Binge Elsa's videos on comic book storytelling

A YouTube channel dedicating to exploring the craft of comics.

In April 2021, my long-time creative partner Pierrick Colinet and I launched a YouTube channel about comic book storytelling. Our ambitious goal was to offer our community, offer you all, a place to understand comics better, in video form. 20+ videos later, I know that I’ve learned a bunch on how to be a better artist. Putting concepts into words is to me, the first step to really being able to apply them. I personally find that if I can’t explain something, then I don’t really understand it, or not well enough.

I’m hoping that our expertise as working professionals helps you better appreciate some of your favorite comics (Batman: Year One! Hawkeye!) or inspire you to give comic book creation a go. And if not, well, at least Pierrick’s incredible producing, directing, and editing talents make these videos gorgeous to look at. I do the writing, he handles everything else.

Naturally, this is all free content that you can binge at your leisure. Below is a quick look at our main video series, and coming really soon is a little something about a certain caped crusader :)

The Case Studies:

The hardest ones to put together if I’m being honest but also maybe my favorite to write. The idea is to take a comic book page from one of our medium’s masters and figure out what makes it work so perfectly, with the help of a notepad as big as me and an array of very colorful Sharpies. I sketch, use arrows, follow eye flows, deconstruct and rebuild panels in what I hope are clear but deep analyses.

• Marvel’s Hawkeye Case Study

• Batman: Year One Case Study

• Deadly Class: How Graphic Design Can Inform Page Layout

• Hellboy: Mignola’s Genius For Simplification

The interviews with:

• Ed Brubaker

• Amanda Conner

• (more to come really soon)

The Chat’N’Draws:

In which you can enjoy Pierrick’s gorgeous, incredibly crisp and detailed videos of my inking. In voice-over I delve into more practical aspects of our industry and my personal experience coming up.

• How I bluffed my way into an art career

• Why I needed to fail to become successful

• How to boost your career with self-publishing

Our 10-Minute Layouts:

I watch a lot of movies and read a lot of novels. Parts of which I can’t help but to adapt into sequential art in my head. Rather than letting that thinking go to waste, we create a series where I do just that: adapt a scene from a piece of fiction into a comic page.

• Reservoir Dogs: Music In Comics

• Chernobyl: How To Build Suspense

• Blade Runner: Adaption Slow Motion in Comics

• Redrawing a Jack Kirby Fantastic Four page

And lastly, our bookclubs!

• Daytripper

• Kent State

We’re putting videos up as often as we can—which is not as often as we’d like seeing that we each work on different projects—but rest assured, there’s always something in the works.

Happy Sunday!

Elsa