The comic The Reverse Circle of Life tells a story about the life trajectory of Michael, who physically grows from older and younger. Though experiencing the reverse circle of life, Michael luckily has his two friends accompany with him to go through the life journey together.
The story was inspired by the film, the Curious Case of Benjamin Button. After I finished watching the film this time, I wrote the words "If life is actually in reverse, will people understand more about life?"" in my blog, and I also incorporated it in our comic as the theme of our project. After Experiencing the aging in advance, people might not be so afraid of "aging", and might accept the fact that this is the natural law in the world. Therefore, our comic uses the concept of "the reverse life" to facilitate people to think about their life. If the fact of aging will not change, why not take a look at the people surround you, and enjoy your everyday life? That’s what the characters do in our comic.
I wrote the plot, drew and coded the homepage and the ending page, as well as all the background elements in the panels. Diya drew the characters, positioned and animated them in the html file. For the homepage, I tried to use two circles which were drawn in different directions to represent the two trajectories of life. The grey and black background creates an atmosphere of calm and narrative, making readers to calm down and be ready to read our panels. I used the Illustrator to create all the background. The color of all the elements are not so bright, hoping that the readers can calm down to read and think about our panels.
There are several details in the panel. In the second panel, there is a figure flying the kite behind Michael. This fast motion contradicts the shaking motion of Michael, to emphasize his oldness. In the fourth panel, the clock and the sky outside of the window show that the time is about 10:10pm. This detail further shows that the three people are good friends, as they hang out in one of their houses late, drinking wine. Their high school graduation photo on the wall shows their relationship as well, which further build the consistent relationship between the previous panel and this panel. The clock and the photo are inspired by the Watchmen, of which in one of the panels when Dr. Manhattan was in the room, there was Salvador Dali's famous painting, The Persistency of Memory hanging on the wall, which shows Dr. Manhattan's flat perception of the time. In the last panel, though there are no people in the panel, there are three cute birds on the tree. I found the red, yellow and blue birds online on purpose, as it represents Jim, Pam and Michael, since they wear respectively red, yellow and blue clothes throughout the comic. This detail adds some brightness in the gloomy atmosphere, showing that though the three of them might not be in that place and perhaps not in the world in 2018, but they have the cherished memory of getting together with each other. I designed the end page as the words that Jim, Pam and Michael leave for the world. This reflects the theme of the comic, and guides the readers to think about our comic deeply. In fact, this is also my feeling and perception of living in this world.
I mentioned the word "learn" in the end page. The six panels actually are the three characters' process of learning "life". When they are young, they are naïve and only sense the differences between them. Therefore, Jim uses a little teasing tone to call for Michael to join them. When they are eighteen, Jim and Pam have some concept of growing younger and older, so that they ask Michael the question if he will last long. Michael's reaction is complicated, as he only says "Smile", letting them forget about the question and take the photo instead. My own interpretation is that he definitely knows much more about aging so that he is more mature than his friends in the lesson of "life". He might also know that he will not last long. However, he only experiences life for 18 years, just like his friends, so that he might not know how to respond, or he has the vague concept of "birth" and "death". In the next panel, they look physically the same. Jim and Pam feel the aging, but the words reflect that they are actually accepting this fact. Michael answers the question in the previous panel, "something" in my interpretation is “friendship”. This can also be regarded as his exploration of life through these years. The three characters sit on the bench peacefully, and don’t say anything in the panel5. They have learned everything, and they just sit together, enjoy the time. The shape of word balloon also has meaning. For example, starting from panel3, Michael’s word balloon is smooth, showing that he is more mature than his friends.
To make the readers feel the sense of flowing of time, I use the “pagepiling” library. The words on top also shows the year when each panel took place.
We met most of our initial design, but there are several points that can improve due to the limitation of time, budget, and effort.
For the scrolling effect, the initial library that we considered was fullpage.js. The pagepiling library stacks all the pages, and slides in when the user scrolls. As our first and last two panels are in fact in the same scene, and we did some tricky connecting things (i.e, benchchair in the first two panels, and the tree in the last two panels), this library cannot meet our expectation. The fullpage effect is exactly what we want, but we need to pay if we want to download the scrollhorizontally effect. We tried several alternatives:
The pagepiling library doesn't allow me to mix the horizontal and vertical scroll.
Another alternative is to insert the normal scroll effect between the horizontal one page effect. But the result is that the one page horizontal effect even didn't work.
The final version of our work though not look fancy as our thought to be, but I think we at lease illustrate the idea of connecting. When the first panel slides out and the second panel is revealed, the chair on each side actually touches.
We added the camera flashlight effect on the panel3 when clicking the camera, but it works locally but not on the cyberduck.
Though there are some of the parts that we can improve or we don't meed our expectation, I really enjoy this process of drawing and coding. I expressed almost every feeling that I have towards life, hoping my audience can have their own version of interpretations and get to cherish their life and the people around them.