How to Make Comics
FROM LA MANO 21 - BUY HERE
maybe you didn't see Houses Of The Holy, that came out last year from Uncivilized Books. if so, get it. Caitlin bleeds comics, and she proves it with this amazing new 44-page zine, HOW TO MAKE COMICS. it's instructional in the same sense that jumping off a cliff can potentially teach you valuable lessons about falling, only not depressing. sort of. what a beautiful, sublime little book. 44 pages, red ink on newsprint.
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“It's an all-splash comic, just like that one issue of Thor, but Skaalrud's use of the technique is to draw sharp distinctions between the images she draws and the sparse captions and word balloons pasted on top, the two planes of narrative only sometimes lining up with one another. The text is a continuous poetic exhortation on the sacrifices and necessities of art-making ("LEARN THE COPPER TASTE OF HUNGER"), while the pictures shift from the observational to the allegorical, with enough in the way of recurring imagery to suggest a discreet, achronological narrative of their own, relating to the domestic life of "Caitlin" - the story's protagonist and possible narrator, possibly remembering herself from some misty place in the future, or perhaps projecting a means of order (text) onto the riot of life (image). The act of reading it, compact as it is, coaxes what feel like intuitive connections as if a demonstration of the artist's synapses firing - a strong marshaling of form.”
