WW1 con

WW1 CON blog post

How long do you think it takes to draw a 3-page comic? Well, if you said 30 hours, you would be mostly correct!

That’s right, it’s time for another blog post.

In my last post, I talked about nationalism, so after wrapping up that project, what is the logical next step? I mean, were there any significant historical events in the early 20th century? Maybe one in which nationalism played a key role? Oh, that’s right, World War One!

Yep, it’s time to talk about the Not-So-Great War.

We went into this project knowing more or less what we were in for. We would be making a comic book, it would be about World War One, and we were going to present it in the winter exhibition. The only detail I didn’t get quite right was how long it was going to take and how much research would need to be done. Source: My 30+ Safari tabs.

We started the project by watching the movie 1917 to get a basic idea of what the war was all about. ¹ After the video, we also read a comic on World War One which, alongside providing a fair bit more information on the war, served as a reference for what a comic about war might look like. The movie and the comic gave me a pretty good idea of what the war was but more importantly, different ways it could be depicted.

Before we could start writing our story, we needed a bit more information than a movie and a comic could provide. We went over some topics like how the war started, how war affected Canada, and Canada’s role in the war. This served a few purposes. First, it ensured we weren’t completely clueless about what was happening in the war. Secondly, like the comic, this provided us with “inspiration” for our own stories.

In classic PLP fashion, this wasn’t the only thing we were doing. Around the same time as us reading the comic, we were investigating storytelling techniques in comic books. I’m sure many of you have read comic books before, but I doubt you know what a “narratory block” is. ² Once we were thoroughly educated on Emanata, Borders, Open Panels, Bleed, and Thought Balloons ³, we could move right along to our concept.

For our story, we weren’t just going to write any old story about any poor sod who was involved in the war. It had to be about a Canadian person.

We were given a few options for topics, but none of them really caught my eye. What did catch my eye was the few cursory mentions of sappers. For those of you who don’t know what sappers are, here’s the definition I wrote up for my comic:

Despite having settled on a basic idea, I still needed to figure out how I was actually going to write my comic. The obvious choices were to either do a broad overview of what sappers were or dial down on a specific instance where sappers played a significant role. After a little digging, I discovered the Battle of Messines, where over 450 tons of explosives were planted under German lines in an operation lasting nearly a year. I wrote up a storyboard, which ended up being a script with scene descriptions, and got to work.

To ensure historical accuracy, I tried to have every image be either traced from a historical image, or referenced off a diagram, or other primary source data. It was very interesting doing all the hunting, and I think there were only a few panels I wasn’t able to do this on. The back shot of the general was AI-generated for the pose, but I cross-referenced it with a real image to ensure it didn’t suck. I did take total artistic license on the detonator, but only because an hour of searching didn’t lead to a single useful source. An interesting one was the map of the mines, which I made by plotting the locations of all the mines from Wikipedia ⁴ and then overlaying a map of the frontlines.

I severely underestimated how long it would take to do all the drawing, which led to me having to really push to get everything done in the last few days, and my screen time will attest to that: ⁵

In the end, I managed to pull through, completing every page with an amount of nitpicking I later realized didn’t really show up on the print. I can confidently say I know more about the Battle of Messines than most people, as judging from the people who read my comic, most people don’t even know what that was. This was a… sort of fun experience? I was pretty locked in, both for research and drawing. Here’s a timelapse of the full 35-hour drawing process, although the original was 20 minutes, so here’s a shortened 30-second version, at around 1.1 hours per second.

I may have forgotten to wait for my storyboard to get approved, which might have saved me a fair bit of stress later, as I had to do a little fix-up of my comic after the exhibition.

Ah, yes. The exhibition. Where all of our work gets to bask in the public eye. A spectacle of learning, but most importantly, it’s:

The second half of this blog post

Occupied in my little world of drawing and research, I didn’t notice the exhibition looming closer and closer until the day of, where it became obvious that many of my peers also weren’t totally prepared either. We all had our comics done ⁶ so we quickly organized ourselves into a few groups based on comic topic and made signs so people would actually know what to do. For the rest of humanities, we attempted to build enough trench segments to cover a part of the downstairs hallway. After school, we gathered down in the cafeteria to receive instruction, but due to it being in short stock, we just stood around. Once we figured out what we were supposed to be doing, we got right to work. We set up a bunch of tables all around our space and put out our comic books. Despite this, things didn’t look like an exhibition yet, more like a bunch of plastic tables. Some people had brought props, and a lot tried to cover the tables with paper, but overall it was missing that exhibition ✨spice✨. At this point, I noticed my friend Caelum had disappeared. He had gone to rip handfuls of ivy out of the forest for decoration. Once I caught on, I also grabbed some ivy, wood, and stones for my table.

It was finally go time, the doors opened and people started pouring in. Sadly, my table was near the doors so people sort of missed us. I’m not too sad because it does mean my voice hurt significantly less afterward.

This seems a good time to bring up one of the things that is interesting about PLP. When we work on projects like this, we often really deep dive into our subjects, much more than “normal” students do. Most people know about WW1 and some might know about sappers, but chances are very few know about the Battle of Messines or mine construction methods. Mostly based on people I talked to while working on this.

This is supposed to be a post about our part of the exhibition, but I feel like grade 10 deserves a shoutout for how incredible their projects were. Ours (and the grade 8’s) suffered from everyone’s projects being sort of similar. All the comics were different, but they are all comics. And all the 8s made different ads, but the repeating slogans made it so once you’ve seen a few, it’s enough.

The grade 10s, on the other hand, had some insane displays. Everything was so interesting and it instantly pulled you in in some way or another. You could really tell how much work, and how much of themselves, the 10s put into this. I feel like this is what an ideal PLP exhibition project is. ⁷

Before I knew it, it was time for my break, which was at the very end of the exhibition, so it basically meant it was all over. Exhibitions have an interesting effect of time dilation where it slows the days before to a snail’s pace, and then makes the 4 hours day of feel like 1.

This has really been a hell of a project, with some great stuff, and some less great stuff, but it totally closed off the year with a bang.

Anyways, you’ve read the whole post (right?) so here’s my comic.

And as an extra, here’s an extended version of the “Modern Graphic Novelist”

I am the very model of a modern graphic novelist, My storytelling prowess is both varied and accomplished. From storyboard to final page, I work with great precision, Ensuring every panel reflects my “perfect” vision.

I’m very well acquainted, too, with matters typographical, I hand-letter dialogue with fonts both bold and graphical. I balance text and imagery to keep the reader’s gaze, Ensuring clarity and style in all the words and phrase.

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Emanata, Borders, Open Panels, Bleed and Thought Balloons, With Inking, Lettering, and Penciling that fills our afternoons, I know the use of gutters and the flow of every comic page, From speech bubbles to captions, in every era, every aaage.

I’m very well acquainted, too, with matters of the four-color, From halftone dots to gradients, I know each shade and hue(of course), I comprehend the layouts and the spreads and all the framing tricks. With splash pages and double spreads, I know the way to make it click.