Cover Illustration: Ahmed Sorour Cover Design: Youssef Ragheb
GENESIS of Narratives by Students of the Comic Strips Course in the Visual Arts program Course Instructor Dr. Youssef Ragheb SPRING 2016 Ahmed Sorour Amina El Banna Dohee Kim Farah Barakat Farah Hegazy Farida Abdel Maksoud Hadya EL Agha Mariam Fayek
Experimental Graphic
Nahla NourhanHambazazaAboGabalRanaKhalilRolaElMissieryYoumnaNafea
An Anthology
Genesis is a look into the structure of a program that teaches non conventional ways in creating graphic narratives that could be perceived as art in terms of conceptual originality, creativity and freshness, rather than being confined to a notion of main stream entertainment. Most of the narratives presented here are open ended and up to the viewer’s subjective interpretation and in some cases the viewers have to physically interact with the comic in order to create their own narrative sequences.
A heavy heritage of misconceptions haunt the medium and portray it either as stories of su perheroes in tight bright color spandex for teens, cutesy furry creatures for children or ultra violent Japanese characters slashing through whatever comes their way. Comics have always been stigmatized by non-art status.
I would like to thank my dear students for the great effort and ardent passion manifest ed in the high standard of originality and artistry of their graphic narratives. I wish them all the best in their future artistic endeavors.
Comics machines, Multi-linear narratives, non sequitur comics, interactive graphic story telling is to mention but a few of what students come up with in class to experiment with the form.
Visual and conceptual inspiration come in many forms including non-comics sources from heavy machinery instruction manuals and electrical appliances to maps, architectural blueprints and science books. The comics featured in this publication were not necessarily designed for print.
Youssef ExperimentalRaghebComic strips Course Instructor
Students are encouraged to experiment with themes related to their own lives, memories and experiences through an archive of personal visual material including documents, family photo albums and various ephemera, then integrate those visual and textual components conceptu ally utilizing the vocabulary of the form.
based on a simple idea of placing one picture after another to show the passage of time. The potential of that idea is limitless, but perpetually obscured by its limited application in popular culture. Even the term “comics” doesn’t describe the medium accurately since not all comics are supposed to be funny.
ComicsIntroductionisamedium
The Comic strips course at the AUC visual arts program examines the potential of comic strips as an art form through an experimental approach in search of new techniques and concepts to tell stories and make viewers experience narratives through non-conventional methods and ideas.
Comics is an art form that combines text and image in a truly unique way and the program gives students the drive, motivation and direction to push the medium to its full potential.
to present the first printed comic strips art magazine as one of the Visual Arts Program publications at AUC we proudly produce every year. This magazine is a docu mentation of the final projects for Experimental comic strips “ special topic course “ taught by visual artist and dear colleague Dr. Youssef Ragheb in the spring semester of 2016. We strongly believe that documenting our courses and teaching process through publica tion is one of the most important principles of success in our education program because it gives confidence to our students and helps them clearly understand the wide array of ap proaches to art compared to the limited time frame of the class.
I would like to thank my dear friend Youssef Ragheb one of the most important teachers of the arts in Egypt, for his great efforts in the production of this publication in terms of design and preparation, as well as teaching this course in the spring of 2016, as it is clearly remark able in the quality of ideas evident in the students projects and presentation quality.
We as visual arts program family are proud and very optimistic about the progressing artistic level achieved in our new program since its beginning in Fall 2013. The program is revised and developed furthermore according to the learning outcomes and feedback by the end of every semester to help our students reach the highest professional standards.
Our new Visual Arts program offers an integrated curriculum within a liberal arts context. It combines an interdisciplinary approach to art in a larger cultural sphere, with tools and methods borrowed from other disciplines such as the sciences, sociology, anthropology and history. The program is oriented toward visual research and production grounded in an ex ploration of creativity and a critical approach to art and culture.
I also hope that comics fans in AUC, Egypt and the whole Middle East find this publication to be fresh, exciting and intriguing.
IForewordhavethehonor
The experimental comic strips course is one of many courses that were recently introduced in the new program that promote the integration of ideas, techniques, history and the ex perience of research, as well as an understanding for standard and professional level of art production, whether in the academic or artistic areas.
Shady El Noshokaty Director of Visual Arts Program July 2016
DoHee Kim Kim experiments with non sequitur panel transitions. She creates her narrative with sequences of images that are logically unrelated yet the viewers minds tend to logically relate juxtaposed images no matter how weak the logical links between them are. In addition to that she incorporates parallel text combinations that are not directly related to the images resulting in a graphic narrative with a haunting surreal feel that some how resonates with the viewer’s subconscious mind to create an interesting reading experience.
Fayek draws her inspiration from an unexplained fascination with Volkswagen Beetles. She presents the car as a metaphor of herself. Imitating a kit car assembly instruction manual to tackle different aspects of her personality and physical appearance. Meticulously copying the manual with hand written text and hand drawn illustrations altering the original text and labeled diagrams to describe herself in the form of the kit car parts thus tricking the viewers at first glance until they start to dig deeper into what’s behind the car as sembly instructions facade.
Mariam Fayek
Nahla HambazazaHambazazausesafolktale
rhyme format to tell us the story of ten fictional characters. Each character is a metaphor of a different facade of her personality. The narrative feels like an introduction to a saga and the viewers are invited to join those characters together in what could be a grand personal adventure.
Ahmed Sorour (Next Page)
Sorour’s Large format narrative is a depiction of how a child is heavily influenced by living most of early and middle childhood amidst a matriarchal environment, spending most of that phase with mothers, grandmoth ers and aunts. Sorour chose to tell a story that portrays his relation to women in his family against a back ground of a Burda magazine sewing pattern. Burda is a German fashion magazine that was first published in 1950 and was very popular among Egyptian middle class women in the seventies and eighties for its free dress sewing patterns. During that era the process of hand sewing dresses out of patterns was considered a playground for little children to play with colorful fabrics, chalk markers, threads, pins and needles while the women spent hours working on dresses. Sorour who studied fashion design states that this had quite an impact on his decisions and inclinations later on in life. His line drawings at many times blend into the linear patterns of the background as if tangled in a complex web. The text traces the shift in ideals of the Egyptian middle class through out the eighties and nineties towards more conservative views and how they conflict with his own views of life.
Rola El Misseiry In this non sequitur narrative El Misseiry is seemingly influenced by the style of German expressionist wood cut printing. The panels are dominated by foreground objects with very little left for the backgrounds, the text is squeezed and bent to fit in whatever remaining spaces. Close ups of faces or other body parts are the main theme of almost all panels. Black dominates the background in every scene. The center panels are su per imposed on top of each other.
Without reading the text the whole narrative is glooming with a desperate claustrophobic feel with no space to breathe. It is up to the viewers to make sense of the narrative while El Misseiry only points in a certain direction.
Farah Barakat Barakat adopts an interactive approach to story telling that involves the viewer directly in the process of storytelling. She creates the story in the form of a deck of cards to be played as an interactive game changing the narrative with every play. Each card presents a significant part of her life. Playing a game of cards usually involves creating or matching series of similar card numbers or shapes, “so is life” according to Barakat. We tend to group memories and experiennces in sets according to a common factor thus creating logical narra tives out of them.
Amina El Banna In “Flower Tower” the conventional structure of comic strip panel and gutter is reconstructed into a struc ture of it’s own nature, reminiscent of architectural plans and elevations. Feeding on memories the structure shows overlapping familiar images with ghostly fading watermarks in the backgrounds. The overlaid images are an analogue to blueprints of memories.
Farah Hegazy
Hegazy creates an alternating checkered board background for her non sequitur comic creating a sense of rhythm when transitioning between panels. Even though the images and words are non sequitur and most of the phrases are enigmatic we can still relate to the juxtaposed pictures and words. The narrative is based on free association of ideas.
Hadya El Agha El Agha is an avid fan of TV shows. Binge watching seasons in a row, reliving the experiences of the characters in fantasy, she creates a narrative based on the TV show Hannibal but this time with herself as a part of the story line. Having conversations with the sophisticated cannibal about her own life examining her inner most notions of self worth and individuality captivating the reader as the dialogue progresses.
The daughter of an architect, Khalil chooses to create a narrative based on architectural drawings and blue prints. The confinement by the borders of the drawing echo the personal and social limitations evident in the dialogue. The whole narrtive is visually reminiscent of strategy and RPG games where the avatar is controlled by the player. The abstraction of the physical place into its fundamental conceptual and visual structure gives Khalil the freedom to jump through place and time and examine important mile stones in her life in the form of an experimental narrative.
Rana Khalil
Farida Abdel Maksoud Abdel Maksoud creates a multilinear story line that has multiple beginnings and ends. It is up to the viewer to choose the starting and ending point for the narrative. For some viewers the beginnings could be the ends and for others it could be the exact opposite. Even though the narrative is autobiographical it is not placed chronologically to create a non limiting experience for the viewer as if flipping back and forth through the pages of a family album.
Nourhan Abo Gabal
In her story “Boogie man” Abo Gabal tackles the concept of childhood fears through the eyes of an adult that still lives the same fears. She presents the boogieman that hid in the shadows since childhood as a member of the family. By time the boogieman -a literal metaphor of childhood fear - grows closer to her than real members of the family, and as fear shapes a great part of who we are as adults, Abo Gabal embraces her fears and learns to live with them.
Youmna Nafae Nafae’s work could well be described as a hallucinatory trip of subconscious fears and desires. She chooses a printing technique that emphasizes a psychedelic feel. Her choice of surreal imagery amplifies the effect of the nonsensical yet captivating sequence.
EXPERIMENTS IN COMICS
Rotary story machine
In search of new ways to experience a story, students were encouraged to work out a device that tells the story through the interaction of the viewer. Several ideas were conceived including sticking comic panels on mechanically rotating gears so that the story progresses and changes in different directions every time the gears turn. Other ideas were based on separating illustrations from text and giving the viewers the chance to create their own combination of text and image. The viewers were given the basic building blocks of the comic strip to come up with their own story. In other attempts inspired by cryptography the students created a grid of images and the story is read through a view finder that exposes certain frames at a time. Moving the view finder in different ways on every page changes the narrative every time. Other experiments included different analogueand mechanical devices as well as digi tal presentations of the narratives.
DoHee Kim (Top page)
Comics Machines and Apparatuses
Pictures rotate on interlocking gears to change the narrative with every rotation
Crypted stories A grid full of images on every page (Bottom Left)
A paper viewfinder is used to create a narrative out of the picture grid (Bottom Right)
Farida Abd El Maksoud (Bottom Page)
Rola El Misseiry (Center page) Story cards text and images
Viewers choose which text goes with each picture
Text and Image
There are several ways of which text is integrated with image in comics. The students are in troduced to comics script writing, creating visuals to existing text or using text visually. The different experiments examine the relation between text and image from image being a literal illustration of text to text being the image.
Nahla Hambazaza (Top left) Comics based on lyrics
Nahla Hambazaza (Bottom right) Comic strip script
DoHee Kim (Top right and center left) Image/Text Blend
Panel 1: Establishing shot with tiny figures barely visible, floating in midair
Nahla Hambazaza
Panel 2: Close up on lawyer 1’s face Lawyer 1: My client is very innocent
Panel 3: Close up on the other lawyer’s face Lawyer 2: My client is more innocent Panel 4: Both lawyers’ profiles shown facing one another with boxing gear Lawyer 1 and 2 simultaneously: You are a copycatted Panel 5:Lawyer 1 punches lawyer 2 Lawyer 2: Ow you hitted me-Panel 6: Lawyer 2 dodges Lawyer 2: --In your dreams that is Panel 7: Lawyer 2 retaliates Lawyer 2: Ha Ha Loser Panel 8: Lawyer 1 rubs bruised cheek Lawyer 1: My client is very innocent Panel 9: Lawyer 2 grins Lawyer 2: I gave you the box in your face Panel 10: Lawyer 3 appears, eating a meal proudly sponsored by Eatorney Lawyer 3: *chewing * Panel 11: Lawyer 1 and 2 reaction shot. Both show scrunched up faces
Comic script: What if lawyers were flying kickboxing champions
Ephemeral Comics
Mariam Fayek (Top left) Nahla Hambazaza (Top right) Kim (Bottom left)
DoHee
Farah Hegazy (Bottom right)
Everyday objects taken from a specific context are usually related to certain memories and life experiences. This experiment examines the capacity of an object to carry meaning and emotion with the help of text. It examines the visual/mental stimulation capabilities of ephemera in the form of a loosely bound narrative to resonate with readers differently according to their own backgrounds.
On the fi rst day I knew On the second day I was unsure But all it took was just one Thcureat things worth having always come with an expense Finally on the eighth day it all made sense
DoHee Kim (Bottom right) What if you came back from the dead?
Foldy comic (Top left) - Comic Zine (Top right)
Foldy Comics ad Comic Zines
One of the early experiments in the comics course is a mini comic based on “What if” ques tions. Students draw out of a bowl “what if” questions prepared earlier. The questions include: What if you came back from the dead? What if you were a fly? What if you could shift shape into a chair? What if you were a member of the opposite gender? among so many other questions. The students create their mini comic in the form of a foldy comic where the frames double in size or number when unfolded or in the form of a zine. The comics are then photocopied and distributed for free on campus in return for a quick written critique or brief comments from the readers.
Nahla Hambazaza (Bottom left) What if you were an astronaut?
Comics make sense by showing key moments of an event or an action placed in a chrono logical sequence of images. The viewer’s mind fills in the missing gaps between the selected moments to create a complete idea of the event. During the course the students experiment with this core concept in comics. We pose the question: what if the viewer is given a set of images that are seemingly unrelated neither in context nor in chronological order? What would the viewer make out of them? According to the Gestalt law of closure in psychology our minds tend to mentally complete the missing parts of a shape according to our prior knowl edge of that shape and the same principle applies to events or actions. By presenting the viewers with non sequitur images the resulting perception of such a sequence of images will be subjectively interpreted by each viewer according to his prior knowledge of each image and its relation to the next one. This method turns the narrative into a machine that gener ates different meanings instead of one specific meaning in conventional comics, a technique used in the visual arts world far more often than in the literary world.
Ahmed Sorour (Top Page) MariamUntiltled Fayek (Center and Bottom Page) UntitledUntitled
Non Sequitur Comics
Mariam Fayek (Bottom left)
Rola el Misseiry (Top left and below)
Rana Khalil (Bottom right)
Character Design and Art Style
Students are subjected to several exercises in character design. Those include intuitive char acter design where each student in class gets to write down a description of a character in one or two words on one sheet of paper then they only get a couple of minutes to draw each character. The characters are then compared to the different interpretations in style and ex pressions by all students. Other exercises are directed towards developing art styles by visu ally researching art history and incorporating those styles in comics.
Rana Khalil (Center left)
Nahla Hambazaza (Top right)
Digitally Manipulated Narratives
(Top
DoHee
One way of making new images is by digitally altering existing ones. Digital tools add a differ ent dimension to photographic narratives. Students get to examine the capabilities of the digital techniques in altering reality or merging drawing with photography.
(Top right) Ahmed Sorour (Bottom Page)
Rana Khalil left) Kim
