Monday, November 17, 2003
New instructional comic...
This article profiles the authors of Gray Matters: The Workplace Survival Guide, a guide using sequential art to give advice (from Dirk).
I personally think this is a really untapped thing. Illustrations in general are a great way of imparting information, and going all the way to a comic format can work really well. Gonick's History of the World books are a good example (I read these as I grew up and learned a lot), and it is the sort of thing that is done quite a lot in Japan (one of these, Japan Inc., a fictional story that teaches economics at the same time has been translated to English). Something like Clan Apis plays a bit looser, but is also a good learning experience. The McCloud books, while being uniquely suitable to the subject (being about comics themselves), still stand up to me as one of the most lucid instruction texts I've seen for any subject.
I really hope this new book does well and inspires more people to try to use comics in an instructional way. I think there is quite a lot of potential in the medium...
I personally think this is a really untapped thing. Illustrations in general are a great way of imparting information, and going all the way to a comic format can work really well. Gonick's History of the World books are a good example (I read these as I grew up and learned a lot), and it is the sort of thing that is done quite a lot in Japan (one of these, Japan Inc., a fictional story that teaches economics at the same time has been translated to English). Something like Clan Apis plays a bit looser, but is also a good learning experience. The McCloud books, while being uniquely suitable to the subject (being about comics themselves), still stand up to me as one of the most lucid instruction texts I've seen for any subject.
I really hope this new book does well and inspires more people to try to use comics in an instructional way. I think there is quite a lot of potential in the medium...
