It’s a dream of many bloggers and comic journalists: to break into print, to create a new comic magazine. Many of them even have the same tag line in mind, something about filling the gap between Wizard (populist, tawdry, aimed at teenage boys) and The Comics Journal (high-minded, pretentious, aimed at academic art-comic readers). It’s an easy market to reach, since there’s only one major distributor, Diamond, and entry costs are low in comics (perhaps the lowest of any mass […]

Recently, a bunch of online commentators have been discussing how Wizard‘s how-to guide objectifies women. At first, all this hoo-hah sounded to me rather like Claude Rains’ character in Casablanca: “I am shocked, SHOCKED to find that gambling is going on in here!” Who doesn’t know that Wizard is targeted at adolescent (in mind if not still in body) males? Of course their view of women is of unknown creatures only to be stared at, because that’s how teenage boys […]

99 Ways to Tell a Story has been billed as a how-to book, but it’s more accurate to talk about it in reference to its subtitle. Matt Madden has been conducting “Exercises in Style”, telling the same short comic story 99 different ways (inspired by the work of Raymond Queneau). Madden is known as a proponent of formalism, the idea that creativity isn’t necessarily constrained by boundaries. Instead, artificial restraints (like restricting the number of pages or requiring that a […]

Panel Two is a followup to Panel One, a book edited by Nat Gertler collecting sample comic scripts by notable writers, that improves on the first in two ways: it covers even more diverse ways to write comics, and it includes commentary by many of the artists involved. As well as learning basic information (pros and cons of full script vs. just panel descriptions, for example, or a list of art reference books), you’ll be entertained by the occasional horror […]