This Comic Poster is called “Online Dating”, by Bailey Tompkins, and was created at Washington State University in DTC 201, October 31st 2019

My comic challenged the readers normal left to right and top to bottom expectations by not having clear textboxes on every scene showing the reading which event happened first and which ones were to follow. However, I was able to guide the reader through my comic by adding linguistics such as “a few months later…” and then setting the scene like booking airfare and then the next scene was an airplane. I also helped guide the reader by keeping familiar objects from previous scene in the next scene, for example, the cell phones were used in the first scene and transferred over into the second scene and the suitcase was used in the third scene and transferred over to the fourth scene. There are two obvious types of closure that are being presented in this comic. One is Action-to-Action and I think this because the individual scenes are not happening at the same time but are occurring in sequential order and at different locations. The other type of closure is Subject-to-Subject because the two characters are talking at the same period of time but in different locations. I used the linguistics mode in my comic to make the message of my story clearer to the reader. The images and words of my comic work together as additive in the sense that the words elaborate on the images. Overall, I think my comic conveys a good sense of passage of time because it utilizes time frames, linguistics, and spatial mode to tell the tale of a love story that covers the time period of many months in just five short scenes.

This was my first-time using Illustrator. I felt familiar with the tools because they were similar to Photoshop which I am more proficient in, but overall it was all very new to me. The biggest thing I learned how to do was make all my own art from scratch rather than getting clip art and ect from the internet or scanning objects. This was definitely a challenge for me but I eventually got the hang of it. Drawing by hand is not my best skill, but I do enjoy editing on Photoshop so

it was interesting to learn what I could do by combining the two. I used many different shapes in my illustration in order to make the people in my comics. I used ovals for bodies, planes and text bubbles, and I used squares for clothes, time frames, and phones. The style in which I made lines and shapes were overall very simplistic and according to Scott McCloud’s “Living in Line” chapter, I would suggest that the simplicity of my shapes brings creativity to the reader because it allows them to develop a sense of personality for these characters rather than me choosing the personality for them if I drew a more complex and detailed character. Although my characters were more simplistic because of my skill limitation on Illustrator, I think it worked out to my benefit. The most beneficial tool from the tutorials was definitely learning how to copy my work by pressing “alt” and dragging my image. This saved me so much time and struggle. It may seem like such small hack but I had no idea how to do it until I watched the tutorial on it!