This is my Junior Thesis! (FYI: theres a lot to read for this one)
First off, I'm very proud of this project! I value the work I've accomplished in this comic! The fact that I could hold the printed booklet of it in my hands at the end of this semester, was such a relief compared to last spring semester (21 page comic that I didn’t get to finish nor liked). And it was partly due to the encouragement, guidance, and push from my Thesis professors, (Nick Bertozzi + Josh Neufeld) and classmates!
Last Spring semester, it felt like I had been thrown into the deep end of a pool when we jumped from doing 3 page comics to a 21 page project. I was unprepared, had no specific guidelines, and I didn’t know how to manage my time appropriately. This Spring semester, we went from doing 1 page comics to a 6 page project (8 cause of the front+back covers). Not only was it a smaller and a more manageable jump, I had an outline and we had spoken about it periodically in the Fall beforehand. We also started conceptualizing in December before break, so when we came back in January, we had already started working on the comic pages.
Last spring, my professor didn’t really hunt me down for my progress, so there was a lot of leniency, and I’m a dangerous procrastinator sometimes and by Spring semester, I’m usually burnt out. So I’m bad with self discipline to say the least. But this year held some changes! There wasn’t any hand-holding this semester either, but my professors showed a whole lot more interest in each individual student and their works in progress and held one-on-ones periodically, which helped in motivating me. Another motivator was the content of my comic. I like Frankenstein, and I’ve even drawn the Creature in high school (when I first read it) before too, so this was an adaptation/excerpt that I knew and was comfortable with doing. There were some challenges, and some aspects that I knew I would excel in, and that’s honestly the best part of making this comic. It was just the right amount of outside my comfort zone where I didn’t feel like I wasn’t in control. And because of that, it pushed me to want to finish and do well (pero también, a fuerza, tuve que ponerme las pilas jaja).
Last Spring, I had to create original pages, and I just didn’t have much experience with making comics and getting to experiment with what kind of comics I wanted to make, so that was another problem. And then we got a new head for the Comics and Illustration department at SVA (Viktor Koen) during Sophomore year, and he wanted our Junior Fall semester to focus on just that: getting to know what kind of work we wanted to do, and I think it helped greatly when I transitioned into the Spring semester, because I wasn’t scared at all this year. And I feel even more excited for my Senior Thesis (10 comic pages of original content)!
I deeply appreciate my Thesis class this year, especially after finding out that out of all the other Thesis classes, we were one (if not, the only) class that was on schedule. Even with the miscommunication between the school, students, and professors this semester, Nick and Josh were there for us when we needed them.
I wrote 3 separate papers on my process all throughout the semester because my Culture Survey professor, Vincent Benedetto (a wonderful and insightful instructor!) thought it’d be a good idea (it really was, it helped organize my thoughts and solidified my feelings all throughout), so I’m gonna attach them here for you to read so you also get a feel for what my process for this project was like!
ESSAY 1 (FEB):
For my Junior Cartooning Thesis Project, I chose Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. In my process of trying to find literature to adapt into my six page comic thesis, I struggled to find something that I enjoyed reading while also envisioning what it would look like as a comic in my artistic style. But as I was trying to remember any books that have made me feel this way in the past, I do remember first reading Frankenstein in my senior year of high school. I recall making drawings of The Creature, trying to emulate his grotesqueness, reacting to the story, and understanding the characters when I read it. I was hesitant to choose the book at first though, because Frankenstein has been adapted across all kinds of formats and media, and I didn’t know if I would be told to pick something else that hasn’t really been redone before. But my professors were so motivating and told me to work on something that I felt confident in doing in my style for the semester. And this story is simple yet encouraging enough for me to do. I don’t want to challenge myself too much to the point where I lose confidence and give up, nor give myself no challenge at all and lose an opportunity to advance skills that I’m lacking on, and this book feels like it’s enough to push me in those artistic areas.
So, I chose to adapt one part of the book as opposed to the entirety of it. Within the six page limit that we have, adapting all that information would be very tedious and unnecessary. There’s a lot more that I can show and convey within a scene than an overstuffed story for this project. While I can also argue that there are ways of doing it though, I only have so much time in the semester, so I'm choosing to adapt the majority of chapters 3 and 4 of the 1818 edition. This part of the book goes over the obsessiveness of Victor Frankenstein and the birth of his creation. The reason why I chose this part is because I thought it would be appealing to draw and showcase! And this is the “comfort area” of my artistic abilities talking. I love drawing figures, clothing, and some organic things like clouds and trees. It’s mainly everything else that I need to improve on, like interiors, exteriors, and mechanical things like cars. But I also think that this is a very pivotal part of the story and seeing it in my style would be very cool.
The good/bad thing about my thesis is that my professors wanted my class to be as historically and culturally accurate to the time and setting of the book/story as much as possible. It’s a beneficial challenge and lesson to know how to be accurate with references, and luckily for me, I already try to be historically/culturally precise whenever I do visual or contextual research for my personal characters and stories. But, this time, it was a little hard, considering that 1800s german fashion wasn’t really documented unless someone was royalty. As to the scientific devices/instruments used, there was more luck there. But, I also have the liberty when It comes to decorating Victor’s lab because this is a science fiction work, so not everything in that aspect has to make logical sense.
Since people are my domain, I was very happy when I made character turn-arounds for class last semester. I love designing characters, so this was a lot of fun and gave a lot more insight and added visual information for the comic. I got to revisit The Creature and make up a look for Victor (I’d never envisioned or drew him in highschool, he was just a character in the book). In thumbnails, interiors (Victor’s lab), exteriors (An outside shot of Victor’s apartment), and the overall setting was pretty vague, but it’s getting more detailed in the penciling/inking stage right now.
Black and White comics impress and scare me because in order for solid Black and White to convey what you want it to, you have to study it and know how to apply it. And I don’t have that talent/skill set nor do I feel like learning haha. Grayscale and monochrome uses of color are a little easier for me to understand and work with because there’s opacity to manipulate. But with color, there is a whole lot more information that can be read, and that’s what I love doing the most. My professors were kind enough to let my class make the choice of how we wanted our comics to look so I’m making my thesis in color!
One of the reasons why I love using color so much is because I use it to convey or heighten emotion and atmospheres in scenes/panels. I chose to reference the coloring of pop horror movie posters from the 1950s - 1980s. I very much look forward to seeing the historical/cultural accuracy and the expressions and body language of my drawing work mixed with this eccentric and modern pop of color! It will definitely be something to look at!
ESSAY 2 (MARCH):
My class hasn’t made any covers for our adaptations yet so I’m assuming that's the last part in our process but I do have some Ideas for it. When I made the character turnarounds for the Creature, I tried my best to draw him as closely to his description in the book. He’s 8 feet tall, very grotesque looking, muscular but also boney, so his rib cage, collar bone, and other parts of his skeleton are poking out in some places. And since he’s made up of dead bodies, his skin, hair, and other external features are dark, muddy, and stretched.
Victor has no description for what he looks like in the book, so I did my best to draw him as closely accurate to what he would’ve looked like as a young German/European man in the 1800s; medium to long hair and he would be relatively short. But compared to the Creature, he would look like a child, so I gave Victor some height and made him 5’9”. He’s around 20 years old at the time he brings the Creature to life, and since he’s been obsessively working on the Creature for 2 years without taking proper care of himself or going outside of his study, Victor’s very skinny, pale, disheveled, tired, and he’s covered in blood and grime from working.
The reason I’m adapting this part of the book is because I think it’s a good place to start with for an audience who’s never read Frankenstein. It introduces us to Victor, his motivation, what he eventually ends up creating, and the instant 180 degree of emotions he has to actually seeing and realizing what he’s done. So maybe, after reading my adaptation, someone might want to continue reading the actual book? And this part had the biggest impact on me when I first read the story in highschool.
So I’ve finished inking my pages now, I just have a bit of editing before I start coloring digitally. In the following paragraphs I’m describing what’s happening in each page and I’ll be attaching scans of my inks to the artwork assignment on canvas so you can follow along.
Page 1:
The first panel establishes the outside setting, the apartment building where Victor lives. The highest window is the only one that’s lit by candle light, showcasing that Victor's the only one awake in town, working at very late hours. For the rest of the first two pages, the panels consist of “pillow shots” (film term) of inside Victor’s laboratory. Because the captions are Victor’s thoughts in retelling his feelings and actions at the time of him building and making his creations, I wanted the panels to show things that he wasn’t talking about, to expand the universe of his lab to the reader more. This includes a look into the guides he’s following in the anatomy book in the last panel of page 1.
Page 2:
This is the second busiest page out of all the pages. I drew the beakers, vials, and microscope in the first panel; the scientific instruments he’d use for whatever he needed. The second panel, I wanted to introduce Victor a little bit, show a close up of his eyes. His brows are furrowed a bit and he’s wiping sweat off of his forehead. He’s also got bags under his eyes. He’s tired but he’s still working hard despite that. When I add color, I’m gonna love adding him smudging his face with blood from working on the Creature! It’s little touches like that, that pulls the reader back into the reality, the world of the story!
Panel three shows that he’s been dissecting animals, mice to be exact. I also wanted to show that he might’ve been messing around with embalming fluid? I recently found out that embalming fluid was invented around the end of the 1860s in Germany, which is perfectly fitting for the time period and place that the book, and this scene, is taking place. In panel four, I’m showing the decaying and gross body parts that Victor’s dug up and collected from graves and charnel houses to save for his creation. And there’s a hint of the Creatures leg resting on the table next to it.
Page 3:
This is the busiest page and took me a whole day to ink. I took too many breaks because my hand ached time after time. This page has gone through the most revisions because perspective is a skill that I'm currently bettering, so I hated working on this page because I didn’t want to but the payoff looks and feels so nice now that I’m finished with that. Here we finally see the Creature in his entirety, Victor is seen from his back, he’s sewing up the Creature. The room is also going to be lit up by the candles that he has in the foreground of the room, it’s written in the book. I wanted to show how small and cramped the room feels, but I got caught up in making the space look accurate perspective wise, that I didn’t add a lot of the lived-in aspects of the room, I forgot to add more personality to it. But I'll do what I can with coloring. I am very proud of this page, it was a big feat within these six pages and I’m happy with it. I did go a little overboard with the detail and I do notice that the spacing in between the rocks on the wall pops out more than I wanted it to, but that along with other details that don’t do what I intended for them to do, are easy fixes that I can take care of digitally.
Page 4:
This is the page where the Creature finally wakes up! And even though I’ve already shown the Creature laying down in the previous page, there wasn’t much detail in his face or torso that I could really show, so I took this page to build up to that reveal on the next page. After page three, it was all smooth soaring because the next three pages mostly consist of Victor and the Creature, and they’re super fun to draw. From this page on to the end of the comic, I also decided to leave most of the background behind the characters blank so that I can use gradients to help tell the emotional mindset of the scenes; plus there’s already so much detail in the characters themself, I don’t want to take that focus away from them and overwhelm the reader with unnecessary detail where it isn’t needed.
Page 5:
This is the big reveal of the Creature!! Him in all of his glory! I had so much fun drawing him, but there was a lot of detail to remember that I forgot to add a scar on his right forearm (easy fix). I like to think that Victor didn’t care enough to put in accurate layers of fat, or maybe the anatomy books didn’t have that kind of information so the Creature is strictly skin, bone, and muscle.
Page 6:
The end of the comic adaptation shows Victor finally waking up from this dream he’s been living in for the past two years. He realizes the horror that he’s created and runs away in terror. This is where I decided to end the adaptation because there’s another scene right after he runs out of the room that would feel like an awkward place to end if I ended it much later.
ESSAY 3 (APRIL):
At the beginning of the year, I struggled to find something that I enjoyed reading while also wanting to adapt it. And then I remembered that Frankenstein was a book I had already read and enjoyed in high school. This project has been fun, annoying, and rewarding. Usually during this half of the year, I’m burnt out and am not motivated to give my final projects 110%. But throughout the process of my Junior Cartooning Thesis Project, other than drawing page three, I haven’t been completely discouraged or lost interest in what I was doing. There are things I didn’t get to do that I wish I could’ve done (mainly in the color section), but I gave it my best and I’m proud of that. Looking at my pages now, I’m happy with the work I’ve done, it took so many hours!
I’ve heard how other Thesis classes didn’t start their projects until late January this semester, while my class started in December of last year. Starting that early was a pivotal move really because, I’ve been in those other thesis class positions before, and I know how stressful and disadvantageous it can be to work on something so important with so little time, and the payoff isn’t what we expected and it’s something we can end up being embarrassed about. I really appreciated the story content of my adaptation, it fueled me to keep going and want to finish this comic. I’ve tried my best to make this retelling of a famous scene in horror/sci-fi pop culture my version while also keeping true to the book.
I’m never gonna forget my feelings while working on this comic. Sometimes, I make decisions that I don’t realize help me out in the long run. That kind of decision was to make the first three pages very external and detail-heavy and make the last three pages very internal and character-focused. While working on page three, I remember thinking that I had reached the top of a hill, and every page after that was gonna be like rolling down the hill: super fun. I made the first three pages the chore before I got to what I really wanted to draw and that made the energy and effort spread out much further in the process of the project (also, establishing the world and characters first, is super important when it comes to clarity in comics, so I was already starting in the right direction). If I had started the other way around, I would have put all my effort and energy into what I wanted to draw in the beginning, and gotten burnt out and demotivated to work on the last three pages that I would not have wanted to touch. And I know that that would’ve affected the weight of my work; it would’ve been imbalanced and inconsistent.
But this was a super meaningful experience and one that I will carry with me forever because I learned a lot about my habits as an artist. Self-discipline is something I struggle with, I can never just sit down and force myself to get things done at times, and that ends up hurting me. I procrastinate whenever I don’t want to work on something I’m not comfortable drawing yet. And I have to say “yet” because I eventually will have to learn, it’s the only way to get better. It’s the one thing I hate about being an artist: having to go out of your comfort zone a lot of the time.
If I had to begin another similar project, I think the only thing I’d do differently, would be to start even earlier. Because I didn’t get to do a lot of color detail that I’m used to doing in illustrations and smaller comics (1-pager, 2-pagers). But then again, I think I could’ve been able to do that If I had been even more serious about this project in the beginning (inking-wise). Out of 110%, I’d say I gave this comic 90% overall. Which is a lot but still not ideal. And the only thing I can do to fix that is to do even better on the next project I work on!
