Category: Student Posts

Well I realize that it may have been easier for more to use pictures for this assignment I decided to go with a drawing. This comic represents the story of someone who has been friends with someone for a long time and is always there yet never is seen as more then a friend till he takes a chance. Well the story is only three panels I prefer to see the first two as a repetitive cycle and the third being the end to the cycle. Well the story may not be complex or pretty I enjoyed creating it as it was a interesting story to me.

I actually thought of this joke a while ago. When telling it to people, the idea where a sperm whale would satisfy both of their desires really set in. That’s why I chose to show that text for an entire scene. It was also to give a little sense that them seeing the sperm whale takes place later. The hardest part of this assignment was the idea behind the comic. Once I could solidify the idea as a comic, it became the challenge to decide what the most important elements of the humor were so that they could be distributed appropriately into the three scenes. Another challenging aspect of this assignment was the brevity. Typically in other writing assignments given in writing classes, there is the general idea that longer and more explanation is better. In this case, however, that is not true. Adapting to that change was interesting but allows for more creative interpretation than formal writing does.

Basically when choosing how this short comic would go, I just recalled my experience when I took this picture. I was walking down Seattle after watching a baseball game when I saw a guy chanting the type of things a gay hater would say and someone that believes that “America is doomed” and all those crazy things. Everyone at first was not giving any of the things the guy said any meaning and just carried on until a couple got in front of him and started to make out. Everyone around me was cheering and I couldn’t believe that I captured a moment like this; both funny and impactful. This is what I tried to portray which was everyone just carrying along and then these two guys come up and basically tell this guy to f off. My only difficulty was being worried about the language I had to use to describe this moment but all I did was censor the words.

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The CLASSIC banana peel.

This was, indeed, a surprisingly difficult concept to grasp. You see so many of these examples in classic Sunday comics that you feel like it should be super easy to grasp. However, upon even attempting to think of an idea, I was immediately stuck. Did I want to go darker, like I saw with A Softer World? Or did I want to go lighthearted, such as with the comic strip Nancy? After a lot of thinking about beginnings and endings, I decided that lighthearted would be better.

The theme was settled. I was going to go for a funny, happier look. Bright colors and poorly drawn figures would resonate better than if I tried too hard to make it a realistic setting. Originally, I was going to settle for stick figures to make it as simplistically lighthearted as possible, but I decided that, in the end, it would be too easy to do so. So I went with drawing bald, thicker stick figures instead.

But I was still struggling with the story. What did I want to happen? I kept running through other ideas about food, sleeping, or anything that everyone does on an everyday basis. But nothing was coming to mind. Or, at least, nothing that was satisfying. But then, I suddenly was reminded of bananas. It is amazing how the human mind can randomly think of something and spark an idea out of it. I decided that a banana slip joke would be ideal. It’s classic, funny, and easy. Right?

Not quite. What would I do with this banana? Someone would slip, yes, but how would you end it? So I decided to take a route that was somewhat unexpected. Falling off a cliff from a banana peel is not the sequence of events many people imagine, so I decided to go for a little humor in the ridiculousness of the situation. This concluded my thinking process, and I finally decided on the story that would emerge.

I decided to experiment with the brush tool for the background, as I noticed that it made it more light and insignificant, which is what I wanted for a background. Overall, I’m alright with how it turned out, but it seems too sloppily done. I’ll have to experiment further as time continues.

This assignment felt somewhat similar to the literacy narrative that we had to do, simply because we had to have a beginning, middle, and end. But like the literacy narrative, the end isn’t really the end. It’s an open ending. You can imagine that the story ends anyway you like, but without it being printed out, can you really be sure?