Mastering Comics : Drawing Words & Writing Pictures continued

The Table of Contents for Mastering Comics.

Mastering Comics, the sequel to Drawing Words and Writing Pictures, is out and can be purchased directly from us or from your favorite vendor via this link.

Mastering Comics weaves together a number of inter-related streams, including:

• 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 organized into four “units” that can be summed up as, more or less, creativity and generating stories; structuring work visually; advanced tools and techniques (i.e. inking, lettering, using tone and color, creating for digital platforms); and professional practice and getting your work into the world. There are a ton of topics covered under each heading, of course, but that’s the gist of it.

How is Mastering Comics different from Drawing Words and Writing Pictures?

In Mastering Comics, 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. 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.