I chose to do a story that's been sitting around for three or four years now, which would have been part of a longer story if it hadn't been switched out with a rather happier ending. I got attached to this excised fragment, though, and had I had more time I probably would have done more pages of this.
Starting in medias res, Kay is a zombie and Fa and Aaron revive her. Originally Fa was going to be in the next page too, but I took her out for reasons I'll talk about below.
Kay, all worried, talks to Aaron. "How long was I out?" "Too long." Basically, the baby is dead.
Kay's washing some of the post-zombie grime off and has a contraction.
She books it to the bathroom and locks him out.
She stumbles back out quite a while later, and he's been waiting there the whole time.
Done in pencil crayon (I know, right?! First real pencil crayon project since ever, and first time I've picked up the damn things in four years!) on textured grey paper.
Originally I was very nervous about doing a story that involved a bloody miscarriage. I actually hemmed and hawed for a week into the project over whether or not I was going to even touch this. Two things, though, tipped my decision: I attended a presentation by Sam Weber, an ACAD alumni, who briefly discussed how to tackle editorial illustrations with heavy content, ie torture, brutality, and he said that a perfectly acceptable way to do it is by implication rather than straight-up illustration of the touchy topic. So I left out a page I had originally conceptualized, when I first thought of doing this graphic-novel style, that would have been Kay in the bathroom in labour, and subbed in Aaron in the hallway feeling helpless. I liked that a lot better in the end, too, because this was so much more meant to be about tragedy and helplessness and waiting than it was supposed to be about blood and gore and potential squick. (Hence also the subdued, rather than black-like-your-soul color scheme I went with.)
The second thing that tipped my decision is the idea that, to present a project that is potentially touchy, it is best to keep what you say simple rather than go into a whole lot of nuance. The idea that I would have to go up in front of the class and present this was the second stumbling block I was facing, after all -- remembering last year trying to present the Fensirt storybook illustrations and just ending up feeling like the biggest tongue-tied idiot on the planet made me loathe to try something that both sprung from a personal project and dealt with a heavy subject. But Terry has the same problem as I do presenting, and she has found this semester that simpling up a concept makes it much easier to talk about in front of the class. And it makes sense. I mean, either they'll get that there are subtexts and they'll ask (or more likely won't, though it would be nice) or they won't get it and an explanation-in-brief will just confuse and annoy them.
That's the curse of projects that have roots in previous, personal projects -- I might know that the story and characters are complex, but in the context of a six-week project those complexities are better left implied. I mean, I don't assume my classmates are dumb or dense. They're anything but. However, I'd rather not trying to be shoving just how AWESOEM and COMPLAX my stuff is, especially since most of it is no more so than the next guy's. I'd rather have a project stand on its own merits.
For the interested, here's a bit of my process. This is like MAYBE 10% of my total actual process.
Starting by splitting up the narrative into potential pages, and thumbing layouts/pacing.
I fought like hell with some of the pages of this comic, getting layouts that worked. 2 and 3 were the worst, while 4 came out almost perfect the first time I blew them up full-size and 1 and 5 needed minor adjustments.
Color roughs on colored paper! This was after I'd settled on a color scheme.
Then I basically printed out the cleaned-up roughs based on the yellow-blue sketches above onto grey paper and had at'em!
