"It’s through drawing that your head starts working"

January 12, 2018 2:23 PM

But to think of a comic book page as a building is not such an abstract thought. In New York Boek, sketches exist as scaffolding for proposed structures, later worlds, waiting to be populated with people – characters that Joost describes as “not the smartest sort in the universe.”

Marianne Hanoun talks about Joost Swarte's work for The New Yorker at It's Nice That.
posted by MartinWisse (3 comments total)

Swarte's comments there made me think again just how many roles a good comic book artist has to combine in his or her work.

In movie terms, the artist has has to scout locations, dress all the sets and characters, work out where to place the camera, decide how to light and pace the scene, get a good performance out of the actors, school them in their body language, ensure the viewer's eye is always directed to the most salient detail and keep all that moving along without any of it becoming obtrusive enough to pull us out of the story.

The writer shares responsibility for some of these roles, but by no means all, and how much of the load he carries will vary a lot from one writer to the next. Drawing a comic book well demands a huge investment of time for very little financial reward, which helps to explain why only those with a genuine passion for the medium stick at it. These guys deserve a lot more respect than they get.
posted by Paul Slade at 4:49 PM on January 12, 2018 [2 favorites]

It's pronounced yoast, not juiced
posted by joost de vries at 8:03 PM on January 12, 2018 [3 favorites]

Thanks for this! Lovely to see all those sketches and preliminary drawings. First ran into Swarte's work in Raw and was immediately snagged by his style. Definitely a lineal descendant of Hergé; didn't know he'd coined ligne claire.
posted by the sobsister at 8:43 AM on January 13, 2018 [1 favorite]