Image from Apple Books
This year, in Language Arts (LA), we made Wisdom Tale comics. Now, you may ask, “What is a Wisdom Tale comic?” To understand this, you need to understand both what a comic is and what a Wisdom Tale is. Most people already know what a comic is. A comic is like a book, but instead of mainly words, it’s a collection of drawings that are strung together to tell a story. Then, you add speech bubbles to indicate text. That’s one part of a “Wisdom Tale comic”, the comic parts but what is a Wisdom Tale?
A Wisdom Tale is essentially a fable or a parable: a short story, either about humans or animals, with a lesson at the end, sometimes relating to religion. Some popular examples of Wisdom Tales are The Good Samaritan and The Tortoise and the Hare. Both of these stories share a lesson, or a moral, with the readers. Wisdom Tales are, well, tales that give you wisdom, usually to strive towards a better life.
We sourced our Wisdom Tales from a book, very conveniently, called Wisdom Tales: From Around the World. In Language Arts, the activity went like this: every week, we would read a couple of Wisdom Tales. Once we were done with the tale, we wrote a summary in a slideshow. We also thought about what the moral was for that story, and wrote that down in the slideshow as well. Sometimes, we talked about it in class, or acted the story out with a couple of classmates. We read about 20 different stories, from all different places. Some were from places in Asia, like India, China, Japan, and the Philippines. Some were from places in Africa, like Ethiopia and Congo. Some were from the Americas or Europe. Point being, people around the globe felt it was necessary to teach lessons, and that the best way would be with stories.
One interesting thing with these tales were the similarities. Even though the story’s authors were around the world and, presumably, never spoke, they had similar ideals of what was important and needed to be expressed, in this case, with stories. For example, there were three stories that I noticed, all with the same morals: Everything has a use. The stories were Antlers, from Greece, The Parts of House Argue, from the Philippines, and The Useless Tree, from China. Each of these stories originated from places hundreds of thousands of miles away from each other, and yet they each have the same lesson. To me, this is really interesting.
Now that we know what both a Wisdom Tale is and what a comic is, we can put them together. A Wisdom Tale Comic is a Wisdom Tale told with a comic. Pretty simple, right? However, these comics are just as effective as a Wisdom Tale. They tell the same story, and provide visuals to help you understand what is happening in the story a little bit better.
For my Wisdom Tale, I chose Fire, Water, Truth, and Falsehood from Ethiopia, Africa. The moral behind the tale is “Speak your truth, always.” In the story, the elements are hunting, when they see a giant herd of cattle. Truth says, “Let’s split the cattle evenly!” However, Falsehood wants it all for themself. Falsehood devises a plan to get the cattle for themself. First, they tell Water, “Go over there and put out Fire. You are much more powerful than them!” Water does as suggested, now thinking that they will get more cattle. To get rid of Water, Falsehood next talks to Truth, “Let’s go high up in that mountain, where the cattle can graze.” Truth agrees, thinking this is a good idea. However, Water can not climb up the mountain: they keep slipping down. This leaves Falsehood just one more element to get rid of: Truth, the hardest. Falsehood decides to just lay it on Truth: “I want all of the cattle!” In rebuttal, and as expected, Truth says, “Never!” They begin to fight over who should get the cattle. Eventually, they ask Wind. Wind didn’t know, so it asked the townspeople. Many said Falsehood, and many said Truth. Wind came back with its own perception, based on the ideals of the townspeople: “Falsehood will always win if Truth stops fighting.” This means, to me, that, no matter what, we should always tell the truth, lest we want Falsehood to win.
At the top of this post, you will find my comic. You’ll notice, different from others, that my characters are not so much as characters, but shapes. Most people in the class used Sketchbook, or some alternate drawing program to create their panels, but I decided against it. I find it much easier to use shapes to represent my characters, not actual drawings. Another reason I used shapes was because of a lesson I learned when a professional cartoonist, Brittain Peck, came to talk to us about this project: Shapes can just as easily represent characters, and even some of their character traits. Even just the simplest change to your shape will provide you with another, completely different character, or can represent a different mood of the same, depending on how you see it. This really spoke to me, and so I decided to use only shapes. The program I used was Google Slides, which, yes, is mainly used for presentations. However, they do have a large selection of shapes to choose from, and I couldn’t find any other program quite like what I wanted, so I decided, “Hey, why not?” In the end, I think that my comic turned out to be pretty good, and that it took a unique new look at the characters.
To actually arrange the drawings for the panels into a comic, we used a program named Comic Life 3. Comic Life 3 is an amazing program where you can arrange panels, text, thought, and other FX bubbles, and text with tons of different fonts, change the color of the background to dozens of different colors, styles, and gradients, write scripts for your comics, and so, so much more. It was really easy to work with, but only once I got a good sense of what was essential, where everything was, and what was what. It was overwhelming at first, with all of the choices, but eventually I fell into a steady rhythm.
One of the main challenges for me was being able to tell the story in one page. Obviously, I would only include the main points, but here, there were several. The only way to fit all of the necessary panels onto one page was to make them smaller. This in turn meant that my drawings would’ve had to be smaller. This made it so planning where to place panels and how to draw the drawing was a crucial part of making the comic.
Here you will find tips and tricks for the programs I used:
Slides – When making a character, animal, tree, or anything else out of several shapes, group them together so that you don’t have to move every shape individually. To do this, hold down anywhere on the screen until you get a message that says: “Drag to select shapes.” When you get this message, drag your finger over the desired shapes until they all have a blue outline. Then, in the top right corner, you will see several buttons. Click on the leftmost one. Now, you can move these shapes around freely.
Comic Life 3 – Try using different shapes of bubbles to indicate different emotions, volumes, and types of sounds. For example, in my comic, on panel 2, when Falsehood tells Water to put Fire out, it made sense for them to be whispering. Thus, I used a bubble with dotted lines, as this is what most comic artists use when characters are whispering to one another. Another example of this is when Water actually puts out Fire on panel 3. For this, I used an almost round bubble with four little spikes in the corners. I chose this one because, out of all the options for bubbles, this one felt the best for an FX.