The Secret Language of Comics

I was thinking about this Sunday Sketch while I was looking out a window in the pitch black night. This gave me the idea of a ghost haunting. Once I got the idea for the sketch, the hard part was deciding how to condense everything into only three panels, such that if you remove one the story would not make. I wanted to keep the comic simple yet colorful so that it can appeal to a wide audience and so that it is light hearted. This is a different style of comic from my story board, nonetheless it was very fun to draw.

I mentions in class that I used to draw little comics in middle school, this is a continuation of said comic. The characters, (Cat, Rat, and Bat) were self inserts of me and my two best friends at the time with Rat representing myself. They all had very simple designs and while I didn’t make many strips, they’d often end up in the margins of my homework. For this comic I decided to draw what happens to me and many others during the weekend.

Most people have probably seen this classic meme format (the center panel) where someone puts different labels on the people. I decided to make a comic showing the full story of what the man was actually looking at. The third panel reveals the woman is half Yoda from the back. This was my first Sunday sketch working with photoshop, and I think it went relatively well. I was able to successfully edit the pictures together, crop, and photoshop. This comic strip is different from previous Sunday sketches because now we are telling a story from a few shots. It also forced me to keep the story to the point which could help in condensing my literacy narrative comic.

For this sketch assignment, I wanted it to simple but meaningful. I had a totally different idea while going through Pinterest and finding a good photo. I was trying to find a photo that was landscape orientation, but Pinterest only had portrait photos. It take me forever to find a photo that I liked or was just the right amount of minimalistic that I wanted. The inspiration behind this sketch is the SAT tutoring scene from “Spinning” by Tillie Walden. In that scene, Tillie, the main character, was sexual assulated by her SAT tutor. I wanted to incorporated some essence of the scene in my sketch. I used Google Draw to add the boxes and frames. While thinking about the text, I wanted to keep it short but still impactful. I feel that this sketch can convey a lot of things, and because it is simple, it lets the viewers bring in their imagination to make it more complex. The dialogue could be put on another photo and still have the same meaning. I choose the bed photo because it hints to what may have happened.

When I first started brainstorming ideas for the triptych, I was not sure what I should think about. There were a variety of topics that I can create triptych about, but I ended up focusing on some of my personal stories. Some of my personal memories were difficult to think back on, and I wanted to switch a topic multiple times during my creative process. I think that was the most difficult part about creating my triptych, and as I gradually overcame some of my emotions, I was certain that I wanted to create a triptych about this specific piece of memory. Creating this sort of three panelled strip was difficult because each panel had to have a purpose. There is no space left to waste and each panel has to push the story forward. Therefore, deciding what to put on the panels was also difficult. The concise nature of the triptych is also the main difference between it and the other writings I have done this semester. There is space for error in the other types of writings, but for this, there is really no space for error.

I decided to take a lighthearted, comical approach when crafting my story. I partly took inspiration from the Nancy triptych mentioned in the prompt and another triptych I came across that showed the struggle of a chocolate chip cookie actually being an oatmeal raisin cookie. I brainstormed situations in which there would be a fun surprise in the third panel and settled on a relatable awkward but laughable situation of someone “accidentally” eating someone else’s food. It was easy for me to come up with the components of each panel however I struggled with making the ending easily understood but not too obvious. I decided to use a zoomed-in perspective so that the reader can see the thief’s reaction and the subtle clue on the food container. This sketch was similar to previous writing in that our literacy narrative comics needed to be condensed forms of a larger story. This sketch differed in that we had an even more limited space (only 3 frames) to express a whole story.

It was hard to make a single image containing three frames and one picture, since I wanted to use only one picture like the triptych that I saw on A softer world. I used two different apps, Pixlr and Notability, to create my frames and used Flickr to search for a picture that goes well with my text. I wanted to write and express something that I have experienced in my life. I tried to show how I felt when everything I did collapsed because of one mistake I made, even though I did so hard on everything else. I spent a quite long time writing those sentences and choosing an image that correlates to my feeling. Crafting this sort of comic strip was easier, but also harder compared to other writing I have done this semester. At first, I felt it easy to write three short sentences. However, the shorter the sentence, the more impactful it had to be, so it was not as easy as I thought, since I needed more creativity.