The Secret Language of Comics: Visual Thinking and Writing

I wasn’t sure what to write about for this project but I decided to write about how I fell in love with my boyfriend over the summer because it’s a pretty unconventional story that I felt could draw the reader in. The process involved thinking back to the week I was trying to encapsulate and trying to remember the details of how everything went down. Then I decided what I wanted to be the first panel that would make the reader want to open the folded paper. I knew what I wanted the next panel to be and what I wanted to end on so the rest of the process was just filling in the time between those panels to tell the story of how we fell in love. Because of the large size of many of the panels, I found that it was not hard to find enough space to fit all the details I wanted to. In fact I found that the fourth and fifth pages had almost too much space, and I wasn’t sure how to fill it all. The most important choice I made was that I didn’t stick to telling my story chronologically; instead I began with the “ending” and then flashed back to a few days before on the next page to start the narrative. I think this made the comic more exciting as the reader knows from the beginning that it’s a love story, but doesn’t know how it’s going to unfold.

For this week’s sketch assignment, I chose to record a short conversation with my four-year-old cousin Cindy through a comic. It was one of my busiest days and I was staying up late working on my philosophy paper on the subject of Love. Suddenly, I received a FaceTime invitation from Cindy. Even though I was so stressed at the moment, her sweet voice never failed to brighten up my day. And when she told me she loves me, it was the best moment of my life. However, as adults, we tend to have this mindset that Love is too heavy a word that a kid might not truly understand the meaning of it (as if we do). To my surprise, my cousin gave the most perfect answer I have ever heard about what love is. As simple as it was, it struck me so hard that I would never forget about it.

This conversation got me thinking about how we tend to complicate things as we grow up. As we focus more and more on logical concepts and definitions, we forget to listen to what our heart has to say, and that might be the one true answer we have been looking for all along. Since this true story gave me such an interesting insight, I knew it was something I wanted to portray. 

I think the most difficult part of telling a true story through a brief comic is that life isn’t always dramatic, and most of the time, true stories can be slightly less exciting than fictional ones. When I was making my comic, I was aware that depicting a FaceTime scene can be boring since the “camera” is fixed. Therefore, I tried to use different background colors for different panels, and I also created a fantasy effect (I tried my best) for the last panel to make the narrative more visually attractive. 

A few weeks ago I took a trip down to Florida to spend the day at Disney World with my sister, my mom, my mom’s friend, and her children. As someone who isn’t used to being around many children, it often got very tiresome listening to their arguing, complaining, and just overall incompetence. Throughout the day, one of the children continuously fell behind our group as we traveled through the busy park and eventually we could no longer find her. Her mother rightfully began freaking out and searching all over the surrounding area. Five or ten minutes later when we were about ready to send out a full search and rescue party she nonchalantly walked back up to us with a turkey leg in her hand and not a care in the world. When trying to decide on a story for my comic I thought back to this moment with the suspense and unexpected ending and knew it would be the perfect one to share. Having a very limited space to recreate this story I wanted to focus on the overall progression of the events. I centered in on the initial reactions, the development of the settings, and the unanticipated ending that arose. The Tell a True Story Assignment gave me the opportunity to look back at the past few weeks and find the event which would best be framed into a comedic short comic. I really enjoy this particular memory and thus this assignment as well.

Telling a true story in so few panels with so few words felt less like writing a “story” and more like writing a moment. The moment I chose was my Friday night when I accidentally slept through everything and me and a friend ended up watching movies on my floor all night instead of going out. My week was pretty uneventful, and the anticlimactic nature of this particular moment/day in my week encompasses that feeling. The most important choices I made in making this comic were choices of which moments to frame. I tried to make it so that panels work and progress the story along even if they have no text.

When we discussed this prompt in class, I had this experience the night before and knew I wanted to use it. I am in Meor, a club that had Jewish speakers come and speak about modern-day Judaism. During a few of the sessions I have wanted to ask this question about the acceptance of homosexuality, but only with this speaker did I feel comfortable enough to do so. She is a popular Orthodox speaker and dating coach and discussed her journey in becoming Orthodox after college and her dating life advice. She only spoke about the relationships between men and women, but she also mentioned that she minored in Women’s Gender Studies in college, so I thought this would be the best opportunity to ask about homosexuality. I wanted to draw the reader in with one of the funny things she said, like date foreign boys, and then have the comic take a turn towards serious content. I realized this discussion doesn’t have the most interesting visuals, but that gave me more opportunity to focus on drawing something other than stick figures.