This is my 52nd “Dilettante” column for Comic Con’s Toucan Blog, and I’m sorry to say it’ll be my last. I’ve had a terrific time writing for you, but the time has come for me to pass this space along to another writer.

Throughout my time here, I’ve discussed what I’ve learned about the art, the craft, and the business of making comics. For this final column, I thought it might be worthwhile to try to identify the most important lessons I shared here. What’s the takeaway?

1. Stay focused on story

Every comics page offers challenges and opportunities. You’re asked to draw people, places, clothing, gestures, props, situations. You design typography and compositions, and you get to arrange the panels to create new meanings by how they relate to each other. It’s fun, but it can seem like an endless parade of exhausting choices. When there are so many options and possibilities, how do you choose?

The answer is to serve the story. The layout that best serves the story might not always be the most fun to draw, or the most glamorous moment, or the most impressive bit of draftsmanship. Stories sometimes need simple, quiet, or prosaic moments. Other moments might require you to knuckle down and draw something really tough. One story might need dramatic, high-contrast lighting, with vivid bright areas, and deep shadows. Others might call for the austerity of clean, uninflected outlines. A coming-of-age memoir that turns on a specific detail of period fashion will require you to draw in a way that makes that fashion recognizable. Another memoir might work best with wild expressionism that deemphasizes naturalistic observation and prioritizes emotional intensity.

Know your story inside and out, and let it guide your choices.

2. Use the tools you need

It’s so easy for cartoonists to make a fetish of tools. Sometimes a young artist hears that her favorite artist only uses a certain brand of brush, and decides that she’s going to use one, too, regardless of whether it gives her the lines she wants. Or he hears classmates at art school call photo-reference “cheating” and so he puts aside a valuable tool that could improve his results and save him hours of work. It took me a long time to learn this: art is not sports. There’s no regulatory body that’s enforcing league rules about what equipment you’re allowed to use, or how you’re allowed to use it. All that matters is what’s on the page, not the difficulty of putting it there.

3. Read your contract and get a lawyer

Making comics in any sort of professional capacity is running a business. You’ll be providing services to or partnering with publishers, signing agreements with distributors, suppliers or licensors, hiring subcontractors or being hired. It’s complex stuff. A sentence in a contract can be the difference between an arrangement that goes smoothly and one that you regret for years. A contract is an agreement between two or more parties. Ideally everyone will understand exactly what they’re agreeing to. Hire a lawyer who has a good grasp of what you’re doing. If you can’t afford a lawyer, see if the Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts are active in your area.

4. Put your work in front of people

Don’t be shy about showing your work. If you want to be published, you’ll want to be seen by editors, agents and art directors. If you want to support your work via crowdfunding, you’re going to need a crowd. Do good work, do a lot of it, and use every means available to put that work in front of people who might pay you for it. This might mean going to conventions. It might mean samples through the mail. It ‘ll definitely mean using social media. Go get on Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Facebook, or wherever people are congregating. If possible, maintain a consistent user name across the various platforms. Put your work out there for people to see. Engage with them too; treat those people in your chosen platforms as people. Get into conversations, be a human being. It’s called social media. Be sociable!

5. Comics is a marathon, not a sprint

Don’t get frustrated. For most cartoonists it can take a while to get good, to get hired, to get published, to get a supportive audience. You’ll have ups and downs creatively, financially, emotionally. Don’t let the stories you hear about overnight successes discourage you. Plenty of artists take years to find their footing. Some artists keep a day job their entire life, and do all their comics in spare time and on weekends. There is absolutely no shame in that.

And it can take a long time to find your voice as well. I’d been drawing professionally for seven years before I put out a comic I felt good about. It’s been 20 years since then and I still have moments when I can’t make a drawing do what I want. I can cope with that because I’m not here to make one perfect drawing. I’m here to tell stories, and if one page doesn’t quite work, I’ll apply what I learned to the next one. I want to keep making comics for the rest of my life so I know I’ve got plenty of time to learn.

6. Ask for help

If you’re struggling with a tech problem, there’s a really good chance that someone else has already solved it. Ask around in person, or on social media. Not sure if the point of a panel is clear? Ask someone who doesn’t know the story to interpret the panel and see if they understood your drawing. If you can’t quite get a gesture right, ask a friend to pose for reference and snap a couple of photos. If there’s a prop you need to draw from, see if someone you know already owns one.  Cartoonists have a bad habit of becoming hermits and trying to do everything themselves. But you know what? People want to help you. You’ll be both more productive and happier if you let them.

7. Help others and build community

You probably already know a lot. You know people, you know the books you’ve read, the movies you’ve seen, and the artists you admire. You’ve fought with software and hardware and printers and scanners, tried various pens and paints and brushes. You can pose for someone’s reference photo, read someone’s first draft, brainstorm about a book release party, help set up chairs for a reading or a panel. Boost someone’s tweet or article. Spread the word about an impressive new book, or an exciting reissue.

The world of comics is built on small supportive, interlocking communities, both face-to-face and virtual. I’ve gotten where I am in comics because of the help and support I’ve received from teachers, mentors, peers, editors, retailers, festival organizers, journalists, critics, and readers.  And I’ve been fortunate enough to take on most of these roles myself, too. My time as a teacher and mentor has been every bit as rewarding as the time I spend at the drawing board. Being part of comics can bring you close to a whole community of wonderful, funny, thoughtful people. They’re friends, peers, protegés, sometimes even family. Share your time, your effort, and your expertise, and you’ll find you get back what you give.

I’d like to say thank you to everyone who has followed this column, and especially Gary Sassaman, who brought me aboard and made it all happen. And if you have any thoughts to share about comics, talk to me! On Twitter I’m @steve_lieber and on Facebook I’m at https://www.facebook.com/steve.lieber

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(Editor’s Note: We’re very sad to see Steve leave the Toucan family. He was the first regular contributor we recruited back in early 2012, when we were planning to add a blog to our website, and he’s provided five years-worth of incredible columns (you can read them all here) filled with valuable information for any artist, from new and budding to seasoned professional.

Who will take over the second Tuesday of the month slot here on Toucan? Well, we’re working on it. Tune in next month to see who takes on the mantle of our monthly artist columnist!)

Let’s start before I was even aware of the project. Editor Bob Schreck had been talking to Greg Rucka about Whiteout and wanted Greg to take a look at my art and see if I was a good fit for the project. Today, an editor would just send some JPGs or a link to my website or an online portfolio, but this was 1997. Personal websites were pretty rare in comics. I didn’t own a scanner or Photoshop—didn’t even know anyone who did—and I had no clue how to put a picture online. So Bob sent Greg over to my table at a convention to take an anonymous look at my work. Greg liked what he saw, and soon we were working together on the book.

I was a very collaborative artist then, and wanted constant feedback and discussion about every choice. Greg lived an hour and a half away, so if I had a question for Greg about a layout, I’d doodle it on office paper and fax it to him. It was slow and clumsy, but the alternative was driving 90 minutes every time I wanted to show something, so fax was the best option.

The comic takes place entirely in Antarctica. I knew nothing about Antarctica. So Google, right? Wrong. In 1997, Google was still in early Beta. They’d only just registered the domain, and not many people outside of Stanford had heard of it. I spent long hours pecking away at early search engines and portals like Hotbot and Lycos, and they yielded a few useful sites. I’m pretty sure I downloaded and printed every publicly available photo the 1997 Internet had of Antarctic buildings and equipment. After that, I hit the local libraries and bookstores and found every book and magazine article about Antarctica I could get my hands on.

Sometimes I had questions about specific details. Today I’d ask on social media and get an answer almost immediately. Back then, there was no Twitter or Facebook, so I’d find strangers on the Internet who had been in Antarctica, and ask them all the same questions in the hope that one would take the time to answer. Sometimes they did! “Hi; You don’t know me, but I see you were stationed at McMurdo Base last year. I’m a comics artist drawing a story set there, and I know this is a weird question, but do they have single-serving cartons of milk in the cafeteria?” “No. First, it’s called the galley, not the cafeteria. Second, the nearest cow is thousands of miles away. They serve powdered milk in big metal urns.”

In the nineties, my process was all analog. If I wanted a mark to appear in the book, I had to get that mark onto a single sheet of bristol paper with all of the other marks. Here was my process:

1. Rough out tiny thumbnail layouts with a graphite pencil.

2. Measure out a 10 x 15″ box on a page of Strathmore bristol and rule the panel borders onto my page with a pencil.

3. Use a T-square and an Ames Lettering Guide to rule guidelines, pencil in the captions and dialogue, then ink all the letters, adjusting as I went to make everything fit reasonably smoothly. This was usually the first hour or two of every day.

4. Rule panel borders and word balloons in ink using a ruler, a Rapidograph pen, and an oddball selection of ellipse templates.

5. Start penciling figures and backgrounds. I almost never used any direct photo reference in those days. I’d use photos to find out what something looked like, but I’d almost never draw anything from the same angle as a photo. This slowed me down a LOT. If I made a mistake, I’d erase and redraw. If something was particularly tricky, I might draw it on a separate sheet of paper, and use a lightbox to trace it onto my final sheet of bristol, rather than wreck the surface by erasing it over and over.

6. Once the pencil drawings looked good enough, I’d Ink them with a Winsor-Newton brush, crowquill pen and India ink.

7. Add reproducible greytones with bootleg zip-a-tone that I made at a copy shop by photocopying a screen-tone pattern onto blank sheets of crack-and-peel sticky-backed plastic. Each section of tone was cut separately with an X-acto knife.

7. Make corrections and add snow effects with thick white gouache. I’d brush it on with an old watercolor brush, or spatter it on with a toothbrush. I’d also scratch at the paper with a razor blade, smudge it with a wax crayon, and do anything else I could think of to make my panels look like they were taking place in the coldest, windiest, driest place on earth.

8. If I needed to repeat a panel, I’d walk a mile to the nearest photocopier, copy what I needed, cut it out, and paste it down on the page with glue stick.

9. Lettering corrections would be a huge pain and require a lot of careful pasting over or whiting out.

Today, I shoot lots of photo reference and draw everything on my Cintiq with Clip Studio Paint. If a panel has tiny details, I just make it bigger. If I draw a head too big, I shrink it. I can add tone or fill in areas of black with a single click. I can try out lines on separate layers, then flatten them onto the final inks if I like them, or delete them with one click if I don’t. I can even make random spatter patterns with a digital toothbrush. It took me a while to find the right combination of tools and settings to make things look the way I want, but now only experienced art professionals can look at a page of my comics and tell whether it’s is analog or digital. Many can’t tell at all.

Back then I’d send my publisher a big stack of pages by FedEx and hope they arrived safely. Now there are no physical pages so I just send a download link to a file.

I enjoyed the process of drawing with physical tools. I liked the results and I really miss having a physical piece of original art to sell. What I don’t miss are the many, many hours all those extra steps took, and the physical and emotional stress that came with them. A single error with the brush might mean an extra hour of work. I think I’m a better artist now, and faster, too. But I’m still tremendously proud of the work I did twenty years ago using mostly the same tools that my teachers used when they started their careers around World War II. You can judge the results for yourself. The Whiteout Compendium will be in stores December 6th. I hope you’ll take a look!

How have the ways you work changed since you started making comics? Let me know on Twitter at @steve_lieber, or on Facebook at steve.lieber. 

Steve Lieber’s Dilettante will return to Toucan on Tuesday, January 9th!

I’ve been waiting almost 30 years for this book.

EuroComics, a division of IDW, just released Alack Sinner, a 400-page, black and white collection of expressionist stories drawn by Jose Muñoz and written by Carlos Sampayo. The stories follow the eponymous ex-cop/ private detective/ cab driver Alack Sinner, through a series of cases set in the decaying New York City of the 1970s and early ‘80s.

I’d first read Muñoz & Sampayo’s work when I was in art school in the late ‘80s. NPM published a translated edition of Joe’s Bar, a collection of stories that spun out of Sinner’s milieu. To say they were a revelation is an understatement. I’d never seen comics that communicated such a distinct and compelling worldview so effectively. Over the next few decades, I read and reread the Joe’s Bar stories, and kept an eye out for more of their work in English. There wasn’t much: one graphic novel, a couple of magazines and a few short stories in some anthologies. So you can imagine how thrilled I was to see this handsome new edition from IDW arrive at my local shop.

As far as I know, Muñoz & Sampayo had never visited NYC when they created these stories, which is remarkable to me, because above all else, they feel observed. The stories are full of incidental details and background characters that remind the reader that the story they’re reading is only one of many. Often Sinner and his associates are pushed into the far background of a panel or sequence and we get a glimpse of the life and struggle of some other character.

And “struggle” is definitely what’s going on. The characters in Alack Sinner are oppressed and oppressors, tormented and tormentors. The writer and artist both left Argentina and settled in Europe to avoid the Junta, and their politics inform much of the pain and sadness they depict.

In the first Alack Sinner story, “The Webster Case,” Muñoz’s drawings are solidly academic in the manner of early influences F. Solano Lopez and Hugo Pratt. At the start, his pictures are built from thin outlines and broad areas of solid black with just a few areas of close pen or brushwork to indicate specific textures and create greys. He initially incorporates only a tiny bit of expressive distortion.

But over the course of that story, things start to shift. Pen and brush lines lose their sense of calm control and take on a certain urgency. Features distort. Shadows pool in odd, unexpected places. Supporting characters begin to feel less like extras in a cop show and more like they might have stepped out of photographs by Weegee, or paintings by George Grosz or Amedeo Modigliani.

This process continues throughout the book. With each chapter, Muñoz’s drawings and Sampayo’s stories are less interested in depicting the surface of Sinner’s world, and more concerned with communicating its emotional states and power dynamics. Sinner, his city, and the people who surround him become increasingly vulnerable and disheveled as the stories progress. And the powerful people, the cops, mobsters, plutocrats, and celebrities, all twist into nightmarish icons of corruption.

Munoz is able to depict his figures with sympathy and compassion, but these are stories about people trapped in a brutal world that brings out our worst and most depraved inclinations. Some fight to maintain their decency, their connection to humanity, and that’s where his, and our sympathies lie.

Munoz’s influence can be felt throughout today’s comics, but there’s no other work like this out there. No one else puts so much emotion on the page, or tells stories with this much rage and empathy and pain. I hope you’ll take a look at Alack Sinner, because it’s an absolutely spectacular example of what comics can be.

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Steve Lieber’s Dilettante appears the second Tuesday of every month here on Toucan!

It’s a long-held truism that the one of the most dangerous times for a business is during a period of rapid growth. This is doubly true for cartoonists, who frequently run their own businesses with little or no support whatsoever.

But as a comic builds an audience, opportunities will present themselves: making merchandise, licensing, expanding into other media, advertising, distribution, partnerships, sponsorships. These can be the economic engine that makes it possible for a cartoonist to earn a good living making comics. They also require time and knowledge that is entirely separate from making comics. But if making comics is already a full time job, how does a cartoonist take on these additional responsibilities? For some, the answer has been bringing in additional help. The job is broad, complex, and continuously changing, so for the purpose of this article, I’ll just call the position “manager.”

Let me state right up front: This is a difficult position to fill. Everyone I’m aware of who does the job has been asked, “How do I find someone who does what you do?” And the answer is always “I don’t know.” Someone able to do the complete job of a business manager for a cartoonist has skills that that they could be putting to work in the corporate world, with more security and benefits, and better prospects for advancement. Most cartoonists who are ready to expand their empire don’t have the cash on hand to pay someone through the lean months that expansion will require. It’s a real chicken and egg dilemma, and can require a lot of trust on both sides.

But there are a lot of comics-savvy people out there with some business skills who may want to get more involved with comics. Taking care of some of business-side concerns for a favorite cartoonist could be an interesting side gig, with the potential to expand into a larger position. Many cartoonist/manager partners are also spouses or life partners.

But there are a lot of people out there who have left established comics companies and are looking for something with more freedom, less hierarchy, and others with experience that could be described as “comics adjacent.” If they’re willing to start small with a cartoonist, they can build a valuable partnership.

What are some tasks that a manager can take on?

Print Buying

A self-publisher has to deal with printers. They’ll need to get estimates, compare quality, find out who is reliable and trustworthy, and make decisions about the best way to get stock from wherever it was printed to various distributors, wherever it’s going to be stored.

Hiring and Managing Subcontractors

Graphic designers, production artists to make sure print files are properly assembled; flatters, letterers, fill-in artists or assistants; convention helpers and web developers. Someone has to hire them, communicate with them, supervise their work, pay them, and make sure they get their 1099s.

Maintaining a Web Presence

Every moment a cartoonist spends fighting with CSS, WordPress, MySQL, HTML, or any other tool or system is time that they could have been making comics. That new WordPress update broke your theme? Someone’s got to figure out how to revert to the previous install.

Dealing with Advertisers and Affiliates

These are important sources of income for many cartoonists on the web, and they’re an ever-shifting landscape.

Running an Online Store and Doing the Packing and Shipping

A cartoonist whose work is in demand should have a pen in their hand, not a box-cutter or a roll of packing tape. And they don’t need to be looking at spreadsheets, deciding when its time to restock the XL shirts, or if they need to make more of that pin set that did well last year, but may have tapered off. What new merchandise options are out there? Is running a book sale going to alienate important retail partners? Which packing option is best for shipping prints? How do you gently explain things to the fan in Europe who doesn’t believe that international shipping is really that expensive.

Handling Convention Logistics

Arranging convention appearances and signings, booking travel plans, and coordinating them with other scheduled items, managing inventory, making sure that booth, supplies, and sales-stock arrive where they need to be, when they need to be there.

Booking Interviews

Good press doesn’t always just happen. Frequently someone has to go out and wrangle it. And it takes time and attention to keep track of who reaches the right audience, and to maintain connections so that requests get responses.

Crowdfunding

Ask anyone who has run a Kickstarter campaign—it’s exhausting, and it’s a whole job all by itself. And then if the Kickstarter succeeds, there’s the never-ending work of fulfillment. Several thousand people each have a special request, an upgrade, a question about their reward, a change of address. And even working with a fulfillment company is a lot of work. You don’t just forward them an email and write a check. And if the cartoonist is running a Patreon, what sort of extras can you afford to offer?

Distribution

Writing solicitation copy, negotiating terms with distributors, ironing out snafus about whether a book is still available or not. Sending reminders that an invoice is overdue. Deciding whether adding on a new distributor is worth the hassle. Should the cartoonist/publisher give up a significant percentage of their profit for the advantage of partnering with an existing publisher to take advantage of their better distribution arrangements?

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Answering all these problems requires both an understanding of business in general, of the current culture, and the cartoonist’s specific audience. And there will be continual changes in the business landscape. An important ad platform can quickly wither to insignificance. A new web-based service might pop up that could make a daunting task irrelevant. Is it worth the time to learn about it?

As you can see, running the business side for a cartoonist is a big, sprawling job that can require wearing many hats. I asked Cory Casoni, director of business development and brand management at Toonhound Studios about how one would get started. He said, “there’s no school for this. You just learn the job by doing it.” He suggested starting by getting to know the industry. Go to conventions. You can approach a cartoonist who seems ready to expand, maybe offer to work with them on one service, then expand from there as opportunities develop.

Are you doing business side or management work for a cartoonist? Or are you a cartoonist who has worked with one? I’d love to hear about your experiences. You can reach me on Twitter @steve_lieber or on Facebook.

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Steve Lieber’s Dilettante appears the second Tuesday of each month here on Toucan!

This August will be the 100th anniversary of the birth of Jack Kirby. My main exposure to Kirby’s work was through a small pile of comics and reprint books I acquired as a child. Most of them were torn, coverless and incomplete, and I read them over and over until they were as fragile as moth wings.

With the exception of a few stories reprinted in Stan Lee’s Origins of Marvel Comics collection, I rarely had any sort of context for the Kirby stories I encountered. I could only buy comics at thrift stores and flea markets, so I almost never read two issues in a row of anything. If a story was “to be continued,” I’d just have to guess what happened next. If the comic featured “part two,” I only had a bit of recap to tell me what had happened in part one. Not a fair way to encounter an artist’s work when they’re often telling serialized stories.

Nevertheless, I was always drawn into the slices of Kirby’s stories I could get my hands on. I was fascinated by the action, the imagery, the mythic feel of larger-than-life conflicts. I was also a little scared by some of it. Most of the comics I read were friendly and inviting, full of pictures composed to convey a sense of sports-hero athleticism and television glamour. Kirby’s work served up a different menu: his characters didn’t look or behave like those in other comics. They seemed like they were formed out of granite, or hard rubber, or cooling lava. They stomped and leapt with wild, explosive movements and contorted themselves into agonizing shapes. They paused to pose like roman statues and deliver soliloquies, then relaxed and kidded around with each other like my friends at school did.

I thought it might be worthwhile to take a close look at some panels I remember from back then, analyze them with what an eye for what I’ve learned about comics storytelling, and try to recall the impact they had on me when I first saw them as a pre-teen.

This one is from a Hulk comic. I obsessed over it for a while. It felt like one of the biggest punches I’d ever seen in a comic, but we never actually see it. The key action in the sequence (Hulk punching the guy flying at him) happens between the panels. I might’ve seen something like it before in a Peanuts cartoon, but this was the first time I found myself aware of how powerful it can be to make the reader fill in the blanks.

Looking at it now, I can see just how much Kirby did to make that sequence work. In the first panel, the guy with the sledgehammer is large in the foreground, and brandishing a heavy-looking weapon. (It’s not Thor’s hammer, though the design is similar.) This is necessary to make him a credible threat to a big monster like the Hulk. He’s hurtling through the air at Hulk like a cannonball, so it’s clear that Hulk only has a moment to act. Hulk’s gesture communicates that he is off-balance, but still ready for what’s coming at him, and that big green left fist is low to the ground, so we know he’ll be swinging it upward. That’s the kind of blow that might knock his attacker into a new trajectory.

In the next panel, that POW is there both for clarity, and for rhythm. Clarity: the sequence doesn’t quite work without the sound effect. In a world full of superheroes, the reader couldn’t be sure whether the guy with the hammer was punched, or if he just changed his mind and decided to fly through the top of the circus tent rather than face an angry Hulk. Rhythm: that POW is the beat that feels like an impact between two moments of movement.

Another favorite Kirby image was this one, from an issue #4 of Fantastic Four, in which Stan Lee and Jack Kirby reintroduced Bill Everrett’s character the Sub-Mariner.

We’d been introduced to a mysterious bearded hobo who was winning a skid row brawl against impossible odds. Then Johnny Storm gave him a shave.

This was a fascinating sequence. I liked Johnny use of a fantastic power to do something as ordinary as giving a guy a shave. And I knew who the Sub-Mariner was because he was in the very first comic I’d ever read, but even if I hadn’t, I’d have known this was an important revelation. Prior to this moment, the comic was full of wild action and dramatic camera angle changes. That Kirby suddenly stopped and devoted three panels in a row to a static shot of a guy getting his beard shaved off made it perfectly clear that this was a crucial moment to witness.

As a very young reader in the mid 1970s, I found that the reprints I read of Jack Kirby’s work from the ‘60s to be mostly friendly, funny and inviting. His new work in the ‘70s was mind-blowing and scary. I didn’t always know how to process his images. The monsters and machines were wild and unlike anything I’d seen in any medium. The stakes seemed life-or-death at every moment. This splash from Kamandi has huge terrible monsters at the center. They outnumber the heroes, who are separated from each other, pushed to the very margins of the page. The good guys seem entirely ill equipped to handle this onslaught, and nothing that they are doing is helping the situation at all. The bat creatures’ movements on the page are explosive and thrust violently in multiple directions, creating a sense of chaos. Nothing about this image was comforting to me as a young reader, and there was no indication that anything would turn out all right. This is as it should be in a Kamandi story, of course; it’s set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland where humanity has been all but wiped out. But I was seven years old and new to the genre. I doubt I’d ever seen an image in any medium where things seemed so dire for the heroes.

This final image was also from the 1970s. It’s the opening splash of a story from Kirby’s series The New Gods, and while the rest of the story is every bit as much chaotic and violent as that Kamandi panel, this picture struck a note I didn’t expect. Despite Kirby’s monumental figures, it’s more like a drawing from a romance comic than the intro to a story about the war between two cities of Gods. Izaya and Avia sit back-to-back, sharing flirtatious sideways glances in an impossibly idyllic garden. There’s a waterfall and garlands of flowers and a passing dove. The two warriors look comfortable and utterly at ease, her body curling into his as she strokes him with a feather. Their bodies together form a shape like the base of a pyramid, accentuated by the angles of Izaya’s staff and Avia’s lower leg. But within that pyramid the shapes all flow in uncharacteristically gentle curves. This was probably the first time I’d seen an indication of what these warriors were fighting for.

I didn’t know at the time that Kirby was one of the inventors of the romance comics genre. He had the tools to communicate connection every bit as well as conflict, and he knew when to use them. That’s what I see in Kirby now, remarkable craft in the service of an unfettered, world-class imagination.

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Steve Lieber’s Dilettante appears the second Tuesday of every month here on Toucan!

A ridiculously lucky thing happened recently: my wife was sorting through some old boxes of her late father’s papers when she found a small batch of his old MAD magazines from the mid 1950s— the era when it was wrapping up its time as a comic book and transitioning into the magazine it is today.

Leaving aside the thrill of learning that we own a small cache of first-rate 60-year-old comics, I was really excited to see what a typical issue of MAD, the full-color comic, had to offer. And I was not disappointed.

I sat down and, gingerly, gingerly, opened issue #17, the cover of which is only type, superimposed over a blue-tinted photo of skyscrapers. The copy promises that “This issue is going to change your whole viewpoint of MAD …” with a black and yellow banner across the bottom explaining that the insides are upside down. Sure enough, they intentionally attached the covers upside-down and backwards. Open the front cover and you see the last page of the comic upside-down. Even with the cover banner, I can’t imagine how many times they would have had to reassure their printer that this was what they really wanted to do.

The issue was written by Harvey Kurtzman, drawn by Bill Elder, Bernie Krigstein, Jack Davis, Basil Wolverton, and Wallace Wood, and colored (I think) by Marie Severin. As a whole it’s clearly intended to move the reader from mere diversion and entertainment to an awareness of the machinery of publishing, of culture, of politics and society. It still feels daring in 2017. I can’t imagine the impact it must have had in 1954.

Flip to the back cover, turn it upside-down and there’s your first story, a parody of George McManus’ comic strip Bringing Up Father, which was created in 1913 and already a 40-year-old institution by the time this parody was published. The strip dealt with the struggles of a newly rich man, Jiggs, henpecked by Maggie, his status-seeking wife. Initially the comic looks like any other MAD parody of the time. Artist Bill Elder draws “Jiggie and Maggs” in a pitch-perfect imitation of McManus’ elegant deco stylizations and quirky background gags. But Kurtzman foregrounds the class conflict in the strip. Their daughter is reading The Daily Worker, and Jiggie treats his employees miserably. When Maggs’ henpecking turns violent as it always does in the original strip, Elder’s line preserves McManus’ light, cartoony tone.

And then MAD pulls the rug out from under the reader. Bernard Krigstein takes over the art. Jazzy deco pen-lines become thick and brushy and fall against grimy screen-tones, communicating harsh light and murky shadows. Panel compositions shift their emphasis from flatness to depth, and the forms take on weight and heft. Jiggie explains just how painful and awful it is to live in a world of casual sadism.

The rest of the strip zings back and forth like this, one page of Elder-as-McManus, gently teasing the original strip for its tropes, followed by another of Krigstein’s ruthless, violent expressionism, in which Jiggie asks the reader to confront the violence they’ve been entertained by for decades.

And having done that, the comic goes one step further in asking how this world would really function. Jiggie snaps back at Maggs, at his daughter, at his employees, and everyone else that vexes him. The punchline is that he uses his money to hire thugs to beat the hell out of everyone and get them to do what he wants. A rich guy in a top hat might be a long-suffering victim in a comic strip, but in the real world, oligarchs get to do what they want.

If the comic wasn’t making its point clearly enough in those first eight pages, it then moves on to a parody of the McCarthy hearings, offered up as a game show. “What’s My Shine” is drawn by Jack Davis, in black and white with craft-tint grey tones, and—rare for comics of this era—is printed without any additional color, to look more like an actual 1950s TV show. It swings directly at McCarthy’s red-baiting, and even features a creepy, muttering Roy Cohn figure virtually attached to McCarthy’s right earlobe in every panel. McCarthy’s sick lies and accusations are shown for what they really are, as is the media’s reliance on the spectacle of easy conflict.

The comic moves on to satirize corporate messaging, the concept of beauty, hedonism, and finally, at the end, it satirizes the very notion of satire. A figure that represents the writer standing in front of a comics rack is at loss because there are now 12 different monthly parody comics, (there really were!) and he works the name and logo of each one into a soliloquy that runs through successive panels on a 12-panel page (above, left). This leads into a magnificent act of sawing off the limb they’re sitting on a comic called Julius Caesar, which looks like it’s going to lampoon the Marlon Brando movie of the time, but instead shines a light on all the tired tropes and strategies that go into making a lampoon. Wally Wood draws the writer standing in front of the panels of the comic, casting a shadow on them as if he was lecturing in front of a movie screen, the chaos mounts, and by the end the reader is presented with new critical tools to scrutinize the very comic he’s holding (above, right).

It’s not hard to see why authoritarians in the 1950s wanted to keep kids away from comics like MAD. This was genuinely subversive stuff, produced by the top talent of the era. I hope our comics hold up as well 60 years later.

Have you stumbled upon any treasures from the past recently? Let me know! You can reach me on Twitter @steve_lieber or on Facebook.

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Steve Lieber’s Dilettante appears the second Tuesday of every month here on Toucan!

Comics convention season is almost upon us, and my friends and I are doing what we always do, panicking. There’s so much to do! (If you have a comic you need to finish in time for the con, this column isn’t going to help you.)

But you’re going to be multitasking in the weeks before the con and at the con itself, so the more you have things organized, the better the con is going to go. Here are some steps to set yourself up for success in the weeks and days before the con.

First, make a folder in the cloud called “Conventions.” Make it in Dropbox, Google drive, wherever. The point is to have all your info in one place online.

• Make a new document that’s a list of the names and dates of all the cons you plan to attend this year. List them in order.
• Now make a folder for each convention. Here’s what’s going to go in those folders:
• PDFs of your travel info for that convention: Your flight or train ticket, hotel or other lodging details
• Sales tax documents and permits
• A document with contact info for:
• The person meeting you if you’re getting picked up
• The convention guest liaison, if any
• Any local contacts you might need.
• Tracking info for packages you shipped
• A list of what you need to do to attend that con, what you need to ship, and what you need to bring with you

Make another folder with your headshot, bio, and the cover of your latest book. Have the images in both web and print resolution.

Make another folder with any files you might need to print at a convention:

• PDFs of your art prints
• PDFs of your price lists and other table signs
• PDF of your business card
• PDFs of promotional items like postcards or bookmarks
• A sale-sheet: this is a checklist of everything you’re selling, with space for hashmarks to track sales

And here are your to-do lists for the months, weeks and days ahead of a con.

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Months Ahead:

• Apply to convention.
• Arrange for booth or table space.
• Send the con a link to the folder with headshot, bio, and the cover of your latest book.
• Arrange travel. If the con is making the arrangements, have a document ready with all the travel info they’ll need: frequent flier numbers, TSA Pre code (if you’re a frequent traveler, the time and expense required to enroll in the program is absolutely worth it), passport number for non-US conventions, etc. Assemble this document once and you’ll never have to hunt down all that info again.
• Arrange housing. Book a hotel, line up any roomies, find out if a local friend has a couch?
• Sign up for whatever permits are needed to exhibit at the show.
• Make arrangements for any panels or talks.
• Find out who the retailers are near the con. If timing works, maybe arrange a signing?
• Check inventory. Do you have enough copies of the books, prints, etc. you plan to sell?
• Re-order or reprint anything you’re short of.
• If you have to reorder, first check with the publisher.
• If the publisher doesn’t have enough copies left, see if you can get copies (at a price that’s near-wholesale) from any local or internet-based retailers.
• Announce your appearance at the con on social media. Make sure to tag the con so they can share the announcement.
• If you’ll be taking pre-con commissions, let people know the terms.

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A Few Weeks Ahead:

• Decide what to ship to the con.
• Find out if the hotel accepts shipments. Most do, though some charge storage fees, and one or two charge by the day, which can cost a fortune. If so, look for other options. Maybe a pack and ship near the convention, or a friend who lives near the con? Maybe a local retailer who’ll be exhibiting at the show?
• Make a note in your document for that convention exactly what you’ve shipped, and in what quantities, and the tracking number of the shipment.
• Reach out to anyone you want to meet with. Don’t put this off! Schedules fill up quickly.
• Decide what original art to bring, and make sure it’s priced in pencil on the back.
• Announce appearance at the con on social media, again. Make sure to tag the con so they can share the announcement.

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A Week Before:

Notify collaborators and clients that you’ll be away, and that you might not be reachable or free to do any last minute fixes.

Announce your appearance at the con on social media, again. Make sure to tag the con so they can share the announcement.

Gather all the stuff you’re going to bring:

• Whatever books you didn’t ship.
• Art prints. (If you have a lot of different prints, organize them, and have a way to find the one you’re looking for quickly at the con.)
• Any other merchandise.
• Business cards.
• Promotional items like bookmarks, postcards, or preview booklets.
• Sale-sheet listing of everything you’ll have for sale.
• A sign-up sheet for convention sketches.
• Ones and fives so you don’t run out of change.
• Foreign currency, if the con is outside of the US.
• Convention Kit

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What Should You Keep in Your Convention Kit?

• Your booth or table display equipment. If it’s elaborate, you’ll probably ship it ahead, but for many exhibitors, it’s just a tablecloth and a few bookstands or wire-mesh cubes.
• Your table signs and price lists.
• A portable travel scale. Most airlines charge a huge fee if your bag is even one pound over their limit.
• Anything you might need to repair your display. Packing tape and a spring-clamp or two can come in very handy.
• A flash drive with a bunch of images of your work. If you get called onto a panel, the AV tech can quickly add your images to a slideshow
• The art supplies you might need: pens, pencils, brushes, markers and marker refills, good quality paper, scrap paper. Don’t raid your daily supplies. Have a separate set.
• Post-it notes.
• Phone charging cables
• A spare battery for your phone
• A Square reader (now called Point of Sale) or PayPal Here reader, so you can take credit cards. (If you haven’t signed up for Square or PayPal Here, do that right now. Taking credit cards at conventions used to be a novelty. Now it’s expected.)
• A few extra business cards, because everyone runs out.

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The Day Before Departure:

• Print out a document with complete convention schedule: meetings, panels, signings, dinners.
• Print out all your travel info.
• Print out proof of the permits or sales tax registrations you signed up for.
• Print out any notes or visual aids for panels or presentations.
• Charge all your devices.
• Google to see if there’s a grocery store anywhere near the con. Some cons feed their guests, some don’t. If they don’t, and you don’t want to wait in a 20-minute line for a $9.00 convention center hotdog, you’ll either need to pick up lunches and snacks somewhere before the con, or bring them from home.
• Gather clothes and personal items.
• Get everything into one or two suitcases, and weigh it all to make sure each bag is under the airline’s limit.

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Does this sound like a lot of work? It is! But exhibiting at conventions is an increasingly important part of every comic creator’s schedule, and the better organized you are, the more you’ll be able to enjoy them.

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What’s on your convention checklist? Let me know! You can reach me on Twitter @steve_lieber or on Facebook.

The holidays are long past. You probably gave gifts to a dozen people. Now it’s time to give something to yourself. January is a great time to start a habit that’ll yield rewards for you in the future. Here are a few suggestions, broken into rough categories:

CREATIVE

Seed a few new ideas or possibilities into your current project.

Start a running gag or a motif in the backgrounds: ads for a made-up film or a business, an odd fashion trend that’s unique to the story you’re telling, references to a possible story element. Keep it subtle, but plant those seeds now and you’ll enrich the world you’re creating.

Start a folder of old school paper reference and inspiration.

The Internet is full of wonderful images and ideas, but it’s also got the rest of the Internet attached. It’s too easy to segue from useful research to falling down an endless well of cat videos. (Trust me, I’m as guilty of this as anyone.) That’s why it’s great to be able to move away from your computer and work from paper. If your big project for 2017 is full of horses and riders, gather some clippings from horse magazines and thrift store books and try sketching from those instead of the first 30 hits on Google Image Search,

Take up an activity outside of your work.

I know, I know. No one who makes comics has time for a hobby. Make time for something. It’s too easy to get stuck in the zone where all you do is sleep, eat, make comics and talk to other people who make comics. Are you a workaholic? Remind yourself that time spent kayaking, or volunteering at a shelter, or dancing, or playing an instrument isn’t a distraction that’s taking you away from your work. It’s recharging your batteries, and giving you a broader range of experiences to draw upon.

Lay the groundwork to organize a meet-up.

It’s hard to sustain creative and professional momentum over the length of a career. It’s even harder to do it without a strong support network. Take some time to be part of or strengthen your creative community. Is there a regular coffee meet-up or a drink and draw in your area? Put it on your calendar, and make a point of attending. If there isn’t, why not start something? It doesn’t have to be ambitious. Pick an afternoon or an evening and send out emails saying where and when you’d like to meet. Talk about what you’ve been reading, show off what you’ve been working on, exchange tips. Have some conversations away from social media or the pressures of a convention table. Some of the best friendships I have started with casual shoptalk … some of the best business relationships too. And community with closer ties based on regular face-to-face contact is far more resilient.

Chose a new element to incorporate into your work.

A low-stress way to introduce some variety into your work for the year. Pick an intriguing tool or technique you haven’t used before and make a point of finding ways to incorporate it into your projects. Have you been doing strictly black and white line art? Set the goal of incorporating a grey wash or digital tone into your linework. Been doing all your color with gradient fills? Maybe try a texture layer or cel-shading. All your stories told in strict linear time? Look for ways to introduce flashbacks as a storytelling tool.

Pick a lesson book and commit to a small daily exercise from it.

Most creative people I know own a lot of how-to books that they rarely open after purchasing. Why not commit to following through and learning from one of them? In art school, I used to take George Bridgman’s Constructive Anatomy with me to lunch and copy the drawings into a notebook while I ate. Later I did the same with Jack Hamm’s lessons on drawing drapery from his book on drawing the human figure. It was a small thing, just a few minutes a day, but it helped burn the information into my brain, and now, decades later, I can still call on that knowledge.

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HEALTH

Sit up straight.

Do I need to explain why? Make a note for yourself, and put it on your drawing board or monitor. Keep your back straight while you work, because you’re going to need it for a long time. If you work around someone else, ask them to call you out when you let your posture slip.

Set a routine exercise.

It doesn’t have to be a lot, but incorporate some movement into your workday. Set a timer to stand up and stretch every half hour. Take a 15-minute walk after lunch. If you juggle multiple projects try to work on them at different set-ups, maybe do one seated at your drawing board, another standing at an easel or standing desk.

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BUSINESS

Social Media

If you haven’t reserved your name on the various social media, go do that. If your name isn’t available, pick a variation that is, and if possible, pick the same one across the various sites. You don’t have to participate in all of them. It isn’t even possible to do that, but set up your profiles to point back to your portfolio or primary professional page. Put a reminder in your calendar to post something once a week. If you can’t post finished work, at least show off an interesting fragment. It doesn’t have to be chore. Just share something.

Taxes

If you’re a freelancer in the US, your estimated taxes are due January 15, April 15, June 15, and September 15. Put these dates on your calendar, and put in reminders two weeks, one week, and a few days before they’re due. There’s no reason to be taken by surprise by this.

If you don’t have one, set up a filing system now. For paper receipts, get a file box and a batch of file folders and set up a few categories: Rent or Cost of Home Office. Utilities. Work Supplies. Business Meals and Entertainment. Travel. Marketing. Misc. And the all-important “To Be Filed” so you have a place to put things when you’re straightening your office. And set up a digital bookkeeping system, too. It doesn’t have to be complex. You can use a free system like IQBoxy or even Google Sheets. One sheet to keep track of what you’ve spent, another to keep track of who owes you money and whether they have paid you yet.

There’s a ton of great information about finances for freelancers at the Freelancers Union site: https://www.freelancersunion.org/resources/

What are you hoping to incorporate into your routines for the New Year? I’d love to hear about them! You can reach me on Twitter @steve_lieber or Facebook.

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Steve Lieber’s Dilettante appears the second Tuesday of every month here on Toucan!

Like many people who work in creative fields, my greatest enemy is the blank white page. Limitless options are a nightmare for me. I need walls to bounce off of, rules to obey or defy, some limitation on what I can do with the project I’m working on. What I’ve learned as a creative person is this: if I want to do my work effectively, I don’t just need a reason to do something, I need a reason to not do something else. Sometimes these are inherent in the job. If I’m hired to create an 8-page comic, that eliminates a lot of possible stories that would require more space. If the story needs to be reproduced in black and white, I’m not going to make color an important story point. If the intended audience is children, I’m going to steer away from R-rated content. And if my story is in an established genre, I’ve got the tenets of that form to work with as well.

But sometimes these sorts of basic constraints aren’t enough for me. I need to take a few more options off the table, to work with more structure, to really begin to make interesting decisions. And if that structure isn’t handed down from a publisher or client, I’ll create it myself.

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Writing prompts

When I need a starting point for any creative endeavor, I’m fond of working with writing prompts.

Letters of the Alphabet

Pick a letter and jot down a list of words that start with it. Try a mixture of nouns and verbs. When you have a list of fifteen or so, start looking for associations and possibilities.

Bibliomancy

This is a favorite. Grab a novel or a book of narrative non-fiction. Ask a question about the story you want to tell. Flip to a page at random and point to a sentence. Jot it down. Do this again. Look for possibilities in the juxtaposition of these two sentences and the story problem you’re trying to solve.

Photos

This bibliomancy approach works with images, too. Get a big collection of photographs, ideally ones that aren’t all on one theme. Jot down the problem you’re trying to solve and flip through to a photo. Scrutinize them carefully, and you’ll probably find your mind applying the contents of the photo to create possible answers to your problem.

Oblique Strategies

In the 1970s, Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt created a deck of cards, each of which featured some sort of constraint, designed to get artists unblocked by encouraging them to approach problems from a different angle. You can generate random picks from the deck by clicking here.

There are countless great constraints artists and writers can apply to their process.  The Constrained Writing entry in Wikipedia lists quite a few; click here to read it.

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Drawing constraints

Restrict the Tools You Use

Some of the biggest jumps I’ve ever made as a cartoonist came from setting up restrictions on what tools I’d allow myself to use. I’ve drawn stories where I said I had to diligently reference every figure with a photo. Other stories where I didn’t allow myself to use any photos whatsoever. I’ve tried pages where I only used a brush, or only a dip pen, or only two markers. You can do this with paper as well. Set a rule that you only draw with India ink on heavily textured white paper for all present-day scenes, while drawing your flashbacks in a dark grey ink-wash on smooth tinted paper, and add white highlights with gouache.

Restrict Technique

I’ve had great results setting up rules limiting the sorts of marks I can use in a scene or a story. No hatching or crosshatching was one. I could only use simple outlines, and areas of solid black. Look at the way artists like Chris Samnee and David Lloyd have eliminated outline entirely throughout some stories. Other artists only allow themselves to draw with an uninflected outline and don’t depict light and shadow whatsoever. Artists working in color might use only flat colors with a story. Or they can limit their palate to a couple of hues. Every scene could be keyed to its own symbolic or literal color. One story might be carefully colored within the linework, defining the local color of every individual object on a page, another could let the color spill loosely across forms, binding whole planes of depth together and only defining areas of focus.

If a story doesn’t require precision or accuracy, you could skip penciling entirely, only drawing directly in ink, and incorporating any construction-lines or mistakes into the overall look of the work.

You can set rules for perspective. In Superior Foes of Spider-Man, I drew most of the comic following the rules of normal academic perspective. But for a couple of fanciful sequences that I wanted to look like a side-scrolling video game, I switched to isometric perspective (a type of drawing where parallel lines stay parallel rather than converge to a vanishing point.) You could decide that all of your scenes will be viewed from a certain eye level: a child’s POV, say, or maybe tell the story gazing up at everything from ground level, like the POV of someone in the orchestra pit at a theater looking up at the stage.

You can set up rules for how pages are laid out. Decide that every page is designed around one important central image, and that every other panel will be smaller and less important. Or restrict yourself to a formal grid, and make all of your pages within that framework. On my current project, The Fix at Image, most pages are built from a 4×4 grid: four rows of four panels each. I don’t do many 16-panel pages so I usually combine some of these panels into layouts like these:

My main exceptions to this rule are splash pages and double page spreads. The Fix is full of conversations and subtle actions and movements, but in just about every issue, we’ve had some eruption of activity that’s heavy on slapstick and broad gestures. For these scenes we abandon the disciple of the 4×4 grid and burst into a different grid entirely.

Apply a Formal Structure

Maybe your story will start with a splash, then page two is two panels, page three, three panels, page four, four, and so on, until page ten, at which point every page has one less panel with the story ending on another splash. Or maybe every page is a splash.

Every scene could start with a shot of a city street. Or every scene might end on a shot of the weather. Every right-hand page could have a tall thin panel that communicates the main character’s emotional state. Or perhaps you could introduce a visual refrain. Dylan Meconis’ Family Man frequently features splash pages that focus on round, white objects, right in the center of the page.

You could use decades as a structure, and have every scene somehow subtly reflect what was happening in history in a different decade. Or start every chapter at its ending, and then move back in time to reveal how your character got there.

Novelist and essayist Zadie Smith refers to this sort of imposed structure as “scaffolding.”

Each time I’ve written a long piece of fiction I’ve felt the need for an enormous amount of scaffolding. With me, scaffolding comes in many forms. The only way to write this novel is to divide it into three sections of ten chapters each. Or five sections of seven chapters. Or the answer is to read the Old Testament and model each chapter on the books of the prophets. Or the divisions of the Bhagavad Gita. Or the Psalms. Or Ulysses. Or the songs of Public Enemy. Or the films of Grace Kelly. Or the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse …

Scaffolding holds up confidence when you have none, reduces the despair, creates a goal―however artificial―an end point.

And this brings me to the most important part of this. All of these rules and restrictions are here to help you create better work. By all means, set rules for yourself, and enjoy the fascinating new hops your work takes as you bounce it off the structures you’ve erected. But if following a rule means doing something that just doesn’t work, ignore the rule. Suppose your rule is “no hatching or cross-hatching. only thin outlines and areas of solid black.” Then after 50 pages,  you need some grey to clarify an important story point in an important panel, and you just can’t solve the problem with black and white? Hatch away, and feel fine, knowing that your number one job is telling the story. The rule is just there to help you unify your pages and get things done. As Smith says:

Later, when the book is printed and old and dog-eared, it occurs to me that I really didn’t need any of that scaffolding. The book would have been far better off without it. But when I was putting it up, it felt vital, and once it was there, I’d worked so hard to get it there I was loath to take it down. If you are writing a novel at the moment and putting up scaffolding, well, I hope it helps you, but don’t forget to dismantle it later.

Have you employed constrains in your own work? Get in touch and let me know! You can reach me on Twitter @steve_lieber or Facebook.

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Steve Lieber’s Dilettante appears the second Tuesday of each month here on Toucan!

Over the course of a career in comics, you’re going to tell a lot of stories. Along the way, you’ll churn through many ideas, and watch them descend from exciting, to welcome, to expected, to tedious. That clever new twist that earned so much praise is now part of the everyday toolkit for a dozen other cartoonists. Your stunning risk is now a standard riff.

No one likes to acknowledge this. What’s the point of laurels if you can’t rest on them? Too bad. You need to keep learning. And here’s a valuable tip: you’re going to want to learn from places outside of comics. There are enormous bodies of work to explore in other media, with valuable lessons you can apply to the stories you want to tell. Every work in every medium has its own beauty and spirit to share. But for the purposes of this essay, I’ll be talking about coming to other works with a utilitarian eye and asking, “What can I learn from this work to improve my own?”

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Photography

Just about every cartoonist spends time looking at photographs for pure research purposes. “What do a giraffe’s spots look like?” “How do the sleeves on a Victorian-era dress gather at the shoulder?” But photography is a vast and expressive visual medium. Study a photographer’s work to see the world through another set of eyes. Great photographers catch decisive moments. They isolate geometric order in the midst of the world’s organic chaos. They create mystery by juxtaposing unlikely elements. They highlight sly ironies. They use pictures to talk about the world, just like illustrators and cartoonists, and many of the strategies that work for them will work for you.

Photography also often has unplanned elements that lead to surprising and unexpected compositions that are extremely useful for cartoonists to consider.

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Dance

If you work with the human figure, you’re going to get a lot out of watching dance performances. This is particularly true of artists working in adventure comics for whom the athleticism of dancers is extremely valuable, but any visual storyteller can learn from them. Dancers spend years sculpting themselves into precision machines, and their choreographers bring a lifetime of experience to the job of setting them in motion. Watch dancers for ideas about balance and movement. Look for the lines they create with their bodies, how they arrange themselves into abstract shapes, and how those shapes can express such a wide range of human emotions and attitudes.

When dance performances are built around a narrative, you can study how they combine elements to shape a story. You don’t have music, of course. But you do get to arrange the figure in space, and juxtapose it with other figures. You have light, and color, and costume, and you can change these over the time the story progresses. You have rising and falling action, and moods that can change gradually or abruptly.

And when a dance abandons narrative to emphasize abstract beauty and movement, study it the way you would another artist’s sketchbook. Look for daring or unexpected arrangements of shapes and colors, mine it for ideas for poses and gestures and movement. Everything you see on that stage is the choice of skilled and thoughtful artisans. Their ideas might mesh well with yours.

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Prose Fiction

Most of the stories that get told in our culture are told with words, not pictures. Look to novelists and short story writers for, well, everything.  Images. Language. Pacing. Story structure. Symbolism. Insight into human behavior. Ideas about how the world works, who we are and what we’re doing. Prose fiction’s value to a storyteller in any medium is so vast I almost feel foolish mentioning it at all. If you want to tell stories, read stories.

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Theater

Stage plays offer many of the same immense possibilities as prose, and as visual media, they do a lot of things that are useful for a comics-maker to study.  A stage play is constrained by the limitations of the space it’s performed in, and requires a high degree of stylization. Look to theatre for the power of minimalism. See how a lamppost can stand in for an entire city street, how a desk and a window can become an office, how a few shadows on a wall can be an army marching to war. Pay attention to how costumes are used to help the audience keep characters separate and recognizable, how the clothes show who characters are, and how they’re changing. Watch how theatrical designers use light, and how a simple change of color or intensity can vastly change the mood of a scene. The same sort of change of light can make it immediately clear that the time and place has changed, even if nothing else on the stage has.  

And pay close attention to how few unnecessary moments there are. A good play is full of lessons in economical storytelling. It’ll bring you into a scene as late as possible, and get you out as early.

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Painting and Sculpture

Fine artists speak a number of visual languages, some going back thousands of years. A visit to even a small museum will surround you with more visual possibilities than you can incorporate into an entire career. You’ll find work that uses the conventions of western art which form the foundation of most academic or “realistic”) drawing styles. What do I mean by that? Linear and atmospheric perspective used to create the illusion of depth. Figures based on the study of human anatomy. The effects of light and color observed in nature and faithfully recorded. Compositions based on rules of design. Symbolic schemes that artists have relied on for generations to extend meaning beyond the literal.

You’ll also find works from other cultures around the world, each of which has created their own harmonies and tensions and dissonances. Learn from them—find ideas and strategies that you can incorporate into your own creations. Just take care not to appropriate undigested elements and claim them as your own. It’s one thing to look at a Benin Bronze head and be inspired to juxtapose big organic facial forms with areas of elaborate patterning. It’s another to just copy a specific work, stick a few cylinders underneath it and say you designed a robot.

Where do you look for inspiration? Get in touch and let me know. You can reach me on Twitter or Facebook. And be sure to pick up The Fix #6 this week at your local comic shop!

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Steve Lieber’s Dilettante appears the second Tuesday of each month here on Toucan!