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
