The Secret Language of Comics

The composition I made has to do with time travel. I have been watching the TV show The Flash recently and it inspired me to do a funny comic about failed time travel. My principles of time travel were inspired by the show which means anything that happens in the past alters our current reality. The point of the comic was to show the irony in Sam’s, the main engineer, intelligence as he was able to create a time machine but violated the basic rule of time travel by talking to his mom when in the past. If he had not talked to his mom, his mom and dad would’ve met like they originally did and lived a happy life, leading to his being born. However, his carelessness has led to the second version of the present-day with no record of his existence and a failed time travel machine that his partner Tim can not figure out on his own. My main struggle with this sketch was being concise but clear. This resulted in me needing to ensure that my visuals had small details like stitches where you are able to infer the meaning of the story. This sketch was very different compared to the rest of the sketches but resonates closest with the week 2 sketch where we had to create a visual and explain the significance. Overall, this process was very fun a I look forward to creating larger stories with more panels to create stories with more depth.  

The composition I made has to do with a street basketball reference. I like to play basketball a lot with my friends, and sometimes the games get very competitive, and we start throwing trash-talk and insults around when the games get intense. One of the main phrases we say when somebody when they miss a shot or when we know that they can’t shoot is “brick.” This insult means you can’t shoot and is often used when playing games at LA Fitness or parks. I just thought this comic was funny because the main character was working on his shooting and basketball game and went to play with his friends, but then the character realized that he was in the same place as before and still could not make a shot. This Sunday’s sketch was very enjoyable because the topic I wrote about was one that I experienced a lot. I chose the paper-pencil method because it was easier to draw pictures and have a more comic-like feel than doing the assignment digitally. The only really difficult part of the assignment was creating an entire plot that was only three panels long. The crafting of this comic was similar to the Sunday Sketch assignment (Sk2), as we needed to draw a picture that describes a situation or story. But it was also very different because we could explain a story using three different panels, and we did not have to tie in a real-life object to our panels either. 

The triptych used as an example hit me hard emotionally–I wanted to do something similar with mine. I was looking around my dorm room for inspiration (like I usually do), when my eyes landed on my favorite stuffed animal (I’m not ashamed to say I brought it with me to college!). It has received a lot of love over the past 18+ years, which caused it to need a bit of “doctoring” from my mom. To show my impact on this stuffed animal, I tried to find a picture from early in my childhood where I hadn’t made any holes in my stuffed animal. I found one that my grandma has framed on her wall and laughed at how little I was in the picture. As I was writing the words to go along with this triptych, I stopped after writing the third and final panel: these words apply to me, too. Life has been full of obstacles for me, and definitely has scarred me in many ways, be it physically or mentally. Like she was there to fix my stuffed animal, my mom was also there to fix me. She is still my biggest supporter to this day, and she always encourages me to love myself just as much (if not more!) than I love my favorite stuffed animal.

*I apologize if this is really cheesy, but it’s how I feel about this!!

Why is the desert white though?

The first thing that I related to this assignment was clouds, since their various and unpredictable shapes provide a vast space for imagination. As I searched up pictures of clouds on the internet, I came across this one in which the lower layer of the clouds seems almost to be a perfect plain. I thought that it would be adequate to add some animals there. During the process I had some trouble editing the size of the camels and cropping them out of the original picture. 

This was a surprisingly difficult Sunday sketch to think of for me. My humor and creativity usually revolve around puns and simple comparisons, but the images by Mcmennamy did not seem to have any rhyme or reason. He simply replaced a certain object with another that had a similar form, and my mind had trouble deciding on anything specific to edit. The fascinating similarity between an actual airplane and a paper plane is how they fly using the same physics. The lift that keeps a few-ounce piece of paper in the air also keeps a hundred-ton hunk of metal in the air. I loved building these as a kid and throwing them off balconies, and a fascination with gaining this type of liftoff has been common throughout mankind’s history.

runway photo- by Just Planes via Flickr https://flic.kr/p/wJ5kYj

paper airplane photo- by Wadleigh Memorial Library, “Airplanes 44” via Flickr https://flic.kr/p/6M2UMi

Initially, coming up with an idea was very hard for me. However, after looking through Stephen Mcmennamy’s Instagram, I realized that all I needed to do was to think of a realistic image in my head, and simply replace one of it’s features with another unlikely, yet similar structure. I looked around my dorm and saw my mug I just washed, which prompted the idea to use a mug as my realistic object. The mug handle is the most “swappable” feature on the mug, so I decided to choose something that I felt resembled the shape the most… an ear. After brainstorming and planning out my photo, it was then time to manipulate it in Procreate. I think my image conveys something “fantastical”, I can picture this mug on the set of Harry Potter.

“Mug 16”, @unforgiventak, Attribution (CC BY 2.0), edited

“Ear”, @eltpics, Attribution (CC BY 2.0), edited