#gompei

After taking all of your suggestions and peer reviews into consideration, we finally finished the final draft of the comic! It took a lot longer than I expected, but I’m thoroughly happy with the results!

One thing that we changed was the perspectives in each shot and panel. Instead of having Gompei in every panel, we decided to spice things up after Prof.’s suggestion! And from that, we were able to diversify each page with a lot more interesting drawings.

Additionally, we took inspiration from Freud for Beginners by Richard Appignanesi and Oscar Zarate. Like how they made collages instead of always having the “standard” comic style. Likewise, I took big inspiration from the statue The Thinker.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thinker

"Gompei’s SophEx Adventure!” pg 2.

Instead of collaging like them, I drew it out to keep the drawing style consistent in the comic. To add some WPI spice, I gave it the SAS shirt and cap!

Overall, to connect it to Scott McCloud’s Show and Tell, our comic uses word-specific, duo-specific, and interdependent relations with words and images. Here are some examples in the comic!

“Gompei’s SophEx Adventure!” pg 2. Word-specific.

“Gompei’s SophEx Adventure!” pg 1. Interdependent.

We were aiming for more interdependent panels, but got swept up in telling the story. I don’t think it took anything away from it though! 

Reflecting back on the quarter, this is by far the funnest (yes, funnest is a word) project in Visual Rhetoric. I was able to engage a lot more with the readings, mostly because it was a lot easier to digest. The comic was a lot more flexible too. It probably took the most time, but with the finished product, I didn’t mind too much.

With our new project, I found it really daunting to even start it. I had little to no info about SophEx, and from what I heard, it was a complete flop. I remember it was brought up at the mental health awareness town hall as being a lazy attempt at giving the class of 2024. With all that, I knew that painting this all in a good light was going to be a toughie.

To give it a more personal feel, we emulated the narration that Scott McCloud’s comics had, replacing him in Show and Tell and Brian Rakowski in Google Chrome with Gompei! We thought it’d be best to have him because Gompei’s pretty iconic to WPI, and he’s a very neutral-to-positive-lighted character in the community. He’s also timeless. Additionally, we thought that it’d be more like a story, which is something McCloud discussed in Show and Tell. 

Before actually beginning the story boarding process, we first had to figure out what information to put in the comic. After filtering it all out, we began! To set the scene, we started out by giving context to why SophEx was created. Then we went into the topic communities and the goals. From there, we finally talked about the events that happened and related them to the goals SophEx wanted to pursue! We are still drafting up the ending, but we plan to conclude with the impact that SophEx has had on the community. We’re unsure of how we’re going to do that, but hopefully there’s some data or info on the WPI instagram page that will show us! Let me know what you guys think and if y’all have any ideas!

So every year at my school, our SuperFan shirts have a slogan put on the back that has to do with either goats (which is our university's mascot), engineering, or technology.

But goats are more fun.

In the past, slogans have included:

"BUILT GOAT TOUGH"

"Let's get Technical"

"Give 'em the Goat"

"Goat so hard Engineers wanna find me"

I have faith that Tumblr can do better :)