Making Comics – Lynda Barry
Making Comics by Lynda Barry / ISBN 9781770463691 / a 200-page book from Drawn and Quarterly.
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The bestselling, idiosyncratic curriculum from a 2019 MacArthur Fellow will teach you how to draw and write your story
“Eternally wise and strange.”―NPR
“Barry is pushing the envelope on understanding how the brain creates and responds to words and pictures ― a scholarly envelope that, in her mind, should be positively covered with illuminating doodles.”―The Washington Post
“The self-help book of the year.”―The New York Times
Hello students, meet Professor Skeletor. Be on time, don’t miss class, and turn off your phones. No time for introductions, we start drawing right away. The goal is more rock, less talk, and we communicate only through images.
For more than five years the cartoonist Lynda Barry has been an associate professor in the University of Wisconsin–Madison art department and at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, teaching students from all majors, both graduate and undergraduate, how to make comics, how to be creative, how to not think. There is no academic lecture in this classroom. Doodling is enthusiastically encouraged.
Making Comics is the follow-up to Barry’s bestselling Syllabus, and this time she shares all her comics-making exercises. In a new hand-drawn syllabus detailing her creative curriculum, Barry has students drawing themselves as monsters and superheroes, convincing students who think they can’t draw that they can, and, most important, encouraging them to understand that a daily journal can be anything so long as it is hand drawn.
Barry teaches all students and believes everyone and anyone can be creative. At the core of Making Comics is her certainty that creativity is vital to processing the world around us.
