TBT to the Comic!

Katie and I both really loved the comic unit. Professor DeWinter had some really awesome suggestions for improvement, so we decided to revise our comic to try to make it as funny, effective, and awesome as possible. We decided to add a seventh panel with an information graphic, reviewing what was said about the depth and breadth requirements. We wanted to include this quick review because we knew our text was more creative story telling than information. We made the infographic in powerpoint and then moved it over to Google Slides to add the picture of Gompei and the speech bubble. We also decided to include our selfie and our names, grad years, majors, and depths so that students reading our comic would identify with students and feel comfortable getting the information from us. Here is our new slide:

I look like a thumb lol

We also revised our artists' statement to be more accurate to our revisions:

In our comic, “A Tour of the HUA Requirement: The Breadth and Depth Path”, we are targeting prospective students and first-year students that have already enrolled at WPI and are exploring their Humanities and Arts Requirement options prior to course registration. Our purpose in creating this comic is to explain the breadth and depth option of the HUA requirement, since it is one of WPI’s most confusing and diverse graduation requirements. In our comic, we include a sample breadth and depth schedule to give students an example path they could follow. The story of the comic follows a general overview of this particular HUA option interlaced with the breadth and depth classes that Gompei, the star of our comic, took. We chose to use WPI’s mascot as the main character in order to create ethos with the reader. Since our audience is students interested or enrolled in WPI, it is likely that they know that Gompei is our mascot. Using him as our comic’s main character will create a shared character of school spirit, as our school’s mascot fills us all with a sense of pride. At the end of our comic, we added testimonials from current WPI students that explained why they benefited from this option. We decided to add students’ personal stories to the comic to show why WPI students like having the humanities as a part of their education, even though WPI is considered a tech school. As students, we are more likely to choose a class or humanities path based on the recommendation of our peers, since we trust their advice. These personal stories will appeal to the readers since they are also students, and students are always more likely to listen to students rather than to an advisor or someone seen as superior. As neither of us have much artistic talent, we decided to superimpose pictures of Gompei that we drew on top of various locations on WPI’s campus that we photographed. These pictures will be familiar to the audience, further creating ethos. Readers will be able to relate to the comic since they have seen the campus locations we have included, giving that familiarity and a further sense of shared school pride. On the final comic panel, we added an infographic to summarize the breadth and depth HUA option. Since our comic is not purely informative and informational, we felt that this infographic could quickly show readers how to complete this option. On the same panel we included a selfie with a quick “about the authors” blurb. We felt showing that WPI students wrote this comic would strengthen the readers’ connection with it. Our comic is meant for two different mediums, online and print. It could be put online as a series of panels on the humanities and arts website, or be printed as a poster panel or a pamphlet that would be distributed at Accepted Students Days or before course registration.