In response to your comments, Samantha is the most experienced using Adobe, but she will be giving me a crash-course workshop so I can aid in creating graphics. I am familiar with the programs but will be needing a helping hand to master the more difficult parts of illustrations. We are considering a mix of hand drawn and computer illustrated as a way to differentiate answering the questions posted specifically for the project. For obvious reasons our images will mimic Yang’s original work but will also have our own take on it. For example, for our presentation, Samantha cropped out the characters from the graphic novel to show how each character looks like. We will use a similar method to add/retell some part of the story. We have decided to focus on a particular scene to elaborate on but since we have not yet picked out of the options, we will omit from saying which scenes we’re considering. In regards to the aesthetic difference between the way we will produce the images and the way Yang produces them, we will be a disclaimer in the beginning explaining that we are using Yang’s characters but hopefully will be changing their tone of voice once we develop the particular scene.
As mentioned briefly before, we are trying to zero in on a specific scene to add on to. We believe that this would give us a little more creative freedom as we will be able to manipulate the story and the tone to make it ours. We have also been conducting some comic book-making research in effort to closely recreate a comic book. Having visited creative blogs and various livejournals, we found that saddle-stitch binding a book is what most comic book writers do. Therefore, we are going to saddle-stitch our final products. We are also going to stick with the book dimensions of American Born Chinese.
That being said, we plan on incorporating the characters to help answer the various aspects/information the assignment asks us to include within our book content. Samantha and I have been able to meet up and discuss ideas on how to creatively execute this but we are yet to make final decisions. We hope to come to a consensus by the middle of the week so that we can begin working on the creative as soon as possible. As a group, we have already began outlining and answering the questions and information that the assignment requires us to include. We have taken your suggestion of creating a forward/blurb to incorporate the information and we will be working on which would be a best fit for our graphic novel. If we were to do the blurb approach, we were thinking of doing something similar to the back of the novel. It has “ABC” with blurbs explaining what the book is about. We also will be incorporating the page block dividers when we see fit.
Samantha and I also visited Harper & Brothers to HarperCollins Publishers: A Bicentennial Exhibition at Columbia University, Kempner Gallery, Rare Book & Manuscript Library. We drew great inspiration from the books on display and have taken into consideration how important typefaces (commonly known as fonts) are to a book. We also will be using a different typeface for answering the basic requirements and when we add our specific scene. Aside from the block dividers this will be the best way to differentiate the parts.
