Comics

I know I complained about learning all kinds of new software programs a while back, but mostly I was just grousing about having to learn so much in so little time. What I have learned is some pretty cool stuff.

One of the software programs I've been learning is called Comic Book Creator. It's a pretty neat little program that provides templates for creating comic book pages (or whole comic books for that matter) either from stock images, or your own photos or sketches.


We're using the program to create introductions to a series on personal finance for youth. We figured the comic book format might be one way of engaging the young adult user's attention, and the images are accompanied by an audio track featuring the voice of the character who walks user's through each of the modules of the program.

The one on the left is the introduction to the module on employment deductions and benefits.

It's been great fun learning to use the program but I quickly realized that writing a comic book - even if it's with mouse clicks and drag and drop rather than a pen - is a very different kind of writing than anything I've ever done before. And since I never read comics as a kid (only as an adult - yes, I do do a lot of things backwards...) I felt like I didn't have a really good idea of what makes a good comic book.

So I turned to Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics for some hints about what makes a good comic. If you have any interest in comics (or graphic novels if you prefer that label), McCloud's book is an excellent read. It's a combination of history, art lesson, reading theory and entertainment. It taught me a lot about what kinds of things work best in comics. I certainly didn't exploit all of them when creating the visuals for our project - I was more concerned about reaching our learning objectives and hitting the points we wanted to in each section - but it was interesting to read how different comics are from literature.

For example, in literature, the more detail one gets, the more one tends to identify with the protagonist, particularly in first person narration. But in comics, McCloud showed that the more detail the artist provides - the more specific the character's features become - the less the reader identifies with the character. It's a case where "everyman" emerges most strongly through a lack of detail, rather than the wealth of detail that usually creates character identification in literature.

I suppose there are some cases where a sparse narrative could create a sense of identification with the character in literature, but I can't think of any off the top of my head. If you think of one, let me know, because there's part of my dissertation that will engage with this question of detail and character association, and I'd hate to have egg on my face about this proposition...

But learning to put together a comic book page has been lots of fun, even if I complain about how much work it's been!