First Fear/First Bliss Comic

First Fear Comic– Stage Fright

First Bliss Page 1– Bliss Wars

First Bliss Page 2– Bliss Wars

My final project for Guy Billout’s Thursday Graphic Narrative class was two-fold, first consisting of creating a comic that expressed my “first fear” (the first thing I remember being afraid of), then consisting of a comic expressing my “first bliss” (the first thing I remember giving me great joy and happiness). Both comics were drawn, scanned through Photoshop, and colored with the Paint Bucket Tool.

For my “first fear” comic I recalled my fear of the stage or being the center of attention as a shy child, and so I dramatized and imagined the audience as being this all consuming globular ocean of creatures booing after my lackluster performance, then growing steadily angrier until finally becoming this monstrous worm that chases me around. The audience becomes gradually redder and redder in color to signify their anger and their rising dissatisfaction, in contrast to the blue of the stage and the person on the lower left, who runs off-screen.

My “first bliss” comic centers around the almost primordial ecstasy I felt upon seeing Star Wars on DVD for the very first time as a young child. I truly felt immersed in the world of the space opera, and sometimes fantasized about being a star pilot like Luke Skywalker, destroying the Death Star and defeating the Galactic Empire. The comic literally shows me as a child being sucked in (with hyperspace aesthetics on the TV) to the world of Star Wars, and finding myself as a star pilot who destroys a heart-shaped Death Star by firing proton torpedoes through a heart-shaped tunnel (the heart shape alluding, quite literally, to my own heart, which exploded metaphorically seeing the movie). The last panel shows the spectacular explosion of the heart-shaped Death Star, with pieces flying around everywhere, in much the same way as the Death Star exploded in Star Wars (the culmination of my bliss).

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