DIGITAL ILLUSTRATION GALLERY
AT THIS POINT ISSUE #002
“The One That Ran Away”
“The One That Ran Away,” Issue #002 | At This Point, Valerie Caesar, 2025.
I (finally) made another comic strip! I’ve been so excited to create another one after dashing out Issue #001, but then work, life, and other ideas — the ADHD thing is real — got in the way. But I was recently newly inspired to work on this new one (read: I’m procrastinating on doing something else. Somebody help me, please). In this post I’d like to share some behind-the-scene details about the inspiration and process.
Update: I created a pocket zine from this comic strip in collaboration with The Free Black Women’s Library’s Canon Zine Project. Check it out!
THE MOTIF
The overall motif of the At This Point comic strip is an honest and sometimes humorous chronicle of the mundane and moving experiences of a Black woman born and living in New York — Brooklyn, to be exact. I’ve decided to employ a diary/journal style approach to these comic strips, so the narration is written in the first person, and the character is loosely (or tightly) based on me and my life. More precisely, these have so far been inspired by my real life experiences, but I can see a world in the near future where I am using this character to explore ideas that aren’t necessarily autobiographical.
THE VESSEL
What I like about the act of creating these personal journals in the form of a six-panel comic strip is that it does just that — it strips down what is personal, hard-to-express, sometimes awkward, or vulnerable, or saccharine episodes and feelings — into the briskly comedic one-two punch of a setup and punchline. No matter how devastating the content, we know what to expect from the timing. In fact, the more brutal the message, the more delightful it is that the comic or comedian managed to fit that amount of emotion into the constraints of that old, familiar framework.
PROCESS
Now allow me for a moment to geek out about process. Part of what I love about making comics is that it forces me to step outside of my natural approach to artmaking. I tend to go off vibes, using what’s around me and tuning into what message it wants me to deliver. My exploration of illustration has forced me to be more intentional about my work — I have to chose or imagine an object or a scene to recreate, and I have to stay with it longer than the moment in which it’s happening to do that recreation. My video work is very much here and now. I do have to sit with it later to pair it with music, and find the words I think it wants to say about itself, but again, the magic in that process is not stressing it, but rather being intuitively selective. The longer it takes for me to process a video in my special way, the less magic it will deliver. That’s just a fact I’ve observed.
But I find the opposite is true with storytelling via illustration. Time is not necessarily the measure, but a certain level of premeditated intention about composition is a necessary measure for a well balanced strip. In consideration of the pairing of the panels, there’s the setup and punchline of Chris Rock; the iambic pentameter of Shakespeare; the call and response of Black music. You gotta know where you’re going before you head out, and be prepared with all the things you’re gonna need for the journey.
THE STORYBOARD
The inspiration for the story is simply that what happened in the story happened to me. But the inspiration for making the comic strip was more about the fact that I was forced to sit with and process that embarrassing experience by myself. (Normally I would immediately call my best friend and confidante to share this cringy moment, laugh about it, and dispel it from my consciousness. But it so happened that she was unavailable for that sweaty, desperate phone call.)
It is really hard for me to sit with weird emotions without overthinking, unless I make a concerted attempt to transmute them, either verbally or through writing. This time I decided to use the feeling to draft a loose script and storyboard. This craft involves deftly paring down what would have been a two-hour phone call (or even a 2-3 page journal entry), into about a dozen short sentences. It’s therapeutic in that I have to step outside of myself to view the story almost clinically, which takes a bit of the personal sting of emotion away from it.
Here is also when I start considering a loose color palette, making frame-by-frame connections between objects and the colors that represent them, and how these colors can be varied in subsequent frames for contrast and harmony. I saw quickly that the colors green, black and brown would be hues that could be carried from panel to panel, for the usage in skin tones, trees, brownstone buildings, and street details. I’d figure out other tones later on.
THE ROUGH SKETCH
Then I get to sketching! (This was declared in my Martin Payne voice. IYKYK.) You can play the video to see how I shaped out the story, panel by panel.
For me, it’s important to think strategically about what images, angles, perspectives, levels of focus, etc. should go into each panel to provide a balanced visual story. Ideally the reader could potentially be able to piece together the general idea of the story without even reading the words.
Here I alternated between long shots and closeups, landscapes and portraits to create dynamism between each panel. I later shifted the image panels to add title and text panels. I alluded to the call-and-response tension between panels in terms of visuals, but that definitely holds for text. In another post I’ll talk more about how I approach saying enough, but never too much.
NERDING OUT BRIEFLY ABOUT COLOR SEPARATIONS
One of the things I love the most about creating work with a mind toward future printmaking is working with color separation. This means not only did I consider a limited palette for the sake of visual harmony, but also that I must think deliberately about how to mix primary colors (often limited to a range of 2-5) to produce that envisioned palette. Here I worked with 3 colors (red, yellow and blue) to produce the mainly brown, green, black and gold (with some red for contrast) palette that I wanted for this comic strip. The gif shows how those three colors came together, along with the outlines of the drawing, to produce the finished product. Viewing the color separations this way is my absolute favorite part of this process. I love them so! Especially the ones without outlines. They remind me of photonegatives.
CHOOSING A TEXTURED BRUSH
I initially colored the comic using a CMYK halftone fill. Halftones are so quintessentially the comic strip texture, inspiring memories of my beloved Archie & Jughead, Betty & Veronica, & Josie & the Pussycats collections. While I liked the halftone effect, I should have made the grain smaller. The chunkiness of the resulting texture had a way of obscuring the detail of the image that viewed close up was kind of thrilling, but from far away just looked a damn mess. You can see what I mean with this image and accompanying gif that shows the halftone texture along with some color separation. (I low key really like the red/yellow image by itself, but that’s neither here nor there.) I’m going to try again using it at a smaller grain next time.
Ultimately I went with a risograph brush in layers of red, yellow and blue, to create the texture of the colored panels. I love the soft storybook style it elicits. Check it out in this video that gives a closer look at each panel.
And that’s all! I really enjoyed the process of creating this comic, as well as sharing it here. I’m looking forward to creating the next issue!
A CLOSER LOOK
Watch this short video at the full screen setting to view At This Point Issue #002 in closer detail.