Mastering Comics is the companion book to Drawing Words & Writing Pictures. In it, we return to all the topics covered in DWWP and work to not only deepen students’ understanding of things like pictorial composition and design, inking, and story structure, but more importantly, to broaden it.
The Table of Contents for Mastering Comics.
DWWP is a highly structured book, with 15 chapters that build carefully on one another, and it intentionally doesn’t offer a big palette of choices for how to make a comic. This is so that the tasks in the book can be achievable, and readers will come out of the book as cartoonists. But of course, we’re very aware that there are endless ways to make comics, and MC is where we try to open those floodgates and point students out in new directions. Mastering Comics also covers a lot of topics that aren’t mentioned in DWWP at all.
Like the first volume, MC weaves together a number of inter-related streams. These include:
- creating and developing stories
- coloring, both by hand and using the computer
- expanding your inking palette–incuding digital inking
- perspective basics: both linear perspective and other systems
- reviewing topics and techniques from volume one and taking them deeper
- making and publishing webcomics
- getting your work published, from agents to promotions
Mastering Comics is also out of print but can easily be found used, for example at Abe Books and Thrift Books.