Do you think in order to make a GOOD comic, you should be a reader of comics?

[AxemanRifflord]

...How is this person even expecting to get the art done? Are they going to hire an artist? Do the art themselves? Freeload? Have they even considered that part?

[candiedcotton]

Oh no, I've known this person for a decade. It's 100% believable, lol.

[candiedcotton]

I think they assume I will be the one drawing it, haha.

[DiegoPalacios]

Gotta say one must understand how the medium they are using works and reading is an easy way to get the grasp on comics.

[Lensing]

You should be really good at telling stories and be able to communciate with pictures.
You need some experience in visual storytelling, I can imagine someone who is into
movies and doesn´t read many comics and is still able to make a comic book.
But I think in reality most people who create comics are comic fans first

[powerplantanimations]

Yeh. I actually recommend people go back to early as the 30's and start seeing the evolution of comics first hand. This is why I think reading stuff like DC is useful lol.

[DNoble]

Has any good music ever been produced by someone who dislikes music? any films by creators who don't enjoy movies? Any novels by those who don't like reading?

Reading comics doesn't produce good comic creators by nature, it certainly helps improvement, but it isn't a prerequisite so much as it is a simultaneous phenomenon: People don't make good comics because they like reading comics, people who make good comics also like reading comics.

One is not the product of the other, they are simply simultaneous and symbiotic phenomena.

[hakei]

Sounds like "I'm going to cook the best steak even though I've never had a bite of steak or even watched someone cook a steak before but I'm good at cooking bacon so it's basically the same thing."

[AxemanRifflord]

They shouldn’t assume anything.

[theyrebothakilogram]

Yeah, there's a lot of visual tropes that you don't know unless you've read a lot of comics, so it's like everyone else is in on the joke except for them. Panelling is a lot more complicated than just 'picture with words' so reading comics is pretty important to making a comic

[ziibb]

Oh absolutely. They'll probably make a decent comic but not without tons of trial and error and even learning the basics through a much harder way than necessary.

I'm ngl though I think I understand them, I liked making comics ever since I was a kid but I didn't like the classic superhero style (the only type of comics I knew at the time) and just did my own thing steering clear of them. Once I came across webcomics and webtoon I felt like I found my place! Completely different format that has its own formulas and technique to learn about and I gladly read their tips and tricks and improved my comic skills.

Maybe let them do their own thing first. I know I wasn't like them where I rejected the very idea of ANY comic and you're right cuz reading comics is important to really master the elements, but maybe learning that itself is part of their journey!

[Katzalcoatl]

You do have to read a bare minimum of comics to understand how comics are made.

You can't cook a pie without looking at the recipe or at least tasting one pie. If you cook without any knowledge you will never arrive at the answer without many trials and errors.

Trying to do a comic without knowing what is popular and what is well accepted in certain genres is like attempting to draw the mona lisa without ever having seen the painting and just getting a vague description of what the mona lisa looks like by a friend.

You always need to investigate the things you are attempting for the first time. If you don't investigate your competition or your target audience beforehand your business will fail unless you are extremely lucky. And lets be honest not everyone is the unicorn they like to see themselves as.

[Katzalcoatl]

That mentality is common. But not necessarily in making comics. It can be in business, music, or other areas.

Many people just see something and think it's easy just because another person who practiced years makes it look easy.

Everyone likes to beleive themselves as exceptions to the rules while in reality they are not. (There are still exceptions to the rules but they are super rare.)

[Mallory]

Honestly this attitude is prevalent in all kinds of writing circles. Hit up any writer forum and you’ll see a small but recognizable minority of people who don’t read books/watch movies/etc but are going to write the next big thing and anyone who tells them that they probably won’t because they don’t respect their chosen medium is a hater (they’re also pretty much always doing it for clout/fame/$$$ without any respect for the market… like how your friend thinks they’ll make big bucks in comics even though the comic market is completely dwarfed by figures found in the novel/prose market).

I will confess that I am not a huge FAN of comics. I read about one volume a week (from the library) just to do research and be informed, but it’s a concentrated effort on my part. I usually buy any book I truly enjoyed reading, and my comic shelf only has about a dozen things on it, half of which are nostalgia from high school. So I don’t know if you need to be a huge, unrepentant fan of other comics to make them, but you absolutely need to read and respect the medium.

[abigaillmartin]

My mother is a writer and reader too and she wrote her own stories when she was younger. She always told me the more you read and the more experience you get the better your writing will get. I’ve loved reading not necessarily fiction but non fiction like intellectual books and fact and history so I’m not really a storyteller but more on an intellectual standpoint. I use history and science and the real world as my guide to enhance my ideas for my stories with a sprinkle of imagination of course.

I mean in the logic of a cartoon in which I draw, really anything can happen but I choose for it to be grounded in reality a little bit.

I admit I do have a great imagination but I’m not a great storyteller I’m still improving in that aspect of my comics. I also write scripts and the occasional novel but it kind of ends up in the most whimsical way possible and poorly written fanfiction.

But in my experience just read more and learn from the masters. And always keep reading!

[Awesomeness_Studios]

What the heck

Every time I work in a new medium or format I need to know what it’s supposed to look like before I can get started. If you don’t read comics then you have barely any clue what comics are supposed to look like.

I will add that it’s important to also consume other kinds of media so you can add something NEW to comics, but yeah if you never read comics you’ll never understand them.

[thepenmonster]

I'm going to say yes but only because comics are in the same pop cultural state as jazz. It's nerds making nerd stuff for other nerds.

That means you have to appeal to the nerds and knowing what they want requires knowing what they're actually consuming. That's why the latest Generic-Man always fail in cape comics and any manga without a topless 15 year old girl flops as well: Those creators didn't see what the audience was actually into.

[c0rg1c0m1cs]

I used to think that you should read comics to create great comics, but 2 of my favorite manga artists are hollywood movie buffs, and the only other thing they care about consuming is playing vidya.

Also the manga artist that hooked me into anime & manga is obsessed with Monster Hunter, to the point that he played it for thousands of hours, and he said in an interview that he's self-taught, and he learned to draw manga by studying movie storyboards, needless to say that his manga paneling is very cinematic.

On the western comics side of things, my favorite artist from this side of the world learned a lot from hollywood too, so it's probably a pattern that I'm a fan of cinematic comic artists, even tho I'm not big into movies (more of an animation, anime, manga fan) maybe I should give movies a chance. (Live action almost always turns me off, and there's very few movies with real people that I like)

On a side note: I heard that Kojima (legendary video game creator) is a movie buff, and his biggest inspirations come from movies, not other games. (take this with a grain of salt, I didn't check it)

[TheLemmaLlama]

raises hand

I am that person you just described. Guilty as charged.

Seriously though, I'm not much of a comic reader at all; it's probably my least favourite of visual media But then again, my webcomic is really only a 'comic' in name only It would be really weird and unlikely for someone to make a good traditional comic despite having no interest in reading comics, but if they consume and engage with other media like film, animation or video games, I can see them making a good story involving sequential visuals that are really an attempt to approximate their preferred medium with the limited resources they have on hand, but happens to end up having more in common with what we consider to be 'comics'

Or at least that's what I believe, otherwise I wouldn't be trying to do it myself XD

[system]

This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.