Obviously I didn't expect it to be easy to make a comic strip, but my expectations were certainly exceeded. And I didn't help myself much either.
Personally, the hardest part was conceptualizing the dialogues and the punch of the comic strip. I have very little experience with writing, and even less with humor. The closest I got to that was in text interpretation classes. Although they were quite tough, I wouldn't skip them under any circumstances. Since I've always been aware that my textual interpretation isn't the best, I've always needed external videos or texts to understand and perceive the symbolism and implicit subjects of slightly more subjective artistic works. I still don't consider my textual interpretation very good, but those classes were far from useless. But I'm still trying to improve my interpretation and media literacy!!!
Back to the comic strip, my biggest inspiration was IT influencers. Those who constantly insist that you don't need college to learn [X], you just need to buy their exclusive course/workshop/e-book that is conveniently on sale and very close to selling out. Obviously, it's possible to learn almost anything on your own, but an academic and pedagogical environment is essential for a stable knowledge base. Maurício is a programmer who, as soon as he finished college, got a job in the field and left home to live alone in an apartment. Working from home and not having many social interactions, he ended up becoming more and more reclusive, avoiding leaving the house as much as possible. And that includes “learning” how to cut his own hair.
I intend for this to be the first comic strip in the “Comic Standard” series. My biggest inspirations for the series are “Helvetica Standard” (by the author of Nichijou) and the comic strips from Shen Comix. In other words, it’s a collection of slices of life that may or may not make the slightest bit of sense, starring (or not) some of my characters that have been gathering dust for a while now. I still plan on making a separate page for the comic strips from this series!
Now, about the practical aspect, I had no idea what art style to follow. I considered doing something similar to the art style of Helvetica Standard, but I wasn’t really sure if I wanted to do something so “simple”. So I decided to continue with the modus operandi.
I started on January 23rd. And I only finished on March 17th. I didn't work on this comic every day, I'm sure I would have finished it much sooner if I had it as a priority. But I still greatly underestimated how much work it would be to sketch, paint and render 5 different illustrations (considering that each appearance of the characters takes my entire illustration process). Even more so since it had been a while since I painted (my last painting was done last year). Don't expect the next comics to be as "well done" as this one.
Only one frame had a significant reiteration, the last one. As you can see in my unused drafts, the last frame was going to show Mauricio from the front. In other words, the reader would have to deduce that his hair is badly cut only from the front. I thought it wouldn't be very obvious. So I decided to abandon that pose and draw him from the back, since it is significantly more difficult to cut the back of your own hair (not that I tried).
One detail that I made sure to add are the speech bubbles with different shapes and colors. Obviously the different colors make it easier to identify who is speaking, but I also made sure to vary the shape to represent each person's personality and also their voice and tone. I hope it worked!!
Anyway, thank you very much for reading! I hope my work was entertaining at least.
See you soon!
-NekoRaita