There's a Monster in Town!

"There’s a Monster in Town!" is a short comic that illustrates memory bias and persistence through different characters who hear about a monster. This project was made for Art & the Brain, a course at Carnegie Melon University. taught by Patricia Maurides. The entire comic was created in Adobe Illustrator. I wanted the comic to have an angular look, so the illustrations themselves don't use bezier curves.

Character Design, Digital Art, Illustration

Below: Planning sketches.

The first sketch I made for There's A Monster In Town. The underlying idea of the comic is that a variety of different people had expeirenced the same thing, but rememberd it in wildly different ways.

Quick sketches of monster ideas

The crux of the comic starts to come together: The source of misremembering is an odd-looking little girl (who in the final comic is partially hidden in all of the panels featuring monsters). The little girl's design would inform the characteristics of each imagined monster.

Cat monster design sketch

Character design sketches

The comic layout starts to come together as the design of the little girl is finalized. Each character remembers two traits that informs their monster's design, and monsters in the middle of the game of "memory telephone" must possess four traits - the two traits the previous person told the current person about, and the two traits the current person will tell the next person about. In additon, all of the dialogue lines about monster traits must rhyme in an ABAB structure.

Baba Yokai, one of the monsters in There's A Monster In Town. It's got sinister stripes, a snaggletooth smile, a huge nose, and knobbly knees!

↑Back to Top