Comic+Creation

=Comic Creation Analysis=  The comic I created is named, “The Cake Monster”, I found it was only fitting considering the storyline of the comic. The comic is about a father and daughter in a house setting. The father makes a cake and leaves it in the kitchen, telling his daughter not to touch the cake, that he is going upstairs and he will be back. The daughter is very sneaky and wants to eat the cake. The reader then gets to follow the steps the daughter takes in order to eat the cake through a sequence of pictures. The father comes back downstairs to find his daughter with cake all over her face and the cake nearly finished. As for the storyline of the comic, I wanted to create a comic that was easy to understand and a comic where not many words were needed in order to explain the story. I wanted my comic to resemble characteristics of those I see online - they are simple, easily understandable, and not very long so it does not require too much of the readers’ time.  I created the comic by taking various pictures and putting them in sequence to portray a story. After that I used the ‘Comic Life’ software in order to add comic features outlined by Scott McCloud’s comic, Understanding Comics: invisible art.  When putting together my comic I took McCloud’s concept concerning the faces in comics into consideration. He mentioned that in effective comics, faces are stripped down to their simplest form in order for the audience to understand and create closure or focus within the frame (McCloud 1994, 30). In my comic, I manipulated the pictures so the faces would not look realistic using the ‘Oil on Canvas’ colour style. In addition, when taking the pictures of the two characters, specifically the daughter, I asked her to over exaggerate her facial expressions so when I altered the pictures it looked iconic; the ‘Oil on Canvas’ tool emphasized the facial expressions. I also played around with the faces in terms of the size of the face in specific panels. When I wanted to show the sneaky side of the daughter, going for the cake in a panel, I altered the picture in order for the face to take up most of the panel therefore; the emotion of the character would be evoked to the audience. I did this for several frames, by using this tool; no words were needed in these panels because the audience could easily understand what was happening.  As for the spacing of the panels ‘the gutter’, I decided to base the space between the panels on the time gap between each scene and/or action. Because the storyline is something that happened in a short time period, I made the space between the panels relatively small and space stayed constant throughout the comic. As for the size of the panels, the panels were fairly larger than others in some parts of the comic so that the audience would focus on facial expressions and it could express a longer period of time for that specific scene and/or action. In addition, in every panel I used borders so it doesn’t show t imelessness: long, lingering time, I used the border to evoke a beginning and ending of a scene and action.  A lot of focus of the panels was given to pictorial representation. I tried to evoke emotion throughout the comic and did this by pictorial representation; the pictures included in the comic were carefully selected and taken, in relation to McCloud’s theories, these panels in my comic are picture-specific panels, where the pictures are dominant in explaining to what is going on. The panels that included pictures and words were needed in order to convey what exactly was going on. I used these duo-specific panels in the first panel of the comic when the father finished cooking the cake and when the father was talking to the daughter, telling her not to eat the cake and etc. You will notice that I don’t use many words in my comic; I only used words to describe specific actions and sounds when I could not think of how to create a pictorial representation of the specific action or sound.  The transitions seen in my comic are mostly moment-to-moment transitions, which require “very little closure” (McCloud 1994, 70). This is something that I wanted to accomplish in my comic. I used this type of transition because I wanted the reader to easily and quickly understand what was going on from panel to panel. I wanted to transition to leave the audience not having to think what was going on, everything was pretty self-explanatory in every panel through pictorial representation. This is seen in the scenes where the daughter is approaching the cake and looking at it.  In conclusion, I used the various concepts outlined by McCloud in order to make my comic effective by being easy to understand. All of the features I used worked together to evoke the storyline I was trying to portray through pictorial representation and many other tools McCloud speaks about.  Works Cited  McCloud, Scott. __Understanding comics: the invisible art__. New York: HarperPerennial, 1994.