Draw Stronger Review

Speaking from experience, 2020 was a crappy year to have your book come out. As you may recall, there was this pandemic that had just started which confused and scared virtually everyone. And while, yes, there were a lot of people who were staying home a lot more than they used to and needed things like books to occupy their suddenly increased amoutns of free time, the news was wall-to-wall COVID coverage and trying to promote your new book that just came out was insanely difficult because you couldn't cut through everything else. I know because that's when my Webcomics book came out; it was supposed to debut at that year's ALA conference... which was canceled because of COVID concerns.

All of which I provide as context for how/why I missed hearing about Kriota Willberg's Draw Stronger: Self-Care for Cartoonists & Visual Artists until just recently. Now while I don't do nearly as much drawing and graphics work as I used to, and have long been at least nominally familiar with the necessity of posture, stretching, etc. when it comes to being an artist, I was interested to see how the subject would be handled in a comic format.

In retrospect, I'm a little surprised I haven't seen a book like this before. There are certainly books about self-care for artists, and there are comics showing how to do different exercises, but I don't recall ever seeing a comic about doing exercises specifically geared towards comic artists. I think I've seen single page or meme-type images from artists that might focus on a single exercise or something, but never an entire book. It's seems almost self-evident that it should be a thing.

The book's contents are pretty straightforward. Willberg talks about why physical health is important if you're sitting at a drawing table all day and how to recognize that you might be moving/acting in an unhealthy manner, then offers a variety of execises for different muscles groups, and finally ends on some basic first aid ideas if you do injure yourself drawing from an unhealthy position. There are a handful of minor gags throughout the book (I think someone says, "Oh, look! A dime!" every other time they do an exercise that puts their face near the floor) so it stays fairly light but the focus is squarely on the information throughout; Willberg doesn't try to force any sort of additional narratives around things. This makes it an excellent reference guide in the longer term because it's easier to skip to whichever part of the book you need to in order to address whatever issue is bothering you now. The book's use as a reference tool is also reinforced by the simplified illustrations; Willberg draws enough to let the reader know what things should look like but doesn't over-complicate anything with fiddly linework, so the art is very clear and clean.

While the book is meant to be used referentially -- where you can jump in and out of the book casually to look up specific exercises and forms -- and things progressed in a fairly straightforward fashion, I did find there were a few parts that I think could've been organized a little better. Where a topic is brought up but asterisked to say, "For more information, go check page XX." While I understand not everything can be written linearaly and that some measure of this has to happen, some of those instances struck me as ones that could've been written in such a way as to simply not even bring the subject up until later anyway, so the asterisk wouldn't even be needed. There were also a couple instances where an execise is explained in its more complicated form first with a note to say "if that's too difficult for you, you can simply it like this..." but then the more simplified version is shown in the art before the more complicated one. It didn't happen a lot, but it did happen and seemed unnecessarily confusing when it did.

If you are an artist, you've probably seen/heard at least some of these execises before. And if you're anything like the vast majority of artists I know, you've said something like, "Yeah, I know I should do more of that, but..." and then work until you've gotten a swollen wrist or back pain or something. It may not be a flashy, whiz-bang type of comic that everyone is going to flock to, but it is a solid book with solid information that most (if not all) artists should have. It's out now from Uncivilized Books and retails for $16.95 US.

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