An introduction of sorts...

I suppose that as an introduction to anyone that happens upon this blog I should explain the assignment that lead to its creation and the intention of what I hope to accomplish with it. My name is Kathryn and I’m currently a graduate student in English at NDSU, currently enrolled in a class called Rhetorics and Poetics of New Media. The assignment is to do something that creative, something that qualifies as poetics, with new media.

With complete creative freedom I had the option of doing something fun or something useful. I figured I could do a little bit of both. I’d just created a rubric in a previous class for a comic composition course that I’d really love to get a chance to teach someday, but I have little experience creating comics. So I decided that I could create an online comic. During the creation of this hypothetical comic composition course, however, I had reread Understanding Comics and read Making Comics both by Scott McCloud. The things that I found most interesting were his ideas about online comics and how they failed to take advantage of the capabilities of their media. I do both agree and disagree with his statements and I’ll develop a post on McCloud’s theories at a later time, but suffice to say that I agree enough to take on the challenge.

So I decided that I’d create a comic that utilized electronic media more completely. At first I thought about creating the sort of “art” comic that McCloud, and many academics who view comics, would be more interested. That somehow stopped seeming like fun so I revaluated what I would really want to do. I then reminded myself that I am at heart a geek and trying to be something that I’m not would just be like sticking a squid in a tutu—completely absurdist boarding on Dadaism. So I really needed to do something geeky and enjoyable and what could be geekier than doing something fandom based.

Fandom itself is very connected with new media through reinvention and participatory culture. I’m also reading Henry Jenkins’ book Fans, Bloggers and Gamers, so I’m feeling the need to explore some different facets of fandom that I perhaps haven’t had exposure to yet. Yet because this is an official class assignment that I need to put my name on and I’m hoping to develop a somewhat professional persona during my graduate school years I can’t have any type of legal action potentially leveled against me. That brought me to the question, what active fandom do I have interest and investment in that has also been historically supportive of fanworks? Only one of my geekiest obsessions ever, Doctor Who.

So in summation, I have decided to complete this assignment by making an online Doctor Who comic with interactive elements. I’ll hopefully have a post later this week about the progress that I’ve made thus far and some reflections on McCloud.