Death’s Plight manga. Emily Bruckner, 2018

My comic “Death’s Plight”, I believe fits well into the criteria of a comic. The comic as a whole, is made up of a series of depictions that make up a cohesive story line. While I was trying to decide on what type of comic I would like to make, I considered a very simple and cartoonish design at first, but looking at some of my early ideas of it I didn’t like how simple it was, and the dialog and content of it was lack luster. I changed my perspective when I remembered that a manga is technically a comic in form. I had an idea of a more somber and hard hitting storyline that would work well in a manga style. This style runs higher on the realism spectrum than most comics, making it easier to identify with a more human looking character. When reading through McCloud’s book, I took the idea of using very few words of dialog in the story and focused mainly on the visuals to help convey meaning to the reader. In McCloud’s book silent characters are often more physically expressive and they are able to convey so much meaning without “saying” a single word. The abject silence of most of the moments in my comic give it a more serious undertone appropriate for the subject matter. In using the fewest amount of words possible, I wanted them to be able to stand out as much as they could in the mostly silent story. I chose to use a black and white color scheme mainly because it is utilized traditionally in most manga. I wanted a lack of color to also add to the sense of dread, sadness, and foreboding in the comic; happy cheerful colors would have taken away and distracted from the narrative. In all, the story is purposefully a little vague to leave interpretation up to the reader. In the end, I did cut out a large portion of the prolog story part, chiefly because I ran out of time to complete all of it. The story still retains its core meaning however, those first few frames functioned merely as added context. This comic I would think would be best suited to print, in a sort of traditional manga style booklet, perhaps, if the story ever carried on past what I have written so far.