Creative Lab: Breaking the Frame: Exploring the Expanding Universe of Graphic Novel Illustration with Jen Wang

Jen Wang is the award-winning NYT Bestselling author and illustrator of several graphic novels for young readers including Stargazing, The Prince and The Dressmaker, In Real Life (co-written with Cory Doctorow), and Koko Be Good. She is also a co-founder and organizer for Comic Arts LA where she lives in Los Angeles.

She started off the graphic novel creative lab with Writing with Pictures: Applying Art to Narrative, a deep dive into the fundamentals of visual storytelling in comics. Jen shared how she uses her layouts, pacing, and panel composition to convey emotion, manipulate timing, and enhance the narrative. Jen doesn't consider herself an illustrator first. She really only illustrates for her stories, so she thinks of herself as a writer who does drawings to support her words.

Jen believes being a seasoned illustrator is not what makes for a great comic, it’s more important what you have to say. The combination of a personal style and voice is what makes it unique to that person.

Jen wants people to not feel intimidated to consider exploring, comics are a medium available to however you want to express yourself.

But they DO require an intensive amount of drawing, at minimum you’ll have done at least a hundred pages of drawing, if not more typically 200 pages! So by the time you’re done, you’ve basically Malcolm Gladwelled yourself into being a legit graphic novelist. Jen learned many things from her first forays into long-form comics, knowledge that continues to inform how she works even today.

Lessons on layouts, pacing, and panel composition are illustrated with examples from a variety of comic works, including Jen’s own books, as well as inspiration from film/tv and photography

Participants in the lab then did some simple drawing exercises to explore our voices and approach with the techniques learned during the lab.