Suddenly, Something Else

Blunt visual metaphor

This exercise came from rereading Pablo Holmberg’s book, Eden.

For this exercise, you will need:

Post-It Notes
Paper
Pen or pencil
At least one strong emotional connection

Instructions:

1. In the first panel or two, draw yourself performing some mundane task or activity.

2. Make a list of five things (big or small) that fill you with an intense feeling. The thing can be big or small, alive or dead, organic or inorganic, and the feeling can be positive or negative.

3. Pick one of the five things and write down the feeling that thing gives you. If your thing creates more than one feeling, write down the big ones that are on your mind, and then pick one.

4. When you’ve done that, brainstorm some actions that might be a good metaphor for that feeling, think, “when I feel that way, it’s like I am…” and fill in an action.

   For example, if you’re planning a depressing story and your chosen feeling is sadness because you want to depress everyone else, your list might include actions like falling, shattering, splintering, dissolving, etc…

5. Pick an action and apply it to your character as you move forward with your comic. So, if your action is “shatter”, then make your character shatter, if it’s dissolve, then they suddenly dissolve. You get the idea.

6. On the last panel of your comic, simply inform the audience what your character was thinking about so they can make sense of it.

Thoughts:

I sometimes get odd ideas in my head about how comics “should be”. Like, sometimes I think that using narration is a cheat and that if I was a better cartoonist I would use only dialogue, or that thought bubbles are tacky, or that every time a character breaks the fourth wall a piece of my soul dies. I hold onto these beliefs for a while - a month, a year or two - and then I read a comic that does that thing I thought I hated… and I love it. And I remember that I know nothing about anything. And I remember I prefer it that way.

Pablo Holmberg’s work is full of little things that normally bug me, but work perfectly when he does them. One of the things he does that falls firmly into that category is to have his characters explain what’s happening in a comic… by just saying it to the reader! It’s so blunt and unsophisticated and I should hate it… but it comes off as funny and dry instead.

This exercise is an attempt to grapple with that, and scratch the surface of that whimsical/meaningful combo of his that I love so much.

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