If you are a cartoonist, most likely you’ve come across the one book that provides all you need to know on perspective, David Chelsea’s “Perspective! For Comic Book Artists.” Well, did you know that this now classic work may have never gotten off the ground if it weren’t for Scott McCloud’s “Understanding Comics,” which had come out right at the time that Chelsea needed to decide if he was going to pursue work on this book? You can learn the background behind this book and other fun facts as Patric Lewandowski, the chair of the Minneapolis Media Institute Digital Art and Design Program, talks shop with David Chelsea in a recent interview you can read here.
David Chelsea has a really unique deadpan sense of humor that works so well in his comics. Give it a try and you’ll be hooked. If you’re a fan of certain humor with an absurd, witty, offbeat bent (Doctor Who is a good example), then you’re going to dig his work. Consider his latest, a collection of really strange and inventive comics, “Everybody Gets It Wrong! and Other Stories: David Chelsea’s 24-Hour Comics vol. 1” which you can learn more about and buy here. And you can read my review of his 24-hour comics collection here.
There’s a skill, and a certain amount of magic, involved with creating good 24-hour comics. 24-hour comics, the whole idea of staying up all night in the pursuit of a creating a complete comics narrative in the span of 24 hours, originates with comics theorist Scott McCloud. He set up the rules to follow which boil down to do whatever it takes to create a 24-page comic within 24 hours, preferably a page per hour.
This process is a perfect counterbalance to the work David Chelsea has done to make perspective more accessible to artists. With a 24-hour comic project, you are concerned less with precision and more with intuition. It will appeal more to the right side of the brain: the artist, the writer, and the dreamer take over for this one. And, as you’ll see, David Chelsea is quite up to the task.
