All the World's a Stage (Theater and Comics) (Patreon)

My first love was theater.

From the ages of eight till eighteen, my life revolved the stage. I loved performing, I loved learning, I loved being a part of a story, I loved being part of a cast, I loved having an audience, I loved how every single actor could bring something different to the exact same role, I loved how every single director could bring something different to the exact same play, I loved the power and artistry of set design and costumes and lighting, I loved the collaborative effort of cast and crew working together to create something bigger than each of us could accomplish as individuals, I loved the applause, I loved feeling like I mattered.

My first paying jobs as a teenager were performing in professional plays (Shoutout to Taproot Theater and ArtsWest in Seattle!) and a radio commercial (Shoutout to that one ad where I encouraged my mom to join me in a hotel’s swimming pool!), and I really, truly thought acting would be my career. But then around the age of fourteen I started to become more and more immersed in comics, and I was startled at the end of my first year in college when I realized I hadn’t signed up for any acting classes or play try-outs. I was even more startled to realize I just wasn’t craving the emotional and mental nutrition that I had always gotten from theater, and that was because I was getting it from comics now.

I feel so much overlap between theater and comics.

On the surface, they seem pretty unrelated! But every time I’m illustrating a script, I can feel all my old acting lessons pouring into my page. When you’re acting, you’re not just repeating lines, you’re inhabiting a whole different person that you’ve created from scratch in your brain. You consciously decide how this character moves, how they think, you create their mental motivations to justify why they do the things they do, even if they never have a chance to verbally explain it to the audience. A good actor can convey to the audience who their character is and what they’re feeling without ever saying a word, just through their physical movements and reactions. The same is true when you’re drawing a character in a comic! The artist conveys to the reader what kind of person this character is before the first line of dialogue is written through their drawn mannerisms, posture, how they take up space in the panel, how they physically react to other people or things on the page with them. Body language is so important in comics! A good panel should still be readable even if all the figures are blacked out to their silhouettes. Even without their facial expressions and dialogue, as a cartoonist you want their body shapes to still convey all the important information of who this character is, what they’re doing, and what they’re feeling. I mean, obviously that won’t be possible in every single panel, but it’s the goal.

Making comics is like creating my own tiny little plays. The characters "act” through their body language, I create their costumes, I design the backgrounds they’re performing against or just arrange them deliberately in empty space, and I direct the pacing and energy of how I want each page to be experienced, how much time is spent on each scene or timing beat. Through comics I get to be a part of a story that’s consumed by an audience. I share my own, unique take on how to draw a page that is completely different to how another artist would illustrate the exact same information and dialogue. I love the power of a well-designed layout that effortlessly guides the reader’s eyes to all the visual moments in the correct order. I love capturing the attention of my readers and I’m humbled to hear how my comics have affected them (whether positively or negatively!). Comics make me feel like I’m a part of something larger than myself. Comics make me feel like I matter.

For better and for worse, comics is my life. Comics is my love.

Aaaaaaaaaaand SCENE!
::curtain::