Making Comics: Storytelling Secrets of Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels
Where to buy Building Comics: Storytelling Secrets of Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels books online?
Product Description
Scott McCloud tore down the wall between high and low culture in 1993 with Understanding Comics, a massive comic book about comics, between the medium to such diverse fields as media theory, movie criticism, and web design. In Reinventing Comics, McCloud took this to the next level, charting twelve different revolutions in how comics are generated, read, and perceived today. Now, in Building Comics, McCloud focuses his analysis on the art form itself, exploring the creation of comics, from the broadest principles to the sharpest details (like how to accentuate a character’s facial muscles in order to form the emotion of disgust rather than the emotion of surprise.) And he does all of it in his unique voice and through his cartoon stand–in narrator, mixing dry humor and legitimate instruction. McCloud shows his reader how to master the human condition through word and image in a brilliantly minimalistic way. Comic book devotees as well as the most uninitiated will marvel at this journey into a once–underappreciated art form.
Amazon.com ReviewScott McCloud’s Understanding Comics was published in 1993, just as “Comics Aren’t Just for Kids Anymore!” articles were starting to appear and graphic novels were building their way into the mainstream, and it quickly gave the newly respectable medium the theoretical and practical manifesto it needed. With his clear-eyed and approachable analysis–done using the same comics tools he was describing–McCloud quickly gave “sequential art” a language to know itself. McCloud made the simplest of drawing decisions seem deep with artistic potential.
Thirteen years later, following the Internet evangelizing of Reinventing Comics, McCloud has returned with Building Comics.
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Designed as a craftsperson’s overview of the drawing and storytelling decisions and possibilities available to comics artists, covering everything from facial expressions and page layout to the choice of tools and tale construction, Building Comics, like its predecessors, is also an eye-opening trip behind the scenes of art-building, fascinating for anyone reading comics as well as persons building them. Get a sense of the range of his lessons by clicking through to the opening pages of his book, including his (illustrated, of course) table of contents (warning: large file, recommended for high-bandwidth users):
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Scott McCloud is known best for his masterpiece, Understanding Comics. Whereas Understanding Comics clarified and simplified the principles of comics in a universally appealing way, Building Comics succeeds at removing the screws and getting into the cogs and gears that keep juxtapozed-pictorial-and-additional-images-in-deliberate-sequence ticking.
That understood, this isn’t really a book for a name that isn’t interested in building comics, because most of the information within isn’t easily applied to additional disciplines, media, or all-purpose understanding of our own cognitive processes–at least not in the ways it so successfully did in Understanding Comics. That being said, the book also doesn’t seem to offer a lot of useful information for the thoughtful veteran of comics creation, either. It’s a bit like he’s describing the subconscious actions that go with driving a car, but persons won’t automatically make you a better driver.
Building Comics is certainly worth a gander, though–it’s vital to realize that even an average performance by Scott McCloud is reasonably well-done.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
Brilliant book – very well open and detailed. Well worth the fee. Our kids (9 and 7) are using it to make better comics
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
OUT THERE, ARE NOT BETTER BOOK THA THIS ABOUT MAKING COMICS, NO ONE, THIS IS THE BEST
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
Fantastic introduction to building comics. Fantastic presentation. It clarifies the intricacies of the medium very well for a beginner.
Developing the skills to make excellent tales or improve your drawing skills need to be sought outside this book. There are some excellent looking references for these. While I can know drawing being left out, would have been nice to go through some plot/tale development.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
What I like about this book is the fact that it is not only instructional for comic book artists but also for all artists. He writes and draws to enhance what he is teaching so that it is not even noticed by the reader that he is being taught. I have met Scott and he is as entertaining and amusing in person as he is in his book.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5