Introduction
Okay. So where to start? I published, for my own purpose, a zine of my original characters: The Sad Dogs. It was its first zine, so that would be the first time I attempted to create a logical timeline to tell a story for those characters.
Even though that wouldn’t be my first time writing a story like (I’d done a few comic strips, storyboards and scripts by that time) the challenge was more around creating a narrative to characters that already existed without a background story.
Context
I already had the basic principles of the characters itself: they are neutral gendered dogs, their colours are cold, and they have this specific shape ( I’ll update a text with the Sad Dog’s Club idea process in the future).
So I was missing a story. And it came. Maybe 1 or 2 weeks after I decided to work on the zine when I was listening to Amy Winehouse and then the line “I’ve died a hundred times” struck me as lightning. I’ll make my dogs “die” 100 times and for every single time there will be a reason.
Idea
The idea originally was to make an extremely long and complex artwork but as my sketches began I noticed I was lacking substance. Yes, it was very shallow. So after a few more sketches I came up with a structure. The dogs should follow a journey. Beginning, development and ending.
This journey should cover the following concepts: betrayal, being disturbed, unstable and chaos. Each part of the journey would be named as an act. The dogs are not really sad. They are complaining, most of the time without reason, so they are basically making drama. Like in the theatre. Plus I could replace the “T” in act for a cross, which I thought would look cool and would make sense to the concept.
Structure
On each act the character died a little bit more until the story reached the end and then it was followed by a conclusion. What was written in each act was a mix of stories friends told me and also lines I created myself.
The way the dogs would perish in each chapter should be brutal so it would contrast with the cuteness the drawing has. I wanted people to be really sorry and empathetic with the dogs’ suffering because they are there acting.
This is what I decided to each act:
act 1: it would be hit by an arrow
act 2: be set on fire
act 3: the dog would drawn finally stop shaking its tail.
Format
The initial concept began as zine that I’d print, but then the main object It was turned into a digital publication which I’d share through instagram stories. So to take advantage I designed in a way that the frames looked like a frame-by-frame animation (fig.4). When I had the basic structure and format decided, it was time to develop the visual concept.
Shape
Well, the dogs’ line follow simple rules that I can adapt it to whatever I want in the sense of style. For this I decided to go with unfinished lines (fig.5). My goal was to make the outline chaotic and disturbed, as the dogs were.
So I had one part sorted, then I was left to work up the text. How would I design that? The Sad Dogs always had kinda of a chaotic type style (fig.6), but for that to be more adequate to my propose on this work I needed to fix a few things. After sketching and experimenting fonts and grids I decided to work with justified text box which the justification would create gaps and loads of “design errors”. My college teachers would kill me, but whatever, that’s what I wanted. So I created a system where there would be hierarchy. The cover text would look like A and content text would look like B.
