The Importance of Making Your Work Physical

Wise words from Mentor, Elise Dietrich, in our Year-Long Intensive Program!

In the final session of our Year-Long Intensive Program (currently), SAW brings in forces-to-be-reckoned-with from outside its virtual and physical walls to aid students in their Final comic assignment. Students in the program are split up into different groups and assigned a Mentor! These outside forces are Comic Professionals brought in to share their feedback on our students’ work and give some advice about a comic world beyond SAW. One group has Brazilian cultural studies scholar and cartoonist, Elise Dietrich (IG: @djsereja), as their Mentor and she had some recent words of wisdom for students! See what she had to say below!

“In yesterday's call, we talked a little about what it means to make your work feel FINISHED. For me, a big part of that has always been publishing it as a physical object--in my case, a minicomic. Once it's printed, it takes up space in the world, giving it a permanence that it doesn't really have as a computer file or a drawing in a sketchbook.

‘A minicomic can be any size you'd like’--it refers to a comic with a (relatively) small print run that has usually been self-published. I had been making comics for about two years and posting them on Instagram before another cartoonist encouraged me to make my own minicomic. I went down to my local copy shop with 20 pages of comics and some cardstock I had bought online. 

Jessica Abel's writing was immensely helpful to me when I started out-- both in this article and in her book Drawing Words Writing Pictures (like an indie comics textbook-- I highly recommend buying a used copy!). You can even see the book in the copy shop process shot above!

In my effort to compile my work, I realized that some of my sizing was off, and I needed to do a fair amount of tweaking with white out, scissors, and tape, to come up with something I felt proud of. It takes a lot of fiddling to get it right, but this is the process of FINISHING your work so that it can go out into the world on its own.

I felt compelled to make something physical in preparation for a comics event that I was attending-- one of my favorite local cartoonists was going to be there, and I really want to put my work into her hands. It was certainly an awkward moment, but I made a connection with her and we became friends. I'm pretty sure that if I had just told her my IG handle, it wouldn't have turned out the same way!

I made a lot of early comics, but the ones that ended up in this anthology are the ones that feel like part of my official history, because I have a physical record of them. The others are scattered about and mostly forgotten. The initial print run was maybe 40 copies, but I've gone back to reprint this several times in the last 4 years, and it still occasionally sells on my Etsy shop. I went on to make several other minis, and when I make comics now I think of them in terms of filling up the next mini to put them out into the world. 

Are you planning to physically publish your work? How will you do it?”

Thanks for sharing, Elise Dietrich!

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Want to get serious about your own comic creation?

Do you have a story inside you that’s just itching to come out, but want some guidance to help push it out?

Learn more about intensive comics learning with teachers at SAW by checking out SAW’s Year-Long Intensive Program and our Six-Month Graphic Novel Intensive.

Be sure to also check out our Online Courses, since some courses are offered year-round and are always enrolling!

Our Comics Flow Group, for example, is year-round and always enrolling and is SAW's MOST AFFORDABLE course option with access to Monthly Pro-Calls!

And, of course, come see what we’re all up to on SAW's Mighty Network anytime!

Cheers,

Karlo