Emily Nally

May 12th, 2020

CR 5

What is the process of making comic strips like?

One thing I know I don’t know yet is how to write a story. These past six weeks I have only been working on the art aspect of a comic strip because I decided early on that’s how I wanted to approach my project. However, this decision meant that I won’t have much practice, experience, or knowledge in storytelling/creative writing. I got a sense of how words apply to art/comic strips in one of my resources by Scott McCloud; He talked about how words need to be clear, and only provide context that art cannot portray (for example, explaining that two characters are cousins). He explains that this is important because if words take over the artwork in comics, then it defeats the entire purpose of telling a story in the form of a comic. I do not regret my decision to do wordless comic strips with nearly no “storylines” because I had a lot of fun trying to tell these stories with dumb “punchlines” or endings. Going wordless also challenged me a lot, since I had to make sure my story made sense to readers other than myself, which I sometimes wasn’t so successful at. Choosing to use words would have provided a different challenge for me though. I’ve never enjoyed writing or thinking of deep plots that are original, so getting past that would have been difficult.

Another thing I “don’t know yet” or haven’t experimented with is designing characters. Since I’m using maquettes I decided to use my figurines that came with them, and I did this for two reasons: 1) I thought it would be fun to make jokes in my comics that are tailored to specific animals, like the Mice Family celebrating a birthday with a cheese-cake. And 2) because the figures are proportional to my maquettes, which made my job much easier. I might be interested in designing my own characters, however, I imagine it as a kind-of-long process. I have always worked with references, and to come up with a character without that seems very difficult.