First four panels of The Anxious Astronaut

When we first looked at Scott McCloud’s “The Right Numbers part 1” in class, I really wanted to make a comic that kept zooming in on itself to navigate to the next panel. However, I didn’t really know how to do that, or how I would go about doing that. After reading Eroyn Franklin’s web comic Bikram Addict, I knew that I wanted to take advantage of the fact that the viewer would has to scroll in lieu of turning a page to advance through the comic. I wanted to incorporate some large panels to ensure that my viewers’ attention stayed on a single panel. I made my comic assuming that my readers would read the first four panels left-to-right and top-to-bottom. In class, however, Kristin pointed out that the two panels on the left are left-justified and the right panels are right-justified, so she thought to read it top-to-bottom, left-to-right. Having each panel justified to each side was necessary for putting the images on WordPress. Because the comic is meant to scroll, the platform that it is being viewed on does not change the comic at all. I think that Scott McCloud would say that I manipulate time in an interesting way in this comic. Almost all of the panels take place in the astronaut’s imagination, I am able to manipulate the passage of time to make a long trip to moon only take a few panels.

To create this comic, I used Illustrator to make almost all of the image, but I used Photoshop to create the worm hole using distortion tools. I composed each panel on it own separate Illustrator file. I then saved these each panel as a .jpg so that I could upload each panel to WordPress individually. If I could change how I composed my comic on the web, I could’ve done a couple different things. I could I have created a single artboard on Illustrator and saved one big .jpg so the I could move each panel to where I wanted it. I also could have made a Wix site instead of just using the WordPress site.

https://kristinbeckerdtc.com/2019/12/04/web-comic-the-anxious-astronaut/