Assignment three : A graphic short story

The aim with this assignment was to create a mini graphic novel. The seed for this one came one lunchtime when I was sat staring blankly at a lined pad with a biro in one hand and a coffee in the other. I sat in a bit of a meditative state waiting for something to come, but annoyingly I couldn`t quite clear my mind enough to reach that creative Nirvana.

Then I had a think about some of the odd notions and ideas I’d ever had as a kid, like the one where I would lay on my back on a sunny day and watching the clouds, imagine that the clouds weren’t moving, it was myself that was moving out at sea on a huge ship.. or the one where I was the only person left in the country, yet I was being pursued constantly by someone on foot who would always find me eventually, which led to an eternal cat and mouse around the country (incidentally, a similar idea exploited years later in the decent horror film, It Follows, albeit without the sexually transmitted curse thread). That helped me springboard onto other ideas I’d had about worlds in micro or macro, exploring for artefacts which were always there in macro but couldn`t be seen due to their immense size, or exploring things in micro where the everyday can’t be perceived due to it’s extraordinary size.

I had a few ideas in mind, and had recently been watching several YouTube documentaries about ancient Egypt. My partner and I are both fascinated with alien conspiracies, even if there’s no truth at all to them it at least proves what a fertile bed of material there is for people to create a Mandela effect. Both Egypt and alien tales are associated often with one another so I wondered if I could spin something out along those lines.

While I was having a think about the story, I became distracted by having a read through Scott McCloud’s indispensable bible, How to make comics , an absolute must read for anyone with even a passing interest in having a go at creating comics. His accompanying volume, Understanding comics is also a fantastic read, more of a deep dive into the psychology of how illustration and words work together. I made a few notes from one of the early chapters which gave the core tenets of what anyone creating a comic story should be aware of.

The Idea

I decided to go with an idea of miniaturization : this was somewhat challenging in that I had to present the miniaturized world without any particularly overt spoilers for the climax which required some thought.

I took the usual approach of writing out the text idea first, with a panel breakdown. At this stage I don`t even worry too much about having a particular image in mind, although as a natural process I do actually visualize what might go with each line of text. If I feel it’s something fleeting and I might not get that idea back again, I scribble something at the side in a bit of a thumbnail size to remind me. Generally I try not to be all that slavish with that though and instead I’ll revaluate the text at the scribbling breakdown stage. I know every artist / writer and artist/writer team have their own methods for breaking down etc., this is the one I’ve found works best for myself.

From the text stage, I moved onto the breakdown stage. Here’s where I refer to the text, then imagine how I want each panel of action to be a snapshot of the story as it unfolds and which views are likely to be the most opportune in terms of narrative. Some of these shot positions present themselves quite naturally when relating to the text, others not so much and these need some thought to make sense visually while representing the text description or caption.

From this breakdown stage to the actual pencil stage, I didn’t really have to make so many changes, the ones I did change were done mostly for interest in the angles or to make sense more visually.

As the tale was by definition an Ex Machina with it’s conclusion, I thought it only fitting to call the tale that. It’s a bit wacky, contrived and makes little sense in of itself, but I liked it as an idea!

In terms of the process for creating the strip, I took the usual approach of setting up a logical and sane layer sequence in photoshop just so I could make sense of where everything Is and how it’s organized by naming it nicely and keeping each aspect tucked into it’s own relevant folder (one for pencils, one for inks, page layout, backgrounds, colours if needed etc)

(first rule with anything in Photoshop or similar : if you assume you’ll end up with lots of layers, get into the habit of also assuming that at some point someone else might have to open up your file to either help you with it, or follow your work. They’ll thank you for it in the end).

I create the panel layout first, then I add the text to see how that flows for the captions. Dialogues can be added as placeholder, the bubble placement is worked out while pencilling. As I’m inking this myself, I don`t have to worry about shading the pencil work which saves me some time, I work out the lighting directions etc as I go when inking.

Deus Ex Machina

Conclusion

Great fun and highly enjoyable! OK it’s a bit daft and it has that Ex Machina going on, but there were a few surprising challenges I had to consider. The first one was choosing that monochrome scheme. This was intentional, as I had planned to colour this to make it more appealing. If I had coloured this however, I felt it may well have betrayed the actual setting once the protagonist was seen in miniature and given away the twist (if you can call it that). I ended up going with this particular monochrome colour scheme because it not only imparts the feel of desert sands, but also it gives a sort of Howard Carter era of antiquity by being sepia.

The title page was a let down in retrospect, although a successful title page gives little away of the impending plot, it should also encapsulate the essence of what the tale is about succinctly. Mine merely makes reference to Egypt through using King Tut’s burial mask, which gives a strong common link to Egypt, but a tenuous one to anything happening in the tale. The pyramids sort of do the same, although the lesser pyramid does feature in the first panel. The Hieroglyphs are an invented attempt at threading the artefact into how the priests of Egypt along with Anubis would allow the mummy to travel through the afterlife and time by wearing the amulet. The process of miniaturization is a side effect of the amulet not only bending time and space, but also dimension and scale.

I did a scribble early on when breaking down the pages of the protagonist hacking through some of the gigantic thorns or hairs, but I felt this gave the game away too early on.

Looking at it now, I think a scene of the priests attending to the mummy in it’s burial chamber and applying the amulet would have fitted better, perhaps with one holding the treasure aloft as if regarding Anubis or some other distance deity.

I know I’ll not be able to leave this alone though, so I think it’s inevitable I’ll be going back and colouring this in just to see how it does actually turn out and whether it affects the tone of the reveal. This was probably one of the most enjoyable assignments I’ve done so far, and it’s definitely spurred me on to get busy trying out more comic work.