The Rewards of Persistence
In college I read a ton of Dystopian, Utopian, and Science Fiction books. When I say a ton, I’m saying that I would read, on average, 2-3 books a week (with the exception being during finals where I’d downgrade my time to 1 book per week).
It was in early 2013 that I started to notice these books influencing my artwork. I was drawing cyborgs, tentacled humanoids, weird creature mashups, aliens. You name it, I was doodling it. Over time I noticed that I was forming a story of my own. Conversations around campus were focusing on the subject of equality for all and I started trying to find a solution. I am a big fan of history and knew that all actions, no matter how innocent the intentions, have resounding and unexpected consequences. So on top of planning out a perfect and equal society without contention, I started imagining what the consequences of this environment would be.
After planning out the story I was at a bit of a roadblock. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to create an animated short or if I wanted to create a comic. Both had their pros and both were completely new to me. Either way, I knew I would need a storyboard so I decided to start there. I roughly mapped out the story and worked to layout the images that I had pictured.
After getting the main scenes were all mapped out, I had a decision to make. As I worked to layout the images I saw them mostly as moving images. I made a brave decision to try my hand at animation. I read a few articles and jumped in feet first. Over the course of 4 weekends and with over 90 layers, I decided to animate a middle scene and the scene at the very end. You can see this animation below.
23 was the clone number that I had chosen for this animation.
The animation is rough and needs help with timing and smoothness but it showed me what I did and didn’t want with my story. While this approach didn’t tell the story the way I had hoped for, I learned a lot of things throughout this process. I learned that I didn’t love doing animation and I learned that going the route of comics would be the better choice. More importantly, I got out of my comfort zone and worked to learn a new skill. I was a bit disappointed at this not working out but I was pleased at my progress thus far.
After the failed animation attempt, I wanted to try my hand at putting together a comic. I planned out a 25-30 page comic as an Independent Study class and worked to get 5 pages completed by the end of the term.
I broke down my writing into pages and then further down into sections. After that I worked on recreating the clones and removed more possibilities of differences by making them bald. I tried adding a character, a cyborg modeled after the clones that The Governance system would control.
The sketches below show this progress. I illustrated the same end scene as in the animation and really liked the results a lot more. I worked with changing up the composition and I felt that I was getting closer to where I wanted to be but I wasn’t quite there.
It was back to the drawing board.
I finally contacted a writer friend, Reggie Carlisle, to help me format this story. I knew what I wanted to say and where the story was going but I wasn’t sure how to illustrate the middle sections of it and knew that he could help with this.
He, being a big fan of flash fiction, believed that we could more effectively tell my story in a more condensed format. He took my 25-30 page comic and condensed it down into 4 pages. Creating 4 perfect comic pages proved harder than I’d originally thought. After inking, scanning, editing, formatting, and adding in the text, we achieved the look we were going for.
The comic below is the final version of this story.
