Create Comics 2008 Day 4!

Here’s the fourth installment from Alex Bullett at the Create Comics Workshop

Today was a busy day for Create Comics students. The group of forty produced two full mini-comics. Each book stars Erin Branson Private Eye and her pet dog Watson. The students started drawing after lunch, finished their pages at five, and didn’t complete production until midnight. The covers are one-color silkscreen prints on file folders. The subtitle is a gocco print on the file tab. Every student contributed a page, resulting in two great comics. Jon Chad has been a guest at the school for two days. He is a Burlington resident, a great artist and an all around great guy. Today he lectured about mini-comics and drew the cover for the comics. The book looks fantastic.

Create Comics 2008

Here’s the first installment from Alex Bullett at the Create Comics Workshop:

The Create Comics Workshop started today at The Center for Cartoon Studies. Forty eager students gathered in the main room for lectures from Steve Bissette and Jason Lutes. Both creators talked about their approach to story telling and panel design.

Steve Bissette is well know for his horror comics. He talked about using panel design to create suspense. In the following sequence, Steve had to show a woman’s husband arriving at home. Steve did two things in the third panel in order to build up a feeling of horror. He drew the panel lower on the page than the previous two. He also drew the border without a ruler. This woman’s husband is going to make her life much worse.

Pages/panels from SAGA OF THE SWAMP THING #29 © 1984 DC Comics, Inc; script by Alan Moore, pencils by Stephen R. Bissette, inks by John Totleben, lettered by John Costanza, colors by Tatjana Wood.

Jason Lutes is fantastic at using panel design to slow down a story and convey an overall mood. The following sequence is take from his book Jar of Fools. Jason uses an unconventional panel layout. He divides his sequence with one long panel. This slows down the story considerably. It allows the reader to feel the calm as the money falls and the man lights his cigarette.

Pages/panels from Jar of Fools © Jason Lutes

More to come tommorow!

Comic Influx

Perhaps it’s because I’m lucky enough to work nearby a great two-year school for the study of creating visual stories, the Center for Cartoon Studies, that I’ve started to notice the influx of comics and graphic novels in mainstream marketing. I’ve collected just a few examples here, but I’m seeing more and more each day:

• Random House, Macmillian and Dark Horse bring comics to our bookstores.
• Emily the Strange gets her own movie
• Bizarro and Derek Jeter share a SI cover
• Batman’s got a milk mustache & you can get in on the action
• Iron Man, Batman, Hellboy and the Hulk hit the summer big screen
• A movie, based on a graphic novel won the ‘07 Cannes Jury Prize
• The longest running sitcom in the US is a cartoon

Todays graphic designers are incorporating cartoons, comics, graphic novels and visual story telling into more and more of their work. To raise the awareness of this great pairing, and to provide an inside look into the creation and education surrounding this medium today, we’ve asked Alex Bullett, an intern at Center for Cartoon Studies, to blog about his experience attending CCS’s boot camp for cartoonists, Create Comics Summer Workshop. You’ll soon hear from Alex, in his own words, how comics and design go hand-in-hand. Questions for Alex? Leave them in the comments section below. Keep checking back, or use our RSS feed, to learn more about Alex and his day-by-day experiences when the Summer Workshop starts on June 23rd.