To begin this exercise, I chose the above thumbnail as reference for the first panel. The thumbnail is my impression of the opening shot of the Japanese animated film “Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind” by Studio Ghibli. It is, from my research, rather commonly used shot, especially in old western films where a major character, usually a cowboy or bandit of some kind is seen approaching the camera in a wide shot.

In several places, this kind of a shot is also known as an establishing shot:

“Extreme wide shots are often used to introduce the audience to a location. In this case, they are referred to as establishing shots. Often, an establishing shot is used at the beginning of a scene to let the audience know where the ensuing action takes place.” (^1)

With that established, I proceeded to illustrate the first panel.

This first panel is of a man walking away from what appears to be some kind of a crash, a shot that establishes the situation very superficially. This gave me enough of a context to draw out the rest of the page as I had presented myself with enough questions to answer in the following panels. The questions I used as a reference for the page were along the lines of –

Who is the man? > Did he come from the crash? > If so, was he with someone? > Did they die in the crash?

(1)Unknown, Author. “Extreme Wide Shot: A Guide to Shot Sizes for Filmmakers.” Cadrage Director’s Viewfinder | App for iPhone & iPad, 7 Sept. 2022, http://www.cadrage.app/extreme-wide-shot/.

Right off the bat, I had a decent backstory to support the scene so I went with it for the time being. Since it came to me so naturally, I was able to visualise the scene in a cinematic format almost immediately, the rest was just fitting each shot into panels and figuring out the style. Initially, I thought I’d go the usual line art way with and draw the scene in detail, but with a limited scene like this, there were bound to be a limited number of elements to make in the first place, and I figured that since I had full creative control of this comic strip, I need not go the detailed route, all i needed was something just enough to convey the message. From there on out, I decided to improvise as I drew, focusing on the just the idea, and not putting too much effort into the drawing itself.

The very first panel, being in greyscale, already had a noir atmosphere and I decided to ccarry that forward. Something I’d subconsciously picked up over the years of seeing a lot of noir cartoons and comics was the use of negative space and just the colours black and white in general; especially in comics like Batman: Black & White, which I realised might have been one of the influential factors, where noir is a consistent theme throughout the collection. Here is one of the covers as an example:

So, finally, what I ended up with was a man in a suit (to go along with the noir style) walking away from what appears to be some sort of crash site in a barren land, followed by an explosion in the crash site. On a closer look at the man’s face we see him crying, perhaps grieving, perhaps he lost someone in the “crash”. Basically, I’d created enough on this one page to leave the reader with a number of questions, both about the character and the context.