My Lady

By Jen Vaughn
www.mermaidhostel.com

I read this comic by my zine BFF Jen Vaughn and was cofused. It tells a story (of which I liked the ending), but the dialogue seems almost like poetry, and a strict nine panel grid was used for no apparent reason.

And then it hit me when I saw Wally Wood listed in the special thanks. This comic was made using the 22 panels that always work! Here's a site that tells the story better than I could, but the you can understand the gist of it by the very title. Clearly this comic was an assignment that Vaughn completed for the Centre for Cartoon Studies. As such it makes far more sense! Vaughn was attempting to create a comic using as many of these panels as possible. It doesn't seem to be made solely out of them (though I could be wrong), but it does use many of them and matching them up is kind of fun.

One thing that still confused me about this comic was the massive size it was printed at! 11x17 paper folded in half. I wondered why it could possibly be printed so huge, when it really doesn't need to be. Finally I decided that it must be because it was drawn at this size, and reducing it would have made it fit onto the page weird. North American paper sizes are stupid. (Check this wikipedia article to see why the A-series of paper sizes makes wayyyy more sense.)