Michael Avon Oeming on Sequential Art

Comic book artist Michael Avon Oeming is best known for his work on Powers, which he co-created with Brian Michael Bendis. Despite his exagerrated and cartoonish style, Oeming excels in creating noirish cityscapes and troubled characters. Thus he is playing to his strengths in Powers (currently being developed for TV by FX) and Dark Horse Comics's The Victories.

In an interview with Sequential Highway, Oeming discussed how there are multiple ways to tell the same story and what makes comic books and sequential art unique with regards to storytelling:

JM: Do you find that sequential art provides you with near-limitless possibilities for storytelling or do you experience it as constraining?
MO: Pretty limitless. I could tell the same story three different times and never draw the same thing twice. There are so many choices. Do you want to approach a story really simply and straight forward? Do you want to take a more adventurous approach and find ways to break storytelling rules while creating new ones? What about the mood? What parts of the story do you want to emphasize? There are so many choices in telling a story and I love that. Only time and energy are constraints.

JM: What qualities or resources do you believe are most important for a sequential storyteller to have?
MO: The ability to lead the reader's eye, to invite the reader into visually reading a clear sequence of events. If you can tell a good story in your rough thumbnails without needing to use the art to "sell" it then that's a good storyteller.

Further information: sequentialhighway.com/