Distinguished comics creator and Burlington resident Glynnis Fawkes joined us in March to discuss elements of comics visual storytelling, including dramatizations, maps, data visualization, and how they intersect with research. She then led us through a hands-on drawing workshop where we tried to put some of our own experiences and observations into visual sequence.
The afternoon started with a compelling talk in which Glynnis showed us her process for adapting text into the language of comics, from thumbnail drawings to final pages, highlighting her recent collaboration with Eric H. Cline on the graphic book 1177 B.C.: A Graphic History of the Year Civilization Collapsed (Princeton University Press).
This presentation helped us understand better how the sausage, er comic, is made. When approaching Eric’s original book 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, Glynnis explained that she did not view the adaptation as attempting to directly translate Eric’s text into graphic form. Rather, she carefully went through the book line by line and gave deep consideration to how its narrative, characters, and historical details would translate into the comics medium where words and images work together to tell the story. Drawing inspiration from archaeological illustrators she admires, her own background as an archaeological illustrator, and a lot of research on the Ancient Mediterranean that she has been building on for years, Glynnis developed scenes, characters, scripts, and thumbnails to tell the story of Eric’s book. But what’s cool is that the new graphic book is both loyal to and more than the original, because Glynnis’ expertise, creativity, and drawings brought new elements, visual and textual, to the graphic version of the book that are not present in the original text.
All warmed up and excited to have a hand at such matters ourselves, Glynnis then walked us through drawing exercises and a workshop to help us represent, with words and images, our memories of a place that we’re connected to but also curious about.
I gave it my best shot…
