Customer Reviews

Expressive Anatomy for Comics and Narrative: Principles and Practices from the Legendary Cartoonist (Will Eisner Instructional Books)

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Length:: 0:26 Mins

Expressive Anatomy for Comics and Narrative is one of the three Will Eisner instructional books. The other two are Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative and Comics and Sequential Art.

I bought the book to learn how to pose characters properly and create strong silhouettes. I'm glad to say that this book provides tons of examples selected from Will Eisner's years of comics.

Will Eisner started the book but unfortunately passed away in 2005 before he could finish it. Enter Peter Poplaski, an artist who have worked long time beside him. Peter Poplaski was engaged to add the finishing touches for the book with some additional drawings. The majority of art work is still from Will Eisner's archive.

The first few chapters explain the anatomy and how it affects movement. It offers a basic introduction to the latter chapters and is definitely not a substitute for an anatomy book.

The core concept of the book is actually this: human actions come from reflex and emotions.

The bulk of the book is devoted to showing examples of how certain feelings are express through body language and gesture. Each example is clearly explained and exceptionally easy to understand. Even if speech balloons are taken away from the example comic panels, readers will still know how the characters are feeling. Such is the power of a strong silhouette.

Included are also many other techniques to help breath life into characters, such as staging, composition, positioning of characters etc.

This book is very useful for any artists who wants to create believable characters people can relate to.

I think I'll also be getting the other two books.

(More pictures are available on my blog. Just visit my Amazon profile for the link.)

This book arrived fast and was exactly what my aspiring artist wanted. Great resource material, quality item, good investment! Recommended!

Yet another useful set of instructions and attitudes from Will Eisner. For story-telling artists, this goes with the other Eisner books. Everything here can be applied to today's static and sequential art.

Subtitled "Will Eisner Instructional Book," I have a hard time understanding exactly who this book is aimed at. Beginning artists are given no step-by-step instructions for drawing the complex physical actions contained here. In spite of several pages of depictions of the body's skeletal and muscular systems, more advanced artists are given little indication of how the inner musculature of the body is expressed. The tone of the book is pedantic in the extreme. The best parts of the book are snippets from Eisner's classics -- Fagin the Jew and the Dropsie Avenue series. Even here, the tips about character development and story arc are very few. I'd give this one a miss except for those who need to own everything with Eisner's name on it.