Mind's in another world thinking how can we exist through the facts
Women’s voices, LGBT voices, and the voices of people of color are all needed in any art form if we want to explore the true possibilities of that art form. Diversity is strength.
My drawing, like that of most cartoonists, is intended first of all to be functional: to create believable space, and communicate information. My strongest point in drawing has always been my ability to show characters' nonverbal communication through facial expression and posture.
Cartooning is completely different from other media: it is closely related to film and prose, other narrative forms, but the skills needed to realize a story are very different, and include not only drawing and writing dialogue and narration, but graphic design and the ability to depict time passing visually. It's a whole suite of skills that has to go into making a comics page, skills that are quite distinct from those that go into writing a page of prose, or making a film.
Why does the need to explain comics still exist? Because that prejudice still exists. It's fading, but it's still very strong. It's important to keep pushing the boundaries of what people know comics to be so that they are receptive to the whole world of comics, not just one or two genres of work.
It's a mystery to me why comics have been so despised for so long. Obviously, it has to do with the history of the medium - arising out of cheaply-reprinted booklets of newspaper strips, just out to make a quick buck, followed by mostly-crappy original work. It took a while for really talented artists to move into the comic-book world from the newspapers. It really is strange that even TV commercials got respect before comics did. I have never been able to figure it out.
I don't think comics use iconic forms - or they don't have to. But that makes them even more "cool," if I understand the idea. One has to be quite involved to make comics work. Signals have to be decoded on both the verbal and visual level, simultaneously, and the reader must do a lot of cognitive work between panels as well. Comics definitely need an engaged reader.
Yes, victors are our strongest. They're the ones who survived the arena and slipped the noose of poverty that strangles the rest of us. They, or should I say we, are the very embodiment of hope where there is no hope. And now twenty-three of us will be killed to show how even that hope was an illusion.
No one can ever heap enough insults upon me to suit my taste. I think we all really thrive on hostility, because it's the most intense kind of massage the ego can undergo. Other people's indifference is the only horror.
It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road.
Ken Bates is a football cretin.