The Autobiographical Comic project focuses on personal story-telling as the driving conceptual force behind the artwork. Students spend several class periods reading, writing, and telling stories, learning how to understand and unpack personal experience. How do the stories we tell about ourselves transform our relationship to the past?

 

In addition, the student artists invest time into understanding and practicing comic, character, and lettering design. The student artists worked hard to "cartoonize" themselves into original characters. We observed and discussed music videos drawn by Jamie Hewlett and Takashi Murakami, read autobiographical graphic novels, and studied panel compositions made by Wally Wood to gain inspiration.

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Once the students had undergone multiple peer reviews of their sketches and designs, they created their final artwork using watercolor and sharpie. Once the student artists completed their work, the Computer Science class digitized the comics and created a website called the Comic Nest as a part of an interdisciplinary collaboration.