Throughout my life, I have loved communication. First and foremost, I am dealing with the process and art of telling a story. I would say, "illustrating" rather than "telling," but what I've experienced in making this graphic novel is something much more immediate. An illustrated story, in general, can exist outside of its illustrations, and may have multiple publications with multiple artists capturing this scene or that aspect, or may exist without the images at all. In the comic world, there is a wide spectrum of artist/writer relationships on a personal or business level, but any reader can tell you that when it comes to the actual product, the art is an integral part of a story's tone, impact and success. Rather than illustrating the story, the art becomes part of the storytelling process itself, and cannot be separated from the text.

In order to convey a narrative through sequential art, I employ the standard tools of the comic book medium: drawing, inking, panels and page layout, and also explore the potential of the medium as a book. Each story has a setting and characters and they are conveyed through the artist's ability to draw. My personal style lies somewhere between realism and cartooning: stylizing and simplifying forms to a degree, but retaining realistic detail. The works of Japanese artists Katsuhiro Otomo and Takehiko Inoue exemplify the successful use of stylization with a great love of beauty and detail. My inkwork relies heavily on line, in outline and in shading, to render space rather than graphic spaces of white and black, and I look to Carla Speed-McNeil's work for guidance and inspiration. Panels divide up the page into different ideas. They imply the progression of time and space, breaking the story down into moments. Page layout and panels are perhaps the most defining and dynamic aspect of comic art, and their arrangement is just as important to storytelling as the drawings they contain. Panel size, spacing and flow across a page indicate which panels (and which thought ideas within the panels) are most important, they imply the flow of time from one panel moment to the next. Darrick Robertson's work for Transmetropolitan has been very influential in the construction of a page. Just as one panel relates to others on the page in sequence and flow of narrative, so do two facing pages when bound in a book. Also, when pages face each other, they read not only as discreet works, but as one, and comic artists take advantage of this by continuing images across pages, uniting them more firmly. Breaking with the institutional two-page folio structure, I explore this idea further by moving to an accordion-style book, so the pages flow into each other constantly rather than be divided into sets of two.

Having written the story that I'm working on this semester, I've been able to synthesize the visual and verbal aspects of storytelling to a much greater degree. I want my viewers to look at my work and see a story. If I can use all of the techniques of comic book-making well, the narrative should flow seamlessly.