I've been working on Ivan Brunetti's Cartooning: Philosophy & Practice for a while now... I pick it up and put it down as I have time. This is just a page of an exercise from week 1. Stream of consciousness drawings. An exercise in iconography if you will.
It's a good workbook. As are many of the exercise-style books that relate to cartooning. Where you get into trouble is when you pick up the how-to-draw sort of books. Now don't get me wrong. There are some great how-to-draw books out there, and I love a lot of them (10 or so on the bookshelf). The issue is when you want to learn how to tell a story or actually cartoon. How-to-draw only gives you construction of an element, which is great. But a book like Brunetti's tells you WHAT element to construct, WHY you should construct it and WHERE to place that element in the panel in order to best tell a story. That is the strength of a good exercise-style book. It gets you into the mindset of what do do.
Which brings me to another point. I am seeing a lot of really well-executed stories out there these days. Well done, composed nicely and well-drawn. But the subject matter is just so worn down or just not interesting that I can't get involved. Something like Joe Sacco's Safe Area Gorazde (a new find for me) really draws me in, in large part because it has so much revelation on matters that I always wondered about. At the top of the Fantagraphics page for Joe Sacco, there is a terrific quote attributed to Art Spiegelman:
"In a world where Photoshop has outed the photograph to be a liar, one can now allow artists to return to their original function — as reporters."
Which I think is really powerful and true. So much of contemporary art in EVERY form is art made for it's own sake, having no connection to any narrative or anything beyond it's own existence (abstract art, I'm looking at you). I know that has it's place. But it feels like every artist feels compelled to create without a connection to anything larger. And that, in my opinion, creates a loss of context for the viewer and thus generates disdain, or worse, apathy.