A Journey in Comics

Sneak preview? Sneak preview!!

This is the first page of my final comic for class! It’s also the only fully colored page of the comic (for now). I decided that, for the purpose of the project, it would be best to use the first page as the “splash” page and color it, leaving the rest uncolored. I am no digital artist, and coloring this page alone took me close to 4 hours.

The technique of having a splash page be a page of the comic itself is relatively popular/common in Japanese manga, though the splash page is usually reserved for a large center-fold, or it takes up the first two or three pages of the comic instead.

I used flat colors with selective blending and coloring because, I’ll be honest, this digital coloring was mostly experimentation.

Anyway, this isn’t an official journal post or anything, I’m just too excited about this project to resist sharing it.

For the final journal, I thought I would try to have some fun, and follow a tutorial for how to draw a cartoon body! The tutorial I followed can be found here.

Here’s what my final result looked like:

I decided to go with fanart, because it’s a little more relaxing than drawing a totally new character from scratch. I ended up with Leo from Fire Emblem: Fates; one of my favorites, and the first that came to mind.

Following the tutorial felt odd, since it only became a true step-by-step in the end. It was helpful, though, as far as getting proportions for bodies down a little more solidly. I’d have to look at a few more resources before I became totally satisfied, especially when it comes to building clothes off of the body separately from drafting the skeleton for the body itself. And yes, I know I did conveniently hide the hands, but it’s in-character for him to stand that way.

Workshop Task 3: Gestures and Facial Expressions

When I worked on the adaptation project, I was a little loose in my planning: I had a vague idea of what I wanted to do, so I mapped it out, tried to place the text, and then went for it on the real deal immediately. When working through my final project, I noticed I was planning things much more meticulously. I spent a much larger amount of time on my thumbnails, focusing on creating a grammar for the comic and generating the dialogue and text that the comic would contain. I think, in general, the final project has had more prep work done to it: we created character sketches, workshopped thumbnails, and have been tasked to draw expressions and hands for our characters. We’ve taken a lot of class time to workshop our ideas with each other, so overall, I’ve ended up feeling more prepared.

Workshops Day 3 & 4

These two workshop days were productive as well! I was a little nervous about the layout of my panel, and the first day (Day 3, in this case) was the most helpful for that sort of thing. My group felt that my comic was understandable to read, that my placement of bubbles worked out well, and that it looked like I had a good setup for the rest of the pages.

Workshop Task #2: Thumbnails

The two workshop days were very productive for me! I came in with a few basic questions, and I made sure that I went last for both of my groups. Unfortunately, that only gave me about 5 minutes to run through my story and ask my questions, but it ended up working out. My groupmates were excited about my idea, which gave me the motivation to keep going through with it.

The first day was by far more helpful for me—mostly because I had a larger question. My story, based on an old video game idea I developed, is already completely written out. I had to decide what section of it to excerpt for the sake of this class’ comic. My group mates helped me pick a section that would be a good preview, of sorts, for the rest of the comic. It focuses on introducing the third prophetic hero, which gives some backstory to him while keeping the general plot on the sidelines.

Mapping out my thumbnails, it still might turn out to be a 5-6 page comic. I’m afraid I won’t have enough time to experiment with digital coloring, so I’ll have to try and up my game with colored pencils. I hope it works out!

Workshop Task #1: Character Sketches

This week’s workshop task asked for us to take a whole sheet of paper, and fill it up with poses that help define our protagonists for our upcoming final project. What’s funny is that, normally, I’d love to have attempted a full range of motion: my character swinging his spear, or actually taking the moment to reach out and perform magic. It would look almost like a second of animation, broken down into so many frames. However, my sketchbook isn’t that large, and I realized I was more comfortable drawing much larger than I anticipated. As a result, I only drew my character 6 times instead of the 10 or more times I wanted to. Trying to build up solid muscle memory of how to draw a character is tough! I feel like I need to do this again, maybe even with my other characters.

So, here, we have one of 3 main protagonists: Prince Neros! I created him last semester for my Writing for Video Games class. He’s an ice-powered prince who has been cursed by the gods of his homeland, and he needs to get together with his childhood friend from the woods to figure out why this curse has fallen upon them, and what they can do to stop it. It turns out that he and his friend are two of the three heroes of the prophecy, and they must collect the third hero before they can conquer evil. They recruit that third character, and ultimately discover the source of the evil and, through the power of friendship and teamwork, save their world.

If it sounds a little bare-bones, that’s because this really isn’t even the half of it. If you’d like to know more, my whole game bible is available to read here.

The excerpt of the story that I’d like to most explore is when two of the main characters, Prince Neros and Princess Anthea, first meet the Water Oracle, Pegaios. Pegaios tells them what he knows of the prophecy, and directs the heroes where to go next. I’ve already mapped out this story in a screenplay-esque style in my Mission Level Script for the game class, and I think it would be a good excerpt because my audience here (the professor and my fellow students) have never seen or heard all about the game. This way, it provides exposition and context where there would usually be none.

In the beginning of the semester, I had debated doing a comic for the end of class based on the original concept I created for my video game from Writing for Video Games this past fall. I’m still strongly attached to that idea, but I’m questioning myself. I don’t know if any particular part of the story can fit into just 4 pages of comic space. Beyond that, I don’t know if my message will be strong enough to come through in the short amount of time there. I may have to start earlier and draw more, maybe developing a slightly longer comic to satisfy the desire to have a good message come across. There are a lot of different moments I could focus on in this story—like when my three protagonists go to the Underworld to confront the god that resides there, and they learn of the truth behind the curse on their homeland. Or, I could fast-forward all the way to the end of the story, and show the ending, where the heroes are struggling to leave each other after forging such a strong bond over the course of the game. I have plenty of options, and the story is entirely outlined for myself if I ever need to reference it.

My other issue with this is that, to some degree, it feels like a cop-out. Like, most of my fellow students will be tasked with developing entirely new, original characters from the ground. Then, they’ll be developing how they look, what their expressions are, how their body moves. And of course, they need to build a world and a story for those characters to live in and go through. Now, that can be a different level of effort for everyone, but if I use my game’s world, I already have a world, characters, and story all set up and designed. I may use the opportunity to re-design my main characters’ outfits, and truly develop the way they look when in motion. I can always move past my issue of it feeling like a cop-out, and just devote more energy to polishing whatever excerpt of the story I decide to turn into a comic.

Discovery Task 10: The Final Discovery Task

This week, we worked from a script for an illustrator based on a selected page of Will Eisner’s Dropsie Avenue. We had to write the script, trade with a classmate, and then draw their script to the best of our ability. Our professor said that, with the right script, even if we don’t match the page exactly, we’ll match the spirit of the page. I’m not entirely sure I nailed that—with only having 5 minutes to create panels based on the provided script, I panicked and my on-the-fly brainstorming part of my brain flew out the window. I resorted to this Ivan Brunetti style of drawing, with stick arms and shaped bodies and heads.

There was a lot of dialogue to fit in here, and it reminded me of how much Dropsie Avenue really was to read. The way Eisner was able to fit so much text on each page was a feat not easily done by comic artists. The added bonus is that Eisner writes the script for his own drawings, something that’s rarely done in the industry anymore.

This semester, one of the comics we read was Hawkeye Vol 2: Little Hits, and I very thoroughly enjoyed it. There was so much to learn from a comic like that, even though there are many parts of it that go beyond my present skill level. I have a lot of things from it that I’d like to steal from in the future, for sure (like the coloring strategies, and how heavily they used icons during the Pizza Dog issue); for now, though, I’d like to take a look at this page:

What I really love about this page is how absolutely average the dialogue is. Here, we have 3 of The Avengers: Hawkeye, Wolverine, and Spider-man, and they’ve just finished cleaning up some unsavory baddies. The action that did take place only took place in about a panel or two, and the rest of the time is devoted to regular discussion—even of a TV show airing in-universe—followed by Clint (Hawkeye) deciding he needs to take some holiday time off. It humanizes the superheroes and takes them away from the typical superhero persona that we’re so used to seeing them attached to. So often we see the “double life” affect at play: where a character has their “normal” life—like Spider-man is Peter Parker—and then the distinctive, action-packed, baddie-punching, city-saving life. What a scene like this does for a reader is that it takes the action-packed superhero life and slows it down to some coworkers having an off-topic discussion on the job. This flows with the rest of the theme of this comic’s issues, where they’re playing off of the joke that Clint Barton is the most average superhero of all the Avengers.

There are a lot of things that I really love about this page: the colors, save for the costumes of Wolverine and Spider-man, are desaturated, so it ends up resembling a scene in real life more than an animated/2D version of it; I think it’s more realistic coloration mostly because it’s snowing in these panels, and snow doesn’t typically leave a bright and sunny-looking atmosphere around it. It’s often cloudy, or gray, and this page really nails that. The panel arrangement has some white space around the middle bits, which to me feel like spaces in time where the reader is forced to slow down. When we’re forced to slow down like that, it tricks our brains a little to match the pace of a conversation we’d have with our colleagues. They also make Clint relatable to a modern audience by having him plug his ears and talk over the spoilers that are being discussed around him. With binge-watching so fervent among people our age, it makes spoilers harder to avoid—since so many people will binge an entire show the day it drops on Netflix.

From the Comic Tools article selection, I chose to read “Using Light,” because light is something I always neglect in my comics and art as a whole. It scares me, as it has scared me for several years now. I know that once I learn my way around lighting and shading I’ll become a better artist but at this moment, some of it absolutely boggles my mind. So, I went into this article to try to learn something.

It boils down to a very basic tutorial on light, but what surprised me initially was that it wasn’t just about light in art: it was also about the light in your room that you draw in. What’s incredible is that I, like the artist, had been incidentally drawing where the light was correctly placed for the entire duration of this class. But knowing where to place a lamp in the future is undoubtedly going to be helpful to me.

I liked how brief some of the advice was, such as the very first point: “Generally, thin lines facing the light source, thick lines facing away.” I want to implement this into my own art and hopefully it’ll give it a far more dynamic outcome. I always struggle over where to place a light source when it isn’t obviously depicted, so having some ideas on how to tackle the art part of this can help me decide where to place lights in my comics from now on.

As I’ve continued drawing throughout this course, my process hasn’t changed a whole lot from where it started. I pencil down my roughs, add more detail as I go, and I ink it last. However, coming into the Adaptation Project I knew I had to provide more planning for myself so I could have more solid ground when I started making the actual comic itself. Therefore, I decided to take a page out of my notebook and save it for rough thumbnails of each page, drawing stick figures and rough ideas for each panel on a small scale so I could get the idea of what I wanted to put where. I even put where the empty text boxes would ideally go, marked with a number matching dialogue I had written on a separate page.

The art always comes first for me, because the text is something I’m always constantly reworking in my head until I pen it out on the final page. I guess this has to do with the writer in me, since writers, when given the chance, are prone to working and re-working their text until the very last minute possible.

Because my actual process hasn’t changed as much as I’ve expected, the amount of time I’ve taken to produce my comics has gone down drastically. At the start of the semester, it would take me upwards of 3 hours to brainstorm, draft, pencil, and ink a comic. Now, it can take me as little as 30 minutes and an hour at most, depending on the complexity I try to introduce into the comic. On that note, I can add more complexity to a comic and take the same amount of time that I used to take at the beginning of the class, which has been encouraging me to try new things, or draw more detailed things.

For our upcoming Adaptation Project, I’ve already settled on a text I’d really like to adapt, which is William Carlos Williams’ poem “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.” It’s a short poem that is accompanied by a painting by Pieter Brueghel called “The Fall of Icarus,” which depicts an imagined scene on a hilltop with Icarus drowning far in the distance.

I knew from the beginning that I wanted to do a poem, because I didn’t trust myself with a video or something else with blatant visual aid, because I thought I would draw too much from it, and become too faithful to the original work and not add my own spin at all. What I like about poetry is its ability to be interpreted in numerous different ways, with many different messages and characters laced throughout. “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” does have the painting paired alongside it, so at first I was hesitant to pick it, but in the end I went for it, because I remembered the poem and painting from a class discussion in my senior year of high school. Seeing it again on the adaptation list gave me a nostalgic feeling, and I was inclined to follow.

I’ve been puzzling over exactly how I want to lay out this comic, and I feel like dozens of ideas are buzzing around my head. I’m going to have to expand upon the text—the poem is quite short, which is a constraint when it comes to adaptation. Often we talk about adaptations in terms of taking something larger and cutting it down to size, but in my case, I’m taking something smaller and blowing it up to be viewed by more people.

My audience, I think, will be teenagers/young adults who have had little experience with Icarus’ story. I’ve been playing around with the idea of expanding on the poem such that I’ll add visuals or story to show more of Icarus’ tale, to provide more context for people who are vastly unfamiliar with the original subject matter of the painting and the poem. In a way, my adaptation of this poem is like adapting an adaptation of an adaptation (wow), since the poem and the painting are adaptations of Icarus’ story.

Discovery Task 9: Maps and Diagrams

I had a good bit of trouble with this discovery task. I went back to some strategies I used in the beginning of this class—an almost Scott McCloud-like self-inserted narrator—to propel myself forward and give a solid idea.

The fact that I remained focused enough away from my Nintendo Switch to generate this comic today is a feat in and of itself. I played the new Zelda game on the new console all weekend, and it goes without saying that I’m glad spring break is soon. I’ve had a busy first few months of the year, and I need a break—it’s starting to show a bit in my artwork, I think.

I do quite like “brain breakdowns,” though; I’ve seen a lot of them in webcomics and such, done in all kinds of different ways. Making my own I found it was quite hard to try and represent things using icons more than just text, since I’m so word-based and word-driven in every other aspect of my life. A good challenge overall!

Discovery Task 8: Travel Comic

I enjoy how this turned out! Unlike last week, where my sickness was clouding most of my judgement, I feel like my head was much clearer and this turned out nearly perfect to how I imagined. I used three different images to re-create the vibe of this space; the Gaylord International Hotel in National Harbor, Maryland. I travelled there two weeks ago and I was blown away by the beauty of some of the areas around the harbor and in the hotel. For attendees of the particular event I attended, Katsucon, the gazebo in the first panel is an iconic location, in high demand for photoshoots. The other two panels are scenes from outside, showing the ferris wheel and harbor, and a few of some taller grass with the hotel in the background.

I don’t know if an “outsider” would be able to fully grasp the essence of this location, but I do think they’d be able to recognize it from this comic if they drove past it in person. I don’t think I’ve quite nailed the scale of the place, that’s for sure—backgrounds are my nemesis as an artist. I think I got the mood almost right, though that is also hard to nail. Because I was at the hotel for an event, I threw in a cosplayer at the last panel (with some commentary), and I’m not sure if I’ve managed to capture the essence of the event with that one panel. At Katsucon, there are cosplayers everywhere, and of course I simply don’t have the skill to accurately draw/represent the sheer mass of people in costume that were milling about the hotel. That, and the amount of people does somewhat distract from the beauty of the place—something I wanted to draw more upon here.