Lynda Barry’s New Book Offers a Master Class in Making Comics
This is hands down my new favorite instructional book on comics and comic book creation.The brilliance of Lynda Barry's approach are her exercises to "dig out of you" the ideas, characters, situations, humor and insight that you're not even aware of, or don't quite know how to access. It helps you get past the "road block" of feeling like you have to draw well to create amazing comics or communicate insight. If you're looking for a "break-through" kind of book this may very well be it!
In the same way you don’t have to like the way your liver looks for it to be able to function, you don’t have to like the way your drawings look for them to start to work. —Lynda Barry
First things first, you can draw. Stop saying you can’t. You can.
Stop saying your drawings look like they were made by a four-year-old.
In Barry’s experience, the unfettered drawings of four-year-old artists are something to aim for.
As author and comics historian Chris Gavaler notes in his Pop Matters review:
Making Comics is a love letter to every child who ever picked up a crayon and started making marks with unselfconscious intensity. Those children include her college students. Like her readers, some arrive at class with artistic training and some arrive with none at all. The latter arrive having long forgotten the uninhibited style of image-making they understood instinctively as children. Finding each of those children is Barry's mission, and she is very very good at it.
Let's take a look at the video once.
