“I am sorry this letter is so long, I did not have time to make it short.” –Blaise Pascal*
When I lecture about comics, I often show that quote and talk about how the real art of cartooning is distillation. A cartoon isn’t an accurate rendering of reality; it’s not a high-definition video or a stenographer’s transcript. Comics may start with reality but then they amplify and simplify, polishing away everything unnecessary until they arrive at one gleaming gem of an idea.
Whenever I rewrite or redraw a piece I’m not happy with, I always remove details, never add them. If I could ever draw a single black dot that conveyed exactly the message I intended, I’d die a very satisfied cartoonist.
To be fair, there are others approaches to comics. There are artists who never use one line when a thousand would do, rendering elaborately cross-hatched minutia, and some of them are all-time greats! But temperamentally and philosophically, I lean the opposite way.
I often end my comics talks with another quote, this one from cartoonist Larry Gonick: “Our brains represent things in some stripped-down, abstracted way. We don’t remember things as photographs or movies. We remember them as cartoons.”
I think that’s exactly right. When a cartoon is firing on all cylinders, it can feel less like reading and more like telepathy between writer and reader because a comic’s combination of words and images is speaking our brains' native language. That’s the goal: direct, instant, clear, intimate communication.
*Also attributed to many others, including Cicero, Pliny, Mark Twain, and George Bernard Shaw.
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