Staff Pick
If you have ever wanted to draw and thought, "I can't even draw a stick figure," pick up this book. Lynda Barry and I share the same philosophy: everyone has the ability to be creative. While this book focuses on the beautiful marriage of words and pictures, I love that the exercises really bring out a passion for drawing regardless of your skill level. Recommended By Rose H., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
The idiosyncratic curriculum from the Professor of Interdisciplinary Creativity will teach you how to draw and write your story
Hello students, meet Professor Skeletor. Be on time, don't miss class, and turn off your phones. No time for introductions, we start drawing right away. The goal is more rock, less talk, and we communicate only through images.
For more than five years the cartoonist Lynda Barry has been an associate professor in the University of Wisconsin-Madison art department and at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, teaching students from all majors, both graduate and undergraduate, how to make comics, how to be creative, how to not think. There is no academic lecture in this classroom. Doodling is enthusiastically encouraged.
Making Comics is the follow-up to Barry's bestselling Syllabus, and this time she shares all her comics-making exercises. In a new hand-drawn syllabus detailing her creative curriculum, Barry has students drawing themselves as monsters and superheroes, convincing students who think they can't draw that they can, and, most important, encouraging them to understand that a daily journal can be anything so long as it is hand drawn.
Barry teaches all students and believes everyone and anyone can be creative. At the core of Making Comics is her certainty that creativity is vital to processing the world around us.
Review
"...[T]hese lessons from Barry, like her art, capture her own brand of magic: a synthesis of theory, practice, memory, imagination, and 'a certain sort of unlearning.'" Publishers Weekly
Review
"The hand-written pages, doodled margins, and off-the-wall characters...might make this seem silly, but there's a serious theoretical underpinning here, and Barry's lighthearted and genuinely fun approach is directly in service of it: banishing your inner critic, developing a disciplined (but playful) practice, and dismantling beliefs about what constitutes a good comic is key to finding something organic, original, and true." Booklist (Starred Review)
About the Author
Lynda Barry has worked as a painter, cartoonist, writer, illustrator, playwright, editor, commentator, and teacher. She is the inimitable creator behind the seminal comic strip Ernie Pook's Comeek, and author of The Freddie Stories, One! Hundred! Demons!, The! Greatest! of! Marlys!, Cruddy: An Illustrated Novel, Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies!, and The Good Times are Killing Me, which was adapted as an off-Broadway play and won the Washington State Governor's Award. Barry has written three bestselling and acclaimed creative how-to graphic novels for D+Q: the Eisner Award-winning What It Is, and Picture This, and Syllabus Notes from an Accidental Professor.