“I often think that, were my arms to be cut off in some tragic accident, I would still feel compelled to scrape my gums against the sidewalk in order to create a comic strip with my own blood.”
– Ivan Brunetti
This seminar looks beyond illustration and turns our attention to cartooning. We will work with character design, one-panel cartoons, sequential art, and comics. Cartooning is efficient visual storytelling — it is as much a matter of writing as it is of drawing. Cartooning is the ability to tell; it’s not built upon the style of drawing, it’s not illustrating, and it’s not just a bit of writing either. It is an image pared down to its essentials, a mark that carries thought, a line that insists on meaning. It resists becoming decoration or style alone; it risks being blunt, awkward, even terribly raw. In the present moment, where machine-learning models flood culture with effortless images, cartooning offers another path: having something to say, and finding the means to say it.
We will focus on drawing that is meant to be reproduced. The history of comics, caricature, and illustrated pages was never the story of isolated genius but of mass reproduction, of images designed to be multiplied and consumed. Distribution defines tools, whether in the feed or on the printed page. However, we will engage with reproduction in print. We will not ignore the exhausting grind of online platforms — their algorithms, their demand for endless content — but we will slow things down and work with print as a deliberate stance. We will put together a booklet: cheap paper and print, stitched together in the best tradition of fanzines, gag-focused magazines, funny pages, and similar. The strict boundaries of a cheaply produced printed booklet will also allow us to focus on what’s important: economy as a crucial aspect of any reproduction.
Objectives of the course
a) creating a character
b) reading selected works and developing our own narrative
c) completing a strip, gag, comic, or writing intertwined with an image
d) collectively producing one issue of the booklet
Tools we will work with
Paper, ink (or anything that can leave a black mark on a bright surface), scanner, Photoshop and InDesign (or similar), cheap print (to be specified).
– Ivan Brunetti
This seminar looks beyond illustration and turns our attention to cartooning. We will work with character design, one-panel cartoons, sequential art, and comics. Cartooning is efficient visual storytelling — it is as much a matter of writing as it is of drawing. Cartooning is the ability to tell; it’s not built upon the style of drawing, it’s not illustrating, and it’s not just a bit of writing either. It is an image pared down to its essentials, a mark that carries thought, a line that insists on meaning. It resists becoming decoration or style alone; it risks being blunt, awkward, even terribly raw. In the present moment, where machine-learning models flood culture with effortless images, cartooning offers another path: having something to say, and finding the means to say it.
We will focus on drawing that is meant to be reproduced. The history of comics, caricature, and illustrated pages was never the story of isolated genius but of mass reproduction, of images designed to be multiplied and consumed. Distribution defines tools, whether in the feed or on the printed page. However, we will engage with reproduction in print. We will not ignore the exhausting grind of online platforms — their algorithms, their demand for endless content — but we will slow things down and work with print as a deliberate stance. We will put together a booklet: cheap paper and print, stitched together in the best tradition of fanzines, gag-focused magazines, funny pages, and similar. The strict boundaries of a cheaply produced printed booklet will also allow us to focus on what’s important: economy as a crucial aspect of any reproduction.
Objectives of the course
a) creating a character
b) reading selected works and developing our own narrative
c) completing a strip, gag, comic, or writing intertwined with an image
d) collectively producing one issue of the booklet
Tools we will work with
Paper, ink (or anything that can leave a black mark on a bright surface), scanner, Photoshop and InDesign (or similar), cheap print (to be specified).
- Dozent/in: KD Office