Back at The Ranch
A few weeks ago Michael Edgcumbe and I made a short comic for CommLab around a retelling of Planet of The Apes. We mined Flickr for high-res pics to use and then modified them in Photoshop and Illustrator. The search string that yielded the best results were “gross” and “monkey”. The story that came out is pretty non-sequitur. We wanted each frame to be loosely related to the others without having much of a narrative, which led us to repeat the phrase “meanwhile, back at the ranch” as a way to bring in a completely different story line. The phrase is usually used to show things happening at the same time but in completely different places. Like the good guys are working on this project, and the bad guys are working on their project.
One of the comments we got from people were that the text in the last frame was unnecessary. Why did we put it there? We had lots of empty space (real space!) that needed to be filled, but not a lot of time to fill it. So I quickly dumped a bunch of nonsensical lines. In hindsight, yes, we could have organized that frame better, especially since it was the first one we did.
