PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE

In the professional world, comic artists employ a range of pre-conceived tactics that are well known by avid comic enjoyers to ensure that their comics are successful, as a lot of professional comic artists are self-employed.

Professional practice as a comic artist not only takes a lot of time drawing panels repeatedly to ensure that you have the correct composition, but it also requires a lot of research on different cultures and ethnicities, to ensure that the comics you create are not all linear and focused on one culture.

A lot of comic artists take the time to gather inspiration from other forms of media as well, when feeling a lack of inspiration this can really help to reignite the creative flame.

Professional comic artists take mental note of lots of different panels, and they can sequence them together to form coherent grammatical systems between comic strips, this allows the comic artist to set the pace and tone for the reader.


Neil Cohn goes into this in his talk "The Visual Lanaguage of Comics" at the Institue for Neural Computation in UC, San Diego.
Cohn talks about how comics are like language, we draw in marks, which can communicate messages to an audience when sequenced properly, just like language.


He also talks about how comics have visual vocabularies, with units built of memorised pieces, for example, comic artists such as Jack Kirby, Jim Lee and Erik Larsen all draw hands similarly in their comics. It is the same visual vocabulary that is stored in experienced artists’ minds.