Comic Book Artist Presents Workshop at Dexter Library

Superhero and comic book aficionados will get a chance to try their hand at the art of drawing at the on Saturday.

Professional cartoon artist Jerzy Drozd of Ann Arbor will discuss how cartoonists use drawings, panel sizes and crazy sound effects to immerse readers in the art of storytelling while leading the audience in an interactive discussion on some of the fundamental comics storytelling principles.

The workshop will be held from 2 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. and is open to teens and children, grade 4 and older.

Drozd, who has been drawing comics since he was 7, and professionally since he was 19, got his start after reading Crisis on Infinite Earth No. 3, an epic adventure featuring the characters of the popular DC Comics universe banding together to defeat a cosmic super villain.

“I have a distinct memory of finishing the comic and turning to my parents to announce, ‘I'm going to make comics when I grow up.’ I've never been interested in doing anything else since,” Drozd said.

That enthusiasm has translated to his workshops that he holds periodically throughout the year, where he meets with dozens of aspiring comic book authors throughout Michigan.

“The single most important message of my workshops is that you don't have to be a great illustrator to be a great storyteller. Comics is a medium for telling stories with images, and whether or not the story is communicated depends less on the overall quality of the illustrations than you might think,” Drozd said. “I focus on how cartoonists use size relationships, color, and line types to create a feeling, mood, or sense of pace in a story.”

Drozd said a big part of his workshops focuses on technique and how to design comic book characters.

“We learn how to communicate the inner lives of the characters through gesture and body language, and look for surprises and ironies in their body type and costume,” he said. “A cartoonist must create a plausible world for their stories, so my workshops often teach how to use images to evoke a believable world that the reader can get lost in.”

Drozd, who has worked with Antarctic Press on their flagship title Ninja High School, and co-created a mini-series called PPV: Pay-Per-View, said he believes comic books are unlike any other medium.

“Comics can do things that other mediums simply cannot. Because a narrative is composed of multiple panels, or moments, on a single page, you can have those individual moments flow in a linear direction, or you can defy traditional reading direction and have sequences move from right to left and then back again. Sometimes the panels can be happening simultaneously on the page,” he said. “Because most comics are made of drawings, there's a heightened reality that is created on the page. This grants a certain flexibility of genre and storytelling juxtopositions that mediums like film have a much harder time with. I often tell my students that their job is not to create ‘realistic’ worlds, but ‘plausible’ worlds with their own internal logic.”

To register and for further information, call the library at 734-426-4477 or e-mail dalson@dexer.lib.mi.us.

For more information on the comic book workshop, visit http://www.dexter.lib.mi.us/