A lesson in the art of graphic novels.

This week in my creative writing module, Writing to Order, we are focusing on comics and graphic novels. As I don't tend to read them, I wasn't particularly keen on going to the lecture this morning. The week before, we had been given a handout with some comic and graphic novel sketches and scripts. I did have a quick flick through the night before, but I didn't really take much interest to it.                                                                                  I've never classed graphic novels as 'literature' as such, and for me, I didn't really understand why we had to study this. I have watched a review of some graphic novels on YouTube by booksandquills, which I did like watching, but I still was unsure by them then. However, by the end of the lecture, my viewpoint on them had taken quite the turn.

Our guest lecturer was someone who taught film and media where I study, but also does some teaching on the literature course. He would often talk about how he thought it was an art, and at the beginning, I was failing to understand his views on this. To me, they were just the comics and graphic novels that you would give to kids, teenagers, comic nerds, and manga lovers. They were, just basically, not my thing at all.

It wasn't until he gave us a five minute task to draw a few blocks of our own that my viewpoint changed. I'm not sure why it changed, but perhaps it could have been that because I was doing it for myself, I understood more how graphic novels can tell stories in the way that they do. He had explained this before we did the task, but I wasn't completely convinced. 
I'm not the best artist in the world, and plus we only had five minutes, but I felt like a story was beginning to get told. When I was doing this, it gave me the idea that if I had writers block, perhaps drawing out my ideas could help me out.

I've not converted to being a graphic novel fan as I've not read any for myself, but I'm thinking that I could give one a go and see what it's like. If you have any suggestions, let me know in the comments.



By the way, this is what I did. I told you I'm not an artist!