Rationale Statement

I decided to create a biopic of Martin Luther King Junior because he is a very important and influential person in history. I wanted to focus on his assassination, however I chose to do a different perspective. Instead of the typical action/battle story line, I wanted to focus on his family’s reaction to hearing the terrible news of him being murdered.

The title of my narrative is called “Tell Them Before… It’s Too Late” because that is my intended message towards to the audience. Learning to appreciate what you have before it’s gone is a lesson that anyone could experience at some point in their life.

I started the story off with a gloomy introductory panel of the King family’s house because it foreshadows how MLK Jr is not coming home. The following panel on the first page also foreshadows the bad news when Martin asks his mom when his dad is coming home.

On the third page, I played around with value and made the telephone have a lot of shadows to create ominous lighting. This creates an uneasy feeling that the incoming phone call will bear bad news (which it does). After Coretta hears about her husband’s tragedy over the phone, she is in disbelief. I exaggerated her emotions and made those scenes more dramatic through using only black and white. I used this black and white technique again on the fourth page, in the bottom panel of Martin crying behind the wall after overhearing the FBI agent talking to his mom about how his father was assassinated. I made this scene even more dramatic by leaving the tear on Martin’s cheek as blue, which is very noticeable as it contrasts against the desaturated setting.

Besides using black and white, I also took what we learned in class about perspective and used it to make some of my panels appear more suspenseful. For example, the top panel on the first page and the bottom panel on the fourth page show two-point linear perspective, whereas the top panel on the fifth page displays one-point linear perspective.

Suspense was also created through using diagonal borders/shapes for certain panels (for example, the octagon and trapezoid shapes during the phone call scene), as well as making some elements of the panel exceed their panel’s borders (for example, Coretta’s head on the first page, the bedroom door on the second page, the “RING!” text on the third page, and Martin’s feet on the fourth page).