Short Comics
ENGL122: Making Comics — Fall 2020
Clip Studio Paint
Overview
I took a creative writing workshop centered around the creation of comics. This class culminated in a final project, which was a comic anthology contributed by every member of our class. The following are a few smaller projects that were completed throughout this course.
Seeing the Spoken Word
In this assignment, we chose an excerpt of poetry and chose lyrics from it to create a comic based on the meaning we derived from it. I chose to use an excerpt from “An Introduction to Quantum Theory” by Franny Choi. The excerpt is:
Sure, you can have these worlds.
You can warm them in your hands at night.
Just know that, by signing here, you agree also to be responsible for the universe
where the oceans glow red, the universe where
what we call shadow is pulsing with the musk of hooves,
and especially the one in which humans do exist, but only in the nightmares of small children.
Will you hold that one too?
The version of the story that never learned to consider sound,
and the one where sound is only the opposite of metal,
and the one where not even the sound of metal is enough to quiet the dead?
Sketches
I started by making sketches.
Inking & Lettering
After that, I inked the final version and wrote in the letterings for the poetry:
Transition and Time
This piece is centered around manipulating space and layout of the comic to represent transitions and the passing of time. I chose to use zero dialogue and depict a dramatic rocket liftoff, using a staggered comic box layout and zooming into the rocket to show the transition between the liftoff and the astronaut’s landing on the unknown planet.
Seven Panels
This was one of the introductory assignments in this course. We were to draw any action sequence with the absence of dialogue to show an event occurring. I chose to draw two teens playing baseball, when the pitcher accidentally breaks a window with the baseball as the batter fails to hit it. The pitcher facepalms at the end in frustration.
