Thinking Through Production

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Scott McCloud is a comic book artist who has also written books about the history, workings, and possibilities of comic books. He has a website that he updates reasonably frequently, and where he has put some of his experiments with the shapes of webpages for supporting different arrangements of the frames of comics. Read some of his experiments, such as Zot or I Can’t Stop Thinking.
Use his arrangements—the long vertical scrolls or the lines connecting frames—to re-shape a piece of academic writing you’ve already produced. You can do this on paper (using tabloid-sized paper or taping together sheets of letter-sized paper) or online, supplementing your writing with drawings, photographs, or collages. Experiment with breaking your writing up into differently-sized chunks and with putting those chunks into different arrangements. How do your changes—and arrangements—affect how others read?

Design and produce a comic that shows what you understand to be the differences between the ideas of “freedom” and “liberty.”

With printed comic strips your eye moves from panel to panel and you probably are not conscious of how your mind fills in narrative detail between panels. Comic book artists take advantage of the space—the “gutter”—between panels in different ways: they can suggest just a very short passage of time or the movement of years between the panels, or they can suggest a movement between different places. If you see one panel with a person smiling and the next panel with the same person frowning, you assume that something has happened to make the person angry or sad. To test out how different technologies, you might encourage different kinds of reading, develop and produce a drawn or photographic comic with a minimum of five panels. Use the comic to explore time: How has your sense of time changed since you were a child, for example, or how does it feel to stay up all night cramming for an exam compared to staying up all night talking with friends? After you have produced the comic, scan its individual panels, and put each panel on a separate webpage, linking the pages so that others can move back and forth between them. How does the visual separation of the panels on the webpages change your sense of the time between the panels?

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