This was the first comic I designed that wasn’t my own story. So for all intents, this was the first comic of Empathize This. And boy was it a hard one.

When a story is as traumatic as this one, it’s hard to visualize the story exactly as it’s told. Since it’s not my own story, any literal visualization of the traumatic event seemed inappropriate. At the same time, it’s important to capture the gravity of the event itself.

In this instance, I just opted for describing the event itself, set against a gray or black background. The gray in the first panel turning into black in the second tries to show the compounding effects of events like this – that they aren’t isolated, but affect the way someone lives their daily life.

What initially struck me about this story was the first sentence. It’s clearly not the point of the story, but I felt that it deserved to be a story on its own - which is why I decided to split the comic into two separate parts.

My notebook sketch for this comic:

Click here to read the original story/comic.