Comic Assignment: The Old Man And His Grandchild

Introduction

The point of my story is about the old man teaching his grandchild that just because someone knows about something, it is not a guarantee that they would care about the same. We can, therefore, state that the dominant theme of this story is education. The reason as to why I came up with these three characters of an old man, his grandchild, and the dog is to bring out the comic. The old man is the main character in this story, and we can see him dominate in the dialogue. The grandchild only acts as a listener and do not often respond. The dog is used as the test experiment for whatever the man says to his grandchild, something that turns out to be disappointing when the dog fails to act in line with the old man's expectation. However, with his wisdom, the old man uses this opportunity to tell his grandchild that "just because the dog knows what it is supposed to do, it does not mean that he would care to do it." There are several reasons as to why I decided to depict the characters the way I did. Firstly, I used the old man who is the main character to represent a wise person. Typically, elderly people are known to be wise, and in most cases, they tend to pass their wisdom to their children by teaching them some of the basic principles of life. It is indeed evident that he is a wise person at the end of the story when he becomes opportunistic with the failure of the dog to respond as he had speculated, to make it a teaching to his grandchild.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Save 25%

The comic got its base on real-world events, and as such, I have employed the use of autobiographiction in several ways. Autobiographiction is where the writer uses events in his or her personal life in the writing of a piece. The story that I have written in this comic strip has a high percentage of it related to my own experience in several ways. It is appropriate to mention that the idea of this strip got motivated by my own life story, and this supports the concept of autobiographiction in it. My father, for example, has the tendency of telling me stories almost every evening and most of these stories are usually aimed at educating me. It is from this motivation that the comic came about since I am always looking at most of the life events from an educational perspective, a trait that I have acquired from my father. That is indeed an occasion that significantly influenced the formulation of this comic.

The story has no clear place setting or time, and as seen in the picture, the characters have been randomly placed and there I no clear indication of time or place. For the icons, I have the icon of baldness to indicate the man is an old man as compared to the child who sits beside him. I have also used the spectacles which the old man wears as an indicator that the man is a learned man as many people would tend to believe that those who use specs are learned fellas. There is also the icon of love that I have used on the boy immediately after the grandpa tells him that a dog can learn some few words, but has a limited understanding of language. The icons of love here are a sign that the boy is getting interested in these ideas that his grandfather is bringing to his attention. Nevertheless, there are several other icons that I would have liked to use for example the icon of thought in the fifth panel to illustrate that the old man is having a series of thoughts in his minds after the dog failed to walk away as he claims. There is also another significant message in the seventh icon where the boy is seen sitting alone as opposed to the other icons. This is an indicator that the boy is trying to internalize and meditate on the ideas passed to him by the grandpa. It is critical to note that a comic layout is just as important as the storyline. The panel sizes depend on the importance of the scene created, and therefore, if there is a scene that the author feels has more significant points than the others, then it could be made to lie in a larger panel. As seen in my storyline, the panels have different sizes and this is dependent on the weight of the message that each panel carries. The last panel is, however, larger than the rest of the panels as it is a dramatic scene where the old man changes the story to be educative after the dog fails to respond as speculated. All my panels are of the same shape that is rectangular for the margins to come out clearly, and for smooth flow. The panels are also placed in a horizontal manner on the page as an indicator that the flow is from left to right.

Conclusion

I only used two of the panel relationships which are the moment to moment, and action to action and both of them are used in an equal ratio throughout the comic. I think for my comic, there is no such relationship or connection between the foreground and the background since all the pictures are set in the same place and with the same picture creating no need for any serious distinction between the foreground and the background. For the speech representation, I used the speech bubbles in my comic to allow words to be understood as to belong to the specific characters to which the arrow points to. They are meant to show that the thought belongs to a given character in the comic. The speech bubbles have a lot of significance as they are used to enclose the text or the dialogues. The bubble has two major parts which are the bubble itself and the tail. The bubble is used in the holding of the text and the tail points to the source of the text held within the bubble. The reason why I decided to use the bubble is to avoid creating confusion to my readers. For instance, in a situation where the texts are dropped without any bubble or box holding them, it could become challenging to identify who such thoughts or words belong to.