How to Draw Comic Animals

Drawing for Dummies

It goes without saying that when I was a kid, there was no YouTube. The closest thing Gen X had to a drawing mentor was Bob Ross, which was great if you wanted to paint “happy little trees” but not so much if you wanted to draw things like, oh, monkeys dropping water balloons onto sleeping cats. That’s where books like “How to Draw Comic Animals” came into play.

I don’t remember when or where I got “How to Draw Comic Animals” but I was probably in first or second grade. This was just one of five or six drawing books I owned as a kid, most of which were geared toward drawing comic-style animals.

Like most drawing books geared toward children, each animal is constructed through a series of steps. The first step typically involved drawing a circle for a head with arms and legs drawn with straight lines. The second frame would show the placement of a few more features, like eyes, ears, and noses. The third panel would be a completely finished drawing. I was pretty good at mastering steps one and two, but step three was always lost on me. The difference between steps two and three is the difference between putting a turkey in the oven and serving Thanksgiving dinner.

The idea behind these books was to show kids how to contruct an animal in one pose, which in theory would allow you to draw a character in any pose. That never seemed to be the case for me. I tried drawing monkeys doing all sorts of things, but the only ones that turned out looking good were the ones in which they were standing on something, about to drop a water balloon on someone else… just like the monkey ont he cover. Unsurprisingly, the number of comics you can work that scenario into is somewhat limited.

In middle school I actually used some of the skills presented in these books to draw comics for our school’s newspaper. I think my comics only ran when nobody else submitted anything. As they say, all animal comics are equal, but some animal comics are more equal than others.

One of the things I like the most about this book is the price printed in the uppoer right-hand corner: $1.25. For roughly the price as a tray of food in the school cafeteria, a kid could get a book full of drawing lessons — the only limits being a kid’s imagination and, at least in my case, a lack of talent.