Making Shitty Comics!

Let’s take a peek at one of my recent crit groups.

The assignment? The annual Comixtape. The details? Make a zine that encompasses the inspiration behind your drive to make comics.

Mine? A trainwreck. I planned to make a Scholastic Book Fair catalog that listed exclusively the books that inspired me throughout the ages. I worked for like two weeks on it, put an immense amount of tedious labor into an intricately arranged Adobe InDesign document.

Lo and behold…the night before it was due? InDesign. File. Corrupted. This means that InDesign quit unexpectedly, then saved a backup file, which the computer then corrupted. This is unsaveable. This is no turning back. This is the end times. I was devastated.

My classmate Michael watched me cry under the table. My roommate Rachel saw me express my anger. And then I put together this chaotic masterpiece in an hour so I could turn it in and never think about it again.

Annabel Druissi, second-year and friend, was the leader of our small group going over these. I didn’t even try to explain what happened, I just let the comic speak for itself. To my surprise, people seemed to enjoy it, even laughed at some parts. Then came the piece de resistance:

I’m still processing this to be honest. But! We then had an assignment where we picked three random words from a book and used it as three different plot points in a 12-page comic, with one beat per panel.

This was also assigned in the middle of the largest project and first group project we’ve had to date, which I was both project manager for and layout designer. Making a shitty comic where I ignored my perfectionism was key to success. And sanity.

I decided to use this time to also give myself permission to use a technique I wouldn’t normally use! A chance to fail productively. I used photographs and a screenshot/realistic technique with drawing on top; I drew it all in Photoshop; and used a technique I spotted in Molly Knox Ostertag’s beautiful webcomic Darkest Night, giving a bit of a glitchy illusion to add to the effect of the narrative as a whole!

Side note: I didn’t know what the assignment was before we picked the words. I gave my friend my copy of a Lord of the Rings Tolkein analysis book I own…and gave myself the one on literature pedagogy. I am very sad I didn’t get to make a LoTR comic for school…but soon. I will.

This was the final product. My assigned words were (in this order): articulate. Screen. Symmetry.

Let me know what you think! I’ll have more time to post as final projects are wrapping up and we’re moving into the critique part of the semester. The cool part about art school is that all of our stressful projects are about two weeks before the rest of academia picks up on their final tests, because part of our exams include critique and discussion, which I find really cool!
I’ll also be giving a presentation in Survey of the Drawn Story next week about Captain Underpants and the oft heard claim, “graphic novels aren’t real books!” Keep an eye out for my first podcast episode of Sorry for Apologizing which will feature that discussion!

Thanks for reading as usual!