Seeing Sound #10: Wordless Comics

Epic Magazine #26 (Marvel Comics, October 1984)
Art by Dave Sim & Gerhard

DAVE SIM:
(from the 'Eisner Goodwin Sim' panel talk, Will Eisner's Quarterly #4, 1985)

I think that's a lot of what you have to determine as you're going along: How much of the proportion is the writer and how much of the proportion is the artist? It will change from page to page. There are definitely pages where I feel much more like a writer - the reason for a particular page is for the writing. There are other pages where - while it's true that I'm writing pictures - it's the pictures that are going to bring the ideas across. Very often that can be the most difficult thing to do. The stories I'm doing for Archie [Goodwin]'s Epic magazine, I've set myself the boundary of not having words in them. That can be very difficult. You can't sit there and jot down lines of dialogue and eventually get the context from that. You have to start making pictures in your head, trying to create funny images that will play off each other.

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