This week’s sketch assignment is by far the hardest for me. I have never read any triptych comic before so it is a completely foreign term that I need to experiment on. After skimming through the examples on the A Softer World website, I was still a little confused about how to create a triptych because sometimes it seems like the narratives in two successive panels are completely unrelated. However, it is clear that each tells a story with a beginning, middle, and end, and pictures help push the narration forward. With this in mind, I started to scroll through my photo album trying to find a picture that could be used to develop a narrative. Then, I found a monopoly meme my friend used to send me and it made me laugh (shown below). Since the image was zoomed in from an original larger picture, I thought of gradually enlarging one single photo to create a sequence. So I searched up a picture of monopoly with a slightly retro tone on Google (Photo source: Classical Board Games we love, https://www.cnn.com/2015/02/03/living/feat-monopoly-real-money-facts/index.html) and edited words on it.
The story here is not really my personal story but I feel like it can speak of many children’s experiences. I’ve met many parents who lash out at their children because of their deteriorated relationship with their partner. Even though it seems to be a normal thing people do when having a bad time, it definitely hurts their children’s feeling with a ruthless rejection. Therefore, I want to send the message of caring about others’ feelings even if we are not in the best mood through this triptych. Looking back at the composition process, I find it interesting that the final panel is itself hilarious yet within the whole context it becomes sad and ironic. It is definitely not easy to tell a story in three panels and at the same time add some deep meaning to it. On the other hand, it is exactly the simplification of narrative that allows the readers to interpret the meaning themselves, which is completely different from the writing we have done which explains everything to the readers as clearly as possible.
Joyce Xu 