please note that none of the artwork in this post is mine. all of it belongs to Laura Hollingsworth and Stephen McCranie and will be credited to their respective artists.
Hello, and welcome back to Blonde Girl Writing, where I talk about writing, God, and reading! Today I wanted to talk a bit about webcomics and how artists use them to tell a story using visuals.
If you know me at all, you'll know that I love webcomics. They're so cool, and each one has its own style, world, characters, and plot! The artist can get super creative with their visuals, and this flexibility allows them to create beautiful stories with deep meanings. I have two webcomics that I'd really like to focus on today, which just so happen to be my two favorite webcomics! Best of all, both are created by Christian artists who weave deep themes into their comics.
First off, we'll start with The Silver Eye by Laura Hollingsworth.
The Silver Eye is a fantastical webcomic about two boys, Enel and Apen, each with secrets and powers, and in families who have been rivals for literal centuries. Apen is a young king who was exiled and left for dead. Enel is an orphan hoping to find his family. They unite to go home and save their homelands, but they'll have to overcome a history of bad blood first. (Loosely paraphrased from the About page at thesilvereye.com)
Apen is a short, cinnamon roll boy with a strong sense of justice and faith in God.
Enel is a noodle boy who can rarely take things seriously and isn't very good at anything except being annoying. But he has his moments!
The supporting characters are also very important to the plot! They each have their own hopes, dreams, and goals that intersect and often conflict with each other's. And trust me, Laura has woven an intricate tale with The Silver Eye. It's taken me several full read-throughs to catch a lot of the hints and secrets, and I still don't know everything!
Every page is fun and eye-catching, as well as mysterious and intriguing and filled with secrets. Laura is also very goofy, often putting funny messages in the hover text and hiding text on books or in little nooks. She even created her own language made out of symbols that is everywhere, and once you begin to decode it, it's so fun to figure out what everything says.
Because The Silver Eye is a webcomic, Laura can use her art to convey feelings and tell her story in a very dynamic way. Color is very important, as are the length of the pages as well as the shapes and sizes of the panels. You can really tell whenever a scene is supposed to be happy, or sad, or serious, because the colors, expressions, etc. tell the story very well.
Anyway, if The Silver Eye sounds awesome to you, you can check it out on Laura Hollingsworth's website thesilvereye.com, where she posts a new page about every week on Fridays/Saturdays.
And now for Space Boy by Stephen McCranie.
image from the cover of the Space Boy printed volume one, found on Amazon
Space Boy is a sci-fi webcomic about a boy, Oliver, and a girl, Amy, who unite despite being light years away, who are trying to find answers to the secret of an alien artifact and survive the evil organization that has captured them both. (Loosely paraphrased from the Space Boy page on Webtoons)
Amy is a sweet, honest girl who wants to help Oliver through his pain and make it home to her parents. She has very deep thoughts and can sense the soul of a person, attributing their personality to a specific flavor.
Oliver is a lonely boy with a traumatic past. He's very artistic but doesn't really know how to open up or talk to people about feelings. He's either stone-cold or extremely angry, but Amy has helped him balance things out and be kinder.
Stephen McCranie has done an amazing job of worldbuilding with Space Boy. It's sci-fi, but the world is just enough like ours that you don't get confused or caught up in all the details. It's mostly set in Kokomo City (at least at the start of the series) but the world is split into countries that like mashups of our own. It has technology like NetGear glasses that are basically a phone on your face, cryogenic freezing for long years of space travel, and entire mining colonies at the far reaches of space.
Just like with The Silver Eye, every character has an important role to play--even if you think they're just minor, more than likely they'll come back! From Amy's school friends to the FCP people to the regular citizens around town, every character has a fun design and motivations that are personal to them.
Space Boy operates on a lot of mystery. There are always more questions to be answered, always more pieces of the puzzle to be solved, and most of the time the characters are right there alongside you, trying to figure things out, too.
And Stephen McCranie's art style is so much fun. It feels very paintbrush-y and whimsical. Every character looks different, and the flavors that Amy sees for each of them also help as a visual tool for what they feel and believe. Stephen does really well with spacing out panels and often drawing outside of panels to give the webcomic a very dynamic feel. His character expressions are also so good, often exaggerated to heighten how the characters feel. And often he'll draw panels like the one below that are extremely beautiful and heartfelt.
If Space Boy sounds like it's for you, you can check it out on Webtoons here--which is updated about every Wednesday night--or you can buy the physical copies of the comic on Amazon, starting with volume one here.
I hope this post has helped you see just what a beautiful visual art webcomics can be, using their art to tell a deep story and convey characters. Not every webcomic is like this, but when done correctly (like The Silver Eye or Space Boy) you get a great experience that leaves you wanting more!
Let me know down below: what are your thoughts on webcomics? Do you read any, and if so, which ones?
Best wishes,
~ Jonah
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