Floating Down
An unexpected collaboration
One of the great joys of my life is passing along to folks the things I’ve learned about comics in the 30-odd years I’ve had the privilege to be involved with them on a professional level.
Two years ago, I was given the opportunity create a comics course for UCLA’s Extension Program, and teaching it has been a labor of love. Midway through the course, I have students write a 1-3 page story, then — in the spirit of collaboration — exchange the script with another student, who will visually execute it. If they have drawing skills, that’s great, but they are NOT judged on drawing ability — they are judged only on their ability to find creative solutions to the visual needs of the story (i.e., choosing “camera" angles, adding/subtracting beats, etc.). Stick figures are fine. It’s not uncommon for the writer to discover when their script is visualized (by either themselves or someone else), that it's not really drawable, and they need to revise it to make it so.
This past quarter, we had an odd number of students, and one did not have someone to swap with. So I did what any reasonable instructor would do.
I volunteered to draw it myself.
Truthfully, I was only going to do the minimum required amount of work (i.e., rough breakdowns), since I only had time to draw it at night. But I had so much fun with executing the script, I couldn’t help myself from doing a lot more!
What follows is the result. Thank you, Natasha, for a fun script!
