As for my illustrations, I was inspired by my favorite graphic novel growing up, the Babymouse series by the Jennifer and Matthew Holms. I thought that Holling’s sarcastic tone and fantastical storytelling style closely mirrored that of Babymouse. I also really enjoyed the limited use of color to make certain objects stand out and to signify an imaginary scenario. Keeping the colors simple helped add drama to the third page, where Holling contemplates why he asked out Meryl Lee the way he did. 

After laying out the second page and completing the illustrations, I read the passage from The Wednesday Wars over again and realized that Mantua is not an island but just another city. However, I decided to keep the boat and the island because I think visually it tells the joke well. I’ve learned through this exercise that comedic timing is actually very difficult to execute well. As I laid out the spreads, I wanted to make sure the timing was elongated by placing less frames and zooming into Meryl Lee’s face. 

I also had a lot of fun playing with the dialogue bubbles. When Holling was done explaining his alternate ending of Romeo and Juliet, I put a mini version of him looking upset in the bubble to show how upset he was. As Meryl Lee was gushing over Romeo and Juliet, I wanted the words to be over-the-top and fill the entire frame around the two characters. Then, as Holling quoted Shakespeare, I changed the font from the regular comic book style to a beautiful script to further emphasize the drama and elegance of his words. 

Overall, I had a lot of fun completing this assignment! I spent a lot of time drawing storyboards, designing characters, and trying to distill the language into a digestible form for a graphic novel.