Before starting anything for my foldy zine, I went over the heroes’ journey and the steps in my story, to have the ideas fresh in my mind while I look for the subject matter. Using my sketchbook, I brainstormed for ideas and wrote down the standard steps in the story. In order to have a better idea regarding the length/number of panels, I created a blank zine with numbered pages and front and back covers.

Next, I looked over my previous sketches, including the ones I had created that day. I was drawn to a sketch of a forlorn woman carrying a birdcage. I felt there was a story there, so I sketched her again when I got home, this time less forlorn. I also sketched a few new ideas for a birdcage, since hers was fairly simple in reality, and I wanted something with a clearer design.

Bird cage lady

Design exploration

Then, I just looked at my sketch, thought back to what the woman looked like and then started conceiving a story. I like making up stories, and that is something I like to partially do just in my head with no obstructions. Brainstorming on paper is great, but I felt that the sketch was enough for my mind to have something to guide it while I thought of the possibilities unhindered by paper. Having the clear limitations of the story phases was both challenging and wonderful. The short cat story from the manual also helped me keep the story small, instead of creating something ambitious and then being subsequently overwhelmed by the scale.

While thinking of the woman carrying a birdcage, I made the rather obvious jump that she must have come from a pet shop. The cage had been empty in real life, but I decided I wanted her to have a bird in it instead. So I was left with a lady walking home with a bird in a cage. The question was: What is the story behind that?

I toyed with a few ideas but in the end these are the steps I came up with:

1. Stasis: Lady sits in living room. (alone)
2. Trigger: She sees a documentary about fish.
3. Quest: She goes to the pet store looking for fish.
4. Surprise: One of the birds catches her attention by chirping.
5. A Critical Choice: She tries to look at the fish again, but the bird keeps making noise.
6. The Climax: She covers her ears but turns to look at the bird.
7. The Reversal: They exchange a  look. She changes her mind.
8. Resolution: Lady sits at home with the bird.

It is a simple story, but it is effective and respects the standard journey pretty faithfully. The Old World is the woman’s home. The Inciting Incident is her seeing the documentary. The Quest is her walking to the shop. The Revelation or is the chirping bird and her subsequent refusal to acknowledge it. The Atonement is her changing her mind. And the Return is coming back to the status quo, her house, now changed not only because she now has a pet, but because she returned with something she had not in mind when she left.

The next step was to illustrate those panels and separate them in a way that would fit within my 16 very small pages of available space. First I simply illustrated the actions as best I could. Here, I drew both from the experience of drawing movie stills and my general knowledge from reading far too many comic books. I did my best to pace the story and add enough variety to the images for them to be interesting. For example, the first two panels are in the same room, but I wanted the one of her getting the idea of buying a fish to be from a different angle. Or when the story reaches the climax, the characters are technically still in the exact same positions as in the previous two panels, but I chose to use a much more dramatic angle looking downwards and bending the physics of perspective a little in order to create a interesting composition.

The sketches in my sketchbook allowed for freedom of movement and composition experimentation, but I soon switched to the format the final zine was going to have. I cut and folded a A4 paper to create a zine, then started experimenting with my ideas on there, taking notes as I sketched.

After I had my first draft done, I could not help but feel it was far too plain and boring. I thought of the previous exercises, where I was challenged to take an initial sketch and put it in a different time or context. So, after thinking of a few ideas, I sketched some concepts for a fantasy version of the same story, and immediately fell in love with the characters. Instead of a regular woman, I created an elf, and I replaced the fish with a jackalope (an antlered rabbit) and the parrot or bird with a griffin (part eagle part lion, though this one is probably part parrot part cat instead).

With these new changes in mind, I created a second draft. The interesting dilemma was that now my world had to change along with the characters. And that made it far more interesting. If the girl is an elf, then she must live in an elven house in an elven city watching an elven-type television. And if she lives in an elven city, then it means that the signs are not only in English but in other languages as well. It also means that the city outside her window must have an interesting, fantastical skyline and that the shop windows can have odd shapes. Things can be made of different materials like wood or stone instead of concrete and glass. In the panels where she walks to the pet shop the buildings behind her can have posters featuring competing dwarfish and elvish politicians and  graffiti in a fantastical language. The animals inside the shop also have to be different. Instead of a cat or a dog, there can be a phoenix and instead of the normal square cages usually seen in shops, they can live in interestingly shaped cages hanging from the ceiling.

For the final draft, I forwent the notes, and drew all the panels in the composition I desired to create a solid idea of what the comic would look like. This created a foundation for my final digital illustrations. I also drew out a swirly text on the front page, creatively naming my comic “The Pet Shop”, so that I could look for something similar on a free font website later.

The next step was to introduce the sketches in Photoshop and illustrate the comic itself. I decided, perhaps unwisely, to align all the sketches on the A4 page as they would be in the final product and illustrate them there. I thought it would be easier than creating them separately and then needing to make the proportions fit when shrunk to the final panel size.

Because I chose to do it all straight on the A4 (which I had sectioned appropriately) I had to keep rotating the page when drawing, I am not sure how much time I lost or saved by doing this. The important part is that I drew over the initial sketches using simple black inking lines, forgoing any color, since my printer doesn’t use color, and choosing not to use any shading with softer shades of gray because I felt it would make the very tiny images less readable.

The final text I chose for the cover was a simple Hobbit-esque sort of font. I liked it because it gave a vaguely fantastical feel, without being too fancy.

Sketches lined up digitally

Digital Inking

Font

Failed Iterations

Printing turned out to be a little more complicated than initially planned. The biggest problem was that we couldn’t get the printer to line up the front and back of the image properly, which would not usually be a problem, but since I had to both cut and fold this in a particular way, it meant that the text had to align at least vaguely with the panel on the opposite side, lest it be cut off. But we eventually managed after several failed iterations, and I had a completed zine!

After finishing and folding it up, I asked my family what they thought of it. My biggest concern was whether or not the story was easy to understand, considering it has no words other than the “chirp” sound effect. Happily, they all understood exactly what I was going for, but they made a few suggestions regarding the last couple of panels, where the actions of the elf seemed a bit too sudden. She shifted from still looking vaguely displeased with the griffin to taking it home with her. I agreed, and made a few changes in Photoshop, taking her hands off her ears in the penultimate panel and placing one hand close to the bird cage in order to have her show even more visible sympathy towards the animal before she actually takes it home.

In conclusion, I am tremendously happy to have created what is basically my first try at sequential storytelling ever. And it even turned out decent and fun! I do not plan to create comic books, but the same basic ideas are applied to any other type of story-based illustration projects, whether they be for children’s books or movie concept sketches or even commercials. The thing that helped the most was definitely the fact that I used the story structure as a guide. I kept referring to it, even though I have known about such things for ages, and have written based on them before.

But the thing, or the twist, that makes this little comic strip interesting is the odd context it takes place in. Without the exercises from before, which encouraged changing the existing context to something completely new and imaginative, I do not think I would have ventured into creating something of this sort. The elf would have stayed a normal lady, the jackalope would have been fish, griffin would have been a parrot. And frankly, that’s just a bit boring. I will always remember this when I take a commission or create a story and the guidelines do not necessarily specify a context or a time period or a particular sort of person/creature. I will ask myself more “what if..?” questions and expand on the given narrative.

“What if it happened 100 years ago?” “What if it’s in space?” “What if all the characters were the size of a thimble?”

Whether or not I or the client like the ideas can be dealt with after the initial brainstorming phase. This opens doors which would otherwise would not even be contemplated.

The thing I would change about the zine is the last part. It ends far too quickly, even after making those last changes. But instead of just tweaking the panels, I would completely change them in order to make space to add a new one with the elf walking home with the griffin in the cage. I was limited in my spacing and initially thought that a “walking home” panel was less necessary than the ones before it and therefore could be scrapped. I thought that the pacing on the panels where she turns and stares at the bird in silence were important for the climax. Now I’m not so sure. I could have either overlapped those or scrapped one of them entirely in order to fit one of her walking home.

But all in all, this was a successful and highly beneficial project, one that I will try to re-create on a bigger scale sometime in the near future!