inside the box

the making of a comic book school thesis

I did it! I made a whole box of comics and earned an MFA from Comic Book School for it! Officially passed thesis review TODAY. 😎

here’s all my comics!

I made ten thesis packages: three for the thesis review committee, two for the school library/archive, and five extras as backups and gifts.

here’s my installation in the senior thesis art gallery exhibition

Here’s what went into my thesis package:

1. a pitch package for my middle grade graphic novel Beyond Troll Rock. (I shared some sketchbook pages/development art for this project earlier!) The pitch package, which looks like a novella from the outside, includes one scene (14 pages) of sample art, plus the entire script (about 100 typed pages, which would be about 250 pages when illustrated), a plot synopsis and a blurb, comp titles, and character sketches.

   

   Goose for scale

2. four mini-comics:

   1. Puffin & Troll Are Friends (here’s an incomplete early version)

      

      complete online version coming soon, with another whole page of story :)

   2. Little (a dream comic)

      

      I have soooo many copies of this if you want one they are very free

   3. Hourlies (reformatted for print)

      

      not my best stapling job, lol

   4. The Goblin’s Gifts (an original queer fairytale, which is not yet on the internet!)

      

      literally a week before thesis was due I was like WHAT IF INSTEAD OF A NORMAL ZINE COVER I MADE IT LOOK LIKE AN OLD FAIRYTALE BOOK BY SCREENPRINTING FANCY LEATHERY LOOKING PAPER IN METALLIC GOLD INK AND THEN HAND STITCHING THE BINDING and honestly it slaps

3. a bunch of random objects. I wanted it to look as though a four-year-old had emptied the contents of their pockets into this box. Almost all of these objects appear in Beyond Troll Rock and/or one of the other stories.

   

   Fun fact, I collected the rocks on my walks to the local cemetery when I needed a break from working on thesis!

   

   I made these out of polymer clay! It took me cumulatively 12 hours to roll one tablespoon’s worth of rainbow sprinkles for these, but DAMN they look good.

   

   miniature scarves/bookmarks I knitted from hand-spun Icelandic wool!

4. a letter to the thesis committee in zine form explaining all of the above

the recommendation was to write a one page letter; because I have zero chill, instead of doing that I made an eight page zine IT’S FINE

It took me eight months to make all of this stuff, with the biggest production push happening in March and April. Here’s some process photos from behind the scenes!

love me a sticker chart and a super granular checklist. I made these in February; thesis was due April 21

this is my packaging dummy! I put this together in early March. It involved a lot of nudging things around in InDesign, test printing and cutting, and math

Beyond Troll Rock was my biggest project; it took all of fall semester plus winter break to write and edit the script, but I DID IT.

it was something like 78 pages printed on letter paper holy crap

this is an early stab at designing what eventually became the cover

I actually sculpted and painted Troll Rock, for drawing reference! This was SO helpful for drawing this rock from multiple angles.

I constructed a quick and shoddy version of the cabin in Beyond Troll Rock out of paper from my recycling bin as I was trying to work out its architectural layout

here’s what a page of thumbnails for Beyond Troll Rock looked like!

I went straight from thumbnails to inks, skipping the penciling step entirely. Saved me about a week of work, would do again.

I painted asset-by-asset; I laid out all 14 of the pages across two tables in the senior studio and rolled along assembly-line-style, painting all of the yellow rain boots, then all of the green hoodies, then all of the blue shirts, etc. It was fun and super efficient; I finished all 14 pages of character colors in two and a half days!

I painted backgrounds separately — another two or three days — and combined them with the character colors and the digital inks in Clip Studio.

finished pages look like this! I hand-lettered them and it looks SO GOOD

I got this professionally printed by Mixam; all of my other thesis comics I printed and bound myself in the school lab

Here are a few in-progress pictures from Puffin & Troll:

loose pencils on printer paper on the left, transfered tight pencils on watercolor paper on the right (and an earlier completed page for reference nearby)

inked the panel borders with Copic multiliners and everything else with a nib

the troll’s feathery clothes are wet-into-wet ink washes; the spot blacks were done with a brush. I spilled ink onto panel two in a most unsalvageable manner, so I had to redraw that panel on a separate sheet of paper (right) and drop it in digitally in post-production. (The other lone panel was also a redraw because I hated the original, lol)

The production for Goblin’s Gifts was really fun (although harrowing; more on this in a future post).

this is the digital mockup I made of the covers

all the covers on the drying rack

And the Objects!!

learning how to spin wool with a homemade drop spindle! (Thank you Leah for the lessons!)

look at my little cookie zoo!!

Who Wore It Better: Sprinkles Edition (yes I bought actual animal cookies for reference)

picked all of these up at RePlay Arts, a local craft supplies reuse nonprofit

I screenprinted all of my box lids with metallic silver ink; here they are in the drying rack

the finished box!!

TURNED IN!!

yes, these ARE, for real, the boxes where we were instructed to turn in our thesis packages. (I was assigned to green group.)

My thesis review committee said my work “has a lot of heart” and damn, that’s about the best compliment I could receive.

Thanks for coming with me on this grad school journey! Graduation is in two (2) weeks and we don’t have valedictorians (there’s no grades and also there’s only 14 of us), but I got picked by my classmates to be our class speaker, so my homework isn’t over quite yet — I gotta write, practice, and deliver a speech before I get my diploma 😱(it’s fine this is good this is normal this is fine)

Also HEY GOOD NEWS: I paced myself well enough this year that I DID NOT INJURE MYSELF and also DID NOT BURN MYSELF OUT, so more comics and craft projects are coming soon :) :) :)

thanks love you xoxo
<3 Maia