Wednesday, February 02, 2005

My story is told with images.


poetry is bliss.


Images talk.

They say an image is worth a thousand words. Maybe a good image, and that's what I want: I want good images, a big range of expressions, faces, hand movements and even eyebrow disposition. The characters are actors, and maybe they need to be really bad at acting, maybe they need to be those over-the-top exaggerated actors who gesticulate too much, and make too many faces, and move too much.

Sometimes, you need to make it bigger in order to tell your story.

Lines in a drawing are like adjectives in a sentence. They add to the story, but the trick, as in adjectives, is in choosing which lines to put and which to leave out. Too many lines won't help tell your story, they'll just confuse the reader.



You have to motivate the eye. Where do we look, where do we go after that image, all must be thought about and decided by the artist. When one character looks a certain way, he's motivating the artist to show, in the next panel, what he's seeing. Like the character, our eyes must follow the story the pictures are telling, and must see the images we're choosing.

We see what the story wants to show.



I like to draw the story that doesn't always show everything. Following the images, we put the story together in our minds, and some images, maybe the most important, the most moving, don't even exist on the page. They are between the panels, after that look and before that smile, when that hair moved and I knew exactly what she was thinking.

Comics is not without it's poetry. To say more than meets the eye, to use words to convey more than just their meaning, to create images that tell more than what they're showing, all that is to be a poet, to make us feel and believe in something that we made up, something the reader made real in his mind and in his heart.