrative concerns. Every time I give this task to a class I’m blown away by the powerful results.

The music interpreted here is “Making of Cyborg” from the Ghost in the Shell movie. Enjoy the snapshots, I’m mighty proud of this day’s work!

You know the guy. If you have ever in any social context tried discussing comics on more than a “Lil’ Abner was a durn good strip” level, chances are he was in the crowd. He’s a pretty nondescript guy, could be anybody really, but you’ll recognise him when he chips in and goes “Yeah, comics and movies are similar in a lot of ways.” And then the conversation takes a turn towards film, and it turns out he’s in cinema studies and really needs the attention. And sometimes he’s a woman. Look, I just made him up to prove a point, okay?

And there’s really no connection between comics and film, either. For one thing, comics don’t necessarily move (although some webcomics do); for another, movies very rarely work with plastic framing (since the silver screen doesn’t change its shape). Certain compositional analyses apply to both media, simply because they are both related to art theory, in which the analyses originate.

Film is the vision of a director (and a producer, and a board of CEO’s, and their daughter, and the pony she rode in on) filtered through a cameraman, a cast of actors, a sound designer, an editor, and, ultimately, a projector. Comics are the vision of a cartoonist, filtered through anything that might leave a mark on paper; the cartoonist sends her work to C’est Bon Anthology, you read it, end of line.

But there’s more: Comics are sequences of images composed and arranged to convey the passing of time graphically, and/or by juxtaposition transcend the meaning of the individual images. Which is quite exactly what the sequential images of a filmstrip can’t do without the projector, and, incidentally, in experiencing the time and space of the movie, we cease to perceive the sequence of the displayed images.

But the notion that film and comics are related on a deeper level is popular, and hard to lay to rest, much like Justin Bieber. What better way, I ask you, than to orchestrate an anthology of comics set to the tune of (no, wait, that’s our next volume!) – to the theme of Motion Picture? Read on, but be aware that we might be spoiling movies for you altogether!

Silly me, its Navy CIS.

Consider then how the first ten minutes or so of Lars von Trier’s Melancholia basically tells the entire movie in compressed, hyper-aesthetic, symbolic form. Also, how that intro affects your viewing of the film total.

I think that kind of hands-on is generally underused, and is love to try my hand at it. Or just see more of it.

It’s all drawn directly with felt tip pen in my sketchbook. No pencil roughs, no whiteouts or digital edits. Apologies for shaky lines and dodgy execution, it was a matter of  getting the thing down before the idea vapourised.

Basically, I wanted to tell a story of the world coming to an end in as few beats as possible, while maintaining a double narrative. Let me know in the comments if it’s too dense

While teaching comics at the Holbæk School of Arts last month, I was asked by fellow teacher Christin Johansson to make an assembly instruction for making pine cone animals.

The cone animals are a companion project to Christin’s current ceramics exhibition in Stockholm, and the IKEA-like instructions are included in the exhibition catalog.

I have been an admirer of IKEA manuals forever, and this was a chance to try my hand at the clarity of visual communication they employ.

The little character in the top left corner is lifted directly from the company’s instruction manuals, all else is by me

She and her then-boyfriend had found it belly-up in the sawdust when they woke up, its abdomen showing clear bitemarks. All the while the other hamster was pounding the treadmill with oblivious glee. How can you pass up a scene like that?

So, here’s what I came up with:

Two hamsters, Fluffy and Wertham, live in a cage. The treadmill is their only entertainment, not least their internal bickering over it.

One morning Fluffy is lying dead in the sawdust, mutilated. Whodunit?

A new hamster, Tantor, is put into the cage, and Wertham begins investigating the circumstances of Fluffy’s death, with Tantor as the chief suspect.

That’s it. Oh, I know how it’s going to end, but I’m not letting on

As I said, this was right after Angoulême, and I was obviously inspired by Cali & Pianina’s “10 petits Insects” to try my hand with a whodunit, but that’s the only similarity.

“10 petits Insects” is a great piece of work, btw, as testified by its inclusion to the Sélection Officiale of Angoulême BD 2010. Highly recommended while you wait for me to finish “Wertham’s Razor”