Eadweard Muybridge

 Although Eadweard Muybridge lived in the USA for much of his life, he was actually English. He lived between 1830 and 1904. He was one of the first people to prove that all 4 legs of a horse are off the ground at some points during trotting and galloping. He did this by setting up a row of cameras which were triggered by string as a horse galloped by... this was a big lead towards motion photography.

Zoetrope Research

Zoetropes are one of the earliest forms of moving images, cinema or animation. They can be traced as far back as around 180 AD in China. A typical zoetrope consists of a cylinder with vertical slits down the sides. Images are made in a sequence and put onto a band which is inserted into the zoetrope, images facing outwards. When the zoetrope is spun the images are given the illusion of movement.

Kicking Ass in 6 Frames

Little White Lies set a competition in which illustrators were challenged to condense their favourite film into a 6 panel comic strip. Here are a few examples of entries.

It's interesting to see the ways in which different people have used the sequential images... some have used lots of text, some very little and some none at all. The qualities of line, shading and block colour have been used in very different ways... and the use of comic style shapes and symbols such as arrows, speech bubbles and 'sound' effects varies a lot too.

Sequential Theorists: Will Eisner

Will Eisner:

"WILL EISNER was born William Erwin Eisner on March 6, 1917 in Brooklyn, New York. By the time of his death on January 3, 2005, following complications from open heart surgery, Eisner was recognized internationally as one of the giants in the field of sequential art, a term he coined.


In a career that spanned nearly seventy years and eight decades — from the dawn of the comic book to the advent of digital comics — he truly was the 'Orson Welles of comics' and the 'father of the Graphic Novel'. He broke new ground in the development of visual narrative and the language of comics and was the creator of The Spirit, John Law, Lady Luck, Mr. Mystic, Uncle Sam, Blackhawk, Sheena and countless others."


...taken from WillEisner.com 


After I read that introduction into who Will Eisner was I decided the next thing to do was to look at some of his work. These are some of his images that really caught my attention.

And here are some Will Eisner quotes that seemed worth noting:




“The work we do is as demanding as any of the great painters because nothing that happens on the page of a comic is accidental. It has to be imagined first in your mind before you do it. Those of us who know something about the art of painting know that working on a canvas, very often a lot of serendipitous things happen that work to the advantage of the painter ultimately.”


“It's very important for me to maintain contact with the reader, because I'm writing to someone, and I'm desperately eager to achieve believability.


“Superheroes are mostly aimed at young teen-age males concerned with their manhood. The medium will have to address itself more to content. . . . I see 22 year olds draw massive Schwarzenegger types, outfitted with metal studs, pressing a mostly naked woman to their breastplates. And I think "Poor girl, that's got to be cold."”

“Comics, which are really best described as an arrangement of images in a sequence that tell a story - an idea - is a very old form of graphic communication. It began with the hieroglyphics in Egypt, it first appeared in a recognizable form in the Medieval times as copper plates produced by the Catholic church to tell morality stories.”

Initial Sequential Image Research

www.edmurr.com/sequential_illustration/portfolio.htm http://www.illustrationweb.com/artists/ThomasAndrae/view
http://www.illustrationweb.com/artists/HansDevolder/view
http://www.illustrationweb.com/artists/ThiesSchwarz/view
http://www.centralillustration.com/artists/12foot6/
http://www.centralillustration.com/artists/Art-Bombers/
http://www.centralillustration.com/artists/Christopher-Brown/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequential_art
http://www.novinite.com/view_news.php?id=102043