A 36 page comic book drawn and written as the final project for CRWR 308 – Intermediate Writing for Graphic Forms. This assignment was built up over the course of the term, where we went through various workshops to plan and refine the comic. This culminated in a miniature “comic con” of sorts at the final lecture, where we printed and distributed copies of our work to the class to read.
We first had to submit a proposal with a summary of our project and the scope of resources and time needed to complete it. The expectations for this course was roughly ~10 pages- However, with this being my final year in undergrad, I wanted to be ambitious and take on a bigger scale project, estimated at 30-40 pages. I’d always wanted to make a full-fledged comic book before, and this seemed like the golden opportunity.
I first needed to pencil out the entire first draft, to be reviewed and workshopped by my peers. This was a time-consuming task in itself, resulting in a whopping 40 pages. My peers agreed that I’d have to manage my time well to make the final product work. The advice that stood out to me most was to be strategic on where I put my effort, funnelling my energy into the big “money-shot” pages, the ones that would stand out the most on a read.
It took about a week straight of non-stop drawing to complete the inks, capping off with an all-nighter on the very last day. I found that many of the creative decisions taken came about from needing to manage my harrowing constraints- Despite my proposal specifying the comic would be in full-colour, I opted to go with a black and white style, both to save on time and go for a particularly grungy and dusty aesthetic that matched with the post-apocalyptic setting.
Moreover, I believed this monochrome theme would make the “money-shot” pages stand out most- Namely any shot where the titular Renegear showed up, which were possibly my favourite pages to work on (as well as the pages I worked on first). As you can see, I also forgo’d adding the scrap armour like in my concept art, once again to save time but also to highlight the contrast of a pure white being against the dark shadows of the environment. Its glowing red eyes are the only source of colour in the entire comic.
I also had to cut down on my page count by two pages in order to meet the deadline- However, I later realized I’d made a terrible blunder. If you read the full comic posted at the beginning, you will notice how the pages have been carefully arranged so that impactful pages are hidden by page turns, and I was able to have a double-page spread perfectly aligned. This ordering was made possible with the 36 page count in mind- by removing two, the layout when I put the pages together to be printed would be off. Thus I added two last-minute additions of character bio pages at the end of the book, both preserving the ordering but also adding extra flavour text for readers to enjoy.
