Contracts

Comics are meant to be read. You can push, but you need to have something to hold onto or you’re not transported, you’re back in a chair, looking at a piece of paper, and you’ll lose a lot of readers that way because you’ve broken your contract with them.

— Chris Forgues.

Parásitos y Parastoides

Una lucha continua.

Kieron Gillen comparte la cruda verdad detrás de un guionista de comics y su reto constante por seguir siendo esencial en el proceso creativo junto a sus artistas y narradores gráficos:

“I concentrated on basically three areas—script as blueprint, script as love letter and pacing (including all manner of weird acts of magic in comics). The photo above is one of my opening gambits, which is trying to encourage writers to realise that a writer isn’t needed to make a comic. An artist could just write a comic themselves, and if you don’t actively bring more than that, it’s a problem. The aim is to become a symbiote, as essential as mitochondria are to eukaryote cells. I also spent a lot of time in the love letter section about how to avoid becoming an active parastoid—as in, a parasite which kills the host.”

Horror Comics

It’s about drawing people in. It’s about creating a tone, and slowly tuning it so that everything becomes threatening. It’s hard to do the sharp-shock of horror in comics, but it is possible to create a real miasma of disturbingness (which may not be a word). Bit by bit, you can worm your way into a reader’s head and, not outright scare them, but disturb them… create genuine revulsion, so that they feel like they need a shower afterwards.

— Warren Ellis.

El Noveno Arte

I’ve used an analogy before by comparing comics to sheet music. Comics are a series of symbols printed out on paper that represent a passage of events through time. In a way, you almost “play” comics in your mind like you might play a musical instrument. And there’s a certain sonority in the arrangement of panels, an internal logic to them, that comes out when you read them, that’s best described as “music”. Maybe “poetry” is a better word.
I feel like how I apply music or architecture towards comics is expressed through graphic organization of images—and is like music and architecture founded on mathematical principles.

Comics, to me, is the “architecture of time and space”. Just like music moves through time and a just like how a building is organized by space—comics deals in space and time and is expressed graphically. So using the “math” of classical proportions seems like an appropriate starting point.

— Frank Santoro.

Inktober

Inktober, more like nothankyouwhywouldisuddenlybemore productivethismonthtober.
Haha yes very good.
— Annie Wu.

[*] En un tweet que aunque lleno de ironía nos lleva a pensar si este trend anual (¿y pasajero?) De dibujar sin parar durante el mes de octubre realmente sirve de provecho al artista gráfico.

Writing comics

If you want to write comics, write comics. If you just want to write, and you’re worried about the state of this medium, go to another one. The medium demands your passion. If there’s a single question in your head about putting your heart here, then go away.

— Warren Ellis.

Content

I don’t much care how pretty a comic book panel is. I care about how much story it can carry.

— Phil Hester.