Customer Reviews

Comic Art 9

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I've been looking at the last volume of Comic Art with the little book by Seth for a few months now when I saw that number nine had come out. Buenaventura Press put out some very beautiful books and while Kramer's Ergot is probably the most extravagant and is a large-format home for some amazing work, where fine art meets comics, I think I prefer Comic Art because these are the kind of in-depth interviews and features that make you excited about things that you'd never be able to find in comics on your own. Kramer's Ergot shows you things to fall in love with them but Comic Art tells you why.

Surely the most satisfying way of discovering Jessie Marsh's work on comics like Tarzan is through a Q and A with Gilbert Hernandez where you also immediately see the influence of Marsh's work on Hernandez. The interview with Jerry Moriarty deflects some of the discomfort I felt looking at his paintings in Kramer's Ergot and I have no idea how much the glimpse into the world of Dick Tracey is going to cost me in the long run.

For me however, you can look at the whole book as free when you consider Ivan Brunetti's course on cartooning that comes with it. If you enjoy Scott McCloud's books on how comics tick, you'll love this course which feels like a real collage course complete with `laziness will not be tolerated on this course...' in the introduction by a teacher who will never be able to check on your work. The exercises are constructive and a lot of fun and help you discover the kind of cartoonist you might already be rather than throwing a lot of instruction about things like draftsmanship and genre at you in the hopes that you'll find a style to pick.

It seems almost ungrateful to concentrate on the gift that comes with the book and there is a lot of Treasure in Comic Art 9, but if you follow the course I suspect that, in the long run, it will be where your investment lies.