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If I say the words ‘comic strip’, what is your immediate association - Batman and Spiderman? Garfield? Peanuts? The Beano? Truth be told, comic strip art is an incredibly wide field, and just like any other discipline (say, illustration or portraiture) can be split into many diverse strands.

And yet, most people, in England, at least, dismiss comic strips as something they grew out of around age six. Famously, of course, this is not the case in France and Belgium, where, I have it on good authority, aisles of comic books are available for adults in every hypermarche; nor in Japan, whose Manga industry is world famous if not globally understood.

I need only tell you that in the streets of Spanish and Italian cities, one can pick up cartoon books of sex strips, to illustrate that this is emphatically not just a form reserved for youngsters.

Literary types among you may now be recalling the way that Maus was heralded as a new dawn of graphic art; and thinking, too, of those areas in chain bookshops marked ‘graphic novels’, where you can pick up V for Vendetta, Watchmen, or Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth. Maybe, too, you remember a publication named Deadline (surely you recall Tank Girl?), a monthly magazine of strip art which coincided with my university years, and which I can honestly say was as formative to who I am now as my degree course was*.

Might that offer you a hint that there is life beyond the Beano (although, not to dismiss this children’s comic - its artists and writers are held in very high esteem by those who have made a study of their lives)?

If I’ve persuaded you, and if the idea seems appealing, then why not consider the humble comic strip as an outlet for your creativity? If one thing’s for sure, it’s that they are the ideal channel for the tentative artist. No-one expects much when it’s ‘just’ a comic (perhaps because of the standards set by the single frame artists who had to come up with a joke and a picture day in day out… wait a minute, that sounds familiar…).

There are a few conventions you might want to consider before you wade in. I guess these conventions were instigated and strenghtened by daily newspaper strips and kids’ comics, so we have something to thank them for there too (not to mention the fact that most adults are cartoon-strip literate, not as simple a concept as you might expect).

• Action happens in panels which are read from left to right, top to bottom (in Western cultures, at least).
• Speech balloons are used for spoken words, bubbles for thoughts, jagged-line bubbles for exclamations. Sound effects can be written in bold on a slanted angle.
• A small rectangle top left of a panel can help move action on with words like ”then…’ or ’simultaneously…’
• If you keep in mind that cartoon strips are like films, you won’t go wrong with your pacing. Just like films, you can cut all the exposition and dull bits; you can have close-ups and longshots and clever plot devices like flashbacks. Even better than in film, your setting and characters can be anything you can draw, so while you’ll never get the budget together for an undersea film, you can draw it while you watch TV one evening.
• Colour or black and white, the choice is yours. Same with medium, although the traditional tool of choice is a dip pen and ink. I’m sure most cartoon artists are heading to the computer instead these days, though.
• Lettering is a profession in itself, but you can get a professional finish by downloading fonts at a site like Blambot.

These are the general rules, but, as in all forms of art, rules are made to be broken, and since comic strips are a longstanding and hugely diverse artform, they all have been, in ways that are both inventive and influential. If you look at political cartoons from the Georgian period, for example (and, living in Brighton, I can hardly fail to, each time I visit our famous Pavilion), you will see that speech balloons were not universally used, but other methods were used, and are quite comprehensible.

* Shut up, you at the back. I don’t mean ‘not at all’.