I drew a few jobs for Shelly Bond when she was an editor at DC under that publisher's Vertigo imprint. More recently Shelly became an editor at IDW. Hey, Amateur! is the result of her idea for a wide range of cartoonists, who happen to also be experts in a variety of disciplines, to pass on their specialized knowledge in a collection of single-page comics stories.
Shelly asked me to contribute. I wracked my brain to come up with something to communicate that seemed visual (it would be a comics story, after all) and that I could write about with some modicum of authority. Most of my life has been dedicated to writing and drawing. I don't think I'm particularly limited in my experiences outside of those creative efforts, but I wasn't sure I could speak with as an expert about much.
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| One panel from my story. |
I'm no dance expert, but it's one of my hobbies. So that was it. My story for Hey, Amateur! explains in detail the pirouette "to the outside."
The book also explains how to accomplish approximately twelve dozen other tasks, such as decorating a cake, keeping a band together forever, making a proper cup of tea, and surviving in the woods with a knife and a rabbit. All these concepts are detailed and drawn by "your favorite" cartoonists, including Michael Allred, Gene Ha, Peter Bagge, Paul Pope, Simon Bisley--the list goes on.
Hey, Amateur! is published by Black Crown and distributed by IDW and Penguin Random House.
Copyright © 2021 Eric Shanower. All rights reserved.
