Most comic books and graphic novels feature the human figure as a primary image. Superhero comics, autobiographical comics, slice-of-life comics, horror comics, romance comics—in all of these and more, drawings of humans appear in panel after panel. Anthropomorphic comics such as Uncle Scrooge and art spiegelman’s Maus, highly stylized representational comics such as Powerpuff Girls and Mark Beyer’s Amy + Jordan, as well as comics that combine both of these ideas, such as Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes and Sim and Gerhard’s Cerebus—all use figures that seem to move and act in the ways humans move and act. Even comics seemingly divorced completely from reality, such as Larry Marder’s Tales of the Beanworld, use figures derived from the human body and its movements.
So, while I’m confident that a comics story completely devoid of anything like a human figure or human reaction could be fascinating if handled carefully, it’s clear to me that we humans prefer to read comics about characters who look and act a lot like us.
Please note the “and act” part. It’s not enough for a cartoonist to have the basic knowledge of how to draw a human or humanlike body. He or she must have the skill to convey the way humans act.
Humans act with their entire bodies. Our physical frames express what we think and feel, sometimes without our intent. The way someone stands or sits tells a lot. It’s called body language, and conveying human action and expression is a necessary skill for any cartoonist seeking to communicate a story to a reader. Some body parts usually convey more information than others. Shoulders usually tell more than knees. (Of course, I realize that some people have body parts, even entire bodies, which don’t move or react. I don’t mean to offend anyone. I’m speaking generally here.)
You might think that one of the most expressive features is the eye. Time and time again, I hear or read references to a person’s eyes conveying information or emotion, even light. People say, “The eyes are the window to the soul.” This is, of course, impossible. Put simply, an eye is a ball with a cornea, pupil, and iris on one side and muscles on the other. It can’t convey anything—not alone, anyway. The most an eye can indicate is a direction of sight, and even that is in relationship to the rest of the head. There’s a reason that people think the eyes are so important. The eyes are a focal point for our understanding of other people. But what conveys the information or emotion, what gives us a look into “the soul,” is actually all the areas that surround the eye—the brow, the lids, the forehead, temple, and cheek—and how the muscles underneath these areas move.
Of course, cartoonists can and often do get away with using the iris to convey expression. They shrink it, expand it, make it go blank, add a jillion reflections of light, or insert shapes into it—skulls or hearts, for instance—that have bearing on the story. But these are usually exceptions; they wouldn’t have much impact or be able to communicate much information if they weren’t.
My point is that the expression of the eyes is usually not really in the eyes at all. It’s all around them. Cartoonists who grasp this idea can more efficiently and consistently convey the thoughts and emotions of their characters.
A character’s wordless communications are carried by more than just the eyes and the muscles and skin and hair of the features that surround the eyes. And while the face is probably the most expressive portion of the body, right in line behind the face are the hands.
Hands tell more about what a person is feeling and thinking than one might suspect at first. The sweep of a hand, the cocking of a finger—these are immediate messages. Even unimportant background characters will add to the texture and credibility of a scene if they are not merely standing with their hands held at their sides. They could be tugging at their clothes or running fingers through their hair. Is a character folding its arms across its chest protectively or placing its hands on its hips confrontationally? Even a character holding its hands at its sides might be posed in the perfect position to convey that it feels stiff or uncomfortable in its situation, or isolated and lonely.
Every character drawn on the page has thoughts, desires, goals, and a past. Those aspects ought to inform the drawing. Of course, you (and by “you” I now mean the cartoonists, aspiring and otherwise, among you out there) won’t generally have much information about the life of each background figure in a crowd scene, but vary the reactions among them according to the situation in the story, even if you don’t know them well. For example, if some superheroes are engaged in a slugfest three hundred feet above a city street, the crowd below might contain a redneck cheering on the action, a middle-aged man stunned by the violence, and a young mother concerned that—when the fighters slam each other into buildings—flying debris might hit the child she’s cradling in her arms.
Now, just about anyone can learn how to draw the human body, learn the relationships of one part to another, learn the skeleton and muscles and how they all move and work together. Acquiring this skill and craft takes patience and study, but it doesn’t necessarily make one a good cartoonist. Don’t think I’m belittling skill and craft. I’m not—they’re important. But they’re only one facet of drawing narrative art.
Whether you draw as naturalistically as Neal Adams or as representationally as Charles Schulz, in narrative art you need more than just the ability to draw well; you need to be able to imbue your drawings with the moods and attitudes of your characters. You’ve got to be able to bring those drawings to life.
How does one get life onto the page? It’s a tricky question, and in the end each cartoonist has to find his or her own singular way. But I’ll offer a couple techniques and ideas that I hope will help you on your way. I suggest you keep two things in mind—two things which are part and parcel of one another in successful narrative art. However, I’m going to try to separate them for discussion. One of these two things starts on the outside. The other starts on the inside.
The idea that starts outside, at its most basic, is mechanical. While drawing a character in a story, the cartoonist uses skill and craft to draw each particular feature of that character in the position that communicates as clearly and effectively as possible what the reader needs to understand.
Here are a couple of techniques that I sometimes use for drawing effective facial expressions and body language; techniques beyond the acquired knowledge of how to draw a humanlike body:
1) Use a mirror. If you’re having trouble capturing an exact expression or body movement, get in front of a mirror and assume the position you’re going for and copy it. I do this often. For drawing close-ups of hands, mirrors come in particularly useful when I can’t place my hand in front of my face in the position the drawing requires.
2) Use tracing paper. Instead of drawing and erasing over and over until the surface of your Bristol board is ruined, draw on successive pieces of tracing paper until you’ve achieved a satisfactory drawing. Transfer it to the final board by scribbling a field of graphite onto the back of the tracing paper with an old pencil, and then trace the lines directly onto the board. I keep the tracing paper drawing aligned with the drawing on the board by first taping the tracing paper to the board over the panel I’m working on and tracing the panel borders onto the tracing paper. Then I have guidelines to register the tracing paper back into position after I’ve removed it. Of course, if you draw digitally, you don’t need tracing paper.
Getting back to my main thread of getting life onto the page: the idea that starts on the inside is perhaps more important than the idea that starts on the outside. Call it sensitivity or emotion or life. It’s the quality of the cartoonist’s drawings that sucks the reader into the world of the cartoonist’s story and lets the reader believe—at least for the duration of the story—that the drawings the reader is viewing are reality.
A cartoonist draws a figure on the page. The line may be smooth or it may be ragged. The figure may be attractive or repulsive. The subject matter may be from real life or imagined. The drawing may be well formed or amateurish. The possibilities are infinite and not important right now. What’s important is that the figure has “life.” Not that it’s really alive, but that it commands the attention of the viewer, announces with conviction that it’s more than just lines on paper, that it has a story to tell.
I’m not sure this is a skill that can be taught. Maybe it’s really that elusive quality we call talent and it has to be inborn. I suspect that most cartoonists—especially those that have been drawing since an early age, and all the really fine cartoonists—draw this way instinctively. But inborn or not, instinctive or not, this skill can be cultivated, deepened, and refined.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Konstantin Stanislavsky of the Moscow Art Theater developed a technique for acting known as the Stanislavsky System, or, more popularly, Method Acting. I’m not going to go into all the details of “the Method,” but I’d like to offer some ideas of how Stanislavsky’s system can be applied to creating comics.
Stanislavsky’s central principle was “emotional memory.” Emotional memory is the concept of taking a memory of your own past, an experience you’ve had, and calling into the present all the emotions from that memory, basically reliving mentally and emotionally in the present your past experience, and—this is the crux—letting those emotions inform your body and actions.
Actors use emotional memory and how it affects their bodies to inform the roles they play on stage and in movies. Cartoonists have to go one step further. They have to transfer what they’re experiencing in their bodies onto the page.
This is the point where the two ideas I’ve been explaining—the inside and the outside—get tied together. It’s what I’ll call Method Cartooning—using the emotional memory to produce the reaction, and then using the cartoonist’s observation and skill with the pencil to recreate that reaction on the page.
At the same time, one also has to make sure the reaction is appropriate to the character one is drawing. But if the script is clear and the character is well defined, this shouldn’t be a stumbling block. If there’s dialogue, that can help lend particularity to the character and story you’re drawing. In fact, while using your emotional memory to help produce a genuine reaction in your body, speak the script’s dialogue.
Have you ever noticed someone sticking his or her tongue out or otherwise making faces while drawing? A subconscious reaction to what’s being drawn on the page is reflected physically. I think Method Cartooning comes from the same place in the subconscious, but it’s more useful because you’re harnessing the reaction consciously rather than letting it remain in your subconscious.
Now, I’m not talking about overacting. Flinging your arms and legs about is fine for some situations, and, in fact, extreme movements are often appropriate in superhero comics. But I find it’s the subtle reactions—a tilt of the head, a shift of the eyes, a minute change of the mouth—that using the emotional memory and physically acting the experience really help reveal. Method Cartooning also helps avoid stock poses and other habits of drawing that risk becoming moribund through overuse. A varied pacing, a combination of large movement and subtle reactions, reproducing something close to the rhythm of real life, will help inject life into the story.
In fact, if I think a scene I’m drawing is getting boring, if the characters just stand around and refuse to look alive, I use Method Cartooning. I stand up, speak the dialogue aloud, and see what happens to my body both on the inside and out. It’s never failed to produce something. I may not use what results, or a better idea might occur, but if not, I know that at least the drawings won’t be boring.
Copyright © 2005, 2007, 2025 Eric Shanower. All rights reserved.
A version of this column was originally published on Buzzscope.com, November 2005.
