After learning that one of our major assignments for this class was to create our own comics, I wasn’t all that excited. It’s not that I struggle with being creative or creating story lines and characters – I just wasn’t all that pumped to have to turn these thoughts into something that was primarily visual.
We had a lot of thoughts about plot when we were brainstorming our comic, but soon realized that everything that we found to be interesting would be very hard to put into an graphic format. Even when we finalized a plot, we didn’t exactly know how to convey certain things when transferring our scripts into panels. So we had to simplify everything – and I do mean everything. Those complex thoughts and emotions that can normally be conveyed just perfectly through text, had to be more or less “dumbed down” for the sake of simplicity.
While the concept of creating a comic seemed daunting and especially more frustrating than I wanted it to be, it was a learning process that gave me insight into just how hard this form of literature is to create. I always thought of comics as the “simple form” of literature, or something that was solely meant for people who preferred pictures over reading text-filled pages. However, this assignment gave me a new appreciation for the comic form and gave me more understanding on just how intricate the process of creating a comic is.