How to create comics the Steve Whitaker way

The late, great Steve Whitaker drew this guide to creating comics back in the 1990s and it’s available online via Flickr if people want to use it for teaching purposes, published under a Creative Commons license.

Printed in the Society of Strip Illustrators newsletter for September 1992, it’s a terrific instructional page about how comics works that was presumably intended for use in the London Cartoon Centre classes which Steve ran.

Strangely, this is the second time Steve has cropped up in online happenings for me this week: this time it’s the result of an appeal by Bryan Talbot, who plans to use the art as part of a presentation on comic storytelling next week to a secondary school whose, pupils are doing a graphic novel on their local history inspired by his graphic novel, Alice in Sunderland.

The first time it was a social networking site suggesting I become his friend, which was really spooky given that he’s not been with us since 2008



Categories: Creating Comics

Tags: ,

2 replies

  1. Thanks for the post. It’s always lovely to see Steve’s work still floating around. Even better that it’ll be used to teach new generations about an art-form he loved so much.

    As for Steve popping up in spooky coincidences, that’s also happened to me before. I’m sure he’s doing it on purpose with a big grin on his face. He was such a big hearted fella of immense talent but he also had a devilish sense of humor.

  2. He’s still floating around as a potential friend on Facebook. This is doubly sad for me as Steve (whom I knew for more than 33 years and kept in regular communication with since my move stateside in 1975) is the one who got me into online social networking. At the time of his death, I’d been on LiveJournal (at Steve’s urging) just a few months.
    By the way, I credit Steve with teaching me about cartooning (a hobby that’s paid off a little here and there). I’ll never be anywhere near the artist he was.

    –Mike Mittelstadt
    Watertown, NY

Discover more from downthetubes.net

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading