by JLRoberson

Created on: March 07, 2010

Last week, a young cartoonist named Stephanie wrote me and, in a perhaps mistaken assumption I know what I’m doing, asked some questions about cartooning, which I tried to answer as best I could from my own perspective and experience. Which I’m not sure was so great, but she seemed to find a lot of it useful, so I thought perhaps others might.

So, edited slightly for brevity, and with some bits revised because of other things that occurred to me later, here are some of her questions alternating with some of my answers. I emphasize this is only the view from here and do not claim this advice to be universally applicable, but there may be some interesting ideas in here somewhere with which to play. (I should also mention that some of these links to my own examples I’m referring to will be to some of my 2003-07 work, much of which is NSFW)

Well, this is pretty involved, so bear with me.

Obviously, I want to work on a graphic novel or at least an ongoing
comic strip, and while I doubt it will ever make money or get
published, I still want to make something better than adequate.

I’m a fairly good artist, but I’m trained in a very classical, realism
and observation based way, and am finding it nearly impossible to draw
purely from imagination, much less tell a story with it. The only
people I have to talk about this with are other fine artists or
non-artists, so the only advice I get is "go to school for animation"
or "that looks great!" and neither is helpful. I’ve even been copying
graphic novels I like, and old silent films into comic page format, to
try to figure out layout, composition, and visual storytelling, by
trial and error. Short of getting an animation degree just to learn to
make a decent comic, I don't want to reinvent the wheel if I don't
have to.

First off: Silent films are an excellent training class for cartoonists, particularly German and Russian ones. More on why further down. And realism & observation are the best foundation.

On art school-You don't have to, and though those schools-I worked for one in San Francisco, the Academy of Art College-are great if your intent is to work for Disney or Pixar or like that, who draw a lot of their folks directly from those schools, if you're after something more individual they may not be of as much use. But just the same, I never knock education, and with art schools that still believe in figurative art, technique can be learned there which is vital and may save

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