Description:
Offering teachers and students alike a foundational understanding of the versatile medium of comics, this book guides readers through the history and principles of reading and making comics, using the creative writing discipline as its lens. Sitting at the intersection between comics studies and comics creation, Comics and Creativity explores what makes comics work, how they are read and asks readers to reflect on the narratological comparisons between storytelling in comics and storytelling in the mediums such as prose or film.
Covering the fundamentals of time, form, character and voice in graphic narratives, as well as approaching the key genres of autobiography, speculative fiction, adaptation and non-fiction, Comics and Creativity uses ideas from both a theoretical/ critical and practical/ creative approaches. With each chapter supported by practical exercises and lesson suggestions, it features step-by-step close readings of a broad range of contemporary works from comics artists including Kym Tabulo, James Kochalka, Tommi Parrish, Chris Ware, Leonie Brialey, Meg O'Shea, Lee Lai, Adrian Tomine and Taiyo Matsumoto, Mandy Ord, Marjane Satrapi, Dominique Goblet, Safdar Ahmed, Sam Wallman and Eleri Harris. Designed to assist with classroom teaching and individual learning, this book demonstrates how comics can unlock and transform approaches to storytelling and creative teaching. Privileging narrative rhythm, timing, page layout and panel design over experience and skill with drawing, Comics and Creativity extends the writer and creative's repertoire of ways to express themselves multi-modally.Brief description:
Jen Webb is Distinguished Professor of Creative Practice at the University of Canberra, Australia. She was the inaugural director of the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research, and remains a core member of that Centre.
Her main research interest is the relationship between what Pierre Bourdieu termed 'the field of cultural production'-the broad sphere of creative practice-and the social domain, including the political and sociocultural, the practical and the economic, the local and the global. Her current major projects investigate aspects of creativity, and creative production, and the creative producer, and she has been supported in this by several ARC Discovery projects, the most recent of which is So what do you do? Graduates in the Creative and Cultural Industries (DP160101440). Academics working in the creative field typically have their own creative practice, and Jen's works include lyric and prose poetry, short fictions, and artist books. She is the holder of the inaugural ACT Poet of the Year Award, as well as many other literary awards. She is also the ACT editor for the Australian Book Review's States of Poetry mini-anthologies (2015-2017), chair of the NSW Premier's Literary Award (Kenneth Slessor Award for Poetry), and co-editor for the Australasian Association of Writing Program's literary journal, Meniscus. Jen's recent works include the scholarly volumes Researching Creative Writing (2015), Art and Human Rights: Contemporary Asian Contexts (with Caroline Turner; 2016); and the Oxford University Press bibliography entry for Pierre Bourdieu (2017). Her recent volumes of poetry include Stolen Stories, Borrowed Lines (2015), Sentences from the Archive (2016), and Moving Targets (2018). She produced all the photographs for a collaborative poetry/photography volume, with Paul Hetherington: Watching the World (2015). With Paul Hetherington, she is also editor of the bilingual (Chinese/Australian) anthology of poetry, Open Windows: Contemporary Australian Poetry (2016); and of the academic journal Axon: Creative Explorations.