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Artist Statement

Often when people talk about art, they're talking about themselves as artists, which to me is a bit of a sham. They throw the word over something so they don't have to think about it anymore. I think when you boil it right down, what I do is exactly the same as what any other artist does. In the fine art world there are good drawings and bad drawings, good paintings and bad paintings, and the same applies in comics.
-Dave McKean

Visual storytelling comes easily to people. From a very early age, usually as soon as a child masters the rudiments of language, drawings and scrawlings are one. The child will use whatever means is most effective to convey a message. Thus, a family picture will not only show individual family members, they will be labeled "Mommy, Daddy, Baby, Me." Since everyone asks the child who is in the picture, it's obvious that the pictures alone aren't getting the message across, and thus tags are necessary to fully express intent. Eventually we are taught that the two systems are separate, and we either write or draw. Most of our oldest writings, however, are pictures. Eventually, the pictograms became more and more stylized, until they became symbols in and of themselves, fully abstract.

This wild separation was not always the case, however. Perhaps the most immediate and appropriate example of a society that did not fully divide glyph and picture is the culture of ancient Egypt, where hieroglyphics and large illustrations blend together to tell tales of kings and gods. (McCloud) Another society wherein art and word served to augment each other was China. In scroll paintings, be they landscapes or the beginnings of Zen (Chen in China) Buddhism, an image and a poem occupy the same work, each contributing to the message of the peace. An image of a budding flower married with a short lyric poem of plants awaiting the springtime sun subtly express and empress's devotion to her husband and lord. The image illustrates the poem and helps further its mood, while the poem lends deeper meaning to (already symbolic) imagery.

In my work I deal with the process and art of telling a story. I would say, "illustrating" rather than "telling," but what I've experienced in making a graphic novel is something much more immediate. An illustrated story, in general, can exist outside of its illustrations, and may have multiple publications with multiple artists capturing this scene or that aspect, or may exist without the images at all. In the world of graphic novels, there is a wide spectrum of artist/writer relationships, but in the final product, both find equal importance. Any reader can tell you that the art is an integral part of a story's tone, impact and success. Rather than illustrating the story, the art becomes part of the storytelling process itself, and cannot be separated from the text. There are a number of aspects by which the story is conveyed purely visually. There is the drawing style itself, the character design, composition within frames, the progression of frame to frame within the page, and finally the nature of the overall collection of these pages in into a book. With this more intense relationship between artist and story, not to mention the sheer volume of work involved, I feel at once much more responsible for and more involved in the story itself, and enjoy the intimacy between the text and image.

Style is possibly the most important aspect of establishing a story's tone. There is a level of stylization to almost all sequential art, but the level of stylization varies. A reader can pick up any comic off the stands and tell at a glance if it is action-based superhero fare with elaborate battle spreads and exaggerated musculature, surreal science fiction horror done in sketchier lines with dramatic shading, or a wholesome kid's story with brighter, cartoony art. Each genre has trademarks that clue readers in to what to expect. "By stripping down an image to its essential 'meaning,' an artist can amplify that meaning in a way that realistic art can't….Another [important part of stylization] is the universality of cartoon imagery. The more cartoony a face is, for instance, the more people it could be said to describe." (McCloud, pp. 30-1) The less detailed the face, the more iconic it becomes, and the simpler it is to manipulate it to show an emotion, and the easier it is for a reader to identify with the character.

Personally, my art is heavily influenced by the mature fantasy series Elfquest, by Wendy Pini, from which I taught myself to draw as a child; and more recently by Carla Speed McNeil's Finder, due to current similarities in process. Both artists keep towards the middle ground between realism and cartoon. This has resulted in a moderate level of stylization in my work, reminiscent of Japanese manga and animation, of which I am also a fan. However, I rely heavily on expression and gesture to elaborate on and beyond the text, and I prefer the subtlety and naturalism a more realistic style lends to the characters. For example, for the character Grampa's age to be immediately understood and believed, he must look like an old man, and I am careful to add detail to his face in the form of wrinkles and make his hands more gnarled, while young Utsusemi could be seen as more stylized because I use fewer lines to describe her, which also indicates that her skin and hands are smoother. The balance, I feel lies between faithfulness to anatomy and the physics of a setting and the expressiveness needed from the face and body and the drive to move on to the next frame, the next page. I also don't want my characters to be so iconic that they become "everyman" figures like Mickey Mouse. My goal is to make characters believable as individual people. Utsusemi may be drawn with fewer lines than Grampa, but she retains a very identifiable face and feature structure.

As we see above, character design is a very important part of any comic story. From spandex-clad superheroes to Mickey Mouse to Joe Normal next door, characters draw readers in, give them a reason to be interested and a way to relate personally to the action. Most superheroes are idealized human forms, and there are only so many cleft chins and bulging muscles that you can draw before they all look pretty much the same. Thus superhero comics rely on unique costumes to distinguish one ripped crime-fighter from another. A good character design goes beyond this, however, and gives the character personality. We know Joe Normal not just from the jeans and T-shirt he wears, but the quirk of his eyebrows and the way his shoulders slouch. He's got expression. Wendy Pini is a master of character design. The Elfquest cast numbers in the hundreds and each character is distinct, to the point where I can name almost every one of her characters by the shape of their eyes alone. The Finder cast is, by style and plot design, much more uniform in facial construction, and yet her characters change clothing and hair style like normal people and are still distinct, through mannerism and speech. The angle of the head, the quirk of the mouth, etc, are often the most compelling parts of a frame and of a character, while speech pattern and turn of phrase make monologue and dialogue interesting. Because the story I'm working with takes place largely over the course of one day, with a few flashbacks, I don't deal very much with costume change except in the main character, but by making expressions appropriate and consistent with character and mood each character remains identifiable through what changes do occur. The young woman talks and moves like a young woman, the old man like an old man, in every frame.

Just as the eye reads text in paragraph blocks, it reads images in comic books in frames, each one a single visual idea, so that the eye moves from one idea to another in sequence, creating a visual narrative. The contents of the frame vary depending on genre and personal style. The most common is the "snapshot" idea, depicting characters in a realistic setting, as if in a photograph or movie still, using various "camera angles" to add drama. Also common are simple headshots, where a character's head is the main focus, and the background details are negligible or absent. I tend to laziness when it comes to backgrounds, a bad habit which I'm actively fighting in this book. A detailed background tells the reader volumes about the characters through illustrating where they are, as seen in the very first page of my story. Settings have strong influence on behavior, as anyone who's gone from the library to the pool can tell you. Yet, in some panels, particularly those with a lot of dialogue, I will sacrifice the background to prevent cluttering. I establish setting early on so that the majority of later frames may be focused on exposition. I am still exploring the balance between word, subject and setting.
Particular to illustrative arts and taken to an extreme in graphic novels, the organization of a page is as key to creating effective comics as character designs are. In instances where the writing and drawing are done by different people, production starts with the writer. Some writers, like Alan Moore of From Hell fame, take a very active role in the setup of a page, describing each panel and its contents in detail, but most leave much of this aspect up to the artist, who must find room for both art and text and create the pacing of the page. Just as the script must be legible and move intuitively, so too must the art must be aesthetically appropriate, fit the action, and progress the reader's eye around the page. I prefer to work with a set script and allow the creation of my page structure and the reasoning behind that structure to evolve simultaneously from it. This is not to say that dialogue will not be edited or re-worked as the final page forms, but having all the action and intent hashed out beforehand provides a strong base from which to work.

The standard page structure is three horizontal bars breaking up the page, which are in turn split vertically, often also into threes or twos. This leaves room for both image and a good chunk of text. I am fond of the horizontal lines, which follow well with the path the eye takes as it reads script. Just as word blocks are read from left to right in horizontal lines, so to do the panels "read," so pacing and flow become less problematic. I am also fond of large images grab the eye and give it a place to rest and really examine a static image idea rather than moving all over the place with fast action or text. Thus I follow moments of extended dialogue with large images to keep my audience grounded textually and visually. These large images also set the emotional tone of the page, and establish the story's setting much more firmly than a textual description. An extension of this idea is the "splash" image, where one often large image moves beyond a single page and occupies space on two facing pages.

And then there's the book itself. Can it be considered an artist's book? An artist's book, as an art object, immediately implies something created by hand and very personal, and most likely produced in editions of one. The graphic novel is a collection of comic pages arranged sequentially in the most appropriate size, the most reasonable combination between fine materials and low production costs, and is one of (hopefully) thousands in an edition that are all exactly the same. Many options exist as to the dissemination of a graphic story: some are published in serial magazines on a monthly basis, either alone or in a compilation of several different stories. These individual issues are usually less than 30 pages long, some as short as ten. Often these stories are popular enough that they will be published together as one storyline in a larger, thicker book. Rarely, a story will skip the monthly serial process altogether and come out as a straight graphic novel, but by publishing in an inexpensive monthly form, a story has a greater chance of gaining readership and being generally successful. This mass production does not allow for individualization among books in an edition.

Now that I've established that I don't want my work to be an artist's book, I fully admit that the work created for this show is, in fact, an artist's book. It is a single, hand-made and bound edition, and though I intend to scan and reproduce the pages in a standard folio format, the original fulfills all of the definitions of an artist's book. The point of this work was appealing enough that I could not help but concede my long-held stance as anti-artist-book. I mentioned splash images earlier. Splash (and all comic pages) work because the book medium places two individual pages together, creating the option to bleed images from one page to the other. The folio format is many sets of two, so the image is effectively limited to the space within two pages. The book I have made has accordion-style pages, so each page bleeds continuously into the next. If spreading a visual concept out across one page is fun and visually powerful, what could be done with an infinite line of pages?

Storytelling is pointless unless there is someone you are telling the story to. This other person, who is a stranger to your world and your characters, must be invited in, shown around and settled comfortably. Their attention must be kept, their experience guided. They may be just yourself, your family, your country or the world. My first audience member is myself. I have a lot of pride in my artistic skill, and I'm not going to make something that does not reflect that in some way, because I wouldn't respect it, which is my main problem with last semester's publication. My second audience is the creator of the world in which the story occurs, who will be writing the work I do in the future and is the ultimate critic of the work. And finally there's everyone else. The writer and I may be the first audience and critics of the work, but ultimately we are performing for the masses. Graphic novels are pop art, commercial art, an entire production system geared towards appealing to as many people in as many ways as possible. On the one hand, the stuff the people want and the stuff the people are getting end up feeling like the endless Hollywood stream of teen movies and action flicks, but on the other, there's always the opportunity for a Fight Club or Life is Beautiful. The goal is ultimately to touch as many people as possible, be it to make them laugh or think or both.
In the end, what I want my art to do is help tell a story. It is one aspect of a whole and should function as such. If a viewer looks at my drawings, enjoys them on a visual level and becomes interested in the story itself, I have succeeded.

So, did you read it? Did you like it? Why?

Bibliography:

McCloud, Scott; Reinventing Comics (Kitchen Sink Press; New York; 2000)

McKean, Dave; Dave McKean; Artists on Comic Art; ed. Mark Salisbury (Titan Books; London; 2000)

Pini, Wendy and Richard; Elfquest (Father Tree Press, Pougkeepsie, NY, 1978)
Speed-McNiel, Carla; Finder (Lightspeed Press, Annapolis Junction, MD, 1997)

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