Books for Cartoonists
The shelf behind every good strip: 11 books on how comics work, how to draw them, and the masters worth studying.
No affiliate links, no "e-book secrets", no sales funnel — just the books working cartoonists actually recommend. Your library probably has most of them, and your local bookshop can order the rest.
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Understanding Comics ↗
The book that explains how comics work — panels, gutters, time, iconic faces — and does it as a comic. Read it once and you can never un-see how strips are built.
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Making Comics
The practical sequel: storytelling choices, facial expressions, body language, lettering and tools. The closest thing to a cartooning textbook.
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Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice
A tiny, dense 15-week course from a New Yorker cartoonist. Its exercises (draw 100 tiny faces, draw the same strip four ways) fix more bad habits than any video.
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Drawing Words and Writing Pictures
A full course in making comics, from thumbnails to inking, with homework. Used in real classrooms for a reason.
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Syllabus
Barry's hand-drawn notebook of her university course on creativity and drawing. Unhinged, generous and weirdly practical for anyone stuck on a blank page.
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Comics and Sequential Art
The original theory book from the man the Eisner Awards are named after. Timing, framing, expressive anatomy — still the foundation.
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Cartoon Animation
The Disney animator's classic on drawing cartoon characters that feel alive: construction, squash-and-stretch, expressions. Strip cartoonists steal from it constantly.
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The Complete Peanuts
Every strip, 1950 to 2000, in 26 volumes from Fantagraphics. Watching Schulz learn his own characters over fifty years is the best masterclass there is.
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The Complete Calvin and Hobbes
All ten years in one box. Study how Watterson stages a four-panel gag and then breaks every rule on Sundays.
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The Complete Far Side
Fourteen years of single-panel perfection, plus Larson's notes on the ones editors hated. The reference text for the one-panel gag.
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Krazy Kat: The Comic Art of George Herriman
The definitive study of the strip poets and painters loved most. If you enjoyed our Krazy Kat page, this is the deep end.