Self Reflection (mini comic)

The Minicomic assignment went through many phases in order to come to a completed work. However the hardest portions I found were the start and end of the process, although the middle was time consuming due to my lack of skill at drawing, it still lacked the ‘issues’ the bookends caused. All together it was an assignment that I have never experienced before on an academic level which provided moments of fun with moments of equal frustration.
As I mentioned the beginning portion was difficult for me. At first I wasn’t even able to come up with a personal story that I thought I’d be capable of drawing. Then when I did start coming up with ideas, I discarded a half a dozen before I came up with one that I felt was interesting enough and at the same time matched my skill set. Up to this point it may not have seemed like much but this actually took me quite some time to figure out as well as a lot of paper as I was mock sketching ideas as I went to try and focus on one plausible story. Once I did had what I thought would be a good idea, I started to doodle once again to try and make a frame for the beginning and end of the story so that the mini comic would not turn into a full on 32page with ads comic (I can be longwinded at times). I did a few pages of very, very rough sketching as well as some paragraph sketching for the details that I wasn’t quite sure how or what to draw. This process was fairly quick and then, as I do with most projects, I set it aside for a few days just to let the idea simmer to see if I could mentally structure the comic book in my mind before I started. This was probably one of the best things I could have done because the next day Professor Hatfield mentioned that for students who have never done a comic before, it is a good idea to lay out the structure as a rough draft before actually attempting the final version in case we ran into problems mid way. This comment saved me two plus hours of work for the reasons that will follow.
I began to take all my doodles and written description and laid out a roughly drawn page of nine panels. I decided on a fairly standard layout because I felt the structure matched the topic and that if I had gone with something that blended the panels or overlapped it would become overly complex. There may have been some moments that I could have considered overlap or blending but I don’t have the talent for something that advanced. So the layout I went with served its purpose. From here I began to fill in the panels with tentative sketches and word balloons and text panels to give me an idea of where the elements would fit the best. This part went fairly smoothly until I got mid way through my second page. I realized at this point that I had inverted some of the panels and that they distorted the story in the order I had drawn them in. This is where Professor Hatfield’s comment came in as an echo in the back of my head. If I had done this as a final draft I would had to have completely tossed the two pages I had nearly completed. But since it was a preliminary ‘dirty’ draft, I had not invested much time in the art work process.
The correction of the structural problem I ran into was as easy as redrawing one panel and using some arrows to indicate where I needed to place them for the final version. Once I had the two pages filled and was satisfied with the draft I went into the final phase of drawing. I drew in pencil. As bad as I am with pencil I’m even worse with a pen so to me that wasn’t an option. Yet this came back to haunt me after I had finished the process of converting my draft copy to a final version. I decided, last minute, to make my comic a digital rendition as opposed to a hard copy. This was a choice to save me money as well as possibly to make the drawings look better as a digital high quality picture instead of a photocopied piece. However this end process proved to be quite frustrating as I ran into issues at every step of the way. My first attempt to scan the hardcopy to my computer showed that half the drawing to be unscannable due to the lightness of the pencil as well as the fact that words at the top and bottom were cut off. This forced me to move some words on the panels as well as retrace half my work. It probably would have been better to have traced in pen but the finality of this option made me go with pencil again. This left me with a scanned copy that was half really dark and half normal but at least this time I could see the pictures and words. Once I had rescanned both pages and found them to be acceptable I attempted to upload them onto Blogger. Again I ran into more issues. The first three attempts left me with out of order miniature renditions of my scans. Once I sorted out the inversion and size, I ran into an issue of linking the two pages. After nearly forty minutes of repeated failure, I settled with two images on the same blog page that only required a single click to access.
For the most part, the end result came out better than I had expected. The story itself was fairly cohesive and the art work fairly recognizable although my choice of style helped aid this. Even though this was a nonfiction assignment, the art work did take on surrealistic qualities while still telling a real event. The anthropomorphizing of certain objects help me lower the detail that may have been needed for a real event as well as adding some hopefully humorous elements to the story. Likewise I was able to project ideas, emotions and thoughts onto the objects this way which helped relate the story better than realistic images could have. Beyond the few frustrating moments, this project wasn’t as bad as I had originally thought it would be.

Binky Brown

Maus

One of the biggest element that stands out with Maus is transition that takes place between book I and Book II. Maus I contains two frames of reference; one of the relationship between arty and his father (external frame) and then the story that his father tells of his experience in WWII (internal frame). Book II maintains this dual frame work yet introduces a third almost metacognitive frame in which Arty directly discusses his difficulty in writing the story. Another interesting moment happens on the opening page of book II where this meta fictive element comes into play. Art Spiegelman uses a visual metaphor by making his humans appear with animalistic elements. On page 11 there is a discussion between Arty and Francoise about which animal he will draw her as yet she appears already as a mouse on the page. This metaphor comes back to the forefront a few more times cognitively throughout Book II. On page 41 where Art's third frame presents itself, the characters are drawn all wearing appropriate masks. Then on page 50, an overlap of a character as a mouse/cat plays into the discussion of whether he was a Jew or a German non Jew. Even though these two conscious decisions, that of frames and visual metaphor, are used in his first book, the differences of these two elements in the second book become very interesting to analyze and compare to one another.

Mini comic

My Group

The group I was in had a few troubles with communication in the beginning so our project experienced a few bumps right off the get go. However once we got the communication aspect smoothed out, our group worked fairly well together and each person for the most part shared the weight of the assignment equally. As far as my specific role went, I helped organize how the presentation was broken up between the four of us and helped to facilitate continuous communication as far as our common goals and expectations of our fellow classmates went. Each of us was responsible for our individual power-point material, but Reid did an outstanding job of putting together the material into a cohesive final presentation. Even with conflicting schedules, we managed to meet a few times to discuss and when it wasn't possible we had plenty of further discussion through emails. The actual presentation went smoothly, was mostly concise (although I ended up getting long winded at one point)and followed how we intended it's organization to be communicated.

Chapter 5 Group Response

Synathesia. This idea was the most interesting aspect of Group 5's discussion. They started off with a good example of symbols by drawing on the board: :) vs $$ for instance. But where they really took of was when they discussed the finer points of senses and pictures and how it relates on a neurological level. There is definitely a relationship between senses in comics and that the choices of the artists are mostly intentional or at the very least a by product of standard sensory psychology that is commonly used unintentionally. They also hit on another interesting point that I didn't fully consider and that was the idea that words are also lines. This is obvious of course but I'm talking about the way lines function in comic art to describe and inform. The way a word is presented on the page can have just as much impact on a reader as the lines of the characters or other drawings on the same page if not more depending on the situation. Overall, group 5 did a good job of reviewing the chapter.