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Panel Discussions: Design In Sequential Art Storytelling
Back in print! Panel Discussions is the combined knowledge of more than a dozen of the comic book industry's top storytellers, covering all aspects of the design of comics, from pacing, story flow, and word balloon placement, to using color to convey emotion, spotting blacks, and how gutters between panels affect the story! The struggle to tell a comics story visually requires more than a cool-looking image; it takes years of experience and a thorough understanding of the art form's visual vocabulary. Learn from the best, as Will Eisner, Scott Hampton, Mike Wieringo, Walter Simonson, Mike Mignola, Mark Schultz, David Mazzucchelli, Dick Giordano, Brian Stelfreeze, Mike Carlin, Chris Moeller, Mark Chiarello and others share hard-learned lessons about the design of comics, complete with hundreds of illustrated examples. When should you tilt or overlap a panel? How can sound effects enhance the story, and when do they distract from it? What are the best ways to divide up the page to convey motion, time, action, or quiet? If you're serious about creating effective, innovative comics, or just enjoying them from the creator's perspective, this in-depth guide is must-reading!
208 pages, Paperback
First published July 1, 2002
5 people are currently reading
109 people want to read
About the author
Durwin Talon
10 books2 followersDurwin S. Talon is an illustrator, comic book creator, educator, graphic designer, and computer artist. He has done work for DC Comics, Oni Comics, White Wolf Publishing and Wizards of the Coast. He created Bonds for Image comics and is co-creator on Beautiful Scars for Archaia Studio Press.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
May 24, 2017
As an aspiring comic book writer, I found this very helpful although the discussions mainly centered on the art. I'm a little disappointed there are no women interviewed for one of these discussions, because I am sure there must be some in the industry around 2002. However, each chapter taught me something new and were brief enough that by the time I got bored, it moved onto a new artist. A bunch of them seemed a little full of themselves and were difficult to read due to that, but I guess if you have their credentials and are in a book on your expertise you can afford some pride.
April 30, 2021
Great info and in depth looks at many great pages from comic masters!
November 24, 2014
There's a presumption among people that if something looks easy or simple, that it must have been easy or simple to create. Most people look at a page of a comic book and think, "Anyone could do that." But until you actually try and write a comic or draw a comic page do you start to understand the painstaking craftsmanship that is the hallmark of most comics out there. This need to actually "try it out yourself," is a reason why I have my students write a comic script (and also the reason for the existence of creative writing in the high school and undergraduate education). Although we are creating stories and scenes in our heads all the time, being able to translate that to the page is the difference between consumer and producer.
With that in mind, let me suggest for everyone who ever wanted to learn about the tricks of the comic trade to look for Panel Discussions, a series of interviews conducted by Durwin S. Talon, a professor of sequential art at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, Georgia. While it shares some similarities with other dissections of the comic art like Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art and Will Eisner's Comics & Sequential Art, Talon's book is slightly less formal in its structure, but makes up for that in the diversity of its points-of-view. The title itself is a pun, for not only are we discussing the panels of a comic, the format is similar to a panel discussion at a comic convention. Talon goes one-on-one with some fine artists like Will Eisner, David Mazzucchelli, and Mark Schultz, and has them break down the way they structure a comic page, how they get the reader's eye to move from point A to point B, and how light and dark play into the design.
Trying to read this all the way through is difficult, like hopping from room to room at a convention without taking time out for lunch or dinner. Instead, you should space this out, preferrably by reading the artist's comments, then taking the time to check out some of their work before moving on to the next. Unfortunately, that could be an expensive task unless you have a wonderful graphic novel section in your local library (don't be surprised--librarians are getting hip to the art form and they are growing collections). With that in mind, I hesitate to suggest this to the casual reader, just as I wouldn't suggest a casual novel reader to check out Umberto Eco's commentary Six Walks in the Fictional Woods. But if you want to learn more about the underpinnings of the form, this is an invaluable text. Talon and his publisher, TwoMorrows Publishing (who are filling the gap in practical comics scholarship--as opposed to academic comics scholarship--left by Fantagraphics), are to be commended, and I'm anxious to pick up some more texts by both.
With that in mind, let me suggest for everyone who ever wanted to learn about the tricks of the comic trade to look for Panel Discussions, a series of interviews conducted by Durwin S. Talon, a professor of sequential art at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, Georgia. While it shares some similarities with other dissections of the comic art like Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art and Will Eisner's Comics & Sequential Art, Talon's book is slightly less formal in its structure, but makes up for that in the diversity of its points-of-view. The title itself is a pun, for not only are we discussing the panels of a comic, the format is similar to a panel discussion at a comic convention. Talon goes one-on-one with some fine artists like Will Eisner, David Mazzucchelli, and Mark Schultz, and has them break down the way they structure a comic page, how they get the reader's eye to move from point A to point B, and how light and dark play into the design.
Trying to read this all the way through is difficult, like hopping from room to room at a convention without taking time out for lunch or dinner. Instead, you should space this out, preferrably by reading the artist's comments, then taking the time to check out some of their work before moving on to the next. Unfortunately, that could be an expensive task unless you have a wonderful graphic novel section in your local library (don't be surprised--librarians are getting hip to the art form and they are growing collections). With that in mind, I hesitate to suggest this to the casual reader, just as I wouldn't suggest a casual novel reader to check out Umberto Eco's commentary Six Walks in the Fictional Woods. But if you want to learn more about the underpinnings of the form, this is an invaluable text. Talon and his publisher, TwoMorrows Publishing (who are filling the gap in practical comics scholarship--as opposed to academic comics scholarship--left by Fantagraphics), are to be commended, and I'm anxious to pick up some more texts by both.
November 2, 2013
The content of this book easily merited 5 stars, but the poor design and organization of the information (a problem made even worse considering that the subject of the book itself is the design of visual information to make it more easily readable) made me give it 3 stars instead.
As its subtitle makes clear, this book is about design in sequential art storytelling (though it may have been more accurate to use the non-art school term "comic book storytelling", since the majority of examples used throughout the book are from mainstream superhero comic books, rather than instructional material, web comics, strips, etc.) yet the chapters are organized according to particular artists, rather than particular design concepts. Because the book goes artist-by-artist, there is a tremendous amount of repetition and redundancy in the insights they can provide about general concepts that "work" in the medium, space that could have been better used to make the images that serve to illustrate the concepts being discussed far larger than the postage stamp size at which they're reproduced. It amazes me that a book about graphic storytelling would literally marginalize its illustrative graphics and consign them to the place of footnotes, when they're really what the book is all about.
That being said, the artists included in the book are industry heavyweights who have a lot of very valuable things to say about how to think your way through the creation of sequential art and if you get out your magnifying glass, you can see the concepts they discuss demonstrated in the illustrations. This book would be worthwhile reading for anyone interested in the nuts-and-bolts creation of comics, but I can't help feeling that it would have been an absolutely amazing home-run of a book if it had just been organized differently.
As its subtitle makes clear, this book is about design in sequential art storytelling (though it may have been more accurate to use the non-art school term "comic book storytelling", since the majority of examples used throughout the book are from mainstream superhero comic books, rather than instructional material, web comics, strips, etc.) yet the chapters are organized according to particular artists, rather than particular design concepts. Because the book goes artist-by-artist, there is a tremendous amount of repetition and redundancy in the insights they can provide about general concepts that "work" in the medium, space that could have been better used to make the images that serve to illustrate the concepts being discussed far larger than the postage stamp size at which they're reproduced. It amazes me that a book about graphic storytelling would literally marginalize its illustrative graphics and consign them to the place of footnotes, when they're really what the book is all about.
That being said, the artists included in the book are industry heavyweights who have a lot of very valuable things to say about how to think your way through the creation of sequential art and if you get out your magnifying glass, you can see the concepts they discuss demonstrated in the illustrations. This book would be worthwhile reading for anyone interested in the nuts-and-bolts creation of comics, but I can't help feeling that it would have been an absolutely amazing home-run of a book if it had just been organized differently.
February 5, 2009
A good book full of practical comics making information. I think it's actually more helpful than McCloud's books - which are, granted, more for the basics/beginners - even though this is focused mainly on mainstreamy artists and writers, and I don't necessarily agree with all of their methods or theories...
April 15, 2014
The information is a bit spread in the middle of repetitive talk for my tastes, but the important bits have their own space in each chapter, and they're extremely valuable! In addition, the choice of paper and the format in which this volume is print make it easy to underline the important bits and study it carefully. Excellent material for a comic artist!
August 4, 2010
It's amazing how different artists approach the sequential art medium. The interviews with Mike Mignola and Will Eisner were particularly insightful.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews