Our comic is done!

This is what we've all been waiting for - Our comic is finally done and published!

This has been a labour of love for all of us. We were really happy and thrilled to see the finished product hot off the press.

The release party was held Tuesday and went great! All of the attendees seemed to be honestly interested in our comic book.

The comic is going to be published online as well this weekend, if technicalities don't get in the way. So be sure to check it out at Tapastic! And stay tuned for more info!

Regards,

Severi
PR-Team

Come join the party!

The comic is coming along nicely, it's almost time to publish the whole thing. We'll be having a publication event on 29.11.2016 at Saikku (Antinkatu 7, 28100 Pori) from 11 am to 13 pm. There will be coffee and some snacks available, so please come visit! You can also buy your own copy of the comic book at the event for five euros.

Also, there has been quite a lot of questions about whether the comic will be released as an internet version. We will be uploading it to Taptastic, one page at a time. But if you're hungry to read the whole thing at once, contact us at akateeminenmangasarjakuva@gmail.com or come buy one at Saikku tuesday 29.11!

- Tiina Tommila, PR-team

Hey!

Our project is making good progress. All cartoon pages are ready and now our layout artists are folding our comic, so we can send it to the printing house. We will also organize a launch event where we celebrate our comic and sell them for five euros. We are going to tell you more about it later. Overall, the project is progressing really well and you can always follow us on Instagram.

 Nora Adler, PR-team

Making progress!

We are living interesting times. The USA has chosen its next president and our comic zine will be sent to the printing next week. We have already drawn the content of our work, and before printing we need to decide the order of the pages and what should the cover be like. Of course, there’s still PR-work, Taidekuja-event and the publishing event on 29.11 at least. We were also present at the Oulu Comics where we had a table promoting our project. We are all very exhilarated about this!

In this post I decided to tell you about some challenges and tough decisions we have faced during this project and how we solved them. We discussed whether there should have been references in the comic bubbles or only at the end of our work in one page. The bubble reference solution would have represented the more academic approach, but it would have decreased the entertainment value. Eventually we decided that it is enough to have the references at the end which works best for the comic format .

Also, we wondered what printing house we should use and whether we use colors. Later it was revealed to us that there’s a group of printing houses that our university is only allowed to use, so we chose the cheapest one. Don’t worry, the quality won’t suffer! We decided also to use only black and white because it was cheaper. Believe me, we don’t have an infinite amount of money in this project. The covers will still be colorful.  We also saved money when we were allowed to use our university’s printer to print our posters seen at the Oulu Comics. In addition, I couldn’t use the Ames –comic font for my own work because the campus computers didn’t support it, and I didn’t have Photoshop at home. Luckily one of the members of our team could insert the text into the bubbles because the work was in Drive, so that problem was solved too.

Happy autumn and remember to follow us also in Instagram!

Our posters at Oulu Comics!

-Jere Kesti-Helia, PR-team

Hey guys!

The scripting and drawing of the comics are almost finished. Even though the work has been stressful at times, I think we’re happy with the results. The next step is to send the comics themselves to be printed. We are all pretty hyped!

Just reminding you - We’ll be at Oulu comics festival. Their website is http://www.oulucomics.com/ . Check it out!

Best regards,

Severi

PR Manager

Come say hello at Oulu comics festival 4.11!

The whole production team has been working almost day and night to get the comic zine done in time. Now a part of this team will be travelling 500 km north in order to attend one of the annual comic events in Finland.

Next week You’ll have a chance to immerse yourself in the world of comic books and the scene around them, as international Oulu comics festival takes place 3.-6.11.2016 in Cultural center Valve. We’ll be exhibiting our comic project there during Friday 4^th November. There will be a small preview of what’s to come as well as some sketches and other making of-material. Feel free to come and chat with us! 

- Tiina Tommila, PR-team

Work in process: Mario

I finally decided to start drawing my pages for our comic. My style isn't the best for comics, because I love realism maybe a little bit too much. One of the most important characters in my pages is Mario, which everyone surely knows. I wanted to bring something new to his design, but still keep him recognizable. 

First, I drew him to a paper and scanned it to my computer. I don't usually sketch that much, but now I thought it would be the best choice.

The next step was background, which is inspired by all different levels in Mario games. This took me about 15 minutes to draw. After that I added Mario to the picture and did the lineart.

This is the final comic panel without speech bubbles which I will add later. I tried so many different styles, but I liked this the most, because it looks a little bit like painting. 

By they way, we are going to be at Tokyo international comic festival, so come to say hi if you are there! 

- Nora Adler, PR-team

MAKING OF THE COMIC ZINE

Many greater or smaller publications have “making-of –material”. You know, stuff where the developers of a movie, a CD or a video game tell about their views about how things are done and what kind of feelings they have had during the production. Unfortunately, we aren’t filming a document about our work during this comic production because that would need much more time and effort than we have at hand. Anyway, I decided to write about the making of the zine in this blog post so that you could get some kind of a picture of how we carry out this comic project.

When you create a publication, you need people as well as tools to implement it. Therefore once a week we have had meetings where we have discussed, for instance, what the comic should  be all about, how to create  the content, where do we get the money for the project, how to  promote the project and so on. There are about 10 people on this course and we have formed groups, and each group has its own field of responsibility in the project. We have a production team, a technical team and a PR-team.

This project utilizes different hardware and software as well. Computers and smart phones play an important role since they have the applications needed in the communication between our groups, in sharing material and in creating the comics.  We use, for example, Facebook and WhatsApp for our inner communication and Instagram  (go check it out!), as well as this blog to promote our publication to the audiences. Photoshop, in turn, works well in the editing of the comic material. We share our schedules, plans and flyer scripts, for instance, in Google Drive. So, much can be done at home, but we also use the computers at the university
campus. It is, therefore, possible to draw and write both at home and at the university.

I wonder what it would have been like to create this kind of comic zine 20 years ago. Back then you couldn’t ask in WhatsApp who would distribute the fresh flyers around the town, nor give feedback on each other's drawing material. Digitalization has made everything so much faster. Of course, we have some traditional project working methods, too, like some draw parts of their comics with a pencil. And, like I said at the beginning, we have these meetings at our university campus where we go through what's next. Traditional speaking is a great way to give feedback, to ask for help or to give suggestions. There is also much humor in our discussions, which strengthens the atmosphere.

Part of our team members working intensively.

So far everything has gone pretty well. We finished the project on the flyers which were visible at the Nippori-event. Now we are busy designing our comics. There’s also going to be a poster in the future. The comic zine will be released at the end of November. Stay tuned!

-Jere Kesti-Helia, PR-team

We'll see you at Nippori!

Hey guys!

We've been really busy doing our comics! We're all excited to have this kind of opportunity to be able to tell people who are unfamiliar with the study of gaming and gaming culture, even though it is done in a somewhat unconventional way.

I'm happy to tell you that we are going to be at Nippori, which is a manga-themed event at Pori. The event has been organised since 2010 with cosplay competitions, workshops, and much more.

You can find more info about Nippori on their blog or Facebook.

So if you are going to attend or you happen to be in the neighbourhood, come visit and say hello to us!


Oh and I'd like you all to meet our mascot, the Academic Fly. Isn't it handsome?

BEYOND!



- Severi Härö, PR Team

Press start

I’ve alway been mesmerized by comics and videogames. During my free time, it has been completely natural to get stuck in front of a tv and fall deep into escapism while hitting the enemies and jumping over obstacles with a push of a button… At least while I haven’t been glued to comic books. And it’s not like I’m only reminiscing times when I was a kid! After all, sometimes a small procrastination with a comic book can’t be bad, right?

I guess this is pretty familiar to some people. Games and comics are something that come to mind when we think of entertainment and our leisure times. You’d think the life of an academic would be the complete opposite; serious business with lectures, thesis work and studying. However, games have been the subject of academic studies more than once, and in our upcoming publication, we will bring together the academic viewpoint, games and comics.

Beyond game culture - an academic representation of game studies in a comic book. In other words, we are creating articles in a comic form, that are based on actual research studies about games and gaming culture. The project participants are students from the University of Turku, and the project is mainly a part of its digital culture studies. With our project, we hope to popularize some of the themes that our university research project deals with and bring informing and entertaining articles to the readers.

While our project is only at its beginning point, I think I can already see the scenery behind the boss level… I hope you will also enjoy our academic adventure!

-     Anna Heinonen, Editor-in-chief