Describe a moment and analyze: “Write about a single experience or moment, and ask: how does this moment, experience, or encounter relate to my essential question?”

Throughout my senior project so far, I have been reading a lot of comic books and/or graphic novels to help me gain inspiration for what I want my comics to look like. The person who gave me these books was the school librarian and my advisor Karyn, and I am super lucky that I received such a range of books. One of the books in particular that strikes me as an informative and interesting historical story is called Marzi: A Memoir written by Marzena Sowa and illustrated by Sylvain Savoia. In her graphic novel, Sowa recounts her experiences as a young girl growing up in communist Poland during the 1980s. As I am currently discovering new comic book concepts such as formatting, color scheme, dialogue, and more, this book is very helpful to me. Something about this book that I want to incorporate into my own comics is how the author can portray a complex and often very upsetting historical event in a way that is easy to read and understand. As someone with no prior knowledge of Polish history, this book is amazing to me as it brings an entirely new topic into my mind and makes me want to learn more about it after reading.

Another aspect of Sowa’s book that I find to be intriguing is the format of her comic book. Each page contains the exact same format: six square panels of equal size. When I was working with James on my first thumbnails, he showed me how you can format your comic in millions of different ways. Some people choose to use larger panels to represent certain ideas, such as a new setting or a paused moment in time. Others use smaller panels to represent faster movement, or time passing by faster. At first, when I was doing my thumbnails I believed it was essential to have different sizes of panels on each page, as to not make reading your comic boring. However, after reading Marzi, I see there is no rule for how you must format your story to make it interesting.

Finally, one part of this comic book that I may want to incorporate into my own work is the color scheme that is utilized. In this text, there are only a small variety of colors used: red, orange, brown, black, grey, and white. I notice how the artist uses warmer colors more sparingly to attract the reader’s attention, which I think is a smart and effective practice. The abundance of grey and darker colors says a lot about the environment of the book without requiring words. It creates an atmosphere that I can somehow understand deeply, despite never having gone to Poland. I hope to give my readers a similar experience to the one I had reading this book. I want people to see my comic and gain an understanding of the partition of India, even if they had no prior knowledge of the event before.