Many apologies for the lack of a post on Friday, folks; I’d been preparing for a big interview I had on Saturday (I think it went well!) so I just didn’t have time for a quality post. So if you’ve forgiven me for my lapse in posting and are reading this, I thank you.
Right now I’m reading Will Eisner’s Comics and Sequential Art, one of the first (the first?) books specifically about comics as an art form. As Eisner writes in the book’s intro, while his contemporaries were just as passionate about comics as he was, no one seemed to give much thought about the mechanics of comics, and certainly didn’t bother writing about them. So eventually Eisner started giving some thought to what makes comics tick, and what creators could do to move the medium forward. He started teaching a course on sequential art at New York’s School of Visual Arts, and collected his lectures into this book.
Eisner covers a lot of ground, with topics ranging from framing, time, expressive anatomy, and others. Along the way he gives lots of examples of what it is he’s talking about; most of the examples are from his own work (it’s what he knows best, after all), but this most recent edition also includes examples from more contemporary artists. His writing is very straightforward, and the book feels more conversational than academic, which keeps it from getting tiresome, even if he labors over a point a bit too long.
To be honest, the book could be organized a lot better; it seems like he repeats himself a fair amount, and some sections could’ve been structured better. Two of the main books that drew inspiration from this, Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics and Making Comics, I have to admit, are better organized and go a bit further with the points than Eisner does. That said, Comics and Sequential Art still has a wealth of information and would be worth the time of both someone interested in making comics and to someone who’s just curious about how comics do what they do.
Happy reading,
-Nate
Tired of Superheroes 
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