After looking at the instructions, I immediately thought of drawing a comic about the stressful schedule that I have since the 24th of February and until the 3rd of March. Unlike other assignments, this wasn’t challenging in terms of thinking about an idea. I believe crafting this sort of comic is different from the triptych in terms of delivering a more profound story as it had the middle act stretch across two panels. I made this story to stay motivated for the devastating week coming up and encourage students to have their heads up as spring break is coming.
This quadriptych process was simple, straightforward, and felt more natural than a triptych. The challenge is finding something meaningful to start with, or an interesting enough twist or climax. Having the middle act stretch across two panels led to a more natural storytelling process. I think this taught me that the more panels you have to work with, the more you can add to the narrative. Too much makes it less punching, but four panel structure seems a very sound structure / good number. I think themes of gun violence made this a controversial comic strip, but hopefully the donuts being at the foreground and the gore coming from Boston Kreme filling made for a lighthearted comic. I chose a comic of this caliber as I wanted to add some unique twist to a seemingly casual cartoon of donuts, as if it was a grown up version of an innocent comic I would read as a younger kid. I thought this content matter could be accepted due to the extremely emotionally harsh subject matters present in the comics read for class.
First, I was met with the difficulty of setting up a story. I chose a relatively funny one that I had experienced in my childhood. I divided the story into four panels read from left to right. I do not believe there was any real challenge for this assignment. This was actually easier to execute than the triptych because I had one more panel to explain the story. The layout of the story was done in a way that I think would be easier to read and by splitting the middle scene in two, I was able to give further perspective.
Making this Quadtriptych involved a brief reflection of the sort of conversations I have had with people regarding the current situation in Ukraine. Mostly between my roommate and I, these interactions are almost daily where we exclaim at the unfortunate reality in Ukraine and almost immediately switch to something else more pertinent (i.e. homework, getting food, or watching youtube).
I am not trying to make a claim about how normal citizens are supposed to stand up, drop everything they are doing, and take immediate action to end this conflict, but at the same time, it is just bizarre how normal we are with a situation that could very easily escalate into something much larger.
This assignment was not as difficult as drawing the triptych. Triptych and quadriptychs are pretty similar. A quadriptych is just making the middle part of the story. The idea came pretty quick to me after looking at a couple of comics by Nathan Pyle. Having the middle act stretch across two panels made story telling a little easier than in a triptych. I made this my story because it would be interesting if the moon and sun had thoughts and looked at what was going down in the world.
I came up with many kinds of classical quadriptych tricks but decided to appeal to poetry. Coincidently, a quadriptych has four panels to fill for each of the four imageries I really appreciated in Jorge Luis Borges’ poem What Can I Hold You With: the lean streets, desperate sunsets, lonely moon, and the yellow rose. The comics has one even more advantage than Borges’ lines of poetry: comics could create the symphonic effect and render all four melancholic symbols to readers’ eye at one time, but poetry things go in order of the words. I hereby attach the entire poem:
What can I hold you with?
Jorge Luis Borges
What can I hold you with?
I offer you lean streets, desperate sunsets, the
moon of the jagged suburbs.
I offer you the bitterness of a man who has looked
long and long at the lonely moon.
I offer you my ancestors, my dead men, the ghosts
that living men have honoured in bronze:
my father's father killed in the frontier of
Buenos Aires, two bullets through his lungs,
bearded and dead, wrapped by his soldiers in
the hide of a cow; my mother's grandfather
- just twentyfour - heading a charge of
three hundred men in Peru, now ghosts on
vanished horses.
I offer you whatever insight my books may hold,
whatever manliness or humour my life.
I offer you the loyalty of a man who has never
been loyal.
I offer you that kernel of myself that I have saved,
somehow --the central heart that deals not
in words, traffics not with dreams, and is
untouched by time, by joy, by adversities.
I offer you the memory of a yellow rose seen at
sunset, years before you were born.
I offer you explanations of yourself, theories about
yourself, authentic and surprising news of
yourself.
I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the
hunger of my heart; I am trying to bribe you
with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.
Link to Poetry: https://www-ccs.cs.umass.edu/cris/texts/two-english-poems.html
When composing my quadriptych I tried to think of something that was on the simpler side but also creative. One thing that was challenging was trying to think of an idea what would be easy to draw but still interesting to read. This is relatively similar to the triptych because there is the same level of creativeness that is required but the comic storyline spans for a longer amount of time. This in a way was difficult because there had to be more to the actual story of the comic. The span of the two middle panels versus one made the climax of the comic span on for longer but it did not make it any more difficult. I told this story because I thought of this out of nowhere and I think it is a cute idea. I think I could have added more detail but overall I like how my quadriptych turned out.
You’ve made a one-panel image with your avatar, combined two images with your combophotos, and made a traditional three-panel comic like those that used to dominate the Sunday funnies sections of newspapers. This week, I’d like you to make a 4-panel comic like the ones that are currently dominating web comics.
As Peter Rubin argues in Wired, “Four-panel strips have been a fixture since early 20th-century newspaper comics like Mutt and Jeff and the concomitant appearance of yonkoma (“four-cell”) manga in Japan. It’s the perfect three-act-structure: You start at one end, develop conflict in the middle two panels, and resolve with a punch line at the end. But thanks to a number of factors—not least of which is the rise of Instagram and Reddit—a gridded, two-by-two variant has come to dominate the internet.” Notice that the four-panel comic, Rubin claims, still has a three-act structure.
Then make your own four-panel square comic. Just like with your triptych, you should still focus on telling a story with a beginning, middle, and end and you are still free to use photographs or to draw in whatever style you’d like. Focus, again, on compact, playful storytelling.
You can combine the four images into a single one or you can publish them to your post as separate images. In order to create a square in the WordPress block structure, you’ll simply need to add 2 “columns” blocks to your post and then hover over the top of each column block to add an image.
Step one: Add a Columns layout block
Step two: Add an image to each block
Column blocks are found in the “Layouts” section of the block selector. They allow you to format your blog posts with columns, to which you can add images or paragraphs of text or embed other elements and so on.
Like with your triptych, add a paragraph of text reflecting on your quadriptych comic. Describe the composition process a little bit. What was challenging about this assignment? How is crafting this sort of comic strip different or similar to the triptych? How was it different to have the middle act stretch across two panels rather than one? Why did you tell the kind of story that you did?
