This year, I took both.

NOTE: I enjoy writing these reviews of classes and the assignments given. Some of these posts become very long and strenuous, so I identified that problem by breaking up longer sections into separate posts. In this blog entry that you are reading right now, I display the final image (or images) of the comic along with a general look at the assignment goals, and what I did to meet them. Separate posts provide more in-depth looks at certain aspects that go into the creation of the comic or illustration. They show sketches, original pencil work, and I talk about where the ideas came from and the troubles I faced while making the final piece.

Project 1 – Not a Box

Booster Puzzle

I hit the ground running on the first project. Our first assignment wanted us to create a comic that didn’t conform to traditional panel shapes. We were not allowed to use squares or rectangles.

The first idea was more puzzle-like. The narrative was more linear, and I planned to create a puzzle that had to be put together entirely to be read. It would have a beginning, middle, and an end. The story would start off with a character that answered the door in every panel, revealing more about a painting that he was showing off at a party. Once the puzzle was complete, it could be flipped over to reveal the painting the main character was speaking of in its entirety. But with some suggestions from the class and little bit more guidance from the professor, the idea evolved into something better.

The concept was similar, but instead of answering the door in every shot, the main character spoke to his guests at an already happenin’ party. The puzzle would fit together to create one entire image, and the puzzle pieces could become a stand-alone conversation between the main character and a guest.

I wanted to create an all-ages friendly piece just like Where’s Waldo. At first, the story took place at a party that starred twenty year-olds, but I couldn’t have drugs and alcohol. They were replaced with pieces of gum and carrot-flavored soda! The character Booster walks around the party and mingles with guests, and hidden within his conversations are references to the past and the future. Things are seemingly happening all at once in one image, but there is also a contradiction in the storytelling that they are happening after one another in an interconnected narrative. I was working with simultaneity without even knowing it, something we would explore in project 2.

Note: If you are interested in reading a more in-depth look at the process of the “Booster Puzzle”, including my reflection on the piece, please click here.

Project 2 – Simultaneity

The idea that two events are happening at once is not a new idea to comics. I’m going to be honest; I wanted to draw a girl several times over. I wanted to draw a figure in a trendy outfit and explore the different angles and poses her body would take over the course of the drawing.  I found a common thread that weaved through the stories of Lichtenstein’s paintings and went to work crafting my own.

Project 3 – Continuous Scene

The problem I faced with this piece was that I felt that this project I had already done before. Booster’s Party became a continuous scene organically, and The Flichtenstein Gallery was logical to make into a continuous scene. My goal was to do something new with the “continuousness”.

I focused on a story and a character. Another beautiful woman would dominate the page, but this time it’d be a woman we’d gradually not like. The story begins with photographs of a girl whose relationship with the narrator is obvious a romantic one. But as the photos will tell us, we learn that their relationship goes sour. I wanted to create a sense of noir storytelling with a hint of 100 Bullets crime and grit. It turned into another interesting concept that needs more exploring.

With only a few days to do this project, our class agreed that finished pencils was what could be accomplished realistically, so I present to you the final penciled work on Project 3.

Project 4 – Parody

The parody is an art I’ve always been interested in, and with the Internet age, the art has grown even more! We live in an age of irony, where nostalgia and callbacks are the fun of living in the now. We all are fans of something, followers of something, NERDS of something, and creating jokes that only those in the know will get is what makes us feel part of a group.

I think collectively, the class had a hard time choosing whether to parody and make fun of a known property, pay homage to it, or even make a pastiche of it. I personally had trouble in finding something that parodied something new.

Now let me ask, have you ever done a Mad Fold-in? Comic enthusiasts and people with a very American childhood growing up will remember that Mad Magazine had a creative activity on the back covers of every issue. The ingenious idea to tell a joke with one image and provide a punch line by folding it and creating a new one was the creation of Al Jaffee. Jaffee has been with Mad Magazine for over 40 years, has made over 500 hundred Mad Fold-ins, and to this day continues making them well into his sixties years of age.

Spoiler Alert! By clicking this link, you will be taken to a page where you can see the fold and ultimately the punch line replicated here, online.

Or you can download the PDF version of my Mad Fold-in, and perform the fold yourself, and enjoy!

Project 5 – Mini-Comic

There was only one other person taking both Mini-comics and Alternative comics simultaneously this quarter, like me. Matt Burbridge and I had been making minis all quarter, separate from these assignments, and now it was time to make another. Most of my comics so far had been illustrations and I was craving to do a narrative. It had to be something simple, maybe a series of illustrations that ultimately told a story in the end. I began to tell the story of a young man who was running into past lovers, all of whom were at the same party as him.

Click here to read the entire comic, “Guilty Party”.

Project 6 – “Off the Wall”

The final was a lot more open than all the others. It could be almost anything.

The catch was that it couldn’t be just another comic on paper. It had to have real-world applications. While we were advised not to do graffiti, our minds were headed that way.

Idea generation was difficult because I wasn’t sure what message I wanted to make. With the quarter coming to a close, I felt burnt out, and ready to call it in. I looked back at my quarter and felt proud of the work I’ve done, and reminded myself that every project isn’t a hit. I decided to just go with my first instinct and make it the best I can.

I settled with an idea I’ve struggled with expressing for years. When I was younger I went through a phase of manga and shounen, like most American boys these days. As I grew up and manga gained popularity, I noticed American comics trying to get on the bandwagon. It bothered me! It was a marketing stunt. It was a trick. I was being marketed to, and even at that age, I was smart enough to know that I was being taken advantage of.

Under the same umbrella is the idea of variant covers. Variant covers are a mainstream comics practice that sells the same comic, but with a limited run of covers drawn by a different artists (most commonly, a celebrity comics artist). The idea is that people will buy the original version of the comic, and then later the same comic again, only with a different “special edition collector’s” cover. And of course, that bothers a LOT of people.

My idea explores two ideas. Readers might be interested if Spider-man was “manga-ized”, but would readers of Japanese manga buy a book that was “Westernized”? I created a cover for Bleach, drawn in the style of classic Jack Kirby, who is basically the father of the American comic book art style.

I placed the covers around actual Bleach graphic novels in bookstores, but it’s a mystery what happened to them.

———

This was the most liberating class I’ve ever had, period. It was a class that I felt paralleled what I wanted to do with comics. Alternative Comics is a class for those who want to learn how to change the medium. You will learn the history of cartoonists who rebelled against the mainstream and created a culture of comics that not only spoke to a generation at the time, but changed the way people view comics and graphic novels today.

Visual Storytelling 1 gives you the basic rules you need, while Alternative Comics will help you break them. With Visual Storytelling 2 next quarter, I’m sure that my experience with both traditional and alternative methods under my belt, I’ll be creating another set of artwork that pushes my skills as a creative artist.

If you are interested in being creative and leaving the comics medium more enriched with possibilities, Alternative Comics will cultivate that side of you.

Please click to enlarge! The “Booster Party” is one of my favorite undertakings, with stories that criss-cross around the board, alluding to events that happen at the same party that happened, that are about to happen, and that ARE happening as you read.

I will be selling prints at the Norris Hall Swap Meet tomorrow at 11AM – 1PM. I have a limited edition print run of 15, measuring at 24″ x 19″, at $30 each, and signed! And finally, I have process scans after the jump, where you can see the stages of its creation. Enjoy!

First of all, I want to thank everyone who has enjoyed this project as much as I have enjoyed making it. Thanks to Brian Ralph for pushing to find wall space where we could hang our very first pieces. It brought lots of eyes from people throughout the department, and if you are one of those people, I hope you had a good laugh!

Besides Where’s Waldo, I was inspired by the illustrations of Scott Campbell, whose work always has lots of simple characters taking part in a large scene. There are always little stories in the scene that create a big picture, and looking at each one allows a reader to slow down and take it in. I also loved the simultaneity aspect, and the referencing of past, present, and future. I’m a fan of Lost, and injected some of that influence on a much smaller scale here.

And I love creating characters. My work in previous comics classes were much more based on realism and accurate proportions, but this class encouraged me to think more about the concept. I stuck to a much simpler style that resulted in lots of energy and personality in each person I drew. It was a lot of fun to create an image on such a large scale, yet hone in on small characters who take up very little of the space.

The Original Pencils

I worried a lot about how I could reprint these inexpensively and at a similar or exact same size. After my penciling, I was too scared to ink on top and have to erase the graphite underneath. Projects where I’ve employed that process always ended with inks that look too different, lots of smudging, and lower quality of blackness in the inks after an eraser went over them. So I decided to do the blue line process and ink over the blue printout, which now results in two original art pieces of the same project (and less stress!)

Inks

Soon after the inks, I printed another version. This time I would complete the assignment by cutting it into puzzle pieces. My cutting was improvised, but by gridding out the comic beforehand in rectangles, I was able to make each conversation contained within a puzzle piece.

Color in Progress.

Party on!

Thanks for reading! Again, I will be selling these at tomorrow’s SWAP MEET in Norris Hall between 11AM and 1PM. I’ll also be selling comics, graphic novels, and action figures (and other people’s prints!) from my personal collection. Hope to see you there .