Douglas Wolk Reading Notes Annalise L & Brielle N

What Cartooning Is and How it Works

Film and photography show you something you would have seen exactly
the same way if you had been present at the right time and place.
With comics, what you view is the manifestation of a comic’s artistic style
and personal interpretation of reality. What you see when you look at a comic
is a particular, personal vision of its artist’s vision, or the way the artist’s mind
interprets sight.
The visual aspect of cartooning is usually achieved through drawing, but
more specifically, cartooning.

Drawing vs. Cartooning

In the conventional sense, drawing is usually supposed to represent real-
world beings and objects.
The chief tools of cartooning are distortion and symbolic abstraction; it
usually begins and sometimes ends with contour and outline, and it relies on
conventions that imply the progression of time. Additionally, cartooning
usually depicts invented or fictional people and settings, or in some cases,
real people and settings that are supposed to be looked at as if they were
fictional.
Artist references:
 Joe Sacco (who creates comics about Palestine and Eastern Europe), whose work
uses “cartoony” distortions and caricatures and whose style relies on careful
observation and subjective interpretations.
 Guy Delisle and Alison Bechdel
 Garry Trudeau, Doonesbury, who substitutes icons for politicians
 Dave Sim, Cerebus, who thinly disguises cartoonists and comedians into outrageous
caricatures

Comics can go Beyond Line Drawings…

Real-world celebrities have turned up in mainstream comics, but due to
cognitive dissonance (seeing images that try and fail to match up to the
reality of actual people’s appearances), they wreck the stories around them
and do not often work.
Photo comics (or fumetti), have been around for decades, but there have yet
to be notable photo comics made in English.
Painted comics, while not the most popular medium, have been appearing
since the early 80s.
Artist references:
 Melinda Gebbie, who uses mixed media artwork for Lost Girls
 Bill Sienkiewcz, who has taken advantage of the distortions and abstractions that
paint can offer, which conventional drawing techniques cannot.
 Alex Ross, who creates painted upgrades of standard superhero-comics imagery

Pen and Ink Cartooning and Borders

Outlines and borders used within a panel impose a purpose on the reader.
In the real world, objects don’t have lines defining their edges, they just end.
 The cartoonist’s line defines the shape of the comic’s image, but the line is
never just a border…it’s a signature, or rather, a marking of the artist’s
territory.
The line itself is an interpolation, something the cartoonist adds to his or her
idea of the shape of bodies in space. In a cartoon, every object’s form is
subject to interpretive distortion.
Artist references:
 David Lloyd, V for Vendetta, who avoids outlines as much as possible
 Alex Maleev, Daredevil, who alternates outline-based cartooning with a blotchy style
that imitates the look of multiple-generation photocopies of photographs
 Hergé, Tintin, has an instantly identifiable line; his forceful lines maintain an almost
uniform density and are rarely used for shading
 Craig Thompson, who uses lusty, rages brushstrokes
 Chris Ware, “dead” single-thickness mechanical lines
 Robert Crumb, tremulous squiggles
 David Cooper, oscillating scribble that blurs the edges of the half-revolting human
flesh
 Megan Kelso or Peter Bagge or Ron Regé, Jr., whose drawings don’t look much like
human beings, but are certainly identifiable as characters of their respective comic
artists

Decorating the Blank Walls of the Fourth Dimension

Comics suggest motion, but they’re incapable of actually showing motion.
They indicate sound, and even spell it out, but they’re silent. They imply the
passage of time, but their temporal experience is controlled more by the
reader than by the artist.
A single panel can imply the passage of time, but only with the help of
symbolic tricks: special kinds of lines that imply speed and motion, showing
the same figure or different figures at slightly separated moments in time
across the direction that the eye scans the panel, or most easily, language.
As a reader, you’re ultimately in control of the speed at which they page
progresses.
Blank space in between panels, the gutter, acts as a clear distinction
between where the panel’s image goes and where it doesn’t. With the gutter,
readers get to fill in the lapse of time represented by the blankness of the
gutter.
The idea of the pregnant moment is when a single image in static visual art
is most dramatic when it’s the moment from which time radiates in both
directions, suggesting what’s happened before, and what’s about to happen
after it.

Some Final Words on Comics…

The comics medium was built on the idea of escapism and the pleasure that
goes with it. Genre comics promise and escape into a more intense and
exciting version of the world; art comics promise an escape into a kind of
vision very different from one’s own.
The broader philosophical implication of many comics, to one extent or
another, is: there is another world, which is this world. The places that
cartoonists draw are very different from the ones where readers live; every
element of the comics world is created by the artist’s hands.
 The distortion of cartooning has only one hard limit. It has to be legible – the
reader has to be able to recognize everything and everyone in the image very
quickly. The medium has a tradition of effortlessness.
The best-remembered, best-selling mainstream comics of the past have been
the ones whose artists were naturally gifted storytellers, encouraged to let
their stylistic quirks show.
Artist references:
 C.C. Beck, Captain Marvel stories
 Frank Miller, Daredevil
 John Byrne and Terry Austin, Uncanny X-Men
 Carl Barks, Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge