Planning/Design

Style:

For the style of my comic I have decided to mix German WW2 posters with a conventional comic book style. I love the colours and the shading of the posters which is what I want to include in my comic. I want to make the comic resemble that time era yet also have a modern day style with it.

Posters were made to support the war and encourage people to join the army to serve their country. In nazi Germany they were used to support the Nazi party and Hitler. On one poster it states "die fahne des sieges" which means "The banner of Victory" suggesting that the Nazi symbol/flag is a symbol of victory.

Posters were also to warn people that a spy could be listening, to save food and materials, The World War 2 era was also a time that posters were made by the old printing technique to mass produce. Most of the posters use vectors and very limited colours.

In 1914 before the third Reich's reign, Hitler was an amazing artist using mostly watercolour for his work. The watercoloured images of Adolf's work was very soft and almost resembles the posters and their colour schemes. Due to the controversy of the subject being the artist the majority of his artwork are currently seized by American Officials who refuse the art to be on exhibit. Some of the artwork however is held by private individuals some fetching to over 100,00 euros.

Uniforms

My main character will be a German general/scientist so looking into the era's uniforms is important. I have found a page of uniforms which I thought could be useful for designing characters along side my main character and to have a range of ideas and designs.

World War 2 Research

I have decided to base my poster on World War 2 era Nazi Germany due to the amount of misunderstanding of the culture and I am interested in the history behind concentration camps/Germany's story. Due to having a German background I can get primary research from a World War 2 victim and secondary research from the internet.

For a storyline I would like to base it of something like Black Ops zombies due to the vast storyline and how real it seems.

Location:

Auschwitz Concentration Camp 1940 - 1945

Source:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auschwitz_concentration_camp

http://www.theholocaustexplained.org/ks3/the-camps/how-were-the-camps-run/uniform-and-clothing/#.VQF-ySusV8E

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/augas.html

Auschwitz was a network of German concentration camps and extermination camps built and operated by the third Reich. It consisted of Auschwitz I (the original camp), Auschwitz II–Birkenau (a combination concentration/extermination camp), Auschwitz III–Monowitz (a labor camp to staff an IG Farben factory), and 45 satellite camps. It was first constructed to hold Polish political prisoners who arriveed in May 1940. The firstv extermination of prisoners took place in September 1941. That is when Aushwitz II-Birkenau went on to become a major site of Nazi "final  soultion to the Jewish question".

From early 1942 until late 1944, transport trains delivered Jews to the camp's gas chambers from all over German-occupied Europe. The victims were killed by the pesticide Zyklon B which was invented in Germany in the early 1920s. It consisted of Hydrogen Cyanide or known as Prussic Acid, a warning eye irritant and several adsorbents such as diatomaceous earth. In early 1942, Zyklon B emerged as the preferred killing tool of Nazi Germany for use in extermination camps during the Holocaust. The chemical claimed the lives of roughly a million people, most of whom died at Auschwitz. One of the co-inventors of Zyklon B, chemist and businessman Bruno Tesch, was executed in 1946 for knowingly selling the product to the SS for use on humans. Although the use of hydrogen cyanide has been banned or severely restricted in many countries, products similar to Zyklon B are still manufactured by Detia-Degesch (successor to Degesch) and by Adezin, a Czech firm. At least 1.1 million prisoners died at Auschwitz and around ninety percent of them were Jewish.


Approximately 1 in 6 Jews killed in the Holocaust died at the camp. Others deported to Auschwitz included 150,000 Poles, 23,000 Romani and Sinti, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, 400 Jehovah's Witnesses,homosexuals, and tens of thousands of people of diverse nationalities. Many of those not killed in the gas chambers died of starvation, forced labor, infectious diseases, individual executions, and medical experiments. In the course of the war, the camp was staffed by 6,500 to 7,00 members of the German Schutzstaffel. 15 percent of which were committed for war crimes, some including Rudolf Höss were executed. The Allied Powers or Allied Forces refused to believe early reports of atrocities at the camp or it's railways remains controversial. 144 prisoners are known to have escaped Auschwitz successfully and on October 7, 1944 two Sonderkommando units- Prisoners assigned to staff the gas chambers  launched a brief, unsuccessful uprising.

Within in Auschwitz, prisoners were forced to strip and wear uniforms that were striped and blue in colour (These uniforms are now known as Striped pyjamas.) Men would wear a vest, trousers, hat and coat. Women would be supplied a smock type dress. On their feet pirsoners were to wear wooden or leather clogs and socks were not supplied so the clogs would rub on their feet and ankles. This would cause foot sores and this could be dangerous due to the poor conditions of the barracks and around the camp. The prisoners would easily get an infection which would lead to death.
The uniforms were changed approximately every six weeks and prisoners were to sleep and work in the same clothing which would get very dirty. 



Each prisoner had a number printed on their clothing to identify them along with an inverted triangle with lettering to signify the reason for their imprisonment. Criminals were marked with a green triangle, political prisoners with red, homosexuals with pink, Jehovah's Witnesses wore a purple triangle and asocials (including Roma) wore a black triangle. In some camps, Jewish were usually marked by a yellow triangle over a red triangle to form the Star of David. However in other camps a yellow star identify them as being Jewish. 

Image: http://www.webanswers.c om/post-images/8/86/160B2349-D28C-C0D1-6553103310036809.png

Crematorium 1:
August 15, 1940 - July 1943
According to calculations by German authorities, 340 corpses could be burned every 24 hours after the installation of three furnaces. After the completion of four crematoria with gas chambers in Auschwitz II - Birkenau, the burning of corpses in Crematorium I was halted. The building was used for storage and then designed as an SS air-raid shelter. The furnaces, chimney and some of the walls were demolished, and the openings in the roof through which the SS poured Zyklon B were plastered. After the war, the museum carried out a partial reconstruction.. The chimney and two incinerators were rebuilt using original components, as were several of the openings in the gas chamber roof.

Crematorium 2:
March 1943 - November 1944
The Crematorium II building contained a gas chamber and furnaces for burning corpses. Serveral hundred Jews were murdered here with poison gas and their bodies burned. Bodies of Jewish and non Jewish prisoners who died in the concentration camp were also burned here. According to calculations by German authorities, 1440 corpses could be burned every 24 hours. According to the testimony of former prisoners the figure was higher. At the end of the war with the intention to remove the evidence of their crimes, the camp authorities ordered the demolition of the furnaces and crematorium building in Novermber 1944. On January 20, 1945, the SS blew up the remains which was not removed.

Research

Comic Book/Concept Artist
Robert Kirkman

The comic book artist I have chosen to research is Robert Kirkman, famous for creating the Walking Dead. He is an American comic book artist who has also created Invincible for Image comics. In addition to Ultimate X-Mean and Marvel Zombies for Marvel Comic. 

He has also collaborated with Image Comics co-founder Todd McFarlane on the series Haunt. He is one of the five partners of Image Comics, and the only one of the five who was not one of its co-founders.

I personally love his art style because it is realistic yet holds those thick comic book lines. Even down to the shading he has created character depth and it shows how dark this series is. The gore in his comics are also one of the reasons why many are drawn to his style.

His work has a sense of eeriness and a disturbing nature. He has a unique style with his art and I love how he can make you feel with his drawings.

Animator/Artist

David Firth

I chose David Firth as he is my favourite animator and one of my favourite artists, He has an air of creepiness when it to his animations and his art. David Firth is most famous for his work such as Salad Fingers which now has a total of 10 episodes each being 5 to 10 minutes long. David mostly uses Flash however he differs from other artist because of his techniques of idea generation. Firth has said in an interview that he keeps sketch pads by his bedside in order to document his dreams which he uses in his animations. I love this idea and I take inspiration from him.

Not only does his document his dreams for animations but he explores abandoned buildings for "textures" he can use within his work. He will take supplies with him to draw on the walls and take images of the abandoned building which he also uses in many of his animations. He creates an atmosphere within his work and it makes you feel uneasy which is what I like when looking at his art.

For the music of his animations he finds old vinyl's which are dirty and have scratches on. To him this creates an eerie atmosphere which helps with his animation's storyline.

His website is called Fat-Pie. http://www.fat-pie.com/

Analysing Art and Design

Artist Name:

David Firth

Title:

Salad Fingers 2: Friends

Date Made (Upload Date):

July 4th 2008

Place Made (If Known):

Doncaster, England

Formal Elements:

David's second episode of the infamous Salad Fingers holds an air of a creepy atmosphere. The music has static and an eerie sound which is repeated. It suits the nature of Salad Fingers who is said to be involved in a Nuclear War which gives him the weird appearance and the almost mentally insane feeling.

The art style is fairly simple and has no blending which shows that it has been made on Flash. The thick black lines flicker showing that he redrawn each frame to make it look more scary and creepy. The animation itself is very dark and consists of mostly greens and browns. The images have almost scratched textures which adds to the creepiness.

Subject Matter:

The subject matter is the bald headed, green man named Salad fingers due to his long green fingers. The reason behind the name was because David use to play guitar and his class friends called him salad fingers. The animation is about Salad Fingers and his "friends" which are finger puppet.

Initial Meanings:

No one really understands what goes through David's mind when he animates however Salad Fingers has been left to the viewer to figure out what is going on. A lot of theories are that a Nuclear war happened which caused the landscape to be bare with just "floor Sand" and the odd tree which Salad Fingers believes to be his child. The meaning behind salad fingers is based on the fact David was called Salad Finger for playing the guitar but he developed it in to a creepy story due to his vivid dreaming.

One Comic/Many Artist

Iron Man

Iron man was designed by two artist, Don Heck and Jack Kirby, the character however was created by Stan Lee. He made his first appearance in Tales of Suspense. (March 1963). 

Don Heck:

Born January 2, 1929 In New York. One of his earliest known comics was Weird Terror in September 1952.


Jack Kirby: 
Born August 28, 1917 and died February 6, 1994. He was considered the most influential comic book artist and one of the major innovators in the comic book industry,

Cultural research:

Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 (Zombies)

Map: origins

Call of Duty World at War, Black ops 1 and 2 are most famous for the unlimited rounds of the undead. The storyline wasn’t debuted until Black Ops 1 when the characters spoke to each other and the player which was different for the Call of Duty franchise. A large part of the Call of Duty franchise influences is War films, comics and real accounts of different wars. (World War 1, 2, Vietnam)

Due to the amount of content that Call of Duty zombies contained I have decided to do research on one particular map called Origins which is part of the Apocalypse DLC pack released for Xbox August 27^th 2013 and on September 26^th 2013 for Playstation.

The game

The map is based in 1918 during World War 1 on the battlefield of Northern France in a Dieselpunk-style which still holds its historical references considering the content such as giant robots being powered by element 115. The map has references to World War 1 trenches and the environment represents the conditions of the trenches in that time era. The game is based on how the zombies came into being which was the effects of Element 115 with it's strange powers. Not only does the environment mirror the research of World War 1 but the zombies are wearing what German soldiers would have worn and wearing gas masks. In the cinematic at the beginning the first zombie to appear was a Roman empire soldier which was buried under the trenches of northern France. Also the dead of World War 1 were reanimated which then killed the surviving people.Only the four main characters survived the zombie herd.