How can researching the historical significance of World War I inform and enhance the storytelling in a graphic novel I create?
That was the driving question for this project. You can probably guess what the final product was. Yes, we all made graphic novels. In this blog post I will break down the steps on how I learned about ww1, and the steps I took to creating my graphic novel!
But first, here is my answer to the driving question: I know that researching about ww1 was essential for me to create an accurate representation about parts of the war. Of course, as a class we learned so much about the war. But I found that a lot of the information I learned came from research for my individual comic.
There are so many things that have enhanced my graphic novel, that I learned from research. For example, I could picture the emotions (helped with my colour scheme), or something as simple as drawing the accurate clothing and uniforms. It would have not come together well if I didn’t do proper research, or find the right photos to trace.
Now that I answered the driving question, let’s jump into the project!
Launch 🚀
For this launch project, we had to make a 10 panel comic about what we know on ww1 so far. I chose to make mine based off of his mother’s perspective. The son is pretending to be older so he could go to war, and the mother gets really sad. At one point, the letters stop coming in, and she gets so worried.
In the end, he send a letter telling her how he lost his leg in an explosion. When I made this short comic, I didn’t really know much about the war at this point, so that was a little bit of a challenge. When doing this launch activity, I thought that this was a lot of drawing. Little did I know what this final project had in store…
Learning about ww1
To start learning about the war, we went through some causes of war. After that, we read a graphic novel to lean about how the war played out. It showed me how one small action made a huge difference, and the world would never be the same again. Reading that comic gave me a very good understanding on how the final product of our project would look.
Scrapbook case studies
We were put into groups to create a small keynote presentation based off of a scrapbook page that we were assigned. I was with Julia, Tyler, and Cole. We got assigned the battle of Passchendaele. I had no idea how there were so many different battles, and it was really interesting to focus on Passchendaele.
Planning my comic 📖
In order to create a captivating, accurate story, I needed to do some planning. Here is the story spine, and the Who, What, Where, Why, When, How.
As you can see, there is a lot of planning that goes into creating a story!
Final Comic 🏁
As soon as I stared doing all my drawings, I realized that this was going to be a lot of work… I started off by using sketches pro to trace my drawings. That worked well for a bit, but then we got Procreate! It took me a little while to get used to it, but as soon as I got the hang of it, I was glad I switched over. the tools were so much more advanced, and that just brought my drawings to life.
Keeping a routine was so important for me during this, because drawings detailed, accurate drawings is very time consuming. Obviously, I can’t be doing homework all day, but I set aside time every night to draw. I admit that I stayed up too late drawing sometimes… Here is the schedule that I made for the week of work.
When I was writing this schedule, I thought there was no way I could get all those done each night. But I was determined, and stuck mostly to this schedule! I tried my best to lock in in class this month, and it really payed off.
Here is my final comic. It is about a boy named jack who has always wanted to work on a boat. He enlists for the army. There was a misunderstanding, and he was put in training to be a frontline soldier. After a while, he transfers to the British navy to be in the submarine, HMS EM3. They are on patrol duty in German waters, when they are hit by a torpedo. There were sadly no survivors. This is based on the real events of that submarine.
