“I think of too many of my white graduate students at Harvard who somehow feel perfectly comfortable calling me by my first name, but feel reluctant to refer to my white male colleagues– even those junior to me– in the same way. And I think about how my black students almost always refer to me as ‘Professor Lawrence-Lightfoot’ even when I have known them a long time and urge them to be less formal. The title indicates their respect for me, but also their own feelings of self-respect, that part of them that gets mirrored in my eyes. And besides, if their mothers or grandmothers heard them call me by my first name, they would be embarrassed; they would think that they had not raised their children right. So I completely understand when one of them says to me (n response to my request that he call me Sara after we have worked together for years), ‘I’m sorry, that is not in my repertoire, Professor Lawrence-Lightfoot.’
These private daily encounters with white and black students are punctuated by public moments– too numerous to recall– when the humiliation of being called by my first name seems to demand an explicit response; when I feel I must react to the assault not only for my own self-protection, but also in order to teach a lesson on respectful behavior. I regard these public encounters as ‘teachable moments.’ I make a choice to respond to them; a choice that I know will both help to shield me and render me more vulnerable.
A few years ago I was asked to speak at a conference at the University of Chicago, a meeting for social scientists and their graduate students about race, class, gender, and school achievement. The other speaker was Professor James Coleman, a distinguished sociologist, a white man several years my senior who was well known and highly regarded for his large-scale statistical studies on educational achievement. Both of us came to the conference well prepared and eager to convey our work to fellow scholars. The language of the occasion was full of the current rhetoric of our disciplines; focused, serious, sometimes esoteric and opaque. I say all this to indicate that there was nothing playful or casual about either of our presentations. Neither of us said anything that suggested informality or frivolity.
When we had finished speaking, the moderator opened the floor for questions, and several hands shot up in the air. The first to speak was a middle-aged white man who identified himself as an advanced graduate student finishing his training at another prestigious university. He began, ‘I would like to address my question to both Professor Coleman and Sara…’ I could feel my heart racing, then my mind go blank. In fact, I could not even hear his question after he delivered the opening phrase. I saw there having a conversation with myself, feeling the same rage that my parents must have felt sixty years earlier in Jackson, Mississippi. How can this be? How can this guy call him ‘Professor’ and me ‘Sara’? And he has no clue about what he has done, how he has injured me. I’m not even sure that the others in the audience have heard what he just said; whether they’ve recognized the asymmetry, the assault. Somehow, I must have indicated to Jim Coleman (we were friends and colleagues) that I wanted to respond first. He must have seen the panic in my eyes and my shivering body. I heard my voice say very slowly, very clearly, ‘Because of the strange way you addressed both of us, “Professor Coleman and Sara,” I am not able to respond to your question. As a matter of fact,’ I say, leaning into the microphone, holding onto it for dear life, ‘I couldn’t even hear your question.’ The room was absolutely still. I was not sure that there were any people out there who had any idea how I was feeling, any idea that I was on fire. But my voice must have conveyed my pain, even if the cause was obscure to them. ‘Would you please repeat your question?’ I asked the man, who had by now slid halfway down his seat, and whose face revealed a mixture of pain and defiance. ‘And this time, would you ask it in a way that I will be able to hear it.’ …My ancestors were speaking, reminding me of my responsibility to teach this lesson of respect; reminding me that I deserved to be respected.”
– Prof. Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, Respect: An Exploration, Chapter 2
SHORT STORY/ONE-SHOT/ONE CHAPTER/COMICS 101 CRASH COURSE RAPIDPUNCHES’ STYLE
I’m NOT an expert but I have some working experience I can share. You need experience to become great. Here is my set of instructions, tips, and notes towards making a 12-page comic.
My method is to work backwards. Personally I work “backwards” because the end is the only wholly necessary page or set of panels in the story. Everything in between is open to editing and hacking as the most important moments are emphasized and chosen.
I even plan/draw the end page first. The end is the last page a reader sees- so spend your freshest energies on making it as epic, memorable, poignant, and beautiful as #$%^&.
If you draw the pages from 1 to 12 sequentially you run the risk of fresh to burnt out- an uneven distribution of drawing skill. (treat the first page and the 2-page splash as you would the last).
Roughly… the steps to making your comic is
WRITE
PLAN THUMBNAILS
DRAW
…BEGIN THE WRITING (DO NOT SKIP NO MATTER WHAT) like this, in this order:
How does it end?
Does the protag succeed or fail?
What is the turning point of their story?
What the protag do that led them there?
Where does it start?
Who is this protag?
EXAMPLE:
Guy gets mauled by a bear.
This is a fail on the guy’s half.
The bear must eat something or he’ll starve to death.
It’s the guy’s fault the bear can’t find other food. He caused the avalanche that buried all the cabins.
The guy is yodeling in an avalanche zone.
The guy is some guy.
CREATING “THE BEAT SHEET” Take the above stuff and reorder it to make sense.
This guy yodels.
Echoes roll.
Snow slides down.
Avalanche buries the mountain.
Cabins are engulfed.
This bear has no access to cabin food and garbage.
Bear eats this guy.
Expand. Blow up important beats for emphasis. Keep less important beats brief.
This guy is hiking in the snowy mountains.
He comes across an avalanche warning sign.
There is nobody around but him.
A dumb expression forms over his face and he yodels.
Echoes roll but nothing nearby is moved.
At the top of the mountain the snow drifts twitch.
Guy, satisfied, hikes away from there still yodeling.
Frozen snow cracks.
Snow puffs billow and great slabs of ice crash down the mountain side.
Guy sees this and hightails it to safer ground.
Animals, people, are all panicking and getting pushed over by the rushing snow.
Cabins are destroyed.
The guy takes cover by an outcropping of rocks, fastens himself securely to the rock face, and waits for the avalanche to die down.
Avalanche dies down.
A lone bear shambles over from the other side of the mountain.
The bear goes to where a cabin used to be (only roof tiles are left). Bear sniffs a dish satellite.
Bear forlornly eats a food wrapper.
Bear tries to dig.
Guy comes down from the rocks he as climbing and sees bear.
Bear stops digging and sees him.
Guy runs.
Bear chases him down.
Bear eats the guy.
BEAT SHEET COMPLETED!!!
After the beat sheet, write up all the sound effects and speech bubbles and conversation/dialogue you want to be in your comic.
Since comics are a visual medium, highest priority is given to the beats. If a story can’t be told with the art without the dialogue– you messed up and it’s time to rethink your life choices.
Try to keep all your text chunks as short as a tweet. Professionally you don’t want more than 25 words per speech bubble and no more than 250 words per page.
Next is translating the beats to pages…
STRUCTURE OVERVIEW:
[1] point of entry, in media res, hero intro
[2][3] conflict. establish conflict, setting, and mood by the third page. [4][5] rising action/false resolution to conflict/investigation
[6][7] turning point/plot twist/epiphany (this one epic image, to page spread is pivotal, spend a lot of effort into creating this)
[8][9] aftermath/“darkness before dawn”/struggle [10][11] recovery/“rise and conquer”/“fall”
[12] resolution/final end/cliffhanger
[front cover][interior] [interior][back cover]
——————–
My maximum per page is nine panels but I’ve seen pages that have way more. I like to have about 3 to 4 panels per row or less but I’ve seen the “rules” broken before. Advanced comic book artists manipulate time with the number of panels and the size of each panel.
remember, DIAGONALS!!! open up an issue of batman, superman, spider man, deadpool or whatever youre reading theyre everywhere.
———-
…DRAW IN THIS ORDER:
Page 12,
Page 6 and 7 (this is typically one large image that takes up the space of two pages),
Page 1,
and then the rest.
ONLY “DEVIATION” ALLOWED:
Page 12 and 1*
Page 6 and 7,
and then the rest.
*Draw the first and last page as a spread in situations where the beginning of the story mirrors the end of the story.
Cover is dead last.
———-
(If at the very end you find out you need more pages and it’s absolutely unavoidable and totally necessary you have to add them in fours. Try to stick to 12 pages for this crash course.)
——————–
FURTHER NOTES:
Plan and draw the pages in spreads (the twos) since this is how it will appear in print and when you submit them to an editor for review guess what, the pages with an exception to the first and last will be reviewed as spreads.
You at most only need one establishing panel of the setting and environment (scene) per page.
Forget “true to life” perspective outside of the establishing panel). Practice diagonal composition of objects and subjects within panels. For dynamism.
You don’t have to present the text all in one go (one paragraph or bubble). You can and should break up paragraphs, sentences, and if you need to single out words– to make smaller, more easily managed bubbles to scatter through the panel.
Less important moments have smaller panels and or lesser detail. More details (or more word bubbles) slow down time. More drawn detail also creates a concentration of values (it’s darker and sometimes combines together as one shape or mass)
Know your light sources. Control the blacks. Control the values.
One of the biggest problems with religion is that people stubbornly, insistently reduce God to their own size; they imagine that God loves the same people they love, and that God hates the people they hate. This is not just insidious theology; it’s actually idolatry, because people are just worshiping a blown up version of themselves. So let me say it simply: God’s love transcends all of that.
When your parents reject you, God loves you; when your friends or classmates make fun of you, God loves you; when your priest, minister, imam, or rabbi tells you that you are an abomination, God loves you; when politicians cater to people’s basest prejudices, God loves you. No matter how many times and in how many ways people make you feel less than human, God knows otherwise, and God loves you. When you feel frightened, or abandoned, or humiliated, I hope the unshakeable conviction that God loves you can help hold you and enable you to persevere.
If you haven’t seen the trailer, I would like to let you all know this movie is much weirder than this headline leads you to believe.
i’ve seen the film, and well they’re not wrong, it’s fucked up.
This was no accident.
Here is the actual trailer and I don’t even know what to say
i cant believe that trailer just had me watch a man ride a living human corpse across water like a fucking jetski and presented it to me with absolute sincerity
Does anyone know where I can find this online to watch??
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