World Famous Comics: Comics and Sequential Art: Principles and Practices from the Legendary Cartoonist (Will Eisner Instructional Books)
Comics and Sequential Art: Principles and Practices from the Legendary Cartoonist (Will Eisner Instructional Books)
By: Will Eisner Publisher: W.W. Norton & Co. Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Label: W.W. Norton & Co. Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 164 Publication Date: August 17, 2008
Two classic drawing textbooks from an American comics pioneer, revised and enhanced for a new generation. Based on Will Eisner's legendary course at New York's School of Visual Arts, these guides have inspired generations of artists, students, teachers, and fans. In Comics and Sequential Art, Eisner reveals the basic building blocks and principles of comics, including imagery, the frame, and the application of time, space, and visual forms. Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative teaches how to control a story effectively using a broad array of techniques. With examples from Eisner's own catalog and such masters as H. Foster, R. Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Milton Caniff, Al Capp, and George Herriman, these books distill the art of graphic storytelling into principles that every comic artist, writer, and filmmaker should know.
Amazon.com Review: Based on the popular course Eisner taught for several years at New York's School of Visual Arts, this lovingly written book on visual storytelling contains an accumulation of his ideas, theories and advice on the practice of graphic story-telling and the uses to which the comic book art form can be applied. Whether you're a film student, literature student, artist or simply a fan of good storytelling, you'll love this book filled with Eisner's cartoons.
Lots of useful tips, techniques and insight Watch Video Here: http://www.amazon.com/review/R2MBY1CKMJ58ZF The book focuses on the creation of comics and the various techniques one can use. Specifically, it talks about the why the techniques work and the concepts behind. The various lessons touch on timing, framing, composition, expressive anatomy, writing for comics and other application of comics.
Every page of comics included that serve as examples come with captions. They explain the effect to achieve on readers. One example would be to tilt a composition of a moving train to simulate the rocking on the tracks.
How Will Eisner uses his panels and framing is amazing. He can use doorways or windows on a plane as frames, and he can so easily blend his panels together using the environment. Paneling and pacing when done right really just enhances the story. You'll see and understand why it works. It's all explained.
This book will serve as a very good introduction to comic artists. Professionals might learn some new ways of doing things too.
There are more pictures of the book on my blog. Just visit my Amazon profile for the link.
Master piece the title talk itself, Will Eisner is a master, he never enter to the universe of the spandex heroes, if you don't like the espandex, or you try to understand the comics, or not only comics, visual narrative inself, this is your book.
Heavily Illustrated Essays about How Comics and Sequential Art Communicate My guess is that a hundred people have heard of this work for every one who has actually read it. At the time the book was developed, you could only find this information by taking Will Eisner's class at the New York School of Visual Art.
Unless you haven't been paying attention to comics, you will probably find that you already understand most of the key messages: words and illustrations combine to form imagery; time elapses between panels and the pacing of the time involved affects how you react to the story; the frames around the panels and pages as a mechanism for tying the story together; using anatomy and expression to extract emotion from readers; how to combine words and illustrations for best effect; the potential to use sequential art in more than comic strips and books; and new technologies for making comics and sequential art.
As for me, the only section that I found rewarding was the extensive middle section on panels. Maybe I'm obtuse (I probably am), but I've often found it difficult to follow and understand the choice of panel structure on pages in Golden age comics. Mr. Eisner thoughtfully provides extended sections from The Spirit to demonstrate why he made the choices he did and what he hoped to accomplish. It was like a Rosetta Stone for translating what some of those odd pages are supposed to do. For that section, it was worth reading the book. The other sections I could have skipped and not missed anything.
I also recommend you read Scott McCloud book's about comics and sequential art: They are more rewarding in terms of setting out the issues and opportunities.
A Must for all Comic writers & artists! I just received this book yesterday, and I've been devouring it ever since! Mr. Eisner is a master storyteller, and he does a wonderful job of explaining the how's and why's of it in this book. The book is loaded with examples as well, mostly from his "Spirit" series. Trust me, you are going to be blown away by these things that were created a good 50 years ago! If you want to improve your comic book storytelling ability, this is an excellent place to start!
What a disappointment... After reading the reviews of this book here on Amazon, and running across mentions of this book in lots of other places that talk about comics & graphic novels, I was really looking forward to reading it. But on the whole, I've been very disappointed. Although the book covers a lot of relevant topics, it does so in a way that seems sloppy and self-congratulatory. The book could do with a thorough proofreading to catch the numerous typos and other errors, and the author seems more concerned with impressing the reader than in making the topics easy to grasp and apply. I'm really surprised to find that this isn't a better introduction to the art & craft of visual storytelling.
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