Good Week #2: Good Story
Excerpts from my newsletter, Good Week. Not signed up? Join here.
1. Vermont's Center for Cartoon Studies (an amazing place to study visual storytelling) is offering a free email-based 'cartooning workout.' It starts when you sign up here and goes for consecutive seven days. I'm enjoying it myself and plan to try it with my students.
2. Lessons From a Screen Play is one of my favorite YouTube channels. Start with the Ghostbusters episode. The lesson here: A story is only a good as the people who tell it. (9 min)
3. Cartoonist Will Eisner is one of history's greatest visual storytellers. He taught America to take comic books seriously. This episode of the podcast, Imaginary Worlds, digs into Eisner's legacy. Take a listen, then get a copy of Eisner's book on the principles of comic art. (35 min)
4. Printed Matter, Inc. is the world's largest public archive of independently published works. Their catalog includes thousands of comics that stretch the art form like it was a glob of silly putty.
5. In 1995(maybe), not long after it became possible to share comics on the web, comic theorist Scott McCloud identified a new opportunity for computer savvy cartoonists that he called the infinite canvas. The mainstream never caught on but the history of the medium is worth exploring.
Good Week #1: Operating Instructions
Content from the first ‘issue’ of my newsletter. Not signed up? Join here.
1. Why make art? Watch Picasso paint some things and you'll get a taste of the pure joyfulness that only art can evoke. (2 min)
2. Maps of imaginary places RULE. The LotR Project is the ultimate tribute to J.R.R Tolkien's world and characters but the map is the coolest part. (∞ min)
3. Speaking of imaginary places... Manylands is a shared pixel art universe of 100,000 spaces and millions of objects. Wander around and/or make your own things. I don't play many video games but I get super inspired by collaborative, interactive art. (∞ min)
4. Reach for the Stars is a beautiful mashup of scenes from films about space exploration. Good stories are honest depictions of the human condition and space is the perfect setting to explore ourselves. Warning: this video will make you want to watch Apollo 13. (3 min)
5. Words from a brilliant mind: “Literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we’re visiting, life.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, from her essay “The Operating Instructions”