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    The Art of the Graphic Memoir: Tell Your Story, Change Your Life
    The Art of the Graphic Memoir: Tell Your Story, Change Your Life
    The Art of the Graphic Memoir: Tell Your Story, Change Your Life
    Ebook326 pages2 hours

    The Art of the Graphic Memoir: Tell Your Story, Change Your Life

    By Tom Hart

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    About this ebook

    #1 New York Times bestselling author and Eisner-nominated cartoonist Tom Hart has written a poignant and instructive guide for all aspiring graphic memoirists detailing the tenets of artistry and story-telling inherent in the medium. Hart examines what makes a graphic memoir great, and shows you how to do it. With two dozen professional examples and a deep-dive into his own story, Hart encourages readers to hone their signature style in the best way to represent their journeys on the page.

    With clear examples and visual aids, The Art of the Graphic Memoir is emotive, creative, and accessible. Whether you're a comics fan, comic book creator, memoirist, biographer or autobiographer, there’s something inside for everyone.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateNov 6, 2018
    ISBN9781250113351
    The Art of the Graphic Memoir: Tell Your Story, Change Your Life
    Author

    Tom Hart

    Tom Hart is a #1 New York Times bestselling author and critically acclaimed Eisner-nominated cartoonist and the Executive Director of The Sequential Artists Workshop in Gainesville, Florida. He is the creator of Daddy Lightning, and the Hutch Owen series of graphic novels and books. The Collected Hutch Owen was nominated for best graphic novel in 2000. He won a Xeric Grant for self-publishing cartoonists. He teaches sequential art at the University of Florida and taught at NYC's School of Visual Arts for 10 years.

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      Book preview

      The Art of the Graphic Memoir - Tom Hart

      PART I

      GETTING STARTED

      Everyone has a story to tell. Over the course of a life, we tell so many stories, and hear so many stories over meals, during free time, during work, play, in public space or in private.

      We are so used to it that we don’t even think about structuring our stories, or editing parts in or out, or the tone of our voice or anything, we just tell our stories.

      But when we choose to move from the merely social world to telling our stories in a more complicated medium like, say, a graphic memoir, then suddenly we realize there is a lot to think about!

      Style, rhythm, panel arrangement, visualization, structure, and even just how do I go through with this anyway?

      This book aims to help you internalize the tools you will need to tell your graphic memoir. When you learn all the elements above, you are on the road to literacy in this unique medium.

      So first, let’s get started, and look at the basics.

      CHAPTER 1

      WHY COMICS?

      To begin, why do we want to tell our story in comics? We don’t really need an answer to this, but asking it might help us make better visual and sequential choices once we get going.

      Comics are inherently visual, like cinema or animation, but they’re also intimate, making a one-to-one connection with the reader as do novels or poetry.

      Comics have in their history early glyphs and alphabets that communicate through pictures. Comics may be closer to runes than to movies. Some historians believe that even some cave paintings were meant to be read in sequence.

      Or maybe comics are more like puppets—in both, we look at fake versions of people, whether made up of foam and cloth or made up of drawings. They don’t move like real people; in comics they don’t move at all.

      Or maybe comics are like theater, the boxes and panels reflecting the proscenium and the stage.

      Or maybe comics are a lot like music, the rhythm of the panels and pages reflecting the beats and measures in a song, and the directness of the drawings hitting our emotions like melody.

      Or ultimately comics are most like comics, and every artist will bring his or her talents, drives, and eccentricities to it. Which is why we study them: to see what others have done, and to mimic and learn as we develop our own voice to tell our own story.

      Since most comics are drawn (though they are occasionally painted, collaged, or even photographed), let’s begin by looking at three artists who love to draw and whose narrative voices are inherently connected to their love of and facility with drawing.

      SMILE

      by Raina Telgemeier

      Raina Telgemeier clearly loves drawing. You can tell from her clean, exaggerated style. You can see the joy she experiences in stretching these faces and bodies to their limits.

      CONSISTENT DRAWINGS!

      Telgemeier’s characters are consistent, expertly drawn, and very funny. Her readers are young adults and this is how they want to read her story. They want clean, easy-to-read cartoons that are elastic and occasionally grotesque. This distortion of the characters’ faces and bodies reflect how childen and adolescents feel about their own bodies and appearances and owes a lot to the exaggeration in classic comics and cartoons.

      HOW SHAPES FIT TOGETHER

      Raina by Raina

      Telgemeier talks a lot about drawing on her blog.

      She talks about drawing as a child. My earliest drawings are just scribbles and shapes, but they’re all sort of rounded, featuring a lot of bubble-headed figures.

      And then she talks about being inspired as a child by TV characters like the Muppets, Smurfs, Care Bears, and Mickey Mouse and about copying how other artists fit shapes together.

      Slowly she began to draw everything around her like cartoon characters: I also drew myself, my friends, my teachers, my family … anybody I came in contact with was likely a subject of my comics!

      In college, I really enjoyed my classes … especially figure drawing classes, learning about human anatomy and trying to capture difficult poses … but, my faces were always cartoony.

      And she talks finally about how in a cartooning style your hand memorizes certain lines and shapes, and starts to simplify them.

      Telgemeier has loved drawing since she was a child and clearly continues to love it years into being one of America’s best-selling cartoonists. This delight in lines, shapes, faces, bodies, characters, and stories keeps her work warm, joyous, and infectious.

      Telgemeier loves faces and shapes.

      BAREFOOT JUSTINE

      by Justine Mara Andersen

      Justine by Justine

      My SAW (Sequential Artists Workshop) colleague Justine Mara Andersen is an artist like few others. She is a master of traditional light and shadow, anatomy and old-school comic book lines and shading. She draws the beautiful and the ugly with the same precision.

      BEAUTY AND HORROR

      In her memoir-in-progress, Barefoot Justine, which is about her life transition from one gender to another, she uses all of her skill and visual imagination to make the story alive, visible, and

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