When I first heard about this assignment, I was stumped and had no idea where to start. I’ve always thought comics and manga art were cool so I really wanted to do something interesting but I couldn’t think of anything. I pushed the assignment to the side until I was done with all my other classwork. At first, I just wanted to get this assignment done and gone. But when I started actually doing the assignment, all the ideas started coming together. 

I wanted my manga reference to be something Naruto related because Naruto was one of the first anime that I got into and I’ve always thought it was really cool. My manga panel reference didn’t take too long. I tried thinking of an iconic scene from Naruto and the first thing I thought of was Naruto and Sasuke’s final battle which resulted in their reconciliation. I didn’t want my comic page to be something as intense and serious as this Naruto scene, but I did want to have some comedic effect; have an intense, serious looking buildup and then an ending with something unexpected and a little anticlimactic. I thought of something that two friends would do at school; I chose school as the setting because I was thinking about what my friends and I would do. My final idea was 2 friends dapping each other up, but it ended up being a high 5 because I didn’t know how to draw that.

With my comic page, each box has a different artstyle, which wasn’t intended but I went with it. I started my first panel with some stick figures with abnormally big, round heads. I never wanted my drawings to be fully drawn out well and realistic or super try-hardy so that was the decision for the big heads and the different art styles. I also drew head accessories for them to help differentiate which was who. The second panels were the buildup and the poses in the original reference were a little complicated to draw with my original big head designs so I just copied the body types of the original, put the head accessories on the characters, and added some non-serious faces on them. At first, I only had the characters in their poses, the “SWOOOSHH” ‘s were added later.

For the last panel, I felt that what I did was a bit lackluster: lazy artstyle for the first panel, second panel looked mostly empty, and it didn’t have that spice to it. So I sat there in class thinking of something I could do to make this assignment pop out more. I thought of something so out there and outlandish and I finally had the idea: Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure. Jojo’s was one of my favorite animes which I enjoyed a lot in middle school with my friends, so it had a special place in my heart. It is an icon and a huge meme with its flamboyant artstyle and unexpecting storyline. I knew exactly what to use as a reference from Jojo’s and immediately got to drawing. I made sure to capture the artstyle from Jojo’s part 3 as it has the most unique and iconic artstyle; the large masculine bodies, their strong jawlines, and their lines on their face that go from the bottom of the nose to the bottom of their chin. I drew my characters in Jojo’s artstyle, with their head accessories of course, and then had the genius idea to add a type of aura just like from an iconic scene in Jojos. After adding the Jojo’s influenced idea, I then added the ‘SWOOOOSHHH’ to the second panel.

Overall this was a really fun assignment and I had a lot of fun thinking of ideas for my manga and I think it turned out really well. Thank you Mr. T for this fun assignment! 

Jojo Reference