Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Research & Scripting / Spanish & Me

I just reread Making Comics by Scott McCloud and The DC Guide to Writing Comics to give me some refreshing pointers as I write my script for my comic. I used the DC Guide's Three Act technique and made an outline, and now I'm working on the script and drawing character sheets. I'm pretty anal about things though, and want to know exactly what is just enough text to fit on one comic page. I know there is no exact number, but I guess I'm afraid I could be jamming too much info onto one page, or worse not utilizing my pages in my 24 page limit. Any thoughts on this, please let me know.
I made up a mockup stapled comic full of blank pages, I think what I am going to do is write notes down on specific pages where I want key points to be conveyed. Then from there, I can elaborate, then write a script so to speak. I think this might be somewhat old school Marvel Style, but with a bit more direction in a way?


Enough of the comic jabber though, I wanted to talk about my Spanish lessons, and even more serious stuff for once. For those who don't know, I've been taking Spanish for the last two months or so. It's been exciting, extremely fast paced, refreshing, fun, useful, and all together enjoyable. I'm so glad to be learning Spanish finally, I was such a weird kid growing up that I didn't try to learn it before. This goes into a lot of identity issues, something I tried to avoid for years.
It's difficult to come from two different ethnicities. Abstractly as a kid, I had to battle questions like "Who am I", "Which side of the family do I belong", even if I didn't know I was dealing with it. I feel like an outsider among my family, neither one or the other. In school, I was always being asked "What ethnicity are you?" I remember feeling ashamed, because nobody else dealt with that. I eventually tried hiding my background because I am more fair skinned but with very dark features... Somewhat hard to hide though when my last name is Acosta, red flag right there. Probably another reason for hiding my heritage is the ever present underline prejudices all around. I remember hearing people say all sorts of things about the Mexican American people without them even thinking twice about who they were speaking in front of. I feel sort of like a slight secret agent in that department I guess...
Its just a weird existence I guess, hard to describe. I don't know enough Spanish and I'm too light skinned to be accepted by Latinos, and I come from a background and look just different enough to not be White either. Not saying that that everyone is against me, but it comes up from time to time, and its confusing...
But back to Spanish though... I'm so happy to learn it, it is so useful at work, and all over. It is the 3rd most spoken language all over, according to Wikipedia. I also feel closer to that half of my heritage now. I wish my grandparents were alive, I think they would be really proud to know how much I have learned. I would give just about anything to have a conversation with them in Spanish. As a child, I remember listening to them speaking Spanish all the time. I used to be babysat by Spanish nuns too. It's weird, but I remember understanding a lot when I was a kid, though I didn't speak it. When I started learning Spanish a couple months back, I was actually really shocked by all the Spanish I already knew. It was back in my head somewhere begging to be brought back into the front of my mind again.

Anyway, I've been typing too much, back to reading.

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