I’m still making my way through the Inkheart series, which is a story about stories and the magic of words, but in the meantime I’ve also read several comic books about comics and art, so that’s the focus of this week’s stack.
Art Club by Rashad Doucet
Of the books in this week’s column, this one is the closest to a typical kids’ graphic novel: it’s an actual story and while the kids in it do make art, it’s not explicitly a how-to book. The art style has more of a sketchy look than what I usually see in comics, but the flow of the story feels familiar. Dale doesn’t know what he wants to do when he grows up, and when the vice principal (who also seems to be teaching classes?) assigns the kids a report on what “financially stable job” the kids plan to have, Dale struggles with it. He just wants to play video games and make comics — but both his grandpa and the vice principal seem to agree that those are a waste of time.
Eventually, though, Dale manages to start up an art club at the school with four students and a sponsor teacher (how they all get there is part of the story). The VP isn’t convinced, though, and gives the club an ultimatum: they need to make a profit by the end of the semester to prove that art can be financially successful, or the club will be shut down (and Dale will fail his final project).
The four kids all have different types of skills: Dale is a comic book writer and illustrator; his best friend Aren is new to art but has a knack for painting; Kya makes art with a message and is great at speaking about it in public; Mackenzie is into digital art and videogame design but has been sneaking into art club without her mom’s permission. The kids also have big personalities that clash from time to time — what would a middle grade story be without some interpersonal conflicts to resolve, right? — but eventually they do figure out how to use everyone’s strengths to help the club succeed.
It’s a story meant to give some inspiration to kids who want to make art for a living: it doesn’t make it look easy, but it provides some information about a few types of careers in the arts, and shows that they can be valuable paths to pursue.
The Cartoonists Club by Raina Telgemeier and Scott McCloud
Here’s another after-school club, this one focused more specifically on making comics — but while this one also features four kids with different talents, the book is also more of a primer on comics themselves. Scott McCloud is well-known for Understanding Comics (as well as the follow-ups Making Comics and Reinventing Comics), which breaks down how comics work and how they’re made. It’s a fantastic book but it’s not written for kids … and that’s where Raina Telgemeier comes in. She’s written and illustrated a ton of comics for middle grade readers, and she always wished there were something like Understanding Comics but for a younger audience. The two of them collaborated on this story that walks through the basics using the cartoonists club as a framing story.
Howard and Makayla are the first two kids in the club — they got in trouble with their algebra teacher for laughing about Howard’s drawings during class. While talking over lunch, they realize that they could make a good team: Howard loves to draw but has trouble figuring out stories, while Makayla loves making up stories but can’t draw them. In the library, they meet Lynda, who is very shy but turns out to be an excellent illustrator. Finally, they’re joined by Art, who just loves making anything and everything.
The librarian, Ms. Fatima, takes the group through various exercises to stretch their creative muscles, while also taking the reader through the basics of understanding and making comics. They cover topics like facial expressions and body language, storytelling, sound effects, and even making mini comics. It’s not quite as in-depth as Understanding Comics but includes a little more story about the kids, and it has a similar way of breaking the fourth wall as the kids illustrate how some of the various concepts work. It’s a great foundation for understanding comics, whether kids are mostly just interested in reading them or want to take a crack at making some themselves. Cartoonists Club will be available in April.
Graphic Novel Builder by Edward Ross
Here’s another one that is even more nuts-and-bolts, though this book still includes a bit of framing story. This time, there are five kids: one is the team leader with the vision, and the others have expertise in writing, drawing, coloring, and book-binding. (Oh, and there’s also a dog.) Ash decides that the group is going to make comics, so then they dive into the various parts, with each chapter focused on one aspect of it.
There’s a lot more in this book about what happens before you draw: creating the characters and location, figuring out a story and actually writing it, and then drawing the comic and publishing it. Most of the chapters also have some exercises for the reader, often using the provided prompts to get you started. Where The Cartoonists Club had a lot about comics theory and what makes them work, Graphic Novel Builder focuses on the building blocks of a story and how to start shaping them. Its own story is primarily about the various kids stepping in and contributing their skills, and you’ll see examples from their developing comics as you read through the book.
For kids who want more of a hands-on how-to book, this one is a good place to start. Graphic Novel Builder will be available in March.
Manga Biographies: Charles M. Schulz by Yuzuru Kuki
Ok, here’s one that doesn’t teach you how to make comics, but tells the story of a famous comics creator. It’s exactly what the title says: a manga biography of Charles Schulz, the creator of Peanuts. The book follows Schulz throughout his childhood and young adulthood, showing how he always loved drawing, but his career still took a while to launch. You really get a sense of Schulz’s persistence and determination, and looking back it is still pretty incredible that he managed to draw Peanuts for just about 50 years on his own. I already knew a lot about Schulz from other biographies, but this one did have a few anecdotes that were new to me. It was also a different experience to see Schulz illustrated in the manga style, but it works. One note is that although the book reads from right to left, any time there are comic strips reproduced, they read from left to right, so I sometimes found myself reading the panels in the wrong order!
Giga Town: A Guide to Manga Iconography! by Fumiyo Kouno
This book is a collection of strips, each one demonstrating some type of iconography used in manga. The title is a reference to Choju Jinbutsu Giga, a set of scrolls from the 1100s that have been called the “first manga” because of the way they show anthropomorphic animals having various adventures. (Though, I should note, the introduction also explains that there’s a lot of evolution and cross-cultural exchanges that led to modern manga.) Fumiyo Kouno borrows the characters from Choju Giga and uses them to illustrate “manpu,” the various little symbols and icons that show up in manga to indicate emotional states, actions, and attitudes.
Some of these will be familiar to most comics readers because they’re not exclusive to manga: sweat marks, action lines, steam rising. There are some that are primarily seen in manga that I recognized: the snot bubble to indicate a sleeping character, or the starburst “angry veins.” But there are a whole lot more that were new to me, or had different meanings depending on the context, and Giga Town explains them all.
Each page shows the symbol with a short explanation in the margin, and is then accompanied by a comic strip (usually four wide panels, stacked vertically) that shows the symbol in use. The characters — Ears the rabbit, Greenie the frog, Keysie the monkey — go to school, play outside, spend time with their families, and although there is sometimes a connection from one strip to another, it’s a lot like a typical newspaper comic strip in that each one is a standalone gag that may or may not have a connecting plot line to the others.
If you’ve got a budding manga reader at home, this could be a fun resource for them, particularly for looking up the less common symbols. There’s even a visual table of contents at the beginning that has the symbols broken down by category: symbols that stand on their own, symbols that are drawn touching something, and symbols that have to do with movement.
Myths of Making by Julien-G
This last one isn’t quite “comics about comics” but it is sort of comics about artwork, so I thought it was close enough to include in this stack. This book is a chunky square — it’s about 6" square and has 370 pages, so it’s not a big format but is pretty thick. The pages are a cream color and the illustrations are in dark blue, light blue, and white (similar to the cover). Within are 25 stories about artists, “True Tales and Legends of Great Artists” as the subtitle puts it. Some of them are confirmed stories and others are legends that seem plausible but may not be entirely factual.
After the first tale, a myth about a cave painter from 64,000 BCE, the stories range from ancient Greece (7th century BCE) to modern-day Australia. Each story is only a few pages long, and is mostly illustrations with a small amount of text accompanying it — there’s a section in the back of the book that provides an additional paragraph about each story.
I really enjoyed this one — even the stories that may not be factually true still tell us something about art, about how artists think about art. There’s a legend about Hokusai creating a painting of maple leaves without ever touching a paintbrush to the paper. Cézanne announces that his portrait of Ambroise Vollard is finally done, even though there are blank spots on the hand. Did Duchamp really come up with the idea of the urinal “Fountain” sculpture or did he get it from somebody else? Every tale is a little window into the creative process.
Disclosure: I received review copies of these books. Affiliate links to Bookshop.org help support my writing and independent booksellers!
