Comics / Cult Favorite

Storytellers Weekend, pt. 2 of 8: The Artist’s Job

By Philip Schweier
March 14, 2010 - 15:16

On Feb. 19 and 20, the Savannah College of Art & Design hosted Howard Chaykin and Klaus Janson, who presented a two-day seminar originally conceived for Marvel Comics. The purpose of the seminar is to introduce new comic artists and Marvel editors, some of whom come from an editorial background and lack the experience to effectively judge comic book techniques, to basic tools of effectively telling a story in the comic book form.

Klaus Janson emphasizes that a comic book artist’s job is to communicate the story “You are a storyteller,” he says. “You have two responsibilities; one is to be clear and one is to be entertaining. You are an entertainer as well as a storyteller. If you’re going to sit around a campfire and tell a story, you have a choice of whether or not you’re going to tell that story in an entertaining way or in a boring way. Are you going to put people to sleep or get them immersed, and I use that word exactly, immersed in your story?”

One of the reasons Janson emphasizes clarity is because of the relationship between words and pictures. “If your art is clear,” he says, “it frees up the writer to write beyond exposition. So by example if you’re drawing Flash running through Central City and it’s clear and obvious that Flash is running through Central City, the writer is able to write about something else besides Flash running through Central City.”

Janson goes on to explain that if the artwork is unclear and unable to communicate that fundamental piece of information, the writer is then saddled and restricted by poor art and is forced to write “Flash is running through Central City.”

“If the writer is hampered by bad art and restricted to covering up your bad storytelling the relationship between the words and the pictures can never rise above pure exposition,” explains Janson. “And if you have any passion for this medium, you want to be able to produce work that goes beyond mere exposition. You want to be able to create wonderful work, wonderful art, that has merit.”

Howard Chaykin stresses the importance of understanding how subjective the term “entertaining” is. “You’ve got to basically understand you’re out there to deliver something that has some charm, some polish, some style and some fun,” he says.  “Any idea that you have is probably already been done by someone else, but using that collective idea in a new way is part of the job.”

As an example, Chaykin raised the question of, on a two-page spread, where do you put the surprise? “You never put a surprise an odd-numbered page, because we see things in twos,” he explained. “Always put a surprise on an even-numbered page because you start on page one, you turn to page two and you’re seeing page three at the same time. Surprises are always delivered on even-numbered pages. It seems simple, but you’d be surprised at how many writers don’t get this shit.

“If you save the surprise for page three, you’ve already seen it, right? Comics is a shocked-based system and there is a simultaneity to it, more simultaneous than subtitles in foreign films.”

However, because comic books, like most publications, are supported in part by advertising, it sometimes happens that an ad will throw off that rthym. “You can’t always control that,” says Chaykin, “because ads might get in the way. He advises that an artist develop relationship with his or her editor, to work out such problems beforehand.

According to Janson, it’s important to an artist’s career in terms of the larger context, in terms of the relationship with the writer, and the words and the pictures. “It does elevate the medium and the page if you’re clear, and if you’re not, then it brings it down to crap, really.”

“What Klaus is talking about,” says Chaykin, “is the idea that it’s your job not to create problems, but provide solutions.

“An artist whose work I admire, a few years back he did a job that took place in Los Angeles, and this writer/artist had not bothered to do any reference, to do any research, so his city is just a generic city. Utter contempt for the material. Your job is so filled with little pieces of business that one must solve, that the contempt this guy had for the material that he could sit and draw this city that he was making up, and he thought it would be okay is just a jerk-off. It’s lazy, sloppy crap. It’s insulting and condescending.”

Downtown Los Angeles, courtesy of Google

Chaykin argues that since the advent of the Internet, there is no excuse not to create a sense of verisimilitude in the work you produce. “There are pictures of everything – everything! And it is your job to deliver images that convey not necessarily reality, but verisimilitude, a convincing idea. If you’re called upon to draw Paris, don’t make it look like Keokuk. It’s your job. You have a responsibility to your writer, your editor, your audience to deliver the best work you possibly can.”

Janson, who teaches at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York City, talked about an assignment he always gives his new students in the fall. “The very first homework is one page: What I Did on My Summer Vacation. Well, that sounds very simple enough and the kids probably think ‘Oh, this guy’s a creampuff.’ So they come back the next week and the lesson starts. What I usually get back is some guys will do one page and it will show them sitting on a sofa playing video games. Some people will do sequential panels. One kid this year, he was on a beach, he was playing football, he was surfing, there was an understandable sequence of panels, so it runs the gamut.”

The point Janson tries to convey to his students is context. “If you give that page of the guy who is sitting on his sofa playing video games to somebody on the street, they don’t know what that is. You’re not going to tell the story. You’re answering the question ‘What I Did on My Summer Vacation,’ but it’s not understandable to anyone else.’ Janson explains that in order for the answer to be understood, the question has to be there too. “So if you take somebody off the street and you give them that page, they understand that it’s you, and this is what you did, and it took place during the summer.

“Because that kid that’s on the beach running around catching footballs and surfing, it looks like it’s summer but it’s not. It could California in January. So there has to be a way of communicating who, what, when, where on that page, and that’s the very first lesson that I try to give to the students.”

According to Janson, storytelling in a comic book requires that same information – who, what, when, where – to be on every single page. Who are they, where are they, when are they? Is it day or nighttime? An artist’s responsibility is to have that information on every page. If you don’t have that information on every page, it’s not understandable to somebody off the street. So the answer without the question is meaningless.

Next time: Making the Leap From Fan to Professional

Praise and adulation? Scorn and ridicule? E-mail me at philip@comicbookbin.com

Last Updated: August 31, 2023 - 08:12