I have another draft of that couch drawing! I did do an extension of the other one, but as I worked on it, I realized that was still the wrong approach, and I decided to redo it completely. I think this shift in pose helps a lot. Their relative positions to each other are much clearer for the triangle and eye lines. The larger frame looks way better, too. I got it all framed more effectively here because I drew out the couch first, so I could better figure out their overall proportions better. That said, I didn’t plan it properly for what I wanted, as the perspective is a bit off as a result. Overall, I’m very satisfied with it.
I am seeing a lot more acceptance of comics in the mainstream, and it’s great. I think everyone should read a comic at least once in school, like how we teach other media. If a kid said they went through school without having read a poem, you’d be shocked and outraged. I have this weird thing, though, with the argument that “comics get kids reading,” and I want to talk about it.
So, comics are possibly the oldest recorded visual art form known to humanity. That’s what cave paintings are; they’re a series of related images that contain more information together than alone. We’ve had various forms of it over the millennia, but generally speaking didn’t have as much of it in the West for the past few hundred years, at least. The modern form of comics came about in newspapers, pulling from cartoons the combination of pictures and words to communicate even more info. This led to strips, which newspapers liked publishing to hook readers who don’t care about the business section. They were entertaining, often humorous and flurid, and countercultural. Then came proper comic books, where they were able to really flourish as a medium once more.
High society turned their noses at it. They didn’t get it, and looked down on comics as vulgar pop art. Not having been exposed to them, “proper society” looked at them as being like prose that uses pictures as a crutch. Especially after Seduction of the Innocent, they were seen as improper. They were culturally and politically suppressed for decades. Not extinguished, and in fact they found a way to work within the cultural edicts to flourish anyway. That said, they lost their cultural reputation and have only recently started to recover it.
That brings us to the modern era, where comics, graphic novels, and manga are getting respect again. Some of that comes from educators and education advocates who say “comics get kids to read.” And I don’t disagree with that, but I kinda feel like it misses the point. All the statistics about the effect of comics on vocabulary and whatnot, while true, still frame comics as a lesser version of prose. Like they’re a gateway to real reading, the thing kids need to be doing. By this argument, comics are a way to use pictures to trick kids into reading words, and those words constitute the reading involved. But of course, comics are their own medium, with their own history and value separate from words. The words aren’t even necessary, they’re just useful in expanding potential.
Like, I do believe in my cause of comics, but I feel silly being nitpicky about that. “Reading” has a lot of different meanings, like reading the room and reading a painting. You do read comics, and they are a very-easy-to-engage with medium that helps kids jumpstart their natural appetite for critical thinking and that definition of reading, which certainly carries over to prose. But at the end of the day, I want us to celebrate reading comics for comics’ sake, not as a way to get kids primed for chapter books, you know?
In a larger sense, in my mind, as long as that argument is a primary way to lend credibility to comics, it means we don’t actually respect the medium for what it is. Written words wouldn’t even exist without comics, as pictographic writing came from comics and letters/characters came from pictographs. It’s really weird to have to explain that a medium of art deserves to be treated like art, just as it’s silly to make fun of sports that aren’t televised, or scoff at martial arts because they don’t protect you from bullets. Engage with things on their own terms.
Weekly Art Blog 12/7-12/14/2024
Life in the Gutters 