Reflective Memo

English 220

Final Reflective Memo

        Right from the beginning of the semester when we all found out that this was a comic based class, some of us were surprised and some were smart enough to look into the section they had registered for; I was on of the ones who was surprised. At first, I was a little nervous about the idea of doing comics but then I thought that this is something new for me and I could actually learn something from the class. Well, it turns out that I was right about that. This class has taught me a lot of things that I wasn't even remotely aware of about comics. It was a very interesting class and I really enjoyed it.

        Before this class, I never knew that there was such a large variety of different comics. Now I know that there are graphic fiction, graphic memoirs, historical and so many other numerous categories. Needless to say, I was very unfamiliar with all of the comic book genres. This class really was an eye opener and in the end actually taught me a lot about something totally new to me. I’ve read a few comics but mainly stuck to Calvin and Hobbs and small comics in the newspapers. I was never one to get into a series of comics or anything else partially because I didn't really think there were many comics other than the ever so popular super hero ones. So being that my familiarity of comics was so low to start with it was hard to understand the complexity of them at first. This semester really made me look into comics and doing the in class exercises where we looked at a comic and then discussed them as a class really helped because some people who knew comics very well gave some good insight. Another part of the class that really helped out was the discussion boards because if there was something that I didn't understand or if I didn't understand the comic I had my classmates comments to see what they thought about it. The discussion boards also give you an idea about what other people think about comics, so when we created our own ones I had a better idea about what to expect my audience to think of my comic. I really enjoyed having many comics up on Blackboard learn because there was a wide variety of good comics that I could reference when I was in a stump when creating my own. I could easily juts go on to Blackboard and see what other artists would do with a comic, for example, that was simply pictures and no words or one with one or two words per frame. So these class activities really helped when I was developing my own comics for the two projects we had.

        Now, when you develop a comic, it is a very long process with many different components that all tie in together at the end. I learned throughout the semester that developing the comic comes with a lot of hard work and the mentality of putting yourself into a comic artists shoes. When we did our comic projects, we had to write a proposal basically just stating our ideas for the comic. Then we had to do a script basically saying what was going to be in each panel. Doing the script really helped when I was doing my rough draft because I could just go reference the script and draw exactly what I had planned for. The last steps were the rough draft and final draft. The rough draft helped with just getting our ideas out there and just seeing how everything works out together. Developing a comic takes time and some good ideas.

        While making a comic you have to think of all the different parts that it contains such as, whether or not to add words, color, or detail. Thinking about different components like these can transfer to other genres and mediums throughout our college years and even some careers after college. When you have to think about what your readers are going to expect you have to adjust according to the situation. I have never had a class where we actually had to make a comic so this was something very new to me. When I was writing my first comic about Apollo 11, I had to consider who would be reading it and what information I thought should be in the comic. For the first project, I only had some words that were actual comments from the astronauts and from President Nixon. I thought that having the quotes from them at the time would make it a more realistic historical comic as if it was made then. As for the color, I chose to only color the American flag, the Presidents’ suits, the earth and the moon; everything else throughout the comic was mainly black and white. I wanted the audience to notice the little details but not have the color over powering the comic itself. I had to consider what I wanted my comic to look like while also thinking about what a reader would expect too. It is a challenging thing to do at times but you have to know how to do that with any type of genre or medium.