Posted in: Comics | Tagged: adam lumb, comcis, kickstarter, the tide

The Reason More People Don't Read Comics Is They Aren't Good Enough

Adam is the creator of  The Tide comics series and Rich and Strange Press, his publishing imprint. Alongside his work as an artist and writer, he is also a "suit" – a trained picture editor, IP, image, and brand consultant and has worked for many art galleries and in TV over the past 20 years. He writes for Bleeding Cool,

All my work is produced from my studio based in Sheffield in the UK, a city home to a vibrant arts scene. Here,  I focus on creating painted-worlds for my own books (and sometimes other clients). I work both traditionally and digitally with the intention of creating drama in comics that allows the reader to suspend their disbelief and immerse themselves in the story.

25 years ago, in my late teens, I stumbled upon a copy of Scott McCloud's book Understanding Comics in my local library. The book left a lasting impression on me and on thousands of others over the years.

"The potential of comics!" I thought. Wow. And comic readerships seemed to be growing. The thing is, most comics I'd read weren't that good. I put my aspirations to be an illustrator or comic artist to one side. I studied film, design, and art management at university and ended up having a successful management career in these sectors. I kept reading comics. Had they got better? Well, yes, they had – a bit. Some were very good. Most weren't. More writers, artists, editors, letterers, colourists, and designers were pushing the potential of the medium, though. (Sturgeon's Law does apply – it just seemed to be higher in comics.)

I was reminded, though, of my early film-history classes and how early 20th-century film stumbled around whilst creative people figured out how to make this new medium work. This "new" medium of cinema wasn't theatre; it was something else. A new language was created. And for a while, it wasn't very good. This is true of comics as well, of course. A rich, sophisticated language has emerged – as explained so well in Scott McCloud's book. But comics as a medium didn't seem to improve as fast as film did.

What matters in a story is emotion and meaning. Audiences get to feel, thrill, fear, love, laugh, and cry. "Meaning creates emotion" to paraphrase Robert McKee's book, Story. This, to me, is at the heart of drama and the reason we don't have a wider comics readership.  To create this drama, we require the reader to suspend their disbelief. And to do this, they need to stop feeling like they are reading panels, words, and images on a page. The core of the problem then is that we must get better at the medium of comics.

Am I better at this than anyone else? Nope. But I'm trying really hard to make better comics. To use the medium better. So I created Sea Change Comics. To publish comics that are trying to make better use of the medium and also to share inspiration and ideas for others to do the same.

I've been fortunate to concentrate my art management work 4 days per week in order to spend at least a day a week trying to make better comics.  I currently have two titles under my imprint for Sea Change, Rich and Strange Press. Dark fantasy thriller The Tide (Volumes 1 & 2 available now) and the forthcoming Russian Cyberpunk book Zoya, coming in 2021. You can judge how my efforts to produce comics with more drama. The Tide Vol.1 is free via my website www.seachangecomics.com.

I wrote The Tide over many years. I had thought to work with another artist on this before deciding to draw the book myself. The Tide started with the ending. It's essentially a story about trust in the face of an overwhelming powerful spy network. It's a witness protection story with supernatural monsters to up the ante. I worked with award-winning letterer Jim Campbell on The Tide debut and got the benefit of Jim's years of lettering and logo design experience.

You can follow The Tide at http://thetide.co.uk. Zoya is my next book. A story about the decisions we make out of fear.

Thinking about comics, I am trying to look at how the medium can help me suspend the reader's disbelief and feel the drama. As McCloud says, much of the power of comics lies "between the panels." It happens "off-panel" in our minds. I'm pushing that as much as I can in my work. I'm also focusing on the little moments of expression in characters. I need you to feel what they are feeling, so you will find "talking heads" in my work. Finally, I'm keen to explore what the medium can do for atmosphere. I was never much one for abstraction in art, but increasingly I want to use light, colour, and tone to create mood over more "definitive" drawings. In short, I'm trying to give you just enough for the story to take place – not on the page, but in your mind. To paraphrase the late, great Micheal Turner, "The readers going to come up with something in their mind far better than anything you can put down on paper."

So, in 2020 I've been experimenting as I work on The Tide 3 to push my style to achieve the above. Experimenting with watercolour, acrylic, ink, pencil, oil, and digital to maximise the effect of abstracted light, tone, mood, and atmosphere.

And in my writing for Zoya, I've pushed the moment-to-moment actions of the characters to create those emotional beats in a story already raw with the emotion of a child facing hard choices in the near future Moscow. I wasn't the right artist for this book, and so for Zoya, I had to put together my first team in a "producer" role.

Zoya is drawn by Raymond "Monds" Agustin from the Philippines. Finding a team meant reviewing the work of scores of people to find the right creative partners. The number of talented artists was staggering, but Monds also shared a vision for what the Zoya book should be. He's hyper-focused on those moment to moment transitions in the "acting" and in creating the sense of atmosphere through well thought through lighting. And Zoya is a tough 9 panel per page format. UK based letterer Rob Jones (also a writer) brings the same thoughtful approach to lettering to place the lettering in the right story beats. And film poster designer Scott Saslow brings the ??? sensibilities to the tone of this book.

You can follow along with the production of Zoya at http://www.zoyacomic.com.

And as a Bleeding Cool reader, you can ensure you don't miss the first-day deals when Zoya launches by clicking the notify button on Kickstarter now.

And why does it matter for more people to read comics? Well, comics are incredibly time-consuming to make. And that can make them expensive to produce. So, unless people are prepared to pay a lot more for a book, we need more readers to make the economies of scale work. But aren't films and theatre even more expensive to make? Yes, they are. Films have to have far larger audiences to make them financially viable. And look at the price of a ticket to a theatre performance in the West End or on Broadway where they need to cover the cost of huge productions.

We are all about the show, but comics must also be about the business. This includes production and distribution. Which reminds me, I need to be more efficient and faster. There are two new books to release in 2021.

You can purchase The Tide at  www.seachangecomics.com. The Tide Debut Edition is available now in hardback on Amazon across Europe and in the US or directly from www.artofadamlumb.com/shop. The Digital Edition is available at www.artofadamlumb.com and ComiXology. UK Stockists include Waterstones, Travelling Man Leeds, Yorkshire, Orbital Comics, London. Destination Venus, Harrogate.

Enjoyed this? Please share on social media!

Stay up-to-date and support the site by following Bleeding Cool on Google News today!