One thing I’ve been mulling over recently is about how to get better, but specifically it’s how to get better at comics and get better at being yourself, I suppose, and one of the problems I have with it, is… well, how do you measure where you are compared to where you want to be?
One of the earliest ways I tried to get better as a comic artist was a fairly simple metric, comics require an artist to produce 22 pages per month so the question was… could I draw 22 pages per month? I got a script off my pal Mal Coney (this was around 1997?) and set about trying to draw one comic in one month, I was working (and I may have been at university too at the time) but i certainly had no other larger commitments (no kids!) so I sat and tried and … I did it. 22 pages (actually think it was 25) and that proved to me, that whether I had the quality of art to do comics at least I knew I could draw enough pages in a month to do it.
One of the second metrics I used to use was about storytelling. Very hard to tell where you are with storytelling – because you’re sort of part of it, but one thing you can do, is you can ask someone you know and trust who doesn’t read comics, to look at a page of art and describe what’s happening on the page – let them walk you through what they think is there, try not to nudge them – let them tell you. You’re not after a subjective opinion (“this is good/this is bad”) you’re after objective stuff (“That guy is talking to this other guy and it’s night. No, it’s day time. Wait, is it night or day?”) that will really help you improve.
Now, it may be a coincidence, but years later I think I have two strengths, one is speed (at my best I can hit 50 pages per month) and the other is clarity in story telling (I think my storytelling chops can be rock solid).
So the question now is what other metrics can I measure, what subjective elements can you tease out of comic art (not a rhetorical question, I’m genuinely curious if you have any answers) and if you can tease them out can you work on improving them?
The truth is I have no idea, numbers of lines on a page? The Mike Mignola-Jim Lee scale. Is your perspective convincing? (does it matter?) white space/black space balance? (that’s a metric you could measure, but literally does it mean anything?) Is the art delicate / beautfiful or blocky / brutal (and what use is that metric if one thing doesn’t neccessarily make it better than the other)
There’s long been the old two-of-three things (applied in comics, but in pretty much every industry you’ll ever read about) You have to be fast, good or easy to get along with – as long as you’re two of those things!
I can control fast (well, I can measure fast).
I can control how well I am to get along with (which really in this means, are you a nightmare or a pleasure for an editor / writer)
Can I control if I’m good? I dunno.
There’s a part of me wants to make a radar chart of a bunch of different, very successful artists and then plot myself in amongst them to see what I could do to improve (sure I could try and make better art, that seems easy … but how HOW?)
Look at Jock – amazing artist, and then look at Bilquis Evely and see the gorgeous filigree noodling of her line and realise that those artists both amazing but polar opposites in some regards. So how do you push yourself?
Anyway these are the thoughts filling my head the last couple of days. The truth is I’m a decent, sometimes great (sometimes not) artist who may never rise above journey man (which you know, that’s not bad) but I do wonder if I could figure out what I need to unlock to get really good, would I be able to do it?
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