Gypsy the Munchkin Cat

If I were to make a webcomic it would be about my cat Gypsy and all the stuff he does. the internet loves cats so I feel like it'd be a hit. Also in its short format and concept it'd be easy to update often and quickly so I would be able to get more pages done on a weekly basis.

Looking good ladies!~

Another comic based on things that have actually happened to me and friends while walking anywhere at anytime of day or day of the week. This comic is 'female friendly' because it's about something that happens to women wherever they go, regardless of how they actually look. Street Harassment is something that me and friends deal with every day, even while walking around the edges of the school campus. Yet if you yell something derogatory at a guy they have no idea what to do, because they get to walk around their entire lives with no fear of being harassed or bothered by anyone.

Student Life

I find it a lot easier to make comics about my life and things in it rather than making up fictional situations that are appealing and relatable to others because what's more relatable than real life? Although this is a simple page and simple idea I think a lot of students, here at Ringling and average College students, can relate to. Starting out a night of work, fresh and energetic and ending it asleep at the computer while dreaming about successfully completing the work. I personally have dreamt about things like this a lot, when you have a lot on your plate it's hard to not have that work follow you into your dreams. If this was a longer comic that's something that I would try and showcase, how work and stress from our awake life can affect our dreams. Though the fun style of it would make it a lot more carefree looking than the general idea sounds on paper

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FIGHT!!!

I read Bryan Lee O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim comics! I really liked the humor and the style of these comics. Also getting to use screen tones was really fun. I looked a lot at O'Malley's traditional brush inking, style and panel layout when planning out this page.

Day Tripping

Since I already did a page of comics earlier in the year inspired by Georges Remi this time I decided to look at Daytripper by Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon. I was inspired by the coloring/mood that I saw in a lot of their covers for the comic Daytripper.

Having done so many panel comics this semester I wanted to try showing a narrative without using boxes or words. This is the story of my cat growing up into a giant adult cat.

Maus I & II

  


      At first I didn't really like this comic, the artists handwriting sometimes was hard to read and the drawing style wasn't what one would expect from a comic. As I read more of it I started to like it, though I'm not really a fan of darker stories.

    Once I realized that it was not only based upon the artist's family's life during the Holocaust but word for word what his father and others there dictated to him it's story gained a lot more weight for me. Even more so as the artists included bits of conversation between him and others as he was compiling data for this huge project. I really enjoyed reading his fathers story and how Spiegelman did the set up for all of this information to be told. He could have just drawn his fathers story happening in real time for the readers, but instead he chose to tell the story of his father telling him the story and I find that to be a  really unique perspective to get to see. The story's not only about what happened to his father and his family but it's also about their current life and interactions.  I especially enjoyed parts where he is shown working on the comic within the comic, it makes it feel much more real and I like that.

     Something I didn't expect from this book was for the animals that represented different nationalities or groups of people to be a representation of them that only we the readers were aware of. Like when the mice put on pig masks and passed as polish, the masks even emoted like real faces, because in all actuality they were just dressing themselves as the polish would dress and acting as the polish acted. It felt weird to have their animal-ness be something that wasn't really existing. Even more so when the artists chose to remind the reader of this by sometimes drawing himself and others physically and noticeably as people wearing animal masks. Although it is again, a really unique concept that I've never seen presented in comics or media before.

   Although I've knows about the Maus comics since around middle school I'd never actually sat down and read them before, there were a lot of things I didn't expect in the general story and events that the book depicts, but I am even more surprised with how impressively Spiegelman delivers this information and has formatted this comic, it's something different and I can really appreciate that.

This is MY city

I looked at Will Eisner's comic The Spirit and tried to mimic the page format along with the shading style on top of my own style.

Tin Tin

I chose to try and imitate elements of Herge's Tin Tin comics. I attempted to mimic the format and panel compositions/layouts of these comic pages.

Hark! A Comic!

I chose to try to imitate Kate Beaton's style of comics after reading 'Hark! A Vagrant!' her style was a lot harder to pin down that I thought it would be, she keeps consistent in inconsistently drawing her characters; something I didn't even notice until trying to analyze her style. I like how she makes comic drawing look effortless, she warps characters so constantly that it looks normal and fluid. Something that is not very easy for me to do myself.

The Wordless Comic

Making wordless comics is challenging in many ways. Although since it's almost entirely based on reading gestures sometimes facial features aren't even needed! Though they do help tell a lot about what a person is feeling, so does body language.

Shaun Tan's 'The Arrival'

      The first few pages of The Arrival were a little tough for me to follow. Without any previous knowledge about this very different world and it's characters the intro was a little tough to understand but as the story went on it became easier to read and understand what was happening in the story and what the characters were going through. It gets to the point where Shaun Tan is working with so many panels and in such a sequential way that it almost becomes like watching a muted movie; there are words being said from person to person but we as the reader can't hear them. It is through characters actions and interactions we can still understand and follow what is happening very clearly.

      It's much easier to understand this kind of story telling after you're already immersed in it. After you get invested in the characters and their lives you stop noticing the lack of a physical narration and just start understanding peoples interactions and reactions to things, it's a very intimate way of storytelling. As the reader the lack of words makes you depend upon the illustrations for information about the story and with this kind of extra attention having to be placed upon characters, I believe it makes the reader become more invested in the story than a book with words does. When you read words you're forced to actually look at the words and sometimes this can make people pay more attention to the writing in a book than the illustrations that are actually meant to tell the story.