For this project I decided to make a horror short story in the form of a comic. I thought about which materials I thought would work best for this and decided to use ink on paper because I like the way the diluted ink looks when dry. I used Junji Ito as my main reference for this as I think that his manga is the best work in the visual horror genre. He uses the turn of each page in his books as a way to further the narrative and build suspense, I wanted to recreate this within my own outcome so I storyboarded each page and tweaked the layout where needed in order to tell the story in the best way possible. He also generally just uses black and white within his work, but I decided to add in red in some places in order to add a pop of colour to contrast with the greyscale I had otherwise been using. I also decided to do this because I wanted the character having red hair to be an important part of the characterisation, even if this wasn’t clear in the comic itself. I also used Tatsuki Fujimoto as a reference in the sense of the way he uses layouts within his manga, which is generally rather unique for the genre in that he uses the layout as an artistic device rather than just a convention of the genre.

I decided to hand write the dialogue within the bubbles because it gives the comic a more organic feeling and fits well with the hand drawn nature of the rest of the comic. 

This is the final draft of the storyboard I made for this project, which shows the layout I ended up using. 

I made a reference sheet for the character, I used Insane Clown Posse as an influence for the makeup I gave the character, but I ended up changing a lot of the characteristics eventually, keeping mainly the red hair and the prosthetic leg.