For my final poster comic, I originally planned to make a stereotypical multi-paneled comic but I ended up scrapping that idea. After reading the requirements for this comic, I spent a long time brainstorming ideas for how I’d convey time and closure, and challenge the typical way of reading comics from left-to-right and top-to-bottom. One idea I had was to have a comic that would read differently depending on if you read it in the typical western way versus the opposite (right-to-left and bottom-to-top). Unfortunately, I couldn’t think of a storyline that I liked. I ended up just making my comic only one frame. I focused it more on time instead of making it challenging to read. My comic pictures a skateboarder doing a trick off of the sidewalk. I opted out of using icons for motion because I felt as though the comic did not need any, the skateboard is in the air so that already implies movement. The rest of the comic is kind of up to interpretation.

The car could be about to hit the skateboarder, or the skateboarder could be about to hit the car, or maybe the skateboarder slipped on the strange slime-like substance on the ground.

I think my comic uses aspect-to-aspect closure the most. I used two smaller frames to highlight separate aspects of the comic: The skateboarder’s eyes, and the surprised driver. I used some text to express the distress of the driver because I felt like I couldn’t display his emotions very well through just his facial expression.

I had never used Illustrator before this project, I found that it was like a much more complicated version of Paint. I used the pen tool and the paintbrush tool the most. I found the pen tool to be really complicated because I forgot to connect endpoints so it made filling the shapes really complicated. I ended up trying to figure out the endpoint connections but I had mixed using the pen tool and paintbrush tool so I couldn’t use the fill option for many parts of the comic. I tried to make my comic relatively minimal but detailed enough to make sense and look nice. I think since I had no background in Illustrator, I didn’t want to try and do too much or else I’d have an even steeper learning curve but at the same time I didn’t want to just do stick figures or something extremely simple. I think my final comic project ended up being a balance between the two.