Continuing my irregular series of reviews on comics instructional books for aspiring creators. Next up is Dynamic Light and Shade by Burne Hogarth (Watson-Guptill Publications, 1981). Hogarth was the longtime artist on the comic strip, Tarzan, and founder of the School of Visual Arts in New York where he was known especially for his teaching of dynamic anatomy.

Now, on to the review.

The first thing you should know about this book is that it is not a how-to book. It does not show you how to light and then draw a subject. Having heard a number of complaints to this effect, it’s important to understand what this book actually is.

If anything, it is an illustrated monograph concerning concepts for lighting the figure and environment. Through examples and descriptions, Hogarth breaks light and shade into categories — such as single-source or flat, diffused light — and seeks to explain how the illusion of each is created within a two dimensional work of art. Concepts in illumination are given detailed explanation as to the location of the light source(s), the effects generated on the figure, background, and atmosphere. Hogarth also spends some time on how various kinds of light affect the mood in a picture.

The illustrations alternate between examples of Hogarth’s earlier drawings and a series of repeated figures, drawn especially for this volume, which illustrate the effects of the various lighting situations on the human form. I found this last to be one of the most fascinating parts of the book, serving as instruction in both lighting and anatomy. To me, this was worth the price of the book alone.

A different complaint about the book is its being nothing more than a glorified portfolio. And though 99% of the illustrations are by Hogarth, it is much more than a vanity project. By categorizing lighting situations, Hogarth creates a kind of shorthand to talk about lighting, allowing the artist to quickly understand and employ different kinds of light for different looks and effects.

To be fair, there are some illustrations which demonstrate certain concepts less successfully than others, and some images seem shoehorned in with descriptions that do not really fit the images. Also Hogarth can at times be frustratingly obscure in his writing, if not downright purple in his prose. However, for the most part, this book is straightforward and to the point, and provides information about lighting a scene that should be in every comic artist’s toolbox.

As such, I recommend this book highly.

Rating: 9 out of 10.

Next up in my irregular series of reviews on comics instructional books for aspiring creators is Reinventing Comics by Scott McCloud (Paradox Press, 2000).

Ostensibly a sequel to Understanding Comics, McCloud goes in a very different direction with Reinventing Comics. While both books explore the possibilities of comics and are presented in the form of comics themselves, there the similarity ends.

Understanding Comics is a look at the internal workings of the comics form — how comics work to tell a story effectively. Reinventing Comics looks at the state of the comics as a medium in contemporary culture and posits twelve directions it can and should go. It’s part sociolgocial study, part historical survey, and part manifesto on the ways comics must change in order to, in the author’s view, grow and mature.

The book is divided into two parts. The first part deals with the state of comics in society today (or at least in the year 2000 when the book was published), along with a good deal of history as to how we got here and the strides being taken to advance the form in nine distinct directions: Comics as Literature, Comics as Art, Creators’ Rights, Industry Innovation, Public Perception, Institutional Scrutiny, Gender Balance, Minority Representation, and Diversity of Genre. For each direction the author goes on to posit how things could be improved, in his estimation, and suggests roads, or “Revolutions” as he calls them, toward achieving those goals. The book thus acts as a kind of manifesto, though I tend to find the suggestions for such change, such as they are, to be of a vague and general sort.

The second part of the book, which takes up almost half the total pages, deals with the future of comics in the digital age. It specifically examines Digital Production, Digital Delivery, and Digital Comics, and how these innovations can and should point the way to a new future for the medium. Given the age of the book, many of the directions suggested have already come to pass, so this section of the book sometimes reads a little more like history and less like a vision of the future. And in his look at digital comics McCloud puts on full display his obsession with unlimited digital canvases which can be read in ways that break the traditional comics page, an experiment he has carried to fulfillment on his website here.

In all, Reinventing Comics is an interesting read if you care about the social aspects of the comics medium, both as comics affect society and vice versa. For those interested in more technical or internal questions about the form, the second part of the book will be more enlightening. But overall you can probably give this one a pass.

Rating: 5 out of 10.

Welcome to part 3 of my review of The Art of Comic Book Inking, Vol. 2 by Gary Martin. To read Part 1, go here.

In the previous two parts of the review, I looked at the book section by section. Now, I’ll give my final thoughts on the work as a whole, along with my own personal rating on a scale of one to ten–ten being indispensable to anyone interested in the art of comic creation, one being so bad you should make every attempt to avoid the potentially stupefying content within. Thankfully, this book fell on the positive end of the spectrum.

That said, on with the review.

Overall, the The Art of Comic Book Inking, Vol. 2 is a quick read and quite instructive. And even though the examples are of somewhat lesser quality than the first volume, if you are trying to learn how to ink or want to improve your technique, this book is definitely worth a look. I first read through it when I started learning to ink and then about a year or so later, and each time I gleaned different but valuable information.

If you’re buying this book instead of using the library, there are Bristol board pages included that can be torn out and inked over as practice. Unfortunately, the library copy I checked out has long since been denuded of these.

Conclusion: I wouldn’t rush out and buy this volume (as I would with volume 1), but it’s still worth checking out from the library and getting from it what you can. Then, a year or two from now, once you’ve gotten better at inking, check it out again and study it some more. I think you’ll be surprised at the new information you discover.

Rating: 6 out of 10.

Last week I began the first in an irregular series of reviews I’ll be writing on selected comics and other instructional books that might be of relevance to aspiring comics creators, beginning with The Art of Comic Book Inking, Vol. 2 by Gary Martin. To read Part 1 of the review, go here.

As I mentioned last week, the book is divided into four sections. In the first section, the illustrative Brent Anderson makes generous use of soft shading in the pencils he provides for inkers Gary Martin, Steve Leialoha, Mike Royer, and Anderson himself, giving the inkers a nice dilemma: how to translate those lush grays into black ink. The varied solutions arrived at include feathering, hatching, dry brush, and zip-a-tone and may well be the most instructive instances in the whole book of exactly what an inker can bring to a project.

Somewhat less instructive are the inks in the next section by Martin, Alex Garner, Michael Blair, and Rachel Dodson over the pencils of Terry Dodson. Dodson’s pencils appear influenced by Adam Hughes–supple figures surrounded by big outlines with relatively little detail inside. Backgrounds are starkly linear and feature large areas of black. Put together, the pencils provide fewer decisions in interepreting the image than with Anderson’s, so the inkers tend to focus more on line weights for the figures and spotting blacks in the backgrounds.

Probably least instructive are the inks by Martin, Karl Kesel, Hilary Barta, and Randy Green over Green’s pencils. The pencils are spare, with heavily outlined figures over backgrounds that are mostly flat silhouettes. There’s just not a whole lot here for the inkers to work with, so the results end up looking pretty much the same between inkers. In their notes, the inkers sense this and dutifully blame themselves, but in this case it’s unquestionably the pencils.

Finally, over the Manga-influenced pencils of Adam Warren we see the inks of Martin, Al Gordon, Randy Emberlin, and Warren himself. To ink Warren’s Manga figures is mostly a matter of choosing line weights, but where the inkers really show their stuff is in the handling of the dense backgrounds and textures, particularly a leather jacket. The solutions are strikingly different and serve as a fine bookend to Martin’s introductory essay on cartoon inking and texture inking, both of which come into play nicely in Warren’s pencils.

Next Wednesday: My wrap-up and conclusions in: The Art of Comic Book Inking, Vol 2, part 3!

And believe me, there are a lot of them out there.

Since I’ve already made a thorough study of these books, my reasoning here is why should you have to sift through them all when I already have. Thus, I’ll recommend those you should definitely check out, those you can take or leave, and those you won’t miss by missing.

So without further ado, let’s begin.

THE ART OF COMIC BOOK
INKING, VOL. 2
by Gary Martin

This is the second volume in a nice little series (if two books can be said to constitute a series) called The Art of Comic Book Inking, assembled by veteran comics inker Gary Martin and published by Dark Horse Comics. As with the first volume, this book brings together a fine group of professional comics inkers and shows you examples of their inks over the same penciled pages. Four penciled pages are each inked by four different inkers, for a total of sixteen samples. The author inks an example of each penciled page, so we have the work of thirteen inkers in all.

The book is broken down into four sections, one for each of the different penciled pages. The original pencils are shown first, followed by the various inked pages which illustrate how the different inkers approach the same pencils. Each inker also includes a page of text discussing the materials they used, their approach to inking that particular page, and thoughts about inking in general, working with pencilers, and so on.

As instructive as this is, this volume is on the whole less enlightening than the first. The artists, both pencilers and inkers, are in general lesser known than in the first volume–and sometimes for good reason. The penciled pages vary widely in style and quality, which I think is the point: to show the range of possibilities a professional inker may be faced with when accepting an inking assignment. However, the weakness of some of the pencils and the occasional mismatch in styles between pencilers and inkers renders this volume less instuctive overall than the first volume of the series.

Next Wednesday: I’ll continue the review in: The Art of Comic Book Inking, Vol 2, part 2!