Romantically Apocalyptic

Romantically apocalyptic is a webcomic set in a post apocalyptic future and follows the lives of Zee Captain and his freinds as they adventure throughout the wasteland.

The creator, Vitaly Alexius, creates powerful distopian imagery through a blend of studio/greenscreen photograhy and digital matte painting. Humourous juxtaposition is created through the amusing monty python-esque dialog and characterisation whilst being presented on a backdrop of a devastated world filled with depressing hues and distopian texture.

Incredible beauty and atmosphere has been created by alexius out of subject matter that could easily depress and bring down the viewer but does exactly the opposite. The visual style of his work is something that i find personally satisfying, and is so self explanitory that it is hard to describe its incredible qualities.

Above is an example of a strip from the actual comic. Using photography as his medium for creating his characters, it is easy to see how important capturing the perfect pose is at conveying the qualities and narrative of the strip, especially when the characters have no faces to express emotions upon. Alot is left to the readers imagination in this area, assisted by colours, dialog (or lack of) and pose. The humour is created brilliantly through strong use of juxtapositions between narrative, character and setting. Another device to make note of is how the speech is connected to speaker by colour coordination, Engie has orange goggles so his speech is orange, snippy's goggles are blue so his speech is blue.

The visual style of this work is something that has really inspired me in producing my Jump piece, which also has post apocalyptic themes.

Oh and another thing...

Whilst browsing through the romantically apocalyptic archives i found this piece of guest artwork which has a good example of an untypical action-to-action scene. The second,third and fourth panels or actions are not seperated by individual frames but the action is still clear, flowing through a single piece of enviornment. The despite the lack of seperation it is still clear to the viewer that it is not 3, but one character moving through the scene by use of motion lines that lead the eye through the characters fall with the imagination filling the gaps. This is a good example of the visual language of sequential image making and how using visual prompts such as pose and motion lines creates clarity.

Evolution Sequences

This is a piece of artwork by an artist i found on Deviantart under the alias 'Brabuss'. This style of work shows another form of sequential illustration, where the passing of time is illustrated through changes in physiology, technology and social evolution. This is an interesting take on the traditional darwin model, and is a good example of how some narratives require some educated knowledge of another topic to make sense. As a standalone this image would have to rely on the themes within the image itself to show the passing of time, which it does to a degree, but the fact the viewer already recognises the subject matter as an interperetation of Darwins evolution model means that most of the narrative work has already been done by the viewers own knowledge.