Reviews 

“The Comic Book Lesson”

By | October 11th, 2022
Posted in Reviews | % Comments

Mark Crilley’s “The Comic Book Lesson” is a stylistic and thematic sequel to the 2017 book “The Drawing Lesson.” Both are graphic novels about a child who wants to learn a skill having a chance encounter with a mentor figure who’s willing to teach them. In “The Comic Book Lesson,” the reader and the main character learn the basics of comic storytelling.

Cover by Mark Crilley

Written, Illustrated, Colored and Lettered by Mark Crilley

An aspiring young creator learns the fundamentals of visual storytelling from three comic book mentors in this charming illustrated tale—a graphic novel that teaches you how to turn your stories into comics!

Acclaimed illustrator and graphic novelist Mark Crilley returns with a new approach to learning the essential elements of making comics. His easy-to-follow instruction about comic book art, design, and storytelling provides aspiring creators a one-of-a-kind how-to experience.

In The Comic Book Lesson, you’ll meet Emily—an enthusiastic young comics fan who has a story she needs to tell. On her quest to turn that story into a comic book, Emily meets three helpful mentors who share their knowledge. Trudy, a high school student who works at the local comics shop, teaches Emily how to create expressive characters and how art can convey action and suspense. Madeline, a self-published manga artist, teaches Emily how to use panel composition and layout to tell a story visually and how to develop a comic from script to sketch to finished pages. Sophie, a professional graphic novelist, guides Emily through fine-tuning the details of dialogue, sequence, and pacing to lead readers through the story.

Page by page, you’ll discover more about the events that drive Emily to create her comic book as her mentors teach her (and you!) about the fundamentals of visual narrative and comic book art. Each lesson builds on the previous one, guiding you through the steps of planning and creating your comic, with accompanying exercises you can try for yourself. Are you ready to start your comic book lesson today?

The plot is simple, but deceptively engaging. Emily, an aspiring comic creator, goes to a comic shop seeking a book that will tell her how to make comics, but she finds only “How to Draw [Blank]” books. She asks Trudy, the store employee, for help and discovers Trudy is drawing her own comic. Flattery persuades Trudy to show Emily the basics. After a few lessons, Trudy introduces Emily to a local manga self-publisher who provides more guidance and eventually passes her on to a local published comic professional. By the end, Emily has finished her comic book.

Crilley engages you further through Emily’s comic, which works as a story-in-a-story subplot. Her second lesson is about character design, introducing us to her star and basic mystery concept. Each additional lesson she receives is crafted around the next scene in her comic, until her last lesson culminates with her story’s finale. Like many of the things Emily learns, this technique seems obvious once it’s pointed out, but it’s a subtle tactic that could have been easily botched or omitted.

Since “The Comic Book Lesson” is primarily meant to educate, neither the writing nor the characterization is complex. However, many of the lessons are interrupted by Emily or passersby. These breaks add some depth and individual personalities to the characters, in addition to giving Crilley a chance to demonstrate elements of the lesson directly. This is particularly effective when Emily’s learning about facial expressions. It also provides Crilley with the opportunity to model the wrong method without having Emily make constant mistakes.

The page layouts are open and varied throughout. Few pages have more than five panels, giving each one space to show off whatever elements Crilley is detailing at the time. This is vital because the storytelling in each page is what Crilley wants you to focus on, not the plot, which is really just a framing device to tie the lessons together. The pages with heavy dialogue are denser panel-wise, working in tandem with the lesson on pacing.

The artwork itself purposely lacks polish. Although Crilley himself never tells us why he made this choice, I believe the reason two-fold. First, the imperfectly erased guidelines and lack of inking allows you to learn more than just what he’s purporting to teach. The book is focused on storytelling methods, but if you’re interested, you can also study up on architecture and anatomy. Second, it gives a unified feeling to the two stories – Crilley’s and Emily’s. There’s an obvious change in style when we’re shown Emily’s artwork, but there is not a change in quality, except when Crilley is making a point. The coloring functions the same way: everything in shades brown with an occasional gray background.

Continued below

Why was this published as a graphic novel instead of serialized? The obvious answer is for pacing. On average, two chapters would have been just about right for a regular-sized issue, but in practice that would require some to be made longer or shorter. Forcing a project into a set number of pages goes against Crilley’s lesson about picking the right number of panels for a sequence. If this had been split, it would have been an eight issue mini.

The less obvious reasons for “The Comic Book Lesson” to be an OGN are the publisher and the audience. Watson-Guptill doesn’t publish single issues. Sure, Crilley could have found an alternative publisher, but books about how to write/draw/comic is Watson-Guptill’s whole shtick. Meanwhile, this book is aimed at a younger audience, and that audience is more likely to be in Barnes & Noble than your local comic shop. You’ve got to go where the readers are.

Speaking of that younger audience, what will they think of “The Comic Book Lesson?” I shared the book with my nine year old daughter (and by that I mean she was asking to read it the moment she saw it), and she enjoyed it immensely. As an active comic creator herself, she was hungry to find out how to make them better. When she was done, she couldn’t articulate anything specific she had learned, but that can be hard to do when the lessons are so obvious in hindsight. Time will tell if her storytelling improves. For what it’s worth, she has since read the book two more times.

And that’s another nice thing about this graphic novel: it’s worth reading more than once. Crilley doesn’t wait until he covers a topic to demonstrate it, so you can find more examples of each lesson all through the book. I’m not sure if there can be foreshadowing in instructive material, but if such a thing is possible, Crilley does it very well.

In the introduction I mentioned Crilley’s previous work was “The Drawing Lesson.” It was nominated for an Eisner, but lost to Raina Telgemeier’s “Ghosts.” She doesn’t have a new work out this year, so hopefully Crilley will win this time. I certainly think he’s earned it, and you’ll agree if you read “The Comic Book Lesson.”


//TAGS | Original Graphic Novel

Drew Bradley

Drew Bradley is a long time comic reader whose past contributions to Multiversity include annotations for "MIND MGMT", the Small Press Spotlight, Lettering Week, and Variant Coverage. He currently writes about the history of comic comic industry. Feel free to email him about these things, or any other comic related topic.

EMAIL | ARTICLES


  • Feature: The Night Eaters – Book 2: Her Little Reapers Reviews
    “The Night Eaters Book 2: Her Little Reapers”

    By | Mar 21, 2024 | Reviews

    Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda’s “The Night Eaters” trilogy continues with its second book, ‘Her Little Reapers.’ After the first book ended with the Ting twins discovering that they aren’t human, that they have supernatural powers, you might think that the horror element of the series would be somewhat dampened. You’d be wrong. Spoiler warning: […]

    MORE »
    The Jellyfish by Boum - featured Reviews
    “The Jellyfish”

    By | Mar 19, 2024 | Reviews

    The first full sentence of “The Jellyfish” goes like this: “You do in fact seem to have…a jellyfish in your left eye.” It is innocuous, but portentous. A line full of meaning and absurd all the same. It belies the depths the comic will plumb and highlights the journey along the way. You won’t read […]

    MORE »
    I Don't Want to be a Mom Featured Reviews
    “I Don’t Want To Be a Mom”

    By | Feb 27, 2024 | Reviews

    There is nothing more discussed, nothing more legislated (particularly in the United States) than the decisions a woman makes with her body.  The highly personal has become nothing short of impersonal, with the person at the heart of the matter – – the woman occupying that body – – left almost completely out of the […]

    MORE »

    -->