My name is Can (like the beverage container!), and I’m a comic artist and illustrator based in South Africa! I post a lot about comics & Comics Studies, children’s media, and 2000s-era rock bands :)
I make a webcomic calledInto The Midnight City, about a punk vampire trans guy and his friends solving magical mysteries! Check it out if you like lighthearted adventures, stories about Friendship & Queer Romance, polite little gentlemen, weird girls who like bugs, and the occasional big soft werewolf <3. You can read it on Tapas or Webtoon, or here on Tumblr at @intothemidnightcity (tumblr version best read on desktop)
I think there is a difference between the comic as a sequence of images with text and the comic as a comic. it’s a subtle difference that an untrained eye might not see but the more one as artist draws comics the clearer this difference becomes, because one who first aspires to draw comics will soon find they are merely drawing sequences of images with text.
when people say an artist is clearly inspired by anime they often use “anime” to refer to japanese pop culture in general, but if you look more closely you can often tell it really is specifically anime rather than manga that inspired them, because the paneling and camera angles in their comics will read like a series of anime screenshots rather than a manga page. similarly, when I was a teenager really popular manga that had anime adaptions would sometimes get “animanga” reprints where they replaced the panels with the equivalent anime screenshots of the scene, and they often looked like dogshit because the very premise showed blatant disregard for why the original comic worked in the first place. these two examples are both about anime because i am a weeb but it applies outside that context too. a cartoon storyboard can be read as if it were a comic, but what it really is is a sequence of images with text that has yet to be refined into its actual intended format.
there are many artists who only employ the medium of comic because what they actually want to draw is a video, or a video game cutscene, but the only tool actually at their disposal is the ability to draw a series of images and add text to them so that is what they use. there is no shame or mistake in doing this, you have to make your art with the tools that you have available, and if the sequence of images with text is enough to convey the idea then it was the right tool for the job. but these are different mediums with different visual languages, languages which have a lot of overlap and can occasionally be used in each other’s stead to achieve similar results (especially when drawing a fanart comic of a video game for example), but which are still ultimately different. the comic and the video and the cutscene are all different forms that a sequence of images with text can take but they are far from completely interchangeable.
there is a key difference in approach to the comic as a series of images roughly interchangeable with other forms of series of images like the video and the cutscene, and the comic as specifically the comic. this difference in approach is not always necessary to achieve results, an artist who wants to convey a scenario they came up with needs only the sequence of images with text to achieve this. but the difference between a comic with good writing and art, and a comic that is a good comic, is in whether it was treated as a comic rather than a sequence of images with text. I say this as an artist whose nearly every comic has been simply a sequence of images, because I just don’t have the patience to refine it into a comic when I merely want to convey my idea rather than draw a comic. it takes a particular skill and insight that have to be developed and practised separately from the ability to draw well and the ability to write well in order to become good at making “the comic” as synthesis of the two.
it’s hard to specifically point out the essence of this difference between the sequence of images and the comic because it’s kind of a vibes thing honestly, and it depends on where and how the comic was meant to be published too. comics meant to have paper print editions have different constraints and requirements and frameworks to work with than webtoons meant to be read on slim mobile screens in a continuous scrolling format. a good traditional comic will consider not just how each individual panel looks but also the way each page as a whole looks, and how the pages look next to each other in a spread, and how it feels to turn the page towards the next spread. a good webtoon will consider the movement of scrolling down and how this affects the transition from one moment to another in its composition. time is time in videos and cutscenes but space is time in comics, and the space your have available determines how you can divide time across it. when you make a webcomic on your own website you have no constraints but the ones you set for yourself, and sometimes this leads to things like homestuck, which would not work in any other format than the one it created for itself.
the best comics are good because they tell their story and present their images specifically in the form of a comic, in a way that would not be possible if it were not specifically a comic. I think this is true for basically every medium, I’m just thinking about comics specifically lately, because even though I don’t really consider myself a comic artist - because I usually draw sequences of images rather than comics - the thing my clients want to pay for is often still “a comic”, and they don’t know or care to tell the difference. it’s a difference that, as established, is often fairly moot anyway, because as long as it successfully conveys your idea it’s good enough. but it’s precisely because the sequence of images is often good enough that the specific skill of the comic artist is often overlooked.
consequently, because there is a tangible if somewhat vaguely defined difference between being good at making individual illustrations that may or may not be put in sequence with text and being good at making comics, someone who isn’t a “good artist”, in the sense that their individual illustrations may be unimpressive when viewed separately, can still be a good comic artist, in the sense that they are able to present a sequence of these individually unimpressive illustrations in a way that exceeds the sum of their parts. a comic page by someone who is an unimpressive illustrator but good comic artist will look far more pleasing than a comic page by a good illustrator but unimpressive comic artist, because making a comic is a different skill that is merely adjacent to making illustrations, even though the two are often lumped together.
anyone remember what these things are called like little cartoony expressive doohickies i think they have a real name but i can’t remember
im not fucking crazy.
if i have one more person say sparkles on this post im gonna blow i swear to god
They’re squeans I’m pretty sure! If they pop like that anyway. But the term for this kind of “symbol to refer to the general vibe of something in art” is called “Emanata” because it emanates from a person or object.
what the fuck. comics are magic
These examples (and the term “emanata” as a whole!) come from cartoonist Mort Walker’s Lexicon of Comicana. Published in 1980, the book features a comprehensive look at common conventions of comics-making. Including:
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among other things.
From the introduction:
The Museum of Cartoon Art defines a cartoon as “any whimsical, facetious graphic expression which parodies any aspect of human behavior.” That’s quite a mouthful, and I don’t really bite on it.
Every child is a cartoonist. We all begin by drawing crude symbols of people and houses and trees. No one ever starts out as a Rembrandt. But Rembrandt started out as a cartoonist. I’m sure his prideful parents gushed over his first drawings with immediate recognition of what he’d had in mind. “Look! A doggie!”
It wasn’t a realistic dog in any sense, but a distillation of the shape of a dog, one that was easily drawn and instantly recognized. It was a cartoon because cartoons are essentially just a group of universally understood symbols put together like a jigsaw puzzle to convey an idea.
You can browse through the whole book HERE thanks to the Internet Archive.
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