Comic+Creation



My short comic is called “Ugly Truth”. It features Jessica(the hot high school girl), her mother, sister and brother. The story of my comic is about a girl named ‘Jessica’ and her worst fears with a funny touch. Jessica is a hot girl who is very conscious about her appearance and thinks that looking good is what life is all about. Her worst fear comes true when she gets a minor fracture in her neck and has to wear a neck band. The comic goes on to show how Jessica makes a wrong move while doing yoga and fractures her neck. She goes to the doctor who fixes her with a neck band which she has to wear for some time. She is very depressed about this but her major worry is that people will make fun of her at school. Her brother and sister, who go to the same school start making fun of her at home. Jessica complains to her mom that she looks ugly and tries to convince her that she wants to skip school for a couple of day but her mother does not agree. She goes to bed very tensed and dresses up the best for school the next morning. In the mean time, her brother and sister are making plans how to make fun of their elder sister and decide that they will make a video of Jessica and her school mates making fun of her at school. The next day at school, the unexpected happens when Jessica becomes the center of attention at school like always. Rather than making fun of her, all the guys at school are all around Jessica, offering to do her homework for her, getting her lunch and being their best to make their best impression. While Jessica feels like a princess, her sister and brother and taken aback and annoyed that their plan failed. The bottom line of my humorous comic is that ‘if the girl is hot, no one makes fun of her’. While writing and making my comic strip, I kept in mind a lot of concepts I had read in McCloud’s book and the comic analysis I had done in my previous assignment. Frames are very important in a comic. Frames gives the viewer an idea about the time period a specific frame depicts, It separates the past, present and future scenes that the comic is showing. Frame separate the scenes in accord with time, the current frame showing the present, the previous one showing the past and the next one shows the future. Smaller frames tell the user the happenings in the image in a shorter period of time and bigger frames show a longer period of time, and I have also used a smaller frame within a bigger frame to focus on a short moment within a longer moment. These concepts of time frames is explained by McCloud in very simple and easy to understand illustrations and that made it easy for me to show two days of Jessica’s life in just 14 frames. According to McCloud, “The gutter plays host to much of the magic and mystery that are at the very heart of comics! Here in the limbo of the gutter human imagination takes two separate images and transforms them into a single idea. Nothing is seen between the two gutters, but experience tells you there must be something there.” I agree with McCloud and according to me, gutters are one of the most important parts of comic creation. Gutters are gaps left in the strip for the reader to fill in gaps of the story himself, which makes him think about what must have happened and it is essential for a good graphic novel is to involve the reader. I have tried and done that, moving from a scene-to-scene transition\ To express emotions and expressions, I have used similar speech bubbles except a couple of different types in two frames and a different coloured font to show a difference in speech tones and sound. I have used box shaped balloons to tell where or when that specific moment happened. Comics don’t use words like novels; to describe the feelings or actions of the characters as much. McCloud speaks about using words and pictures and says that they go hand in hand with each other but even in comics, if there are no words and the reader is going with the flow, he will be able to understand what is going on. I drew the comic myself and thus the art was not that good to really express the emotions that much. I would say that I used a technique in which the words helped explain the situation and its emotions. Also, I used sound words in colourful fonts in a couple of my frames to explain the situation and add intensity to the emotional expressions. I added very few and light colours to my comic just to add liveliness to go with the humorous bit of the story and to attract a little more of the users attention. To conclude, i would say that i have compiled all aspects i liked about comics from McCloud’s Understanding comics and effects to make my comic strip interesting, indulging and to be able to show what I learned from analysing a graphic novel in the previous assignment. Although, my art is not that good, i explained my ideas in the best possible ways.
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