From what I understood by reading Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud, a comic refers to the medium itself. In that, comics could be about any subject as long as there is a sequence. After I read that, I started to get ideas about what I was going to do. Firstly, I brainstormed a few scenarios that I could expand on, but that also didn’t require too much background knowledge. At the time, my roommates and I were actually making a pie for a potluck dinner. I thought about how I could make this situation into the worst case scenario, and I came up with a student leaving a pie in the oven which would, in turn, cause the character’s house to be burning down when he returned. Another key concept I wanted to adopt from McCloud was the use of the “gutter.” I wanted there to be some room for imagination that would be left up to the reader. After all, comics rely on how they are created but more so, how it will be read. In that sense, I tried to keep the panels down to only the essentials that were required to create meaning and I think I did a pretty good job doing so. Another thing I tried to do was to use as little text as possible as well as abstracting the character to be someone that readers could relate to or imagine in real life, which are both concepts that McCloud talked about in his book. McCloud said that “the more cartoony a face is, the more people it could be said to describe, with the example of the rendition of his own self in the book. With that, the teacher scene was meant to have a slightly more described character than the main character. My intention for the teacher was mainly to add to the comedic factor. After all, who wants to look at a boring comic?

“Sad Day” by Brandon Bliesner (November 2018)

I feel that my comic could be viewed in both print and digital media. However, I think that I would prefer it to be read online. I could see my comic being centrally placed on a website so that the reader could see the entire scenario on one central page. I believe that being on one page would simply make it easier to understand. Plus, being that it was done with Illustrator, it could be blown up or sized down with no loss of quality or understanding. My hopes are that the viewers will read my comic from left to right, top to bottom, as this is how I was taught to read, and almost anything we read nowadays is in this format. Basically, I didn’t want to confuse the readers by having a complex way that the comic was read. McCloud talks about many different formats of comics but I felt this was the easiest to read without the need of directions.