“The Horrible Truth About Comics” is a 1999 32-pages comic book by James Kochalka where he makes a very interesting and inspiring reflection about what are comics. The book is very rare today, but I think it’s a really important one, so I transcribed the text here for you to read and think about it.
The Horrible Truth About Comics
by James Kochalka
If you can find a copy of this, you're lucky. Buy it.
“I can’t stop thinking about comics.
What is art?
Art is one of the most basic means for understanding the world around us. We process what we’ve experienced and recreate it in simplified form.
Often this brings revelations that we could not come by through sheer reason.
The creation of art should be accompanied by a sense of play.
Play is a heightened state of imaginative awareness that allows us to enter new realms of discovery.
Thank god play is fun and not just a lot of hard work. Play is our most important way of processing the information of experience when we’re little. That’s why children play so darn much… it simplifies the world’s complexities into easily understood and usable information. Unconciously.
Play and art are the same thing!
We try a lot of crazy stuff at random as little children… and we’re delighted to discover that pushing a crayon on a piece of paper leaves a mark.
Physically, on the most basic level, visual art is mark making.
Before the first mark, the blank surface is an undefined void.
We give it form and structure and space by the marks we make on it.
This happens accidentally at first, then we learn to structure the space consciously.
Perhaps a wild scribble to chop the void up into definable chunks.
This is a very literal way to define the void. That is, we define it as a flat surface on which we make marks.
But there’s much trickier ways to define space.
Being people, the most important thing in our lives is other people. So we populate the void with them: “this mommy, this is daddy…” “this is me”
We create a new world within the void. A simplification of the world we live in.
Every child is God, creating its own universe.
However, we’re not simply recreating the physical world we see around us…
We’re also manifesting the secret world inside us.
Our hopes and fears and everything. Art turns us inside out.
Art is not a way of conveying information. It’s a way of understanding information.
That is, creating a work of art is a means we have of making sense of the world, focusing to make it clearer, not a way of communicating some understanding of the world that we already hold.
If you already hold a clear understanding of whatever then there’s no reason to create the work of art. So you don’t.
In fact, you can’t.
If you are trying to demonstrate some known idea, or fact pictorially, this is called illustration.
Illustration is superficial, no matter how skilled, because it is secondary. The idea comes first and the illustration explicates it.
How tedious, and naturally doomed to failure.
It’s important to make a determination on the notion of quality.
Your art is “great” when you successfully focus your experience to reveal some profound new understanding of the world that had previously eluded us.
And the more clearly focused, vivid, and original this revelation is, the higher the quality of the work of art.
So it’s not a matter of “learning how to draw” in the sense that most people think of it.
It’s a matter of allowing yourself to boil in the intensity of your experiences, condensing and clarifying them.
But there’s so much just waiting to drag you down.
Timidness, dishonesty, fear, and pretension. These are some biggies!
Turning yourself inside out can be a very scary thing.
Which is another reason why play is so imporant.
It allows you to reveal yourself in a diasrmingly joyful manner.
Soon you’ll find you’ve struck upon a great truth dug out of the deep recesses of your soul… as easily as plucking a petal from a daisy.
A lack of technical ability can contribute to the fear or timidity that stands between you and greatness. But it does not have to.
Ignore your lack of technical ability.
Technical mastery of one’s medium does not an artist make.
The only quality you need is the ability to open yourself with honesty and pluck out the truth.
Resolve to put the skills you do have to work now and pick up more along the way.
Craft really is just a matter of personal pride and respect for one’s medium.
You want your comic to be well crafted because to do otherwise would be an insult, or an embarassment.
Still, I don’t mind a slap in the face if the result is good comics… but not if the result is just more garbage. The biggest insult is a comic that sucks.”
