Gene Luen Yang
Finally getting around to this. The Blue Metropolis Book Fest is Montreal’s premiere English language lit bash, taking place in April. This year I attended a couple of events, mainly centred around graphic novels and their creators. It was great seeing Gene Luen Yang, who gave a workshop on graphic storytelling, and was quite enlightening.
The main point I got from him was that it’s possible to tell a story in an interior way, by illustrating a character’s emotions. That’s something that Eastern comics do much more often than do Western ones, which are more concerned with the external.
Anyhow, these are doodles I made at his workshop, later embellished with watercolour.
I also saw a presentation by Liana Finck of her book A Bintel Brief. This was interesting because she didn’t have images (the audio-visual people were asleep on the job). So she was forced to describe her comic, which brought it a little closer to verbal storytelling.
