Comic by Angela Basinger 2018

The comic I created in illustrator is intended for a print medium, as it was designed for an 8.5×11 page and has no elements that are exclusively digital. My comic was based on a drawing I scanned into the computer, so it was made to model my drawing style and handwriting. The comic itself aligns with Scott McCloud’s definition of comics as it has a deliberate sequence made to allude to time changes and story development. The frames in my comic move from left to right and top to bottom, like a print book. I took some stylistic points from Understanding Comics including placement and detail. For my first panel, the circle in the upper left, I layered this circle on top to identify it as primary and to be looked to first for sequence. When constructing my subject, the cat Salem, I steered away from heavy detail. McCloud suggested this in his chapter about form and detail in which he regards minimal detail as a strength of comics to make stories more identifiable to relatable for a wide audience. My intent with this comic was to express the quirks and range of emotions of Salem as a cat to a wide audience of pet owners and cat lovers. In order to establish setting and consistency in background, I used the watercolor paintbrush tool to show a difference between the horizontal floor and the vertical walls. Other tools that were essential in the construction of my comic included the pen tool, the curvature tool, and the layering tool to trace and recreate my pencil drawn comic. For my captions, I used the paintbrush, angled in the same manner of my own handwriting, to create the two captions I used. Without these captions, there readers would not have context for the cat attempting to jump onto the bed in the foreground. This comic follows the conventions of comics as outlined by Scott McCloud in Understanding Comics in order to be interpreted as sequential panels to be read as print.