The Secret Language of Comics: Visual Thinking and Writing

After hand drawing my triptych, I knew that for this Sunday sketch of a quadriptych, I wanted to make it out of photos. I thought it would be interesting to see how the challenge of story telling changes from hand drawn images to photos. I searched my phone trying to find four consecutive images that told a story. I found two solid candidates, and eventually settled on the one you see below. This set of four pictures shows my two cousins while we were all on vacation. My cousins and I are basically like siblings, we see each other all the time and are super close. In this moment, their mom wanted to take a picture of them, and at first they didn’t want to, however came around in the end.

After finishing this assignment I took a look at my triptych and tried to compare it to my quadtriptych. In my personal opinion, I found it a lot easier to make and understand the story when it was hand drawn. The stories for both though were very interesting, as my triptych was fiction, while the photos I chose were from a real event that I had a memory of. As a result, I was able to tell the story of what was happening during the four photos.

Initially when I started working on this assignment I had no idea where to begin. After seeing the example posted on the assignment page, I decided to make a comic that was houmorous and fall-related. Shortly after searching for puns I came across the phrase “I’m hollow inside” on Elite Daily. This inspired me to create the comic pictured above. I found a comic with a therapist sitting across from a baby and replaced the baby with a pumpkin. I also added multiple frames in order to create more of a shock and to avoid all-at-onceness.

For this weeks assignment I placed the contents of my backpack on the floor in an attempt to provide insight into my day. All these objects were extremely important for this particular Friday. Here is the list of items and their significance:

• Wallet – For the times when Venmo doesn’t cut it
• Apple – A quick snack between classes
• Earbuds – For peace of mind during my commute between classes
• It’s Your Health – One of my few physical texts.
• Water Bottle – Hydrate or Die-drate
• Coffee Mug – So I don’t experience caffeine withdrawal
• Laptop – My portal for all my assignments, research, and most readings
• Pen and Pencil – Filling in parts of my health book
• Why Architecture Matters – Reading for my assignment due this evening

This week’s sketch was a comic that had to stretch across 4 panels which made me anxious because I have never been exposed to writing a comic. When I was trying to come up with my idea for my topic I knew I wanted to talk about an incident last week in which my teacher cancelled class and I showed up to class in a frantic run thinking that I was late. This style of comic felt different because the triptych had a clear beginning, middle, and ending section while the quadriptych had to have a 2 panel middle section. Having the middle act stretch across 2 panels allowed me to add more elements to my comic and have it run in a more fluid fashion. I told a comedic story because I needed a break from being serious and philosophical in my posts.

Link back to assignment is here: https://eng181f19.davidmorgen.org/assignments/sketches/sketch-10-quadriptych/

This composition process was actually very difficult. This is because I wanted to challenge myself, and draw from different angles. If you cannot tell, the first and third panels are shots from the back. I chose this one because I wanted to capture my character and his sister sitting together while having the television screen in the background. The fourth panel was the hardest; I chose this angle because I wanted to give a different view to the reader, where you see the main character’s controller not plugged in. This format of a comic seems more complex than a triptych. This is because instead of one middle panel, there are two. I used one of the middle panels as additional context to the scene where I used the second one to set up the conflict. Having two middle panels allowed me to give more context to the audience without putting it in dialogue or a thinking bubble. I told this story because I was talking to my sister on the phone right before I made the comic. I liked playing single player games as a kid so I didn’t have many multiplayer ones. My sister, Summer, would always watch me, and we would talk about the game. Being the selfish boy that I was, I would play most of the time, but Summer would want to play about once a week.

Here is a link to the original assignment!