mingjue helen chen på Twitter: "When the Silk team approached me to come up  with a costume change for clone conspiracy, this was my first take!… "

An artist I really admire is a visual development artist by the name, Mingjue Chen. Not only has she worked on some of my favorite animated films (ie. Paperman, Big Hero 6, and Wreck-it-Ralph), but she also worked for two major comic companies, DC and Marvel.

I will link her website here!: https://mingjuechen.carbonmade.com/

While I personally am a bigger DC fan than a Marvel one, I must admit that the Into the Spiderverse film really put Marvel in a new light for me (the new PS5 game also looks incredible!). When I found out that Chen was working on the Silk comics, I was ecstatic. Even though a lot of major female representation in comics are still based off of originally male characters, I really appreciate the small bit of representation we East Asian females have! Besides Silk, we also had Cassandra Cain (batgirl) in the recent Birds of Prey film.

In relation to our design course, I think a major similarity between comics and more general visual arts is the importance of layout/composition. In comics, everything from the size and shape of panels, speech bubbles, etc. impact the pacing and interpretation of the story. And while the designs we are making in class do not necessarily have a story, we have to carefully consider placement and size of our visual elements to relay either a certain impression or message on our audience.

Categories: F_20

1 Comment

Merry Gu · December 8, 2020 at 6:57 pm

Love your point about how every detail in designing comics is intentional. I never really read them myself very much, so definitely took for granted all the aesthetic decisions–but also font, placement, words, etc–that have to be very well thought out to communicate the message or story effectively!

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