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New Change Log comic and thoughts on Visual Storytelling.

It’s been interesting to watch how social media has evolved over the years. People love drama. The news media has exploited this for years and now a ton of people get their daily hit of the drama dopamine on social media. For those people, it is almost never about being “social” online anymore and instead it’s just people yelling at each other to score political points (or so they believe). When you see it for what it is, though, and don’t take it seriously, it can become just ridiculous entertainment. I’m just there for the jokes.

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About Visual Storytelling

Anyone can make comics. That’s one of the best and worst things about them. Comics are my favorite medium to tell and read stories because of the unique relationship the creator has with the reader. There are so many people doing really cool comics, and a good many of them aren’t coming from the mainstream American comic industry. But, there are also a lot of bad comics made every day (also not exclusive to the independents). Making a comic is really difficult, not because it’s all that hard to write a story and draw a picture. Comics are difficult to get right because of the blend of story and art, and that’s what visual storytelling is all about. There have been a lot of great writers who fail miserably at making comics. Likewise, there have been a lot of great fine artists that are very bad at making comics. Someone’s ability to make a beautiful piece of art has very little to do with making good comics. I firmly believe and stand by that statement. Similarly, you could be very mediocre at what some would consider the ideal fine art, but still be amazing at making comics. Jack Kirby, considered to be one of, if not the, greatest comic artists ever, drew some really wonky anatomy. But, damn, could he tell a story!

To me, the number one aspect of making a good comic is visual storytelling. Even if the idea of the comic itself isn’t great, good visual storytelling can make it really fun to read. What do I mean by “visual storytelling” as it relates to comics? It’s all of the visual elements that convey the narrative that the author is trying to get across. The composition of the image (or comic panel), the lighting, the body language and facial expressions of the characters, the layout from the placement of figures, to the word balloons and sound effects, to overall page design including the visual flow of the eye around the page. It’s the total collective of the visual aspects of the comic. All of these aspects have to be in sync and aligned with the story. This is why it’s so difficult. When it’s all in harmony, it’s a beautiful thing. But even one minor thing can wreck it all. If a creative team is not all pulling in the same direction, it’s very difficult to make the overall visual storytelling work. This is why some people feel like a one-man-show writer/artist (which I call just a cartoonist) is often better than a team of really talented creators, because unless they’re all 100% in alignment, there’s often something off in the visual storytelling. Sometimes it’s subtle and sometimes it’s glaring, but the reader can usually tell instantly that something is off.

Anyway, I’m rambling now, but this is going to be a regular feature of this newsletter. I’ll be diving in deeper about a lot of the elements of visual storytelling and giving my opinions (I have a lot of opinions on this), so if you find this as interesting as I do, please tell a friend about it and join in the conversation in the comments!

Have a great week!

-Brad