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-"