Making Comics—Week 8

Reflections on Week Eight of working through Lynda Barry's Making Comics

(Note: This post is part of a 2025 read-along of Making Comics for those interested in drawing comics, loosening up their drawing, building creative habit, and working through this book by Lynda Barry. Illustrated Life has a mix of illustrated journaling, bookish things, and weekly “Sunday posts.” You are probably here for those. If you stumbled here, I would start there. Thanks!)

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Reflections on Week Eight

Week 8 was mostly an extension of the previous week to give everyone some extra time. I’ve seen a few Animal Diary pages shared in the chat. We added the Animal Ad Lib for Week 8, which pulls the six animals to the same page with a line of text.

Beyond that, we’ve been continuing to work on the four-panel diary comics.

This coming week will have you try a few other daily diary formats as we finish up this section of the book.

We’re moving into the home stretch!

“If I don’t record the memories I have right now, they’ll probably never be recorded.” — Drewscape

A Few Panels from the Week

I’m continuing some of the things I talked about last week, including the character with the rabbit ears. Capturing four really simple panels (related or simply juxtaposed) from the day has become a routine part of my day, something I look forward to and have been making time for each evening. (For that alone, the read-along is already feeling like a success for me.)

Here are a few from the week. (These are 4-panel pages. They don’t read “across” the separate pages. I’ve just grouped them so that they aren’t huge on the page. I haven’t been consistent with how I am labeling them, and I haven’t added a few words when necessary. I value these for the daily documentation, so a note here and there helps.)

Assorted daily panels. A. Cowen, 2025

It has been disconcerting lately to run into multiple examples of rabbit ears in other comics and graphic novels. This is definitely the “seeing blue” effect, but it does make me a bit uncomfortable. I tend to steer well clear of things other people do, but I’m so attached to this character right now though that I’m just ignoring the rabbits that are popping up everywhere. There are a few other animals I might be curious about embodying, but there is something about this accidental rabbit. I’m willing to keep exploring. Plus, my animals from last week made painfully clear that my animal game is lacking!)

If you had asked me coming into this if I might end up with a hybrid animal-character as a result of this deep dive with Barry, I might have thought a monster was possible, or maybe at least the adoption of a unicorn horn.

I can’t say I would have ever predicted rabbit ears. Go figure.

Oh… animals…sort of. There were animals I wanted to draw. That’s partly how I ended up with two things that look like cats.

“Animal Ad Lib” exercise from Making Comics. A. Cowen, 2025

To Watch

In poking around for videos to share, I ran into this one, which does have rabbit ears:

Here’s a follow-up to a Drewscape video I shared in one of the earlier weeks.

I know you haven’t been working with text yet, but notice that both of these videos mention not simply repeating the same thing with the images and the text. They need to work together and should supplement and extend but not simply serve the same purpose.

There was a similar discussion of the way text and image work together in a live video this week with Kelcey Ervick, author and artist of the fantastic The Keeper graphic novel.

I had the ‘live’ up while I was working, and I snapped this screenshot when Kelcey was talking about the relationship between image and text:

(Note: The live was free at the time, but the replay is behind a paywall. You can watch a few minutes in this clip, and the mention of the words vs. images is at 1:54.)

Week 9 Schedule

As I mentioned last week, there are a few daily diary comic explorations to wrap up Section Two of Making Comics. Barry stresses that you need to try formats for several days (or a week or so) at a time to get a feel for them. So even though there are only two or three specific things mentioned for this week, the expectation is that you try the diary exercises multiple times.

For next week:

1. Exercise: “You See It When It Sees You” — This exercise uses an inanimate object (like a toy or something you have sitting around on a shelf). (You may have already done this one. I put it on last week’s schedule, too. If not, tackle it this week.) (p 130)

2. Diary Exercise: “Triangle Diary” — This is a two-part exercise. You’ll do the triangle page and then take one of those panels to do a full page. Pay attention to step 3 (if you are a stickler for the rules) because you are to draw the image from the triangle exactly the same into the full frame and then fill in around it. (40 minutes) (p 132)

3. Diary Exercise: “Checker Diary” — This one is eight panels over 2 pages. You’ll draw in four of them and write your notes in the others. There seem to be some missing directions for this one, but it seems clear that you should repeat steps 2-3 for panels 3-8. (30 minutes) (p 133)

4. Extra: “More Monsters” — I know some of you are struggling to make the jump between the fun, additive character and monster exercises in the early part of the book to the focus on more involved diary panels. There really is a big jump. If that’s you, you might want to make some more monsters this week. You could go all the way back and revisit early weeks, or you could do something similar to the “animal” panels from Week 7 (though you can skip the color if you want) and draw a set of monsters and pair them with first lines. You already know how this exercise works, so it will be impossible not to overthink it (e.g., impossible to keep it totally authentic), but a “Monster Ad Lib” would be a great way to bring monsters back in, see how you feel about them now, and use them to give voice to some words. You could even add different words….. so many ways to think about it.

Note

1. Upcoming exercises will require that you have a book of comics or a graphic novel on hand and that you have read it. You can easily check a graphic novel out from your library. If you need suggestions, let me know in the comments. I’ve always got a few checked out!

2. I read The Cartoonists Club by Raina Telgemeier and Scott McCloud recently. It was great, and I meant to mention it here at the time. I think you all would probably really enjoy it, given the context of our read-along. A very short write-up was part of this post. I am a fan of both Telgemeier and McCloud.

3. I’ve included reviews of a number of graphic novels in my weekly posts. I think about this one often and just put it on hold again. Some of you might be interested.

How did the week go for you?

Is anything changing in how you feel about your comics work? Are you approaching the daily diary (the panel part) differently? Maybe you are noticing a bit more fluidity or speed or “just do it” mentality than you did at the start?

Please take a minute and comment here — either about your own experience with the week or just noting you read, saw, or skimmed this post.

Then head to the chat to share your work! Sharing is optional, and you don’t have to show everything you did in the week, but when you share something, you will feel more involved in the group. There’s built-in motivation when you participate at that level.

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General info for anyone finding this read-along for the first time:

Read-Along Format

All posts can be found here.

This is casual read-along, but some structure will keep us all moving forward together.

Each week we will have a set of pages to read and exercises from those pages to do. At the end of the week, I will post some form of reflection here on the week because that is how I will best work through this book. We can then discuss the week in the comments and share exercises/work in the chat (because the comments don’t allow attachments). I’m running the weeks as Wednesday-Thursday, hoping to post my reflections late Wednesday and have our discussion/chat start on Thursday. So every Thursday starts a new week of reading/exercises.

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This read-along is part of Illustrated Life. Thank you for reading. Writers need readers, and I am grateful for every reader!

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Quoted sections with page numbers are by Lynda Barry from Making Comics unless otherwise noted.

Unless otherwise noted, all images in this post are ©️ A. Cowen. All rights reserved.

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