Humanities and Arts Comic, Part 1: Starting Out

     We have a new assignment, and this time we are once again creating something for a client. The task is to make a four to five-page comic which explains how students at WPI can complete their Humanities and Arts requirement, and our client is Kris Boudreau, the chair of Humanities and Arts at WPI. There are actually two different options for this assignment: to explain either the conventional Depth and Breadth method of completing the requirement, or to describe how the Thematic approach to the requirement works. I am working with Jess Hatt again, and we will be tackling the Thematic approach with our comic.

     For the thematic approach, students select an overarching theme, then choose a capstone project (either an Inquiry Seminar or a Practicum) and a set of five regular classes which all relate to their chosen theme. This not only lets them focus on a specific topic of interest to them, but also provides much more flexibility with what classes they choose, and the variety of disciplines which those classes can fall under. However, we have also discovered, in trying to research this project, that there is almost nothing written online about the specifics of the thematic approach, which is problematic. Fortunately, Professor deWinter was able to provide some information and resources.

     We decided from the outset that the majority of the information conveyed in our comic will be through the text. Images will be reserved to a more supporting role, used to illustrate, provide examples, or make the text feel more relatable or approachable. We aim to create what Scott McCloud, author of the informational comic Understanding Comics (1993), would consider to be a word-specific comic. When discussing something as abstract as a way to choose classes, relying on images 

     In our initial brainstorming session, we also settled on a set of key features we want to include. Of course, there were the obvious ones of explaining how the to fulfill the requirement and why students would be interested in choosing the thematic approach. But we also wanted to make sure the information was presented in an engaging, approachable way, and hit upon the idea of using a range of characters representing different academic disciplines. One of the draws of the thematic approach is that it lets students choose courses from a variety of disciplines, and this seemed like a fitting way to tie into that aspect of it. We also realized that it would be hard to stretch the comic to four or five pages if we only talked about how to complete the requirement, so we plan to include examples of some themes students may be interested in choosing. The last main idea we came up with was to use real photos with the characters superimposed on them for the background of panels, ideally ones from the WPI campus or the Worester Art Museum. This would not only let us add a good deal of visual detail without risking going too far beyond the scope of the assignment in terms of time commitment, but would also help it feel more relevant to WPI students and help to establish a degree of ethos.

References:

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. New York: HarperCollins P, 1993. 138-61.