First part of Peter Dowell’s Web Comic

Here is the link to the comic: http://pdowell.com/web-comic/

For my web comic I wanted to make a choose your own adventure type of comic for the project. I wanted to do this because it would add some interactivity to the comic and gives a different way of navigating the comic. I wanted to create an alien exploring an alien planet and different events that happen when it explores the planet. The first part of the story is three panels showing a spaceship flying to a new planet. I made the planet out of multiple different gradients to give a layered effect like how Jupiter looks. I made the spaceship out of multiple shapes and the alien was mostly made with the pen tool and then adding some more detail with shapes. I wanted to make the comic atmospheric with showing different locations where the alien is at and I did this with having the reader choose if they want to go in a cave or go over the cave. Going in the cave there are a lot of crystals and a light shining as you walk towards it. You then find the source of the light and are given another option to take it or leave it, which then leads to the final panel. When you go over the cave you go on the icy mountain tops and meet something frozen in the ice until you go and hear a loud “CRACK!”, what you do from there is life or death.

I wanted to add more interactivity with my comic compared to books because you can do that on the web with making buttons do different things. In my case I made it so the buttons progress through the story with different options for different events that happen and then once it is finished gives the option to restart. I made the HTML code so that it would scroll through horizontally and then once you are fully scrolled through you get on option so you always choose after you read the first part. When the comic is viewed on different devices it just shrinks the window and makes the user scroll more horizontally to read the comic. I think Scott McCloud would talk about the closure of the comic because there is interesting things that happen with closure for each option that is picked because it is different based on what is chosen, also there are multiple ways of reading the comic based on what options are chosen as well.

I used Illustrator to make my comic because I liked using the pen tool to draw characters and using the shapes to build different things as well. I also took advantage of clipping masks for each of the panels which was very helpful to keep it all in one place and not overflowing. I put my comic on my WordPress site where I just uploaded the media in the media library and then reference to it in custom HTML. I like WordPress, it made it fairly easy for me to set up the stuff on the site and had multiple options to change things on there as well. The one issue I had in the beginning was how large the images were because they would not fit in the block in WordPress. I couldn’t just insert the image because the block would interfere with the dimensions and it would not look good. Adding in the scrolling for the HTML helped it fit all in the block. I just uploaded the files using the media library that WordPress has and then referenced them when I had to insert them on the page. I used gradients a lot in this project to highlight specific things or make things look more interesting. The spaceship has gradient for its boosting and the planet is one whole gradient which gives it layers. I made a radial gradient for the shining of the gem and I made the shining of the entrance of the cave gradient as well. I also made the sky a gradient.