#cartooning classes

Comics are fun to make but hard to get right. Come explore the dos & don’ts in my summer classes at the School of Visual Arts: Cartooning Basics and Figure Drawing for Cartoonists.

join us this Friday evening for a free Daredoodling session through the Sequential Artists Workshop's Friday Night Comics series. Learn about my upcoming SVA classes.

Here's an experiment that's been languishing in my files. I've written already of my work with Isaac Cates on his Draw Two Panels game. It inspired me to test an idea for this spinoff I'm calling The Deckless Wonder.

I drew two cards that pose a simple question: is our heroine dressing or undressing? Where the cards are placed in the four-panel sequence would direct the answer.

After completing the first strip, I toss a coin twice, choosing one of the original cards and one of the new cards. Then I make a new strip, placing the cards wherever they can be made to make sense. I'm struggling to recall the exact rules. In each new round, I toss a coin to choose one old and one new card. There should always be four cards available for each new round, from which two are chosen.

The third strip begins an alternate game, placing the first two cards in a different order. This procedure can go on indefinitely, though I wonder whether the story can ever go anywhere, small wonder that I stopped after three rounds. On the other hand, a story stuck in time is interesting in its own way.

One of the things we’ll do in Short Form Comics will be to play with works of literature and poetry: adaptation, condensation, deformation, parody, and play. It’s our cultural heritage. We get to choose what to do with it.