The Comics of Mark Crilley
I didn't grow up reading many comics. As well versed as I've become in pop-culture of the comics-saturated world we live in today, they weren't something I regularly read. The reason for this I assign back to the fact that I was a dyslexic kid.
Cartoons and comics, however, as any hardcore nerd will tell you, are two different things. So recently I've been trying to get into reading comics (no time like the present). Rather than starting with something obvious, like The Dark Knight by Frank Miller, Sandman by Neil Gaiman, or V for Vendetta by Alan Moore (of which I've only recently acquired copies and are awaiting my attention on my ever growing TBR pile), I began with a comics writer and illustrator who some of you might've never heard of: a gentleman by the name of Mark Crilley.
I say some of you because Crilley might be familiar to those of you who have ever read one of his How-to-Draw books or seen one of his YouTube videos. One of the most notable inclusions on his bibliography is his art's guide book, Mastering Manga (the first in a series of three books), which teaches western comics artists the drawing style common in Japan. Crilley himself mastered this style of art. However, like all great artists, Crilley didn't learn just one style. He's a expert of a number of them. His other notable How-to-Draw book, The Realism Challenge, aims to teach readers traditional western still-life drawing as well.
Lacking skill as a visual artist (I doodle, but an idle mind and idle hands have done worse things), I personally don't have much use for Crilley's How-to-Draw books. Two of his comics series, however, I have found highly enjoyable and engaging. Their titles are Miki Falls and Brody's Ghost.
I'll do individual posts on each of the series in the future, but for the time being, I can give you an idea of what these two series particularly make clear about Crilley's style as both an artist and a writer.
First and foremost, Mark Crilley's drawing style is heavily influence by the Japanese manga style. Like many manga artists, he packs each page of his comics with action, reaction, and gesture. He gives attention ot the smallest of details, such as a character transitioning from one expression to another to such a degree that the images seem animated, even though they're static images.
Crilley apparently mastered this style while living in Japan as a young man. He studied it to the point where he felt confident enough to create a style guide (as previously mentioned) for western artists interested in learning. (He also met his wife there, and named the title character of Miki Falls after her). Japanese culture also influenced his work to some degree. The background world of Miki evokes a rural village one might find in a Hayao Miyazaki film, like Princess Mononoke or My Neighbor Totoro. Brody's Ghost in fact even includes the ghost of a Japanese samurai who mentors the titular protagonist, Master Yoda-style.
Despite the eastern bent to his drawing style, as a storyteller, Crilley is more similar to contemporary Western writers. For one, he doesn't shy away from classic tropes we find often in various genres. .Miki for instance follows many o the tropes we find in YA fiction (I'll get into that more in depth when I talk about it). And Brody certainly moves like a classic western crime thriller, with a supernatural edge (again more on that at a later date).
Unlike most comics-writers though, Crilley does do something that I find absolutely interesting and surprising given his medium.
Because comics is a visual storytelling medium, a writer can take advantage of showing as much they wish to their readers. In fact, comics really remains the only literary medium through which Third Person Omniscient storytelling can still work. You show what the protagonist is doing, and then you cut to the other side of town where the antagonist is and what they're up to. That dramatic irony immediately creates anticipation in the reader for what will happen and compels them to keep going.
Crilley, however, abstains from this. He keeps his stories--at least these two--couched in viewpoint of his protagonists. They serve as the first-person narrators of their own stories, which makes the tales, despite their high concept elements, incredibly intimate and personal. This quality of focus on character come through immediately when you consider the titles of both these works. Both feature the names of the main characters, front and center. This communicates that, no matter what sense of wonder inducing elements he includes, Crilley's true focus is on his characters and the struggles they're facing in the worlds they inhabit.
On the whole, I enjoyed my sampling of Crilley's work. His arts style and his way of telling a story truly appeal to me, and I hope that he'll create more stuff in the future that I can enjoy.
I'm unaware if this mindset persists today, but back when I was a kid, teachers and parents of dyslexic students discouraged those with low reading ability (like me) from reading anything that had illustrations. The belief was that the pictures would act as a crutch to such that kids could bluff their way through book reports just by surmising what happened in the story by interpreting the pictures.
That's the past though. Still, it wasn't as if I was unaware of the numerous characters from comic books though. Growing up in the late 90s, you couldn't find a TV station that aired cartoons that didn't feature a show based on one comic superhero or another. There was Spider-Man on Fox, and there was Batman and Superman on the W.B. network. Plus, in the early 2000s, I got to see the first wave of the Superhero movie explosion begin to take off with films like X-Men and the early Spider-Man movies.
Cartoons and comics, however, as any hardcore nerd will tell you, are two different things. So recently I've been trying to get into reading comics (no time like the present). Rather than starting with something obvious, like The Dark Knight by Frank Miller, Sandman by Neil Gaiman, or V for Vendetta by Alan Moore (of which I've only recently acquired copies and are awaiting my attention on my ever growing TBR pile), I began with a comics writer and illustrator who some of you might've never heard of: a gentleman by the name of Mark Crilley.I say some of you because Crilley might be familiar to those of you who have ever read one of his How-to-Draw books or seen one of his YouTube videos. One of the most notable inclusions on his bibliography is his art's guide book, Mastering Manga (the first in a series of three books), which teaches western comics artists the drawing style common in Japan. Crilley himself mastered this style of art. However, like all great artists, Crilley didn't learn just one style. He's a expert of a number of them. His other notable How-to-Draw book, The Realism Challenge, aims to teach readers traditional western still-life drawing as well.
Lacking skill as a visual artist (I doodle, but an idle mind and idle hands have done worse things), I personally don't have much use for Crilley's How-to-Draw books. Two of his comics series, however, I have found highly enjoyable and engaging. Their titles are Miki Falls and Brody's Ghost.I'll do individual posts on each of the series in the future, but for the time being, I can give you an idea of what these two series particularly make clear about Crilley's style as both an artist and a writer.
First and foremost, Mark Crilley's drawing style is heavily influence by the Japanese manga style. Like many manga artists, he packs each page of his comics with action, reaction, and gesture. He gives attention ot the smallest of details, such as a character transitioning from one expression to another to such a degree that the images seem animated, even though they're static images.
Despite the eastern bent to his drawing style, as a storyteller, Crilley is more similar to contemporary Western writers. For one, he doesn't shy away from classic tropes we find often in various genres. .Miki for instance follows many o the tropes we find in YA fiction (I'll get into that more in depth when I talk about it). And Brody certainly moves like a classic western crime thriller, with a supernatural edge (again more on that at a later date).
Unlike most comics-writers though, Crilley does do something that I find absolutely interesting and surprising given his medium.
Because comics is a visual storytelling medium, a writer can take advantage of showing as much they wish to their readers. In fact, comics really remains the only literary medium through which Third Person Omniscient storytelling can still work. You show what the protagonist is doing, and then you cut to the other side of town where the antagonist is and what they're up to. That dramatic irony immediately creates anticipation in the reader for what will happen and compels them to keep going.
Crilley, however, abstains from this. He keeps his stories--at least these two--couched in viewpoint of his protagonists. They serve as the first-person narrators of their own stories, which makes the tales, despite their high concept elements, incredibly intimate and personal. This quality of focus on character come through immediately when you consider the titles of both these works. Both feature the names of the main characters, front and center. This communicates that, no matter what sense of wonder inducing elements he includes, Crilley's true focus is on his characters and the struggles they're facing in the worlds they inhabit.
On the whole, I enjoyed my sampling of Crilley's work. His arts style and his way of telling a story truly appeal to me, and I hope that he'll create more stuff in the future that I can enjoy.
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