"Once you've established where you are, you go to the character and elaborate on expressions and action"
About this Quote
Aragones is sneaking a whole philosophy of comedy into a sentence that sounds like a drafting note. “Once you’ve established where you are” is the unglamorous discipline that makes the wild stuff land. In cartooning, the gag isn’t just the punchline; it’s the architecture that lets a reader orient instantly, then get blindsided. You set the geography, the social rules, the visual logic of the panel. Only then can a raised eyebrow, a limp sword arm, or a panicked sprint become legible at speed.
The subtext is a gentle rebuke to anyone who wants to skip to “funny faces” without doing the storytelling work. Aragones, famous for wordless MAD margins and hyper-kinetic scenes, knows that exaggeration isn’t random. It’s calibrated. “Elaborate on expressions and action” is where the cartoonist performs: the micro-acting of ink. A character’s expression is not decoration; it’s the reader’s emotional GPS. Action is timing, rhythm, the implied before-and-after that makes a still image feel like a sequence.
Context matters: Aragones comes out of a tradition where clarity is king because the joke has to survive reproduction, fast scanning, and language barriers. The advice doubles as a broader creative ethic: earn your chaos. Build the world first, then let the character misbehave inside it. That’s why his work feels simultaneously dense and instantly readable - it respects the audience’s attention by guiding it, then rewarding it.
The subtext is a gentle rebuke to anyone who wants to skip to “funny faces” without doing the storytelling work. Aragones, famous for wordless MAD margins and hyper-kinetic scenes, knows that exaggeration isn’t random. It’s calibrated. “Elaborate on expressions and action” is where the cartoonist performs: the micro-acting of ink. A character’s expression is not decoration; it’s the reader’s emotional GPS. Action is timing, rhythm, the implied before-and-after that makes a still image feel like a sequence.
Context matters: Aragones comes out of a tradition where clarity is king because the joke has to survive reproduction, fast scanning, and language barriers. The advice doubles as a broader creative ethic: earn your chaos. Build the world first, then let the character misbehave inside it. That’s why his work feels simultaneously dense and instantly readable - it respects the audience’s attention by guiding it, then rewarding it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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