Webcomic Concept

This was a pretty tough assignment since I feel like I don't really have the attention span to keep up with a single comic in a regular basis, so I chose to make a small sort of gag comic that would be short and simple but would have some sort of an arch.

This is about two garden gnome brothers in the search for freshly baked goods. The older brother Gnomer pushes his brother Darts around to find food for himself but it often backfires. This is more than a test comic if anything but i feel like it roughly conveys what i would want to do if i ever ran a webcomic.

Superheroes Reconsidered

Many modern heroes are kind of stemmed through some sort of relatability and humor. Take heroes such as One Punch Man or Deadpool that are both characters that have some humor to them and they themselves have a very human personality (as opposed to god-like heroes like Superman which might be difficult to relate with.

I wanted to try to capture the modernity and relatable qualities specifically by making a powerful hero into a somewhat coy college student.

Female Representation in Comics

I mainly wanted to focus on a big problem for women today (and before) and that is sort of how women are viewed as unequal when it comes to jobs or positions of power. The wage gap issue has been discussed more often now than any other time period and I wanted to elaborate on that.

I wanted to have a female character in a certain genre trope that women often don't get to be placed on. Westerns many times have strong female characters but they normally serve a different purpose, as opposed to the protagonist (unfortunately they're normally romantic interests). I've seen some media where the norm is broken for female characters which I always admire ( films like True Grit). I also like to make characters weird so these people are cactus people (that's why they have thorns all around them).

Comics in Contemporary Literature

"Every since I was a child, I always loved cartoons, and as an adult I crave for more wacky zany stuff in media. However it feels as if in comics its been sort of dulled down to pastel color simple characters or overly serious or realistic stories. I'm not against any of that, but I always wanted a comic that would represent my taste in media. I wanted to tap into exaggeration, expression and of course caricature."

Manga

The comic directly references both Shoujo manga (Romance or Slice of Life novels) and Shonen (Action novels). I wanted to place two characters that wouldn't normally star in a manga (american otaku) and satirize nerd culture by using typical banter you would find in a poorly written manga. I also referenced certain effects used to increase the emotion or action of the story (speed lines, shadows, etc.)

Wide World of Comics

For the week, I read many of the Blacksad graphic novels. However, since I'm taking the cartoonist track, I found it unfeasible to re-create the style (Disney quality style + watercolors). So I chose to recreate the much more feasible Persepolis style instead.

I've read Marjane Satrapi's graphic novels various times and always enjoyed her flat yet simple style. Her drawings are very graphic and simple which complement the simple and honest storytelling Satrapi uses to tell the story of her life.

I wanted to recreate her very "slice of life" sort of stories while trying to match her tendency to make certain panels very flat and sometimes floaty. The bottom panel, where the character is laying on the floor which is covered in school materials, is somewhat inspired by the panel where Marjane, as a young child renounces god and is left alone in a  floating void. Simple character designs are another thing I applied to this comic since Persepolis uses very subtle uses of lines to create an accurate depiction of real life people (for example, how Marjane as an adult in the comic always has a beauty mark, or characters with light eyes always have a ring around their pupils)

Ethics and Representation - Caperucita Roja

When it comes to person of color (or POC) representation in media, I feel like there's two ways to do it. You either use the culture to depict the story and characters are therefore representing said culture and ethnicity, or you can simply make a character of a certain ethnicity. Both are viable ways to represent cultures and ethnicities in different respects.

Certain media (like The Princess and the Frog film) take full advantage of the culture and ethnicities its based upon in a non-derogatory way. I'm personally am a big fan of inserting cultures into media, which is what I did.

I took the story of Little Red Riding Hood and applied the basic principles to Mexican culture. I even made the text in Spanish (although it might lack some common Mexican slang since I'm Puertorrican) since i'm always bothered by media where characters of a certain culture all speak English just for the sake of having them communicate perfectly with english speaking characters. Comics like Jonah Hex often have at the very least some sayings in the original language of certain characters (whether they be Mexican or certain languages of Native Americans) which I can appreciate.

Again, this is simply the Little Red Riding Hood story, applied to a specific culture (with a bit of a twist in the female character who is not as gullible as other versions of the story).

Text Translation:

"Hey little girl... What are you carrying in the basket?"

"Tamales... but they're not for you!"

"Not even just a little o-"

Authority

Are there any prominent symbols in the story?
If so what are they and how are they used.

The beginning of issue #1 features an antagonist who uses the symbol of his slaughtered homeland as a symbol of ownership. The comic then uses this symbol as some sort of indication of terrorism, by placing the symbol on all of the "superhumans" destroying the major cities. There are also connotations of Omnipotence in the main characters with powers.

What connections did you make with the story? Discuss the elements so the work that you were able to connect.

It very much felt like its another incarnation of superhero teams such as The Avengers and The Justice League, (There are clear similarities to Batman and Superman in the team), except they feel otherworldly and almost godlike. They float around in a large and very powerful vessel. However, they seem to question one another's intentions and morals at times making them into flawed characters with godlike powers. The comic very much felt like it was about balance of power and responsibility, because of how this team is so incredibly omnipotent.

What changes would you make to adapt this story into another medium. What media would you use? What changes would you make?

For the sake of clarity, I would most likely add more backstory before the actual plot unfolds. This comic is made up of previously established characters I believe and they sort of drop you into the relationship between certain characters rather harshly. I suppose for the sake of deriving from the obvious choice of media adaptation, (film), I could see this adapted in animation (be it a feature length film or a series. Another change I might insert, if it were film, is I would tone it down for the sake of feasibility. Many of the audience, who are new to the series, might find a ton of characters with god-like powers a bit overwhelming. Comics and Film can derive from traditional storytelling a lot but it might be considered bad storytelling to just dump 20 or so characters on a new type of audience.

Art Spiegelman's "Maus"

Maus seems to focus on a lot of narrative, and doesn't prioritize the drawings as much as the story being told so alot of Art Spiegelman's drawings in this specific novel are quite simplistic. He uses icons to depict his characters as animals with a few lines (as opposed to comics like "BlackSad" which goes past simplistic style). That being said Spiegelman's depiction of his father's pained journey through a simple style, has become iconic. I tried to do something similar by briefly depicting some facts about my grandparents' escape from Fidel Castro's governing.

Underground Comix & Robert Crumb

I was inspired by Robert Crumb’s cross hatching style and tendency to over-detail crude drawings. I also focused on a lot of his “inflated” sort of stylizations (Keep on Truckin’, Fritz the Cat, Mr. Natural) as opposed to his more near realistic, and darker works. I was also inspired by other underground comics that aimed at cartoonier yet adult sort of styles (Freak Brothers).

Will Eisner

Eisner’s work tends to have rather realistic characters (although simplified and exaggerated to some extent for appeal’s sake) and very dramatic lighting (or inking in this case). Thick lines emphasize a very dramatic mood (be it noir or action) in his work. I mainly used his detective type comics, which seems highly inspired by 1940’s noir cinematography, as reference to my comic.

Carl Barks

This comic page was inspired by Carl Bark's work, specifically his Scrooge McDuck and Donald Duck comics. I mainly focused on what kind of characters he often included in the comics, his stylization and how most pages of his comics (although are part of a recurring story) end with a sort of joke, or conflict.

Comic Strips

This is inspired by Popeye comic strips specifically. Not just inspired by the sailor theme however, I mainly focused on the slang or visual language they often went with. A lot of strips back int he day have very slurred sort of dialogue with tons of abbreviations (which make you want to read it out loud) and many of them (Like Popeye) had speed lines and sound effects illustrated in the strip.

The joke isn't all too great in this, but most comic strips back then have rather formulaic gags, as opposed to modern gag comics (such as Kate Beaton's work and KC Green's Gunshow). Comic strips tend to be formed by a set up, a conflict and then a punchline or pay off.

Comics Theory

Unlike the “silent” graphic novel I wrote about in my last post, I made a “gag” sort of silent 4-panel comic. I studied “Understanding Comics” by Scott McCloud and what grabbed me was the different type of transitions. This strip uses a “Aspect to Aspect” transition, since it focuses on different things in a place. McCloud also describes the importance of other aspects in comics such as icons. 

Also, creating a wordless comic sort of taught me about how important it is to be clear and to not depend on the safety of text when creating a visual story.

"Silent Comics"

Shaun Tan’s “The Arrival” is a “silent” graphic novel about a man escaping a country and beginning a new life in a foreign land. What I mean by silent is that the novel is completely made up of images in a sequence, with no clear indication of sound or speech and no text whatsoever (except in books with foreign language in the story). What mainly drives the story and helps put the pieces together is experience and sequence. Sequence gives the images a correlation to each other and strings the story along where as experience pieces everything together for the viewer.

Experience, specifically is the main reason why we can read a “silent” and make sense of it. The book is intended for an adult audience, so those who read it are expected to be adults, who have experienced or have heard of experiences similar to those in the book. This allows the audience to piece the story together by relating experiences to those depicted in the novel. Children or a people of a younger generation might not get this book, however, due to the lack of experience or knowledge compared to one who has experienced this or known about it through voices of those who did.

The novel itself is an allusion to Italian, Jewish and other immigrants who came to America to escape problems in their country, such as the Nazi regime. The book however, is universal; the foreign land the immigrants go to has a cryptic language, strange landscapes and strange customs. The book purposefully places you in the immigrants’ point of view regardless of the audience’s language or nationality.

A comic only needs a sequence of images to be considered a comic, and “The Arrival” proves this tenfold. By depicting experiences or characters the audience can relate to, the story becomes clear and the emotion and action begins to make sense to the reader with or without the use of extraneous text.