Burning Question started as part of a discussion. I say it was a discussion; in reality, it was one more instance of someone “proving” to me that global warming is a myth because it wasn’t 100% understood, there was still debate, and some scientists had lied about it anyway.
Although I think that these “points” are wrong, they do represent genuine doubt by some people. I started thinking that there must be a way to address these concerns without just shouting louder. An analogy seemed to be a good approach.
So this comic actually started as a verbal response, but I decided it might work visually as well.
(Click any image to enlarge.)
I lined out the page in blue line. Blue line won’t be picked up by scanners or xerox, which makes for less erasing. I’d use it for drawing too if I could find one that had a hard, sharp point. Usually, it’s kind of soft and crumbly. You can see that I left room for a title which I was still planning on drawing at this point.
The hard part was trying to determine what to use as images, since I hadn’t originally conceived of this as visual. I’m mostly happy with what I came up with, although panels 2 and 8 seem pretty weak to me.
I was pretty concerned about the best way to present this analogy. I think it’s a bit choppy because it jumps back and forth (climate change, health, climate change) rather than being strictly linear. I think it might work better if it were ordered as panels 3, 4, 5, 6, 1, 7, 8, 9. But I kept it as is because I wanted to be clear that climate change was the main idea.
I inked most of the comic with a pen, but I went back and filled in the larger areas with brush and added a few touches here and there in order to vary the line width and add some character.
For the title, I decided that I was finally going to go ahead and create digital letters that I could reuse.
I created these in Adobe Illustrator to look like my hand drawn letters. They came out pretty close to the real thing. Now I can easily reuse them. Plus they are easy to re-size and re-color to whatever is needed.
1 comment
hardtravelinghero
March 24, 2012 at 11:18 pm (UTC -6) Link to this comment
I’m wondering if you could have run this with two columns, one for human body health, one for planetary health, and have it so the comic can be read as a whole or as two separate comics in which the reader could read either column.
There is a New Yorker cover from the past two or three years that sort of has this going on there there are about three separate sequences in which the panels can be read. I’ll try to find the cover date or a link.