During my final year at Parsons School of Design,
I made my thesis project a horror graphic novel to grow my skills
in design and background & environment illustration.
Log Line:
Mavi and his brother try to escape their remote commune on the night they summon a demon, but Mavi is the only one who makes it away safely.
He needs to rescue his brother while his traumatic past wields even more power than before, risking the first chance at freedom he’s ever had.
The Process
My main inspirations were Gigi Cavenago,
the Sandman comics, and Twin Peaks.
I used a gestural style, and the setting is a hospital
in stormy rural town.
Cover Art
To the left is the first pass on the cover. I tried an all caps, sans serif font to create a futuristic "tech" feel. I wasn't married to the font, and I decided on a more classic, 1980's feel.
Instead of making the text change colour when it overlays on the beam of light, I created an outer glow and increased the noise over the whole image.
The second pass also has higher exposure because while printing on both an inkjet and laser printer, the silhouettes of trees were lost in the dark blues.
I made the text fill up the page and made my name bigger. I changed the character's pose to be more active, instead of passively seated in a hospital bed.
Speech Bubbles
Page 16
Page 18
Because a major plot point of The Conduit is demonic possession, I was inspired by The Sandman comics to integrate alternative speech bubbles into the storytelling. I never show the actual demon in the comic, so the speech bubbles could indicate a non-human character and their characterisation.
I made a colourful and distorted speech bubble and chose a different font to
represent the demon.
I created these speech bubbles in Illustrator and pasted them into InDesign.
I created 4 different speech bubbles for this character.
2 for short sentences, 1 for slightly longer speech,
and 1 speech bubble with higher distortion to indicate an urgent tone.
Because I wanted to keep the demon a mystery, playing with text was the best way I could characterise him.
I created my backgrounds in the 3d modeling software Blender to use the dramatic angles that I wanted to experiment with and be able to finish the pages under my deadlines.
Backgrounds
I took multiple passes
of the same scene to choose
which type of light
I wanted to capture.
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I made two different surgery theatre
for the interrogration scene.
They're virtually the same, but the one on the right
is stretched so that I could fit the camera in the scene
and capture wider shots.
(I raised the main light source as well)
At this time, I thought I would make a secret room attached (that is evidently covered in shadow) for a later scene.
I only ended up using the surgery theatre.
