I took a slightly unorthodox (at least in my opinion) approach to the story of this comic strip. The reference for the same was a group chat on Instagram that I am a part of, and once in a while I’d notice some absolutely ridiculous interactions and conversations. One such instance was when a friend of mine had two profiles of his on the group chat at the same time, essentially being able to text from two separate IDs. Once in a while I’d catch him narrating a story on the group (with one Instagram ID) based on something that happened to him in college, and at the bottom of the screen, notice he’s reading his own narration of the story (with another Instagram ID). I found it quite striking that this even happened; essentially I saw no point in having two IDs on the same group if you’re just going to use one to read messages written by the other. And so I made a comic strip metaphorically expressing that interaction through actual characters instead of Instagram IDs.

The first version, that used nothing but dialogue, was pretty basic and only uses dialogues in two of the total four frames. It basically showed an interaction between five characters, including my friend Kartik, his other ID counterpart, two other friends and I. It starts with Kartik narrating his story to three people (including himself) in the first frame, me appearing in the second frame absolutely depressed by the sight of it, Kartik noticing my presence in the third frame (this wouldn’t happen in a group chat obviously, this bit is fiction), and explaining himself in the fourth. The reason the other two aren’t engaging in the conversation between Kartik and I is because they haven’t even noticed it happening. As for the production of the strip, all I used was ink pen brush in photoshop on an A3 size canvas. I organised the layers such that the illustrations were at the bottom, the speech bubbles and boxes in the middle, and the panel lines right on top.

The second one, like the others to follow, saw a slight change in the narrative because of the adaptation of the script into a narration. It also lacked the sarcastic tone born of the silence of the first one. The tricky part is understanding how the words will fit into the space without seeming crammed or overlapping with the illustration. If I may say so, I don’t believe I did the best job of it either, the end product seemed inconsistent, although readable.

The third was easier to articulate because I narrating it from my own perspective, having a character based on myself in the strip. Along with another slight change in the narrative because of the change in style, this also had the most written content and also had its own kind of humour, different as it might be from the original. I also did a better job of text placement in this one.

The fourth and final version, which had a mix of all three, as suggested, served as a collage of the other three, in addition to a few extra bubbles and boxes. Understanding how to coordinate between the narrator, the third person narration and the dialogue was a bit tricky, and again, not as successful as I’d have wanted it to be. However, I managed to add a bit of humour at the end of this one, hopefully enough to save it.