Making Comics

Hello students, meet Professor Skeletor. Be on time, don t miss class, and turn off your phones. No time for introductions, we start drawing right away. The goal is more rock, less talk, and we communicate only through images. For more than five years the cartoonist Lynda Barry has been an associate professor in the University of Wisconsin Madison art department and at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, teaching students from all majors, both graduate and undergraduate, how to make comics, how to be creative, how to not think. There is no academic lecture in this classroom. Doodling is enthusiastically encouraged. Making Comics is the follow-up to Barry s bestselling Syllabus and this time she shares all of her comics-making exercises. In a new hand drawn syllabus detailing her creative curriculum, Barry has students drawing themselves as monsters and superheroes, convincing students who think they can t draw that they can, and most important, encouraging them to understand that a daily journal can be anything so long as it is hand drawn. Barry teaches all students and believes everyone and anyone can be creative. At the core of Making Comics is her certainty that creativity is vital to processing the world around us.

Awarded a 2019 MacArthur Genius Grant

\”Eternally wise and strange.\”–NPR

\”Barry is pushing the envelope on understanding how the brain creates and responds to words and pictures — a scholarly envelope that, in her mind, should be positively covered with illuminating doodles.\”–The Washington Post

\”Making Comics is stuffed to the gills with Barry’s friendly wisdom, characteristic doodles, and mind-expanding exercises.\”–Paris Review

\”Barry pairs a spirit of wise and open encouragement with a demand for rigor… The underlying thesis of Making Comics is that anyone can discover their own cartooning genius, if they are willing to put in the work.\”–Salon

\”What’s most delightful about Making Comics is its emphasis on action, on exercise, on practice–on actual making.\”–New Republic

Format: Paperback
Pages: 200
Imprint: Drawn & Quarterly US
Publication date: 05/11/2019
Illustrator: Barry, Lynda