The Image That Became My Greatest Lesson in Creativity
...and how I apply it to just about everything I create, decades later
The above image was illustrated by John Buscema in the book How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way, which was also authored by Stan Lee. It’s a book I got for Christmas in the late ‘80s, as I was already creating my own comic books before the age of ten, and my mother, who was also an artist, thought it could help me hone my craft.
While comic book illustration has evolved and expanded into many varying styles over the decades since this was first published in 1978, its core lessons still remain true. Also, those core lessons illustrate why Marvel was just so damn good at what they produced in their heyday.
As an artist of a multitude of mediums, the above illustration is the most important image I have ever seen, and the greatest lesson I ever learned in creativity. This lesson wasn't something that I just applied to drawing comics. It was a lesson that I also applied to everything else I did creatively. In fact, I still do. It's something I think about almost daily, and I’m not saying that hyperbolically.
So what is that John Buscema illustration conveying, exactly? Well, let me add in Stan Lee’s words from the preceding page for some context:
Just being able to draw the figure is only half the job. When you’re drawing comicbook superhero sagas, you’ve got to be able to move it—to animate it—to put it in action!
Using what you’ve learned in stick-figure drawing, take a character running, walking, playing ball, or throwing a punch. Draw a series of stick figures, as on the facing page, depicting as many different stages of that action as possible. Familiarize yourself with moving the body; work from one figure into another, slowly, loosely, casually, using as many scribble lines as you wish. Don’t try to do a finished drawing, just loosen up, try to feel the action.
Notice how the first drawing and the last one in that particular sequence seem to have the most impact—the most action. In a Marvel story, the artist would use either of those shots rather than the tamer ones in between. …
And from an added blurb:
Try to exaggerate your action—keep the figure loose, supple, always in motion. …
So that illustration displays what I have always referred to as “dynamic action” or “dynamic motion”. I use them sort of interchangeably. I can’t remember if Stan Lee uses either term in the book, as I haven’t read the entire thing since the ‘90s, but I know I picked up the term from somewhere when I was around ten years-old or so. Or maybe it was a few years later, watching one of the Comic Book Greats videos or reading Wizard magazine, both of which were quite popular in the early ‘90s.
As a kid, I applied this lesson to drawing comics. At that age and into early high school (when I stopped making comics), I might not have been the best artist, but you definitely couldn’t say that my characters weren’t moving with dynamic motion.
Unbeknownst to me consciously, this concept carried over into other things that I started to do creatively, as I moved away from comics and explored other artistic mediums. While none of these other mediums required me to illustrate a punch being thrown, the concept of dynamic action evolved in interesting ways, because at the core of that lesson, it taught me to make everything as dynamic and impactful as I can.
As a musician, specifically a teen getting into rap battles throughout that era, it steered me towards coming up with dynamic lyrics on the fly to destroy my competition. Experimenting with other types of music, as well as DJing live, it carried over into my performances and into how I crafted and presented my music at the production stage. While these were just experiments in me finding ways to express myself and to get the creativity out, this idea of dynamic action was just always there.
Beyond that, when I was thinking about films I’d like to make and outlining ideas for eventual scripts, as scenes entered my head, dynamic action was always there as I visualized things. Scenes were written with a very specific idea on how to shoot, angle and capture simple movement in the frame. While I didn’t make any of these films, some of the outlines were retrofit into short stories that made it into my book Eyes in All Shadows & Other Stories. However, there are still some of these ideas that I might still attempt to film at some point.
Going into the job that is now my career, I had to start coming up with packaging for products that exist in an old industry (cigar manufacturing) that is very entrenched in tradition. Most products have a distinct look and style that is immediately recognized by most people. It’s also an industry that is very closely associated with wealth, opulence, and high society, which is inaccurate as a whole, but Hollywood has their tropes.
I entered this industry at a time when a lot of new companies were emerging and fighting for a piece of the pie that was mostly owned by brands that have existed for decades or over a century. While I respected the tradition and what came before, I knew that to stand out, I had to make something more dynamic than what was typical. However, I also knew that I had to embrace tradition in an effort to attract the old customers while enticing new ones to give my employer’s brand a shot. To do this, I used tradition as the template and applied the concept of dynamic motion to the art.
While that previous sentence might not make a lot of sense on its own, what I mean to say, is that I looked at what was typical, analyzed it, and found ways to focus on specific elements and alter them in a dynamic way that made them standout visually. I made packaging that popped in a new way, and with that and the product being rather good on its own, the company I became the creative director for grew exponentially over just a few years, and continues to grow each year regardless of a pandemic and government overreach.
Thirteen years ago, I began a three year run writing a blog called The Swash. It was primarily focused on political commentary and economics. To stand out from the other thousands of political blogs just on WordPress alone, I employed the idea of dynamic action in my commentary. At the time, and still being a late Gen-X edgy boi, that translated into a lot of colorful words and dark humor pushed to the absolute max, which back then, was well beyond anything that is acceptable today. I had a very loyal, very captive audience that built organically very quickly. In that time, I published four books which were collections of my blog posts but often times greatly expanded. The only thing that really stopped me three years into it, was a combination of burnout, a lack of financial resources because of the era, and a lack of time to devote to it without making myself broke and probably unemployed from the real job.
I did other blogs as well, too many to remember, but the ones that worked for a good period of time, also embraced the concept of dynamic motion applied to the writing and presentation.
Now after all of that, this brings me up to my current creative endeavor, the Barbarians of the Storm book series. If you have read the books already, you probably see and understand what I’m talking about in how I crafted the stories. They’re dynamic, action-packed, fast-paced, never waste time, and are simply very efficient stories, as pulp should be. I also find ways to develop my large cast of characters pretty well, according to my readers, without getting in the way of the books’ efficiency.
Oddly enough, and maybe it’s just life coming full circle, but the Barbarians of the Storm idea was originally intended to be a comic book, and the original script was written that way. Altering it from what it was into what it needed to become probably also maximized the concept of dynamic action. As I wrote the story, everything came to me visually and dynamically like a movie playing in my head. Each book I write in the series comes to me visually in the same way, and ultimately, I try to put that to paper in the prose I use. However, I never meander and I keep it as dynamic as possible.
For something to be dynamic, it needs energy. However, it creates more energy and it is that energy that can give your creativity a real edge. This is something I’ve carried with me for decades now, and hadn’t even realized it until more recently. I think about John Buscema’s image a lot and even more recently since connecting some of these dots.
I guess, in the end, I just felt the need to share this, as it might help other creatives. Being that How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way was published 45 years ago now, I’d assume that most artists today have never seen that image. For me, it’s been burnt into my brain since the late ‘80s. At the risk of sounding hyperbolic again, I probably owe a great deal to John Buscema for drawing it and Stan Lee for describing it to my young mind.