Picture This, How Pictures Work: Molly Bang

Calling all design students, illustrators, or those who want to understand more about visual composition. Chronicle Books released a revised and expanded 25th Anniversary Edition of Molly Bang's Picture This, How Pictures Work.

Brian Selznick calls the work, "the Strunk and White of visual literacy." Leonard S. Marcus calls it, "a peerless handbook and guide for anyone who wishes to make picture books."

Molly's book grew organically out of her quest to understand picture structure. She first tested the concepts successfully with 8th and 9th graders and then adults. With input from Rudolf Arnheim, the dean of the psychology of art in the United States, the book took its illuminating final form.

Dive into this perfect work and see the connection between shapes and emotions. You'll be ready to build the emotional content of your own imagery with a book you will reach for again and again.

Picture This, How Pictures Work
by Molly Bang
Chronicle Books, 2016

Comics Confidential: Leonard S. Marcus

I've only popped open this exquisite work and already have quotes to share:

"Art-making at its best is a confrontation with the mysterious and the irrational. If we listen to the people concerned mainly with classification or marketing, we end up not making honest and true works of art, but only product, rubber-stamped and made to fit into a prefab box that might as well be a casket." David Small

"Without quite realizing it, these indie artists and writers had invented a new art form--a new kind of book for which people at first did not have a name. By the early 2000s, the books were everywhere." Leonard S. Marcus

Whether you call them graphic novels or comics, the current creators are a force in the publishing industry. Comics Confidential, Thirteen Graphic Novelists Talk Story, Craft, and Life Outside the Box, compiled and edited by Leonard S. Marcus, is a documentary treasure of the creative contribution from thirteen viewpoints. Each interview includes a comic and sketches or manuscript pages about "the city." Those nest among personal stories of out of the box artists, including Harry Bliss, Hope Larson, and Sara Varon.

Thank you, Leonard, for stopping and sharing so beautifully the backstories, practices, and thoughts of this group. And thanks, Candlewick Press!


Comics Confidential
Thirteen graphic Novelists Talk Story, Craft, and Life Outside the Box
compiled and edited by Leonard S. Marcus
Candlewick Press, 2016

~Lorie Ann Grover