I'm a Crybaby

A comic about being someone with a lot of ~feelings~

This comic comes from a collection of thoughts that have been sitting in my Notes app, stemming from conversations with friends on why we cry easier now that we’ve gotten older. For this project, I wanted to challenge myself to create a longer comic. I’d hoped it would be less intimidating if I kept the drawing aspect of it simple, but in true Christina Chung fashion, over time it just kept getting more and more complicated. I think at the end of this experiment I found a good middle ground between leaning towards a more minimal approach while still allowing myself to play with paneling and composition. I’m excited to continue experimenting with comics and seeing where this journey will take me!

✦ Ideation + Sketches ✦

After tinkering around with the script for long enough, I got started on what is arguably the hardest part—thumbnails.

I had a vague idea of wanting to use rain and a garden grown with rainwater as metaphors. From there it took several rounds of playing with composition to figure out how I wanted to lay things out.

Once I got to the sketch phase, I got pretty frustrated with trying to make sure that my mini-me character looked consistent across the pages. After asking for advice on Instagram I realized I had to create a character sheet in order to stop running away from really getting to know my character. Somehow I ended up enjoying it despite how tedious the process was! Creating illustrated versions of myself through different stages of my life was pretty fun.

With this character sheet done, finishing the linework was much faster because I just had to trace over the faces and expressions I had already worked out.

✦ Final comic ✦

I learned a lot through this process, one of the biggest lessons being that it’s worth putting in extra time to make the final result better. It’s a lesson that I’ve had to return to lots of times throughout my career and it’s never any less humbling.

If you’ve read this far, thank you. I’ll leave you with a behind-the-scenes Easter egg. For the plants featured in the comic, I ended up drawing nasturtiums only because I thought they looked nice and I love the way their form flows. While procrastinating working on sketches I randomly thought of doing some Googling to see if nasturtiums represent anything. Turns out they were the perfect choice for this comic: