Every single week I’d get my mind blown, because he starts off very simply and then works into something more complex, but the thing that really was devastating for me was understanding — and this sounds really basic, but it’s amazing how I didn’t understand that the words and pictures do different things. To illustrate that he showed this Chris Ware comic from Raw, where the drawings are this very typical superhero comic and the words are just a totally different story. And I remember he was critiquing one comic I had done, and his criticism was the words and the pictures are doing the same thing. That was probably the biggest. That’s one of the most foundational understandings of comic book mechanics ever that he gave to me. I remember hearing Chip Kidd on NPR years later when I was living in Philly, talking about the first day he walked into design class, where the professor drew an apple on the chalkboard and then wrote the word “apple” underneath it and said, “Never do this.” Never — it’s the first cardinal sin of design. And that’s the same thing with comics; the words and the pictures convey different levels of information. And being aware of that and manipulating that generates power, and friction in the story.
(Source: aleskot)
