Everyday, electric cars are sold to people looking for an alternative to gas-powered cars. Most electric car owners believe that they are doing a great service to the environment, and thus humanity as a whole. It is true that electric cars are better for the environment, but most people would be surprised by how little that difference is. Our problem was that electric car dealers were advertising their cars as an amazing way to save Earth. Electric cars are truthfully not that much better than gas cars. To address these misconceptions, we made a comic to educate the public.
Our comic takes the reader through the story of a man who wants to buy an electric car. He meets, quite unexpectedly, a car salesman who explains to him the truth about electric cars. The salesman also provides useful statistics and walks the man through the development process, from materials to final product. All information is arranged in an informative and intriguing, nine-page comic.
We started out by finding the statistics of emissions for the two types of cars. Throughout the research process, we decided to focus on strictly full battery-powered cars. We did not include hybrids because the data was not as sound. After narrowing down our research, we were able build a strong argument about why the customer was being fooled. After the data-gathering was completed, we moved onto our storyline. In order to have all of our facts represented in such few pages, we decided to have the electric car salesman, who took the role of our tour guide, be able to teleport. Writing the script for the characters was not complicated nor that time-consuming. It only took about half a day to create the script. The main challenge that we faced concerned drawing. Neither of us draws well, so we decided to trace all of our images. We used Photoshop to compile images and then printed them out to trace. Another challenge was character consistency. The images we used for the character varied heavily throughout the comic, so we had to come up with a lot of different identifiers.