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During this project we studied and learned the different comic book terms and made graphic novels about an aspect of WW1. Each student chose to learn about a battle or event where Canadians fought or participated in. Chose to base my comic about The first battle of Ypres, the first battle Canadians participated in during WW1.
How might we use graphic novels to understand Canada’s involvement in WWI?
Graphic Novels are not one of the best ways to learn in my opinion because they are very brief since they have little amounts of text and many pictures/drawings. However I believe that making a graphic novel about something you have or are learning is one of the best ways to fully understand your topic. Making graphic novels forces you to understand your story enough so that you can describe it through minimal but purposeful text and visuals to represent whats happening. After doing this, I personally fully understood what happened during the First battle of Ypres because I had already imagined what the scenery looked like before I drew my pictures and wrote the story.
One of our earliest assignments that stood out to me was a paragraph each student wrote about how they thought WW1 began after watching a very informative Crash Course Video. After looking back on this assignment I think I strongly improved my skills on the “Analyze Cause and Consequence: Analyze why events happen, and what are their impacts?” Competency. In short, I thought that alliances countries had with each other brought the world against each other as more and more countries kept getting dragged into a war that started between a mere 5 countries.
Now, the interesting part of this project. To build our knowledge on the concept of WW1, we read a comic called “World War One 1914-1918” by Alan Cowsill and Lalit Kumamoto Sharma. I thought this comic was great because it wasn’t too long and it wasn’t too short. Not only that but it gave you a personal experience a soldier had as the war was just beginning all the way to the end. As soon as we were all finished reading this graphic novel, we wrote a specific reflection discussing the short and long-term consequences of WW1.
A big reason I enjoyed this project was because we got to watch Sam Mendes’s 1917 movie on WW1. I really thought
it was an amazing movie because of the story it told and the perspective on the war it had. Not only was the storyline great but the camera angles and scenery were excellent.
Although it seemed a little depressing (something you’ll get when millions die) it steered my sense of WW1 into a more sensitive place in mind. Overall I think its a Must-Watch movie, and I highly recommend it.
Finally we started building our way to making our comics. We started by choosing our topics within WW1 which me would then illustrate and write about. As I said before I chose the First Battle of Ypres, where Germans would have destroyed and taken control of Ypres if it wasn’t for the strong Canadian Defense lines. Once I had chosen my topic I began learning the 5 W’s (Who, What, When, Where, and Why) and planning out what my story was going to look like.
As part of the planning process I made a storyboard that’s spent too much time on.
Once I was approved, I moved on to making the final copy of my Comic book. Since we were going to put every students’ comics into one big comic, we needed the drawing styles to be quite similar so our teachers decided that we were to find an image on the internet, trace over it, colour it, and use it in our own comic.
I used a mixture of several apps like Keynote, Sketches Pro, and Procreate to trace and draw each panel. As I finished each drawing I would then take it into another app called Comic life and turn it into a well-formatted comic with speech and thought bubbles, captions, sound effects, etc. Even though my comic was pretty late thanks to an awesome trip to New York, I thought I did a great job to extend on the “Create Effectively: Effectively incorporating technical and narrative writing within a comic panel” competency. Although it was pretty frustrating to finish this and other work at the same time I’m really happy the way my comic turned out.
⬇️ Here’s my comic below. ⬇️