Amulet – All Caught Up for the Sunday Re-Blog!

03/29/2015 Leave a comment

The second of my long, note-filled posts about the series Amulet and its graphic novelist, Kazu Kibuishi. I guess the possessive goes the other way, and Amulet belongs to him… Either way! More on the craft of graphic noveling.

Comparative Geeks

From https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20578979-amulet-vol-6 From https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20578979-amulet-vol-6

So after Holly and I started reading Amulet, Holly wrote an initial review. When we were about halfway through reading, I got to chance to see the author, Kazu Kibuishi, presenting live about his process. Now that I have read through Volume 6, and am now officially all caught up with all there is thus far, I thought I would add a bit to the discussion.

I don’t want to add too many details because, like Holly, I don’t want to spoil you – I want you to read these. They’re great. And knowing more now as I do, I think they’re even better – as they were developed entirely as Graphic Novels, as a form – not printed as comics and then bound together. I had mentioned in my previous post that I had more I could write about that, and about Kazu’s process…

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Making Comics and Graphic Novels with Kazu Kibuishi – The Sunday Reblog

03/22/2015 1 Comment

If you get a chance to see a writer at work and talking about their craft… I highly recommend it. I got to watch graphic novelist Kazu Kibuishi at work at the recent Alaska Library Association conference, and it was just amazing. And so I wrote one of my longest ever posts…

Comparative Geeks

Last week I wrote quite a rant about comics, and about how I don’t find them to be a bad thing. I tried to also stress the point that this hasn’t made me blind to the state of the world, doesn’t make me a child. Well, somewhere in the process of writing the rant, I got it all pretty much out of my system.

Kazu Kibuishi Presentation - Amulet Covers

Which was a good thing, because the next day, I had the opportunity to see graphic novelist Kazu Kibuishi presenting on “Making Comics and Graphic Novels.” And I pretty much came at this with my mind clear, which led to five and a half pages of notes (taken on my iPhone no less). There’s no way I can include all of the insights from Kazu, so at the very least, I need to pretty much leave myself out from here.

Kazu is known for a number…

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G – Graphic Novel

04/08/2014 6 Comments

GOkay, comics have been around a long time. Even shows and movies about comic book characters have been around a long time, though they are proliferating and succeeding today like they’re the new thing. However, the graphic novel – a longer story form than just a comic, but definitely more comic-styled than novel-styled – is a newer sort of medium. There is a strong blurring of the two, really; many graphic novels are set in the comic-book worlds, many comic story-arcs have been turned into graphic novel collections; and many graphic novels today are coming out episodically as comics.

However you want to look at it, and whether I am really just talking about comics, trade paperbacks, collected editions, or graphics novels… together they are a growing, and exciting, force and trend. For someone like me, who is a slow reader, the addition of the visual storytelling, and the reduction of the text down to essentials, lets me get through far more content. For someone even more visual than I am, I could see this being even more of an excellent artform.

There are some great storylines being written in what can either be described as graphic novel or indie comic form coming out today, and you should check some out if they interest you. Horror stories like Locke & Key, space operas like Saga, alternate histories like The Manhattan Projects. And then there’s all of those graphic novels that have been adapted for film – Red, 300, V for Vendetta, Watchmen, Kick-Ass, and more.

And there’s part of me, as I enjoy reading these graphic novels so thoroughly, that really thinks that maybe this is the genre and medium I want to write for. That this is how I want to structure and tell my story. At least one. And I have a couple of friends looking over my world and ideas now to consider it.

Because I don’t think this is a fad, and I don’t think graphic novels are going away. A couple of reasons. One is, you now have a bunch of young people who are getting into these and are going to carry this on into adulthood. But that’s always the case with things. The other, however, is that I think that comics and this visual medium have found their perfect delivery method: the tablet. I am on the fence about e-books and e-readers versus their physical counterpart. I am completely sold on digital comics. Whether you use the guided view, that takes you panel-by-panel, or read one page at a time, I think this is the right device for reading comics. My top two activities on my iPad are absolutely blogging, and comics reading. So the future for comics is really only just beginning.

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