Poetry and Comics: Poems Becoming Comics

The connection between comics and poetry has been made several times by several very smart people. “{Comics] are also a kind of poetry, an incantation beckoning us to enter their world. The simplicity of their ...

Kandinsky on comics

I just read through Wassily’s Kandinsky’s book on art theory, Point and Line to Plane (I got this from the Guggenheim online). As the title indicates, in the text Kandinsky meditates on the elements of ...

Panel: top and bottom

Rudolf Arnheim states that in an artistic space, “dynamics [vary] with direction” (30). Or to put it another way, location in a comics panel implies meaning. In the Famous Artists Cartoon Course Lesson 11, the ...

Panel: left to right

The idea that comics have greater clarity when composed with the reading direction in mind tends to be widely understood. Almost all books on comics creation mention this. For instance, addressing English readers, Robyn Chapman ...

Panel: tangents

As I mentioned, I’ve been looking through the old Famous Artists Cartoon Course. Lesson 11 is all about panels and has a lot of solid advice. One thing that is mentioned in that lesson is ...

Panels: shape, context, and content

Does the shape of a panel carry inherent meaning? A square panel seems to imply stability. Its four equal sides create a sense of equilibrium. Rectangular panels imply movement, horizontal for wide panels, vertical for ...