I'd like to talk about some Damn Useful Books!

I like big books and I cannot lie, you other artists can't deny...

Cheesy misappropriation of Sir Mix-a-Lot aside, if there's is one thing I do huge amounts of, (besides having random spurts of art evolution you folks may have noticed if you try to take the archives in all at once), I read lots of art books.

No. Really.

(And this isn't even all of them -- some of the less useful ones are still packed up with the other college things.)

The point of all this?

1. I read way more books on webcomics, art, character design/development, and other core details than I have any business reading at this stage. Most of these are useful and typically meet some level of minimum competency, though obviously some are better than others.
2. Books are not cheap.
3. Selling books, however, is good business, and if I can make a little back showing you which books are useful enough to be worth your dollar, then by all means!
   

So guess who just decided to become Amazon's puppet in the name of sharing all this lovingly extracted wisdom with you!

Now, no promises on this one -- The comic is already guaranteed to be weekly, but eventually I'll run out of books to talk about, not to mention that not all books are created equal -- The Art of Animal Drawing, for example, is almost all pictures, which almost guarantees that its review will be shorter than anything I could say about Scott McCloud's books.

Disclaimer: A lot of these books have my genre slant in them -- the animal books (for the furry stuff, natch) and the manga books because, well, that's part of my general style. More realistic / "American" style artists might not be interested in some of these. If they don't suit you, they don't suit you, but this is why I may cover certain types of books more than others. I never said I was going to be a one-stop source for these things; these just happen to be the books I think are most useful to me, and hence should at least be of interest to you. Heck, we might even have some MARKETING BOOKS tossed in (Gasp! Shock! Horror!) just because -- guess what? -- they're useful too.

Don't be fooled; just because it doesn't have "Webcomics" on the cover doesn't mean it still can't be a damn useful book. If you aren't already subscribed to the blog, you'll want to be, just to make sure you don't miss these.

If you have a book in the stack shown above you'd like me to get to before the others, be sure to say so in the comments! (oh, and there are a few books not pictured here, so you may as well ask...)

List of Books Reviewed So Far:

• The Economics of Web Comics (2nd Edition)
• The Art of Animal Drawing