It’s easy to point out when a comic does something wrong. Well, not easy. What’s the word? Fun. With this column, I hope to point out when a comic does something right, and try to explain how it happened. Might be useful. And I’m qualified to talk about it because…well, I’m not. But I’m loud and opinionated, and this is the Internet, so what more do you want?

So. This month I want to talk a little about developing a style. In comics, all too often, style gets the fuzzy end of the lollipop. In professional and fan circles alike, people act like there’s a right way and a wrong way to draw, and if you draw the wrong way, you’re a bad artist. Trouble is, the “right” way is often not very good. A lot of aspiring webcartoonists draw from their favorite comics or from instructional books rather than from life, and they learn a system before they develop a style. Whether they crib from How To Draw Comics the Marvel Way or How To Draw Manga: Maids and Miko, the results are the same: art that doesn’t have much connection to reality, and doesn’t strongly reflect the artist’s own sensibilities.

Well, so what? It looks good, doesn’t it? Yes, to an extent – but if you don’t draw from life and from a personal perspective, sooner or later you’ll hit a wall that mere technique cannot breach. Sooner or later, if you want to keep improving, you’ll need to stop drawing the way other people draw, and start drawing the way you draw. Yes, the other way looks better, more polished, more impressive – now. But eventually… well…

I’m going to talk about Tom Hart, because I know his work extremely well; I’ve liked his comics since I was a dumb teenager, and I’ve even worked with him on occasion. And that’s why I’m so surprised that he’s still surprising me.

Tom Hart has been drawing comics for a pretty long time. Not a really long time, but pretty long. He got his start in the early 1990s, in the Seattle minicomics scene; his minicomic Love Looks Left is often cited as one of the best of the hand-stapled photocopies. He won one of the earliest Xeric Grants for self-publishing, in 1994. With it, he published Hutch Owen’s Working Hard, featuring his most enduring character, angry bum and philosophical rabble-rouser Hutch Owen. Over the next few years, Hart published an assortment of comics and minicomics as well as two graphic novels, Banks/Eubanks and The Sands. When Modern Tales launched, Hart was on its initial roster of cartoonists, drawing Hutch Owen as a webcomic before publishing it in print. Later, he drew a daily webcomic, Trunktown, which I scripted. Throughout, Hart’s great strength has been his muscular, poetic dialogue. Writing about his work for The Comics Journal in 2003, Tom Spurgeon commented, “In a field historically dominated by artwork that can stand alone as illustration, Tom Hart gives us comics where the words can be isolated as poetry.” (“Working Hard: The Comics of Tom Hart.” The Comics Journal Special Edition, Volume 3, Winter 2003.)

High praise…but also, perhaps, a backhanded compliment. As Spurgeon knows, Hart’s artwork, for the most part, has not been artwork that can stand alone as illustration. It has seldom been beautiful. He is not an artist noted for polished craft. His early minicomics seethe with rough shapes rendered in thick, angry lines, sometimes only passably recognizable as roundish faces or potato-sack figures. By the time he drew his graphic novels, Hart had refined this crude attack on the page into a more personal and deliberate style, but it was a stark, simple style, designed to tell his stories effectively and with little visual embellishment. It is not bad art. Almost from the beginning, Hart has had a distinctive way of drawing and an eye for visual styles that complement his writing. Hutch Owen is typically drawn in wavering, sketchy lines that suggest urban graffiti and Hutch’s constantly-simmering anger. The gentle protagonist and dreamlike story of The Sands are accompanied by smoother art and washes of contemplative white space. These comics are perhaps not the work of a great artist, but they are the work of a great cartoonist. There’s a difference.

It’s not art that most readers, or most critics, admire. It’s crude and quirky and weird. But it’s unique. Hart has his influences – Charles Schulz, indie cartoonist Glen Dakin, illustrator Tove Janssen – but he wears them lightly. His drawings are indisputably his. And he’s kept drawing. There have been times when Hart has not seemed to push himself visually; he’s over-fond, perhaps, of the talking – or, more typically, screaming – head. But he loves art. He teaches art. He studies it. In recent years, he’s been making a study of old comic strips, which I know because, every few months, he calls or emails me, bursting with excitement over Thimble Theatre or Polly and Her Pals or early Doonesbury.

He’s been studying the real world, too. Which I know because I read his Hutch Owen webstrip.

Look at the panel above from the week of February 7. After contenting himself for many weeks with close-ups of the characters, Hart widens his lens and draws shaky, sketchy, utterly arresting urban landscapes. The duotone color scheme he’s chosen for the Hutch strip adds just enough color and texture to his drawings; it’s burnt orange this week, a good choice for bridges and underpasses and piles of junk. Everything in these drawings looks like it belongs to the Hutch universe; nothing is overstudied or underdrawn or in any way out of place. Tom Hart is not a craftsman. He probably can’t produce a slick pinup to save his life. But at this point, he can draw like a demon when he wants to.

This is why you want to develop a style. This is why you want to eschew how-to-draw manuals and stop copying your favorite manga characters, and start studying old art and looking hard at the world and pushing yourself, constantly pushing through frustration and despair. This is why you want to stake out your own territory, even if it doesn’t look as polished or as finished or as good as other people’s. No one will ever make New York look exactly the way Tom Hart makes it look in these strips. These are Tom Hart’s comics. Nobody else’s.

And, frankly, that’s the only reason to draw.