In one, say, they’re shown in minimal pen strokes, crisp black lines with no shading and plenty of white space. Now, changing nothing about their sex, clothes, appearance, posture, or location, imagine them drawn in two contrasting styles. Just as they come to your mind’s eye a person sitting on a bench in the park. It doesn’t matter how you imagine their posture, their clothes, their hairstyle or anything else. Imagine a comic book panel showing a person sitting on a park bench. It can alter the fundamental meaning and significance of a scene. The same situation - a character shot by an arrow - has a completely different emotional effect on the reader because of the drawing style you choose to embody the scene. You could show his knees knocking together, his eyes crossed and tongue sticking out, with him saying, “What a headache! I knew I shouldn’t have had that last cup of wine!” Done like that, the effect would be to raise a laugh, or at least a smile, to the reader’s lips. Now imagine the identical situation but drawn in a comedic style - you can imagine Asterix, if you like - with the arrow going through some dumb Roman soldier’s head. The caption or speech bubble might read only, “Arrghhh!” Using that style to show this scene would evoke a sense of horror in the reader. You could draw that scene with detailed realism, showing the torn flesh, the splatter of blood, and the look of agony and fear on the character’s face. Imagine a violent scene in which, say, a sharpened arrow pierces one character’s head. The same images drawn in diverse styles can leave dramatically different emotional impressions. Still, your style isn’t only a matter of creating aesthetic effects. But your comic book drawing style is always personal to you. Your drawing style may be characterized by clear, bold lines, or detailed dotting and cross-hatching. You could, for example, choose a realistic, or hyper-realistic, or grotesque, comedic, naïve, caricatured, simplistic, even abstract and symbolic style. So, there’s a spectrum of stylistic possibilities in the world of comic book creation which gives you enormous creative freedom. The most complex graphic novels may boast artwork which expresses a technical skill, artistic vision, and attention to form, composition, and detail that would not look out-of-place hanging on the walls of a fine art gallery. The simplest comics can be stylistically super-simple - nothing more than childlike stick figures against a white backdrop. It’s how you use them that will make your comic book unique. These aren’t rigid rules to stifle your creativity they’re the artistic factors which give you the possibilities you need to express your creativity fully they’re what makes a comic book what it is. However, there are certain fundamentals you’ll need to understand five essential elements of every successful comic book. If you want to make your own comic book, know this: it can be anything you want it to be. They range from heart-warming Christmas fables like the late Raymond Briggs’s family favorite, “The Snowman” to dark tales of holocaust survival in Art Spiegelman’s “Maus”, or poetic coming-of-age fantasies as in Neil Gaiman’s “Coraline” and the laugh-out-loud comedy capers of Goscinny and Uderzo’s “Asterix the Gaul”. But comics can be so much more than that, too. Who doesn’t love a superhero comic? Whether you prefer Marvel or D.C., to fly above New York with your scarlet cape flapping in the wind and an outstretched fist or to swing across the Manhattan skyline from a spiderweb thread, most people associate comic books with hyperreal heroic adventure stories.
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