July 24, 2011

Basic Instructions

A week or so ago I started reading a web-comic called "Basic Instructions". Three times a week Scott Meyer uploads a comic with the premise of teaching you how to do something. The title is always "how to" something, such as "How to Sway Someone to Your Political Opinion". Nine times out of ten the title seems like something you might actually want to know. Then comes four panels "teaching" you how to do whatever the title says. The instructions are often believable enough, but the characters portraying the instructions do so in a way you wouldn't expect. The instructions for the above title were, "When faced with disagreement, lay out your position as clearly as possible." See? Sounds like good advice. But one of the guys in the comic is trying to explain why having the murderer in a cop show be the bad guy is offensive and biased. Here, I'll show you an example:

That picture turned out a lot smaller than I thought it would, so for my vision impaired friends click [here] to go to that comic's page.

Scott employs a really neat way of drawing his comics, using all real people for his models (called rotoscoping). He takes pictures of his friends in the poses needed and then traces over them using Photoshop and Illustrator. Since each pose and costume requires a real person to pose for it, you'll see the same poses used different ways throughout the comic. His wife has written a blog post about the process [here].

I've really enjoyed them so far, and I still have a few years of archives to go through. Hopefully you'll enjoy them as well!
Related Posts with Thumbnails