If you’re signed up for the Publishers Weekly Comics Week email newsletter (and you know you should be!) you’ve probably had this appear in your inbox already, but I’ve written a review of Jessica Abel and Matt Madden’s new comics teaching book Drawing Words and Writing Pictures in the current newsletter. As you can probably tell from the review, I really really enjoyed the book. It’s a major achievement and a great stride forward in the somewhat anemic field of comics instruction texts. From the review:
While colleges, universities and art schools have been busily adding comics-making classes—and in some cases, concentrations or even entire departments—in parallel with the current “graphic novel boom,” good-quality textbooks to use in conjunction with those classes have been hard to come by. As I imagine other comics teachers have, for my classes, I’ve wound up cobbling together bits and pieces for my students, drawn from comics’ scattershot history of “how-to” books—from venerable classics such as Will Eisner’s Comics & Sequential Art and Jack Hamm’s Cartooning the Head and Figure, to more recent works such as Scott McCloud’s Making Comics. None of these books, though, offered a single, complete course of comics-making starting with fundamentals, covering the technical nuts and bolts, and culminating with a finished student-assembled comic book.
It should be no surprise that this is exactly what Jessica Abel and Matt Madden have set out to do with their new book on comics instruction, Drawing Words and Writing Pictures, since both have been teaching comics at New York City’s School of Visual Art for many years. (read more…)
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