A Not-So-Mini-Comic

Allow me to preface this post by saying that I am in better spirits than I was when I last wrote. The reasons are several: I've gotten more caught up on schoolwork in the last few days than I thought I would; I stopped listening to emo music; I realized that I'm actually ahead in the reading for this class; and most importantly, my group's mini-comic isn't due until Monday. Yay!

On that subject, my mini-comic group met after class today. Nichol and I had roughed out most of the story elements in class before break, but we basically hadn't even started on the art or paneling stage. After spending a few hours just filling out the story and sketching the panels out, we decided to call it a day and reconvene to hopefully finish things up on Thursday. In theory, a little ten page comic doesn't sound like too much work, especially if you're not going to agonize over the art. However, there is a deceptively large amount of time and effort that goes into even the smallest of comics. Simply figuring out the story was a task unto itself. In such a project, there is a great deal of evolution and change that occurs to the story, even as the comic itself nears completion. There's always some other element that you could introduce, something that you want to explain better, or go into greater detail on. But when working in such a limited space, you just have to accept that you're not crafting a masterpiece.

For our comic, we made a conscious effort to include some more complicated forms of paneling. I'd say a good half of our comic eschews the traditional page of four to six rectangles arranged in neat order. Instead, we have a few cases where the entire page (or sometimes two) is devoted to a single, continuous scene. Interestingly, though, since our comic takes place in a mall, we realized that the multistory, side-by-side stores almost resemble the panels of a comic. This lends the effect of creating a page that almost looks like it's divided up into normal panels, but upon closer inspection, one can see that they are the individual stores. Anyway, I think it's pretty neat.