The in-class exercise for week three is the “wrong planet” assignment here.  We’re doing the assignment collaboratively, with each student tackling one section of the story.  My section is #2, “lands on the moon…”

This assignment has been around since well before this book came out, and has been posted over at teachingcomics.org for a while.  It’s from that site that I got the assignment when I tried it out in a classroom environment the last time I taught a comics class and, while the assignment looks fairly straight ahead, it’s actually pretty tricky.  Part of the challenge is that it’s not worded very clearly: specifically, it’s not made clear whether the moon was the wrong destination… or whether he’s returned to the wrong “home planet” after visiting the moon.

I assumed the latter when I did this exercise in class, but that creates a storytelling problem in figuring out how the astronaut couldn’t realize that he’s on the wrong planet until he’s actually on the ground.  I’ve been tempted to think that maybe what’s really intended is the former interpretation–that he was meant to go somewhere other than the moon–but the assignment very specifically mentions a wrong planet… and given that the only planet in the whole scenario is the home planet, I guess that’s the “wrong” planet in question.  Very confusing….

Anyway, fortunately for me, since I’m dealing with part two of the story, I don’t really have to tackle that confusion head-on.  Here’s what I’ve got:

Homework for week three was basically just a 3-5 panel newspaper-style strip.  I wound up making a list of a dozen or so possible “situations” to build a newspaper strip around, but ultimately got lazy and just went with something I know: musicians.

I think the main thing I learned from doing this is just how important it is to the newspaper strip format for the readers to really know and be familiar with the characters and settings.  It’s really difficult to come up with a single, isolated newspaper strip that really works well.  I regularly read and enjoy strips like Get Fuzzy, Mutts, Pearls before Swine, and Cul de Sac, but doing this assignment made me realize how much of my enjoyment of those strips is based on my knowing the characters.  The way this assignment is set up in DW&WP stresses gags and funny situations, which makes a lot of sense for a one-off strip, but really most newspaper strips (or most good ones, anyway) work more because they’re character-driven.  A prime example of this is Get Fuzzy, which rarely has a “gag” per-se; its humor is driven by the interactions of the characters, and it’s really at its funniest if you’ve known and followed those characters for a while.

Anyway, here’s my strip… Not particularly inspired, but certainly complete to the thumbnail stage as per the assignment.  If I had to develop this further, I’d concentrate on correcting and making consistent the head/body ratio of the two characters, and I’d try to simplify and make clearer the elements in panels one and four (the van, trailer, venue, etc.).