Visual Diary – Mist was Brilliant

This happens immediately after Antonia takes Techo in from her hungover bus journey and settles her down with a cup of tea.

Techo explains that it’s been almost exactly a year since she broke up with Mist. Or rather, Mist broke up with her.

A few notes on experiments that I want to draw attention to:

This is a narratively complex comic, in that there are flashbacks and memories playing in Techo’s head as she talks. I wanted an aspect image to open with, so the reader fills in the details with their mind and also creates a sensory experience with the cup of tea, bringing us closer to Techo. This grounds us in the present moment.

The colour changes and becomes quite cloudy and pink, and the monologue becomes descriptive. This should indicate that we’ve moved to a memory, introducing the reader to the tool of decoding pink as memory and desaturated blue as present moment.

The composition of the second and third panels are almost identical, making a sort of graphical cut between the speech bubble and the steam coming from the tea. This takes us from memory to present in a cool way – I see the memory almost melting away as Techo comes back to the present, seeing Antonia sitting across from her, but still fuzzily, still deep in thought.

The final panel is designed for Instagram, where I have my biggest readership, and is saved elsewhere as two separate square panels that should scroll seamlessly to make one long scene. The act of making someone scroll before they come to the end of the comic adds physical time and pacing, mimicking the time indicated in the final panel, of the rain spitting, growing stronger, and then pouring. It’s up to the reader to decide how to read this – whether it’s been raining harder throughout the whole comic, or whether it begins to rain quickly right then, or even if it’s just metaphorical for her mood.

So I used a variety of different methods to indicate narrative, memory, time passing, pacing, etc. my thumbnails had a few more aspect shots, e.g. the kettle still steaming in Antonia’s kitchen, but the piece of text fitted this number of frames most appropriately.