The Poeticomic - Dave, Lydia, and Brett

In order to better understand the rhetorical possibilities of combining print media and new media, our project will take existing poems of ours and translate them into hypertext-laden comics. Within the comic-book-esque renditions of the poems themselves will be links to pertinent scholarship by Gunther Kress, Albert Rouzie, Myka Veillstemig, and Scott McCloud. The associative nature of this project stems from our interest in the traditional personal essay, and our belief in the lyrical, poetic possibilities of “the new essay” as defined by Viellstimig.

Our homepage will situate the poetry on a picture of a musty, yellowing book. Within the poems, numerous links will take us to discrete comic book scenes that will also be able to be viewed as a cohesive story.

We hope to be able to make this experience interactive; our three poems will line up thematically in a way that should allow the user to choose-her-own poem, choose-her-own-comic, choose her own way through the web of print media, new media, hypertextual link, traditional scholarship, and visual argument.

For instance, clicking on the first line of Lydia’s poem may bring us to a scene in a bowling alley. That page may have two linked options: continue in the poeticomic bowling alley, or choose the next line and comic scene from Dave’s poem (which will be thematically-linked and probably set in an Applebee’s). A third click might take the user to a picture of Albert Rouzie, animated: text here might read “POW KAZAAM, Take that you serio-villains; always be LUDIC. BLAMO.” The word “ludic” will link the user to a funny line from Lydia’s poem, back in the bowling alley (but this time with Zombies). We foresee productive challenges with this method that we will reflect on in “Dave Wanczyk Law Blog,” “Critical Pickle,” and "A Metanarrative."

To make our website, we will become well-versed in Dreamweaver, Comic-Life, Photoshop, and Photo Booth; we also hope to take advantage of the technology in the @lab for rendering our images.

Our process will be logged on RouzieWiki as well as RouzieBlog.

Comments and constructive criticism welcome.

A further note about our process: We will be drawing on some of the scholarship mentioned above to theorize our experience and its implications. I think Geoffrey Sirc's box logic will be particularly relevant and helpful, considering the many boxes involved in our potential project: boxes within the comic form, boxes as links, the blog and the wiki as separate but connected boxes, also we have begun to learn from our friend David Grover, and a bit from our virtual tutor Garrick Chow, about the invisible boxes containing our web design and floating above it to provide links to our other boxes. Boxes abound. We'll see what we can make of them.