Past Submission
Submitted: September 3, 2008 DeviantART

This composition entitled “Anthro Graphic Novel” was inspired by Frank Miller’s graphic novels: “300” and “Sin City”. I absolutely love the two-tone and tri-tone color pallet he uses in his graphic novels, in which he adds only a splash of one other saturated color to balance out the composition. This in turn makes them very strong and appealing compositionally. *Drools*

I’ve never attempted this illustration style before because its extremely difficult to achieve using only negative space, shadows and silhouettes to show the character or scene in its entirety through the use of carefully selected areas of color. As part of last terms graphic novel project we had to come up with an interesting storyline. Thus I decided to base my entire storyline within a local context here in Johannesburg South Africa and I decided to use anthropomorphic characters instead of humans because I love being a fur! *Wags tail and jumps up and down.*

This in itself was quiet challenging for there were reference books showing how to achieve this style on human faces, but it’s a completely different story when it comes to muzzles of felines and animals in general. Nevertheless I’m very pleased with the result, this composition is my front page to my graphic novel and the title of my comic is 3 Months. I was inspired by Eskom’s load shedding issue four months ago.

My storyline revolves around my feline character LeoRa, whereby the city of JHB is plunged into darkness because of an unusually long solar eclipse and because it is dark the people are using power all the time. In doing so the power generators overload and the entire city is covered in darkness. Strange things start to happen when furs start disappearing and strange lurking figures or shadows appear, roaming the streets.

My character has to brave the streets of Randburg, on the outskirts of JHB using only flashlights and any light producing source he can find to ward of these shadows in search for other survivors. To cut a long story short it’s a pretty dingy, but an exciting story. I’ve just finished refining the front page and hopefully the subsequent pages will follow. I really love how it tuned out and I’m really proud of it. I hope you will agree. My comic house name was derived from the DC comics, but I’ve changed the acronym to DarkCub. *Giggles*

Nuzzles,

LeoRa