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Comics!

Nick Gazin's Comic Book Love-In #40

You can't cheat learning to draw. There are no short cuts, just years of perseverance.

Dear Comics Friendsies,

Have you heard the good news?

1) Dan Clowes did the latest cover of the New Yorker. It reminds you that life sucks.

2) These new superhero snuggies are the perfect thing to kill yourself in.

3) Neil Gaiman was on The Simpsons.

Here's my comic book review for this week.

Terry Moore's How To Draw Women
Terry Moore
Abstract Studios

Terry Moore is best known for his comic series, Strangers in Paradise, a comic that follows the lives of three miserable people in a pathetic love triangle. There's Francine, the clumsy straight girl who gets really chubby and seems kind of fucked in the head. Then there's her best friend Katchoo, who is a gay lady with a gay lady crush on her dumb straight friend. Finally there's David, a totally pathetic "poet" who is in love with the man-hating Katchoo despite being told to fuck off all the time. So these three masochistic friends all hang out and there's a big story involving the lesbian mafia and that's all I can remember. As a 13-year-old boy I accepted the world of Strangers in Paradise and saw it as an exciting peek into the world of adults. The drawing style was appealing because of how clean it was and the parts I found confusing interested me. By 14 I had met actual people with personalities, like the main characters, and realized that I hated them. Around 17 I started to see the comic as an unlikable knockoff of Jaime Hernandez's Maggie and Hopey stories. I haven't looked at it since. Before I became the hateful comics Grinch that I am today I must admit that I did spend at least a few hours copying the drawings of Terry Moore.

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I requested this book to review thinking it would be a more thorough volume, something kind of like those Burne Hogarth books about HOW TO DRAW DYNAMIC FILL-IN-THE-BLANKS but with Terry Moore's words of wisdom instead of the former Tarzan artist's. What showed up was a guide produced in the standard 24-page comic format, but with a glossy card stock cover. I'm a firm believer that you can't learn how to draw or do anything that requires physical precision from a book, and this book didn't shake that belief. You can't learn how to draw from books, no matter how many of them you receive from relatives who know you like to draw. You especially can't learn how to draw from a 24-page book. If that book is written by Terry Moore and starts with the sentence, "This is not a book about technique," then you are flat out fucked in the education department.

Moore chats about trying to express the emotions of your female characters, balance, expressions, and there are four pages on boobs, but it's a whole lot of platitudes and fluff. At one point he mentions that he often wants to draw poses that he doesn't have a photo reference for, and that shows in a lot of his work. When I look at his drawings of women I often think,"Where are their bones?" They all kind of look like marshmallow ladies to me. I dig a Reubenesque lady, but you should still get a sense of where a chubby woman's bones are, and a lot of Moore's women are pretty lithe. I'd like to see a little more specificity in the elbow and knee joints of his drawings. Frank Cho draws similar-looking women except there's nothing vague about the details of their bodies. Cho knows where the muscles and bones are in the woman he's drawing. She's not just some squishy, spongecake of a lady.

Summing up: this book is a waste of time, but aren't most books? Malcom X said that they call it the library because it is full of lies and he was right on the money. You can't cheat learning to draw. There are no short cuts or "tricks," just years of perseverance. Fortunately, all women are beautiful and learning to draw them is fun.

Here's a drawing I did of a lady giving me a beej while I rested my sketchbook on her head. This is the very best way to learn how to draw women.

Previously – Comic Book Love in #39