For the first half of this semester, I have mainly done two works-- the auto-ethnography and the comic memoir. For the auto-ethnography project, I focused on the Buddhist community at Emory University and asked people about spiritual practices and experiences. In my opinion, one advantage of my auto-ethnography is its uniqueness, since Eastern Mysticism is a topic that people here seldom talk about. Also, since I am the project leader of Emory Buddhist Club, I had the opportunity to interview monks and leaders of ETSI (Emory Tibetan Science Initiative), which also makes my subjects of interview special. However, there are also several things that I could improve. For example, one of them is maybe I should have paraphrased my interviews more instead of just wrote down what people had said word by word. (Actually, I still don't know which way is better for my project)
For my comic memoir, I basically just used a pan to drew it on 16 notebook papers. I tried to make it really simple and direct, since I intended to express it in a sort of Zen minimalism style, and actually I do feel that I have successfully showed my story. However, I also feel that I kind of overdid it. My drawing is to simple and childish, and my word explanation is so explicit and large ( I was afraid that if it is too small, readers may not be able to see it clearly), so it may confuse people about whether words or drawing is the main subject. This is the experience that I have learnt from my first comic--- always make your main subject outstanding.
For my comic memoir, I basically just used a pan to drew it on 16 notebook papers. I tried to make it really simple and direct, since I intended to express it in a sort of Zen minimalism style, and actually I do feel that I have successfully showed my story. However, I also feel that I kind of overdid it. My drawing is to simple and childish, and my word explanation is so explicit and large ( I was afraid that if it is too small, readers may not be able to see it clearly), so it may confuse people about whether words or drawing is the main subject. This is the experience that I have learnt from my first comic--- always make your main subject outstanding.