Customer Reviews

Cartoon Clinic: Essential Rescue Remedies for Drawing Great Cartoons

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I often get frustrated with 'how to' books because of the amount of knowledge they assume you have to begin with. However with Cartoon Clinic I found each topic was clear, informative, and built on the previous chapters. I surprised myself with how quickly I progressed and gained confidence, never once feeling the book was moving too fast. Cartoon Clinic is a really great read, and definitely one of the best instructional books I've used.

I checked Cartoon Clinic out of our local public library and knew this was a book I wanted on my own shelf for periodic review. It is a very well written book with great cartoon examples and teachings. I ordered it immediately from Amazon at a very good price and can now use it to my best advantage. There are hundreds of books on drawing and cartooning and I have many of them but I will keep this book in close reach. It is excellent.

The angle of this book is this: it assumes you've already got a cartoon or a comic strip going, and Ben Cormack is there to help you with common problems and blocks that cartoonists experience.

The lessons vary in their usefulness: "adding flesh to bones," "making speech bubbles work for you," and "exaggerating action" were examples of good ones. Others were obvious, such as "how to dress your characters" and "bringing it all together."

Still others didn't work at all, like "capturing expressions" and "figures in motion." The reason these and other lessons didn't work is, as in many books of this ilk, the author merely prints a bunch of expressions and essentially says, "Do this" without explaining HOW to really get good at it. Instead, you're merely told THAT you need to get good at it. Big difference.

As far as I'm concerned, the core merit of any how-to book on cartooning lies in getting you to do it from scratch, not simply present a bunch of groovy illustrations and ask you to come up with your own.