I really enjoyed our last project of creating a comic. My group made “The Safety Delusion.” Throughout the semester we have spent a lot of time analyzing different graphic novels and the different strategies that the author used, and so I thought it was very fitting that we had an opportunity to put some of those strategies to use in our own work. The article that my group had translated into a comic was “The Overprotected Kid,” by Hanna Rosin. The article discussed how over time, parents have changed their methods of raising children and how they have become more cautious and strict with their children. Our group decided to analyze the effects of this kind of parenting and prove that children gain very important skills by being more independent and free from stringent parental control. In my group, our roles were not as defined as those in other groups, as we basically did the whole project together, page-by-page.

Before we began working on the comic, we created a Google document, where we organized what ideas we were going to illustrate on each page. This proved to be an outstanding idea because it really made the whole process much easier. That being said, we all had input into the content on every page. During the project, I spent a lot of time searching and obtaining the pictures for out comic. This isn’t exactly as easy as it sounds. I had to take the ideas of each panel and figure out the best way to convert those messages into images. When choosing the pictures, I did not want them to be simple and boring, so I was a little creative when it came to the selection. The pictures needed to be able to attract attention, but not too much or else readers would stray from the important messages of the comic. In addition, I helped edit the photos and had the idea of the different effects that we were going to use. This is probably where I learned the most about the comics. Because the comic is in chronological order, starting from the 1960s, I decided to make the first few pages in black and white, and add color progressively. Another effect was the shading and the diagonal lines that we used. Each effect had its own meaning and our group did a great job at keeping the effects consistent throughout the comic.

One group that also incorporated the use of different color schemes was David, Chuck, Wyatt, and Alex, who all created the comic, “The Life I Lead.” They decided to keep some pages black and white, and others with color, but for different reasons than my group. I noticed that they used these colors to communicate the emotion and tone of the story without using any captions or words. I especially enjoyed the mug-shot page, which gives off a very solemn, and gloomy feel due to the lack of color shown. By making the page colorless, except for the little red in the caption, which is an alarming and emotionally intense, their group perfectly depicted the low point of the characters’ lives.

This class has really been one of the best English classes I have ever taken. One of the reasons why is because we took different approaches to both the way we wrote our essays and the way we analyzed the readings. In order to successfully complete this last comic project, I needed to use skills that I have learned from the other projects during the semester. When figuring out the effects of the pictures, I constantly thought of Maus and the way Speigelman constructed each panel and the artistic schemes he used in the backgrounds. Fun Home really taught me how to translate big messages ideas into visual representations, which was vital in choosing the right pictures for the comic. I learned a lot about the color schemes used in Vietnamerica and put them to use in our comic. I really think that this class has taught me to be more open-minded and creative. Almost everything I did in this class was new to me and at first I never really knew where to start. Thinking outside of the box was crucial in completing these projects and I am very satisfied with the work I have done. I genuinely believe that the skills I have acquired in this class will not only stick with me for the rest of my academic career, but also in any other obstacle that I will face in the future.

My group for the Comic Project was assigned to create a comic that would visually represent the chapter “The 10,000-Hour Rule” from the novel Outliers by Malcom Gladwell. This was definitely my favorite project of the whole semester, as it forced us to incorporate knowledge gained from each graphic novel we read and the lessons learned from this specific chapter of Outliers, as well as allow us to use our own creativity in the process. When our group first came together, it was made aware that multiple members in our group considered themselves “artistically challenged”. This was the first obstacle we had to face. Throughout debates over how to draw our characters (stick figures, fully drawn bodies, etc.) I remembered how in Maus, it was easy to make the characters’ hand-drawn faces consistent throughout the novel because the characters were all mice. My idea was to use cats instead of mice, but with human bodies and in human settings. This way, even if we are all working on our individual parts separately, there would be some consistency and flow in the full comic strip instead of it looking like 5 different comics were compiled together and claimed to be one continuous storyline. Next, we had to dissect the chapter, somehow divide the work evenly, and recreate one, flowing plotline. We decided to use the specific examples (people like Bill Joy, Bill Gates, the Beatles, etc) cited by Malcom Gladwell as a way to break down the chapter from a well-researched argument essay to a story that can be portrayed in a comic strip. To create the narrative ‘framework’ of the comic, we agreed to insert a small picture or full frame of Malcom Gladwell (introducing our section, explaining a point, or concluding our section) in each group members’ part. I suggested this idea because my past experience with narrative framework was in reading Vietnamerica; with all the intertwined stories and characters it became confusing what was the overarching narrative ‘framework’ of the novel and which were the overlapping stories being told. In my opinion, the ideas I brought to this project would not have occurred to me if I hadn’t read the graphic novels from this semester and used my experience with and observations of them to creatively overcome obstacles that inherently come with working in a group project, on a difficult and artistic assignment.

I found the “America’s Real Criminal Element: Lead” comic strip to be very interesting. I spoke to one of the members of the group, Wyatt McGuire, and he told me that their essay was on Picher, Oklahoma, which was an area famously severely contaminated due to a lead mine. I really liked how they totally made up the main character and the plotline; they incorporated factual information from the article and inserted it into an interesting, more relatable story. They were able to turn an informative essay into a personal narrative. I also liked how they used real photographs and grayscaled them—Wyatt mentioned that they did that to make the pictures look not only dated but also look like the metal lead (which is gray). Other elements that made this project a standout to me were the strategically placed colors within certain frames (to draw attention to bright colors against the gray background) and the varying size in frames, close up shots and zoomed out shots that much resembled elements of Vietnamerica framing techniques.

Past assignments from this semester, as seen on my personal website, also gave me significant direction in how I approached this project. In my Tracing Maus Project, I focused on shading, frames and facials. Although I only varied the different cats’ facials when they were talking and used minimal shading techniques, I varied certain frame elements. I got the idea of diagonally splitting one frame into four to depict the multiple connections with club owners that the Beatles made once they started performing in Hamburg–one huge stepping stone in their career as a band. I also used varying depth to give the reader an idea of the numerous and continuing shows that the Beatles played at different clubs in Hamburg. I included a little sub-frame, as well, within the first frame to clarify the “narrative framework” of the story about the Beatles and who is telling it. From our Vietnamerica assignment, just the process of analyzing the graphic novel’s spectacularly creative and innovative graphic techniques was extremely helpful in taking my assigned storyline and adding creative features that help vary in setting (the plane flying from the UK to the US), depth (the four highschoolers walking down the hall), and time (the running clock depicting the hours and hours of time passed playing at the clubs each night). From this assignment, I learned how to use dynamic and creative visual framework to graphically depict a seemingly static text (10,000 Hours Essay).

Over the year the class become accustomed to the google doc, to the idea of real time collaboration for group projects, real time collaboration that the various comic creating software did not allow for.  Thus it was difficult to see where we were in the project as a group and where we needed to go, even if we were all working simultaneously in the same room.  Everyone’s job then became editor and collaborator, we all had to have an idea of what we wanted, what would be the most beneficial for the group’s project as a whole, and we had to execute it and then collectively review it.  It was exhausting.

The project that really stood out to me was the 10,000 hour comic, whose style of hand-drawings and photographs helped engage me more and effectively brought out the point of the argument through fun and cartoony vignettes.  I felt this focus on light-lightheartedness expressed through their artistic style further aided in creating a fun and casual read, whereas some of the other comics were pretty dark and didactic

Due to limitations of the software, we did end up creating some pages of collages that were evocative of certain pages of G.B Tran’s work, Vietnamerica.  Ultimately we found that creating a comic is really, really hard, what with the pictures having to match a story, the story having to match the pictures, and both mediums (text and picture) having to tell a coherent tale.

Our group first analyzed our article, Is Google Making Us Stupid by Nicholas Carr.  Then we brainstormed on potential stories to use in our comic.  After, we came up with the old generation, portrayed by an old man, and the new generation, played by a young man, to be featured in our comic having a debate with one another.  We split up the panels evenly and really helped out each other with any difficulties we had in Bitstrips or Comiclife.  It was very easy to work in a group when we were all sitting together in the library.  One of the most  useful skills that I contributed to my group was thinking of ways to make the comic more humorous and comedic.   I really enjoyed ending off the comic with the young man transforming into a robot.  I thought this brought a lot of humor to the story.  I also loved the facial expressions of the old man throughout the comic.  Bitstrips definitely helped a great deal with the facial expressions and characters. I have never used Bitstrips or Comiclife before but I really enjoyed the experience.  I quicky learned how to use Bitstrips.  Comiclife was a little more difficult to use but after our group learned how to take each individual panel and change it’s shape, the process become much easier and more enjoyable.

I really enjoyed reading “The Safety Delusion.”  By not using Bitstrips the group was able to create a more realistic comic.  I thought the pictures of real kids off of the internet made the topic more relatable to the reader.  I think they did an incredible job of portraying their message through their choice of pictures. I also was impressed by their use of graphs and effects in their panels.

After learning about how to read and grasp comics from “Understanding Comics” by Scott McCloud, I definitely payed more attention to every detail while making my comic.  I was very aware of the specific panel shape and how it would affect the reader’s interpretation of the comic.  Specifically, I adjusted one panel by shifting it sideways.  I remember Art Speigelman using this technique in Maus.    By shifting a panel, the author alters the reader’s perception of the story.  Learning these skills helped me portray my message much more clearly and more creatively.  Creating the comic allowed me to take the skills I learned from each specific graphic novel in class and apply the teachings to my own project.  The final project really enabled the class to utilize the skills we learned throughout the semester.

Follow this link to see our project! ->http://davidmorgen.org/comic4/

Creating our own comics was exciting because instead of reading and analyzing a comic, we were now the author’s of our own graphic novels.

You can view my group’s comic project, “The Safety Delusion” by clicking … here!!!

To design our comic my group and I used a program called “comic life”, the program allowed us to take pictures from the Internet and modify them with different fitters. We were also able to write captions on the photos, which allowed the pictures to come together and become a story. When we were originally making ideas on a Google doc we all wrote down a pre-draft storyline for our comic and everyone elaborated on each other’s ideas. To plan out the outline we each discussed a general theme we wanted to have present in each page. For example on one page we wanted to have a reality verses expectation meme that emphasized the over protective views of parents today. In another page we compared parenting methods in the past to the protective disposition of parents now. We took the facts from the article to support our own views on the argument. For example, in our concluding panels we discussed the reasons to why parents shouldn’t be over overly protective, because in doing so they are taking away their child’s creativity, confidence and deductive self- learning. Our project was difficult in that we had to find pictures that suited our ideas in an order that made sense for the reader.

I enjoyed listening to other comic projects; such as “The Life I lead” whose comic I thought was really well thought out. (Besides the very funny pun in their title) the general theme was expressed clearly throughout the comic. Their project was different in that they had a continued fictional story that followed the life of one character and how his life was affected by lead. The comic also included different filters, like vivid imaging verses the depiction of the past in black and white for instance.

The comic project allowed us to apply the skills we learned from other texts in class like understanding comics, Vietnamerica and Maus. For example, one group used a tilted image in their comic to represent a chaotic setting, much like Spigelmen did in Maus. Many of the groups used images to represent literary devices like the shattering of glass (used in our project to represent a false utopia). Another group also used cats to represent the people in their stories. Overall I think all the groups did well in depicting the points (either supporting or going against the argument) presented to us in our articles.

The group comic project that I was involved with was about the article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The other three people in my group were Mike Green, Adam Lebovic, and Chris Kontoghiorghes. Each of us contributed in a different way towards our comic as a whole. I believe that I played the creative part in our group. Besides for completing panels 14-19, I also helped make the comic more emotional. What this means is I was able to put certain comical techniques such as close-ups and facial expressions into our comic. Throughout this project I realized that comics are not just about creating pictures with words. What makes the comic great are the little things such as hand gestures and facial expressions. I wanted to incorporate these things into our comic about google.

My favorite comic project besides my own groups was the one titled “10,000 Hours.” This group consisted of David Kim, Manasvini Mehta, Brittany Nguyen, Josh Werman, and Nikki Ciesinski. I found this project particularly interesting because I have read the book before. It was one of the most interesting books I have read, and the group did a great job at transforming it into comic form. I like how they drew out the panels, which is something that no other group did.

This final group project really relates to the rest of the semester’s projects because the class was focused on graphic novels. While doing this project I learned that working in a group is the best way to get the most ideas into a project. Each member of my group brought up a new idea that was put into the comic panels. It was a great last project because it took something we learned from all of the other projects and brought them together. We looked at a novel from a different view for each project, and then this last project utilized all of these ideas. I really enjoyed this project and it was my favorite one of the semester.

Mike Green, Eric Meltzer, Adam Lebovic, and I created a comic representation of the article Is Google Making Us Stupid? by Nicholas Carr. This project was somewhat of a reverse order of our previous assignments in this course as we had to create a comic based on an analysis, rather than an analysis based on a graphic novel. There was definitely a connection between the two types of projects, but the approach to this one had to be totally different. We had to be creative enough to be able to convey the message of the article while still focusing on how to make the comic visually pleasing and entertaining.

I believe that I played a significant role in the creation of our comic, just as we all did. I pinpointed most of the most critical arguments of the article; ones which I thought we needed to get across to whoever was to view our comic. Seeing as the article is basically discussing conflicting ideas of old vs new, I thought it would be a good idea to embody the viewpoints of the two generations in an old person and a young person. I figured that the best way to get the points across was for the two people to have an argument, just as they would in real life. Once this was established, we just had to create the script by putting the points into conversational form. I also contributed in the animation of the script, but I feel that I played a bigger role in laying down the foundation of our project.

One of the other projects I liked was The Safety Delusion. I found it hard to believe that they found images that perfectly complemented their storyline. I was initially convinced that they were their own creations (which would have been even more impressive). What I found to be the most effective method they used was the combination of both black and white panels and colored panels. It just made certain images pop out more.

Link: http://davidmorgen.org/comic1/comic-final-project/

As my group and I worked alongside each other to finish this project, my main role as contributor was to make sure everyone’s finalized pages flowed well together. Because we decided to each take an equal part in drawing this comic, there was a concern that the plot line would become too ragged. Regardless of our different drawing styles, we decided to draw the characters as simple cats and pasting the same image for each example, so that the whole comic would be more cohesive. My biggest contribution to this group project was coordination and organization. After everyone sent me their individual pages, I made sure the right images were pasted on certain panels, and the timeline made sense. Also, I served as a vocal backboard, bouncing off ideas and organizing them in our Google Doc. I chose the last page of the comic as the featured image because it represents how all the different styles, dialogues, and examples are tied together. The most difficult part as the central organizer was dually making sure the entire piece was smoothly transitioning and creating a conclusion that was simple, entertaining, and to the point.

“The OverProtected Kid” was created with the intent to make an impact with its colors. Attention to font, colors, and the juxtaposition of the panels was not unnoticed. To make it more relevant, the group used real images as a base for their comic. Instead of a hand-written comic, this style of approach elevates the seriousness of the argument made. The different types of font used were also parallel to the different significances of each panel. The next-to-last panel was almost completely colored, but the “reality” side was more vivid, implicating its contrast. I learned the importance of details, and they make a big impact when handled efficiently.

As a final project, I had to simultaneously do a close reading and distant reading, which is similar to the “Maus” and “Mapping Fun Home” projects. For Maus, tracing the individual panels helped me understand the details of a comic’s impact. After analyzing the general trends of Fun Home, I also understood the importance of overlaying themes and how the story flows, and I translated that experience into this project because our comic had multiple pages, and those pages had individual scenarios: it was essential for all the panels to flow effortlessly. My most recent project, Vietnamerica, digested the entire comic as a whole. In other words, writing an essay about the graphic novel presented a valid argument in text alone and helped me understand how the comic was presented; this learning experience helped my group create a certain approach to creating our comic.

For the project, I took up the role of looking up pictures and coming up with ideas for the text that was going to be inserted to the panels. For the most part, I found myself looking up pictures that tied in to our project’s main argument, which turned out to be challenging because of the difficulty in finding appropriate pictures. The skills that I brought to the project, I think, were to make it easier to go through the project as a group and ensure that all the pages were connected by suggesting ways to go about reviewing the pages together. For the project, I also tried to make the photos on the page match to what the text was saying by using different filters  to convey senses of time and emotions. The way I approached this project was to come up with an agreement with all my group members to make a comic story line that we all agreed on. This was a challenge at first because we saw ourselves running out of ideas early in the book and sometimes our storyline wasn’t cohesive and seemed contradictory.

Another group’s project “The Almighty Google” used bitstrips, which allowed them to freely change the expressions of the characters and also their body movements, which provided for a more fluid comic. To overcome the monotony of using the same characters and background, the group used zooming in and specially-shaped speech bubbles to create different emphases on their topic. By looking at the group’s project, I saw that btistrips was a pretty effective tool at making the comic more fluid, instead of more jumpy between pictures. Using bitstrips is very useful, it seems, to create comics where consistency in characters is important.

I find that this project combines the ideas that we saw in Understanding Comics, about panels, colors and text boxes, since we were forced to incorporate these ideas to make a comic ourselves, which made us look for different ways of expressing an idea on a particular page. This project combined the idea behind close reading in Maus, visually representing an argument in Fun Home and tying them all together like we did with in Vietnamerica. From making the comic, I learned that making a comic requires a lot of effort artistically and also requires a lot of organization to fit words in with your panels that make sense. I also learned that there are many aspects of a comic that can be changed; there’s plenty of freedom to express your style and ideas.

Follow this –> link<– to see the project!

Link: The Safety Delusion

My main role in the project was to do the logistical work of creating the comic in Comic Life 3. I have worked with a variety of creative software, such as the GIMP, so I felt that I was well-suited to figuring out the workings of Comic Life 3. I also played an integral role in drafting the storyline of the comic. It was my idea to gradually flesh out a panel-by-panel draft of our comic in GoogleDocs. Once we had a concrete plan laid out, we cooperatively searched the internet for Creative Commons licensed photos that matched our draft. Additionally, I came up with the ideas to incorporate a reality vs. expectations segment, and the sci-fi esque “danger free” world. These two elements made critical points central to the argument of the article. These elements also both make claims in a stylish, artistic form. I consider myself an artsy person with a penchant for aesthetics, a skill that proved useful for our project.

The Almighty Google made use of bitstrips. I thought this was interesting because it resulted in the comic strip being uniform in style with a consistent set of characters, something our comic seriously lacked. Admittedly, this makes the comic more aesthetically appealing and easier to follow. Obviously using a fixed set of visual elements, however, has limitations. However, this group effectively overcame those limitations through photo editing and creative use of the tools provided by bistrips.

I learned a lot about the interplay between visual elements and text from making this comic. At first, when the first few pages lacked text, a friend pointed out to me that the story made little sense. Looking back at it, I realized she was right. After adding the text, I realized that together, the text and the visuals were able to clearly convey an argument while having a certain aesthetic appeal that text alone lacks. This project combined skills we developed from all of the other assignments. We had to engage in a close-reading of the article to pick up on the nuances of the argument, a skill we learned from the Maus assignment. We had to visually represent an argument about a text, as we did with Fun Home. Finally, we analyzed and explained an argument made by a text using specific references from the text, as we required to do in the Vietnamerica assignment.