#sophex

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.

Visual design 3.1 is officially underway, and after a very productive workshopping session on Tuesday (plus some work outside of class), Ethan and I are nearly done with our rough draft.

We decided that to start, Ethan would make a layout of the pages electronically, with me offering tips along the way. Then, I would sketch the pages on paper, figuring out the exact position of the text and roughly drawing out the characters and scenes (on the computer we used shapes as placeholders for the characters).

For our final draft, our plan is to draw the comic on paper. We think that if we pay attention to every detail and take our time while drawing, this will make the comic look more professional than it would if we tried to create it digitally. Also, for the first two projects our final product was digital, and we wanted to mix up our medium a bit.

One aspect of the comic that we are focusing on is the layout of the boxes and pages. We want to create a layout where it is intuitive to the reader which box they should look at next, but where it's not just a bunch of squares lined up in a row. Here are a few of our more interesting pages so far:

In the first image, we used a diagonal line to split the bottom two boxes, which makes them more dynamic. In the second image, the person drops a dumbbell, and it's spotted by another person "crawling" along the bottom of the page. In this way, the different scenes interact with one another.

For character design, we wanted our characters to be replicable and simple, but not as basic as stick figures. As Arnheim would say, we wanted our characters to be pictures; they should portray people in an inexact way by using their most important qualities (Arnheim 138). After some sketching, we settled on the final character design below as our baseline (it may be adjusted in the future):

We decided to feature two main narrators, with other people sprinkled into different scenes as needed. As the week goes on, we'll keep working on the comic, and I'll update you all with any interesting news!

Sources:

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!

Today I started the design 3 project.  Based on some of the key takeaways the from Design 2 project, such as the importance of planning, the team spent time on the storyboard and outlining what would be included on each page.  

In designing my 2 pages of the comic book on SophEx, I thought back to what made the McCloud comics so good and what made the Freud comics more difficult to read.  One of the key findings from those two readings, were that the more consistent art style of McCloud allowed the viewer to focus on the message without having to readjust to new art styles. By contrast, the constantly changing art style utilized by Appignanesi and Zarate required the viewer to make dramatic swings in thought process as each new style emerged.  However, applying this lesson was easier said than done.

Finding a consistent art style while finding stock images that conveyed a specific message was challenging.  Ultimately, after spending many hours searching through Shutterstock, I was able to find the appropriate images that were consistent enough to add to the message instead of detracting from it.  

Sources:

Appignanesi, Richard, and Oscar Zarate. “Toward the 'Death Instinct'.” Freud for Beginners, Pantheon Books/Random House, New York, 2003, pp. 144–168.  

McCloud, Scott. “Google on Google Chrome.” Google. 2008.