CCT+300+Comic+Creation

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Based on my brief insight into modern web comics, I noticed some characteristics which I decided to implement in my comic strip, specifically; small number of frames, short dialogues, often extremely abstract representation and almost always explicit content. My comic, called “Family Values” begins with the ‘girl’ standing behind the ‘guy’ although an impression of her approaching him is created. In the first frame, the guy says “Looks like the hard drive is busted...shame, so many family videos gone...” The girl gets a funny thought and in the next slide she sarcastically says; “Awww... is your precious German porno collection gone too?” She is obviously mocking him and his love for porn. In the third frame, the guy replies; “Pfft...why would you even bring that up?”. “Dont act innocent!” she says. The final slide is the punch line where the guy pulls out another hard drive onto which he backed up his porn, the girl is depicted walking away in anger. The irony of the comic lies in the fact that the guy backed up his porn and not his family videos, implying a twisted set of priorities. This is very ‘web-comic’ like humour in my opinion and fits my requirements for creating one. My motivation for the character was to keep them very abstract and therefore face-less, allowing any guy or girl to relate easily. The characters used, are simply concepts that allow the imagination to be free of descriptive constraints; they are pictorial icons. **(McCloud, Page 28)** I have tried to give my characters some unique traits as far as their appearance goes, for example the guy’s hair has a strand on the left side that sticks out, like Tin Tin’s fringe this is rather defining. Another example is the way that they are drawn, by having few drawing lines and using bright primary colors I have tried to create an almost child-like drawing style that further adds to the irony of the adult theme. By using this abstraction, I have tried to achieve what McCloud describes as amplification through simplification; a process through which detail is stripped away leaving only the core meaning, leaving the audience much more involved through another concept he mentions; universal identification. As far as gutter-space goes, or the time-lapse between frames; it isn’t particularly important in this comic due to the fact that no movement per-se occurs and all dialogue occurs within a single space. Neither is there any real action that is left to the imagination between frames due to the accentuation on dialogue. Most of the transitions here are aspect-to aspect or moment to moment to moment. Since, comics generally possessed a quality of being rather brightly coloured (to contrast the dullness of written press), I felt obligated to follow that tradition. Somehow, by using primary, basic and bright colours I felt that I was once again abstracting since in reality, one rarely sees something made up of purely primary colours; we almost always see shades of colours. Finally, the dialogue used is meant to be quick and create a sense of a ‘momentary’ occurrence or in other words a feeling that the events unfolded in front of them immediately rather than taking up time. The target audience of this comic strip is mature teens and adults, which according to statistics is the average internet user anyway. Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: the Invisible Art.
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