NOTES ON WRITING AND DRAWING

UNDER THE TREE

Wednesday, June 28th, 2006 | Permalink

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a new panel from A Terrible Calamity At Sea!

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“I’ve always been interested in the problem of depicting sound in comics. I try to come up with a kind of expressionistic pattern or decorative line to represent the music, something that will spark the imagination of the reader. I was inspired years ago by a wonderful cartoon by Saul Steinberg that showed in graphic form the sounds emerging from different instruments. He drew the different sounds as solid, three-dimensional matter, which made so much sense to me as a strategy to draw sound.”

- Megan Kelso, interview with PW

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“Serializing is an interesting problem….How and where to do it? In the old comics format? Online? Grouped in magazines? The serial offers another kind of freedom, and the added value for authors of ongoing contact with their readers. Creators don’t have to toil for a couple years on a project before it gets received. In the highly interactive age of the text message, the Weblog and Wikipedia, that seems a useful agency.”

- Mark Siegel, Editorial Director, First Second Books, in a PW roundtable

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“I actually love drawing what my peers dismissively call ‘backgrounds’ but what I like to call environments. Just sidewalks and cityscapes and skies. Fields of grass and everything. Or ‘the rest the world’ is another way I like to refer to it. Because one of the problems with a lot of comics art today is that many comics artists learn how to draw people and they just stop there. And they become what Will Eisner called ’slaves to the close-up.’ They try to close in on the characters as much as possible because they know if they keep their camera angles tight they can keep their backgrounds down to a few lines.”

- Scott McCloud, interview. Other interviews: here and here.

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