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I rarely do book reviews, but I would like to suggest that anyone interested in a career in comics get Andy Schmidt’s “The Insider’s Guide to Creating Comics and Graphic Novels,” published by Impact books. Most how-to books written for comics cover the same, well-trodden tracks and fail to impart anything new or interesting. In fact, it seems the common approach is divide comic how-to books up by genre, not by technique. So, you can find books how to draw cartoon superheroes, or zombies, or crime noir, or what have you, and they all essentially pedal the same information but couched in terms of individual genres. Schmidt’s book doesn’t do this.

Furthermore, Andy Schmidt’s book is written from an editor’s perspective, which is different than that of the penciler, inker, colorist, and/or letterer. The concerns he lays out are part of the whole storytelling experience, making for a sort of holistic approach to creating sequential art. He covers composition and staging quite well, and some of his opinions were illuminating even to me, after all the years I’ve done this. Then, he goes on to inking, coloring, and lettering, and the inevitable “breaking in” chapter.

This is not a “how to draw” book, but I do see it as potentially informative for cartoonists of just about any skill level. Schmidt’s writing is refreshingly straight forward and concise, and he has a way of making even complex topics clear. I give “The Insider’s Guide to Creating Comics and Graphic Novels” an A.

My position is that this comic is noir or at least nourish because of its moral ambiguity, urban setting, crime and criminals, and its celebration of doomed and/or fatalistic characters. We also have femme fatales, police, hard-luck heroes, brutal action, and gangsters (meta-villains, usually). Spire City is maze-like, all encompassing, a grimy urban chasm with no exits.

There are some ways that Johnny Saturn doesn’t fit the standard definitions of noir. For one, private investigators aren’t the main characters; police procedurals aren’t a plot standard for us; and the art is not high key chiaroscuro or black & white. Is that enough to disqualify us? I don’t believe so.

I’ve often stated that my personal specialty is noble, stoic characters with sad, fatalistic quests. As far as I’m concerned, Johnny Saturn is still as gritty and hardboiled as they come, so I’m sticking its noir title.