Faith Erin Hicks

One of the reasons that I love comics so much is that there are many valid ways to approach the medium. When I make comics, the parts I’m most concerned with are character and story. Everything I draw on the comic page is in service to character and story. Because of my focus on those two elements over, say, experimenting with my art and page structure, I will sometimes get criticism that my work is safe or boring. This is probably fair criticism! I don’t do a lot of experimenting with paneling or challenging storytelling or explicitly challenging artwork in my comics, because right now that’s not what I’m interested in. Maybe I will be more experimental someday, but not right now, with the kind of stories I want to tell. 🙂

When I make a comic, my goal is for my readers to be engaged with the story I’m telling, and the characters in that story. That’s also what I look for when I want to read a good comic. I want characters to love, I want a story to be engaged with.

For the most part, I struggle with drawing comics (most artists do, if we’re honest ;)), but there are some parts of comics I think I have a good handle on. I feel like I’m strongest when portraying emotion on the page, and I’m good at drawing those scenes out and making the reader feel what my characters are going through. Some of the techniques I use to convey emotion came from being obsessed with movies when I was a teenager, and some techniques are stolen from my holy trinity of influences: Jeff Smith (Bone), Hiromu Arakawa (Fullmetal Alchemist) and Naoki Urasawa (Monster, Pluto, 20th Century Boys).

Of the three artists I’ve mentioned, I consider Urasawa especially to be a master of emotion and pacing. When I first started reading his comics, it was like light struck my brain; finally I saw what I’d been trying to do for years right there on the comic page in front of me! I like the way he lays out his emotional scenes a lot. Here’s an example (read right to left):

Urasawa uses repeating panels and decompression to draw out the emotions of a scene. In this single page there isn’t a lot of movement. It’s literally just two characters staring at each other, but the tension rises going from panel 1 to panel five. Gesicht (the man)’s expression doesn’t change between panels two and five, but we literally feel his anger rising off-panel, concluding in the close up in panel 5.

There’s an excellent You Tube channel called Every Frame a Painting (I’m sure you’ve heard of it, but if you haven’t, please go watch all the videos! There aren’t many, and they’re all really informative). My favourite video is this one, about editing:

This video hit on something that I strive for in my comics: emotion takes time. When I draw a scene that is emotional, when characters are struggling with something, or celebrating something, or being challenged, I want my readers to feel what the character is feeling, and one of the best ways to do that, for me, is to take my time. To give that emotion time to breathe on the page.

I’m going to use some scenes in my graphic novel The Nameless City to illustrate how I use decompression and pacing to underscore the emotion in my comics. To avoid spoilers and because this is getting a little long, I’m going to put it under a cut. Please read on! 🙂

Hello again! In The Nameless City, one of the main characters, Rat, lives in a monastery, because she’s an orphan. She seems to have a good relationship with one of the monks in particular, Joah. When we first see them together, they act like this:

Up until this point in the story, Rat hasn’t been particularly nice or affectionate to anyone, but it’s different with Joah. And it’s hopefully obvious from these two panels that he’s fond of her too. Rat and Joah don’t have a lot of scenes together throughout the course of the book, so I use their body language to immediately establish their bond. Rat is very different with Joah than she is with Kai, who she’s either been mean to or openly mocked for most of their interactions.

There are a couple more scenes where Joah and Rat interact, and in those scenes I visually drive home their relationship. Rat is more of a kid around him, bouncing on her toes, asking if there’s anything to eat:

… and Joah’s kind of a dick to Kai at first, which Rat thinks is hilarious:

So basically we have a fairly straightforward Surrogate Dad & Daughter relationship. Rat’s parents are dead, and she comments that the monks are “nice,” but we don’t really see her interacting with anyone but Joah. He’s her connection to the monastery and the monks, and a tiny bit of parental oversight in her unsupervised life. Until he goes too far, and really tried to parent her, and Rat loses her shit:

Oops.

Anyway, this very long set up finally brings us to this scene, which is where I get to unleash my love of decompression and silent emotional beats.

(Above is page 136 and below is page 137 in The Nameless City. Just wanted to be clear where the pages begin & end!)

The story beats on these two pages are quite slow, and I spend two pages on a part of the story where it might be more efficient to use only one or two panels. There are many kinds of scenes where it is appropriate to speed things along more quickly (for example, a fight scene, or a scene where characters are doing something quickly), but for this particular scene, I wanted the fallout from Rat’s emotional outburst to be made very clear. Kai gets three silent panels at the beginning of page 136 to walk back to his home and stare out the window, thinking about his role in the fight, and Rat and Joah get a page and a half to deal (poorly) with their relationship.

The paneling of page 137 is particularly important. Comic paneling has kind of a rhythm to it, and in my own dumb shorthand, I think of widescreen panels (panels that reach horizontally across the length of the comic page) as “boom” panels. I know, it’s silly! But generally speaking, readers tend to spend more time looking at large panels, so they “read” as more important than smaller ones. Large panels slow the reader’s eye down. They’re basically like the cartoonist is saying “hey! There’s something extra important happening in this panel! Or here’s an establishing shot I spent six hours drawing!” The first and fourth panel of page 137 is me, the cartoonist, jumping in and being like “BOOM! pay attention to this emotional stuff! BOOM!” XD But here’s the tricky thing: overusing large panels can lessen their importance, which is why comics that only use full-page-width “widescreen panels” can look stagnant. It’s a complex balance.

My hope is that my readers will feel the emotional complexity of the relationship between these two characters on page 137. Through the paneling, through Rat’s body language, and through Joah’s body language. Up until this point, Rat and Joah seem to have a good relationship. He looks after her a little bit, and she seems very fond of him. Until she very pointedly reminded him that he’s not actually her parents and probably has no business telling her what to do. So at the start of page 137, Rat is trying to apologize, to make things as they were. But Joah just turns away from her and goes back to his gardening, leaving Rat standing beside him, starting to cry. The scene ends on this page, and we don’t see what happens afterwards. There is repetition in the wide “boom” panels at the top and bottom of the page, and the only dialogue spoken is Joah saying “thank you” in panel two.

Emotion takes time! If I had been super efficient with these pages and wrapped everything up in a couple of panels, I feel like this scene would have less impact. Hopefully when a reader looks at this page, they’ll feel something for these characters and their struggles. That is my goal with every graphic novel I create, to make you feel something. 🙂

Anyway! These are my thoughts on decompression, paneling and emotion in my comics. I hope you enjoyed them. 🙂

I did a pretty extensive interview with David Harper of the comics site SKTCHD, which has done some pretty great writing about the comics industry lately. The article I was interviewed for is this one: The American Dream: How Telling Your Own Stories Became the Endgame for Creators. It’s a good article with quotes from great creators like Kurt Busiek, Cliff Chiang, Marcos Martin, Emma Rios, Jake Wyatt and Skottie Young. The article only used about 10% of the interview I did with Harper, so with his permission I’m posting the rest of it here. Click below the link to read me rambling on about creator owned vs. work for hire, and the upside and downside to both. As always, my comments are based on my own experiences as someone who has made both creator owned and work for hire comics, and may not apply to your specific situation. 🙂

>>Before you started your career in comics – back when you were in pure aspirational mode – did you have an end goal of what you wanted to do or a vision as to what success looked like to you? If so, how has that shifted over your career?

All I wanted was to make a living wage doing some kind of creative work. That’s it, really. And I had no idea what that looked like. I didn’t even know what being a cartoonist was. When I was a teenager through college I didn’t think comics was ever something I could get paid to do, so I wanted to work in animation instead. Working in animation seemed like a realistic career to me; there were books written about animators and you could go to school for animation. Comics seemed like a weird pie in the sky career, something very few people got to do for a living. I don’t think I really started learning about what cartoonists do and how they make their living until I started getting published! It was weird. But really, all I wanted was to make enough money to live, pay my rent, own a car, that kind of thing. Very vague goals.

I don’t think much has changed in terms of my goals. I still want the same thing, to make a living wage off my writing and drawing, but I guess my goals have become more specific. I want the books I write and draw to sell well, I want them to be critically acclaimed, I want my art heroes to notice my work, I want to work on specific projects. I’d also like to make more money, but I hope that will come, as long as I continue to do good work. I’ve been really lucky: I’ve achieved a lot of my goals, even crazy ones like winning an Eisner.

>>Besides a few things that were for-hire gigs or pitches, you’ve spent your whole career telling your own stories. As a cartoonist who has been at this for a bit, what are the plusses and minuses of going that route?

To be honest, it wasn’t really a route I planned to take, I just ended up taking it because that was the work that was offered to me. If I had been offered work for hire gigs back when I first started getting published (2007), I definitely would have taken them. Work for hire pays well, and I was very poor back then. But my artwork and writing wasn’t polished enough to attract the attention of those publishers. However, now that I have a number of books published, I’ve gotten some wonderful, tempting offers from publishers like Dark Horse, DC, IDW, Marvel and Boom. Due to my drawing schedule and commitment to my current project (a middle grade graphic novel trilogy I’m doing with First Second Books called The Nameless City), I’ve had to turn most of them down, which is terrifying. I hope the work will still be there if I need it in the future. I have the freelancer’s fear of turning down work.

In 2013 I co-wrote and drew a video game prequel comic, The Last of Us: American Dreams. It paid more money than I’d ever been paid before, and allowed me to become a lot more financially secure. So that’s the big plus of doing work for hire: it really pays well!

However, for me, especially now that I’m more financially stable, I really want to work on my own stories. I’m in the middle of drawing the second Nameless City book, and it’s incredibly satisfying to me. I love creating my own worlds and characters and getting very involved with them. It’s so much fun. It’s a little scary to turn down well paying work on licensed comics to work on your own projects, especially when you don’t know how readers will respond to your original work, but I just have to trust that it will be worth it down the road. I don’t know, I just have an itch to make my own stories. Some people don’t have that itch. Working on other people’s stories is satisfying to them, and that’s great. But it’s different for me. There are very few properties that I love more than I love working on my own stories.

The question that I get asked a lot is “if you could work on anything, any comic book property, what would it be?” And honestly, at this point in time, I think I’d rather make my own stories. As long as I’m making a living wage, that is. 😉 I’m fortunate that publishers have paid me for my original work. I know it’s not always like that.

>>Once upon a time, releasing your own work via smaller publishers or even self-publishing seemed like a greater focus for newer creators with established creators dominating at Marvel and DC. These days, established creators seem to be shifting their focus to creator-owned and creating their own graphic novels. Why do you think that is?

I can only guess based on my own experiences. For me, when I make a creator owned comic, something that I created from the ground up, all of it is me. I’m not working with someone else’s characters or beholden to someone else’s canon, I’m the god of my own world. And every hour I put into that comic is my hour. I’m investing in my creativity. That sounds super bombastic, but that’s how I feel sometimes. It’s like, this comic is all mine, for good or ill. If it’s great and people love it, that’s for me. If it’s terrible, that’s on me.

Also, we seem to finally be in a place where it can be profitable to make your own comics, outside of the Big Two. My career has flourished through publishing with the graphic novel imprint of a book publisher. Other writers and artists find their niche at Image. And we can actually make a living writing and drawing our books. So that’s important.

>>Back when I was growing up, there wasn’t anything I wanted more than to draw the X-Men. Sadly, I had no talent. However, other creators I’ve spoken to had the same dreams, and they ended up either doing that or touching that world in their own way. These days though, it seems like younger readers are growing up on things like Raina Telgemeier and The Adventures of Superhero Girl and teens are reading things like Saga and Lumberjanes rather than superhero books. Do you think the next generation of comic creators growing up on different types of comics will lead to a shift in future creator sensibilities and priorities, and a greater focus on telling your own stories rather than someone else’s?

Maybe. I guess it depends on the kid reading the comic, doesn’t it? And the kind of comics the kid is reading. I meet a lot more kids who read Raina’s comics than I do kids who read Spider-man. I think Marvel and DC have done themselves a real disservice by deciding not to cater to kid readers. Every kid knows who Spider-man is, but do they read Spider-man comics? No, they read Raina’s comics, because her comics are made for them, and easily accessible through libraries, schools and bookstores.

>>It seems to me that the options for budding cartoonists or writers or artists to get comics in front of readers are more diverse and expansive than ever. What do you think having such a variety of options means for the future of comics, and for those aspiring to make them?

I think it’s pretty great, to be honest. I remember being desperate to read comics when I was a teenager and there was nothing for me. Like, just nothing. Now there are dozens of comics that I would’ve loved to read when I was 15, and more importantly, they’re pretty easy to find. Comics are carried in bookstores now, they’re in libraries, they’re in schools. Comics will always have an access problem, I think, but it’s gotten a lot better. Kids will be able to find the kind of comics they want to read, and maybe they’ll keep reading and fall in love with the art form and want to make their own comics. I’m really excited to see what comics will become in the next twenty years. I hope that we’ll continue to see a blossoming of diversity of voices in comics. I think we will. I don’t know what will happen to the world of corporate comics, but I think there will still be a place for them. I don’t think the Wednesday crowd will go away. The future of comics seems really bright at this moment in time. Selfishly, I hope it will include a spot for me. 🙂