AC Original Comic Submission

Hello folks. Just a fair warning that some of the images are graphic. If you'd rather not see that I wouldn't recommend reading on (many apologies!)



So! My comments on my process are below the images.

Assuming the honesty hour position, I have entered a phase in which I am "sick off words" and I find myself wanting to express myself in images more so than the formulaic, pre-determined meaning that comes from parades or words. Images can be raw in an immediate sense-- in the way that they are immediately consumed, whereas words are mediated, filtered and translated before they penetrate.
I say all of this because some of this comic comes from my crude little expressionistic purges. The uglier, the better in my book. Some come directly from my notepad, where others were constructed for the sake of the narrative. Two images I borrowed and altered to stylistically fit the work (and I dare say it's obvious which ones those are!) This work was actually composed by drawing up pencil sketches (I free handed them and altered the sizing and dimensions digitally) and then photographing them via phone.
From my mobile phone, I edited the images (brightness, contrast, etc.) and added the speech bubbles. This was the most time consuming part of the process and my lack of prep landing meant words looked squished on haphazardly at times. I now understand why comic panels can have bubbles placed before the characters are even drawn on!
Either way, I had intended the comic to be a perfect 3x3x3 composition of squares, but again-- I'm not an artist and I failed on the pre-planning boat, so all of that had a huge bearing on the panel composition of the work. That being said, the narrative feels a little more thoughtful and fluid-- thoughts that overlap thoughts and then overcome sequences of association just like the brain. I liked the way it came out in that sense.
One of the hardest parts of this endeavor was actually the mediation between texts and images. I find myself "boxed in" by a selection of the words I wanted to choose-- I had more images in my brain then words (and sometimes vice-versa). Not only that, but I was also boxed in by my skill level. My final panel was envisioning envisioned as a body climbing into another body as if it were a shell. And prior to it being a body in a shower stall, the character was standing atop a bathroom scale.
I took inspiration from the more subjective self-expression that comics can offer like in 100 Demons or the flashback comic in Maus. This work is actually autobiographical, from experiences circa March 2015. Being an ex-writer, the sparse words on the panels came to me as I lived though these moments, and the comic medium allowed me to fill in the gaps that I haven't processed by means of words yet.
I imagine this work would be very disorienting to the viewer; they are not really oriented well in time and space, though it could be a reason that this is all taking place in a brain of someone on a plane. But in the end, this lack of anchoring was intentional. I was going for a sort of stream-of-consciousness setup but with closure (e.g. a conclusion).
There's an obvious lack of congruency in these panels, and I actually do regret that. Expressionism won in this case, and I suppose I found it very difficult to obey one style in drawing my character. I suppose we could chalk it up to themes of expressing oneself on a page-- could we ever really be embodied in just one image, after all?


Thanks for taking the time to read. Feel free to shoot me curiosity questions.