Siddhartha Gautama is the founder of Buddhism and is commonly known in the religion and throughout the world as the Buddha, meaning ‘enlightened one.’ When he was young, an ascetic, Asita, came to his birth and declared that the child would become a king or a great holy man. He left his palace at the age of 29 to meet his subjects. He met an old man that peaked his curiosity and went on more frequent trips to the outside world. Seeing the conditions of the people who lived under his family’s throne, he decided to live the life of an ascetic and traveled around learning different practices and teachings of meditation. After almost drowning in a river and accepting food from a young girl, he decided to sit under a tree where he vowed not to leave until he discovered the truth. He achieved enlightenment after 49 days and became known as the Buddha.
For my comic, I decided to use a mixture of Buddhist art and manga, which primarily influenced the decision of the font. Buddhist art influenced the idea of having less realistic looking characters while more in favor of a large color pallet, which highly affected me to make the background I did, with the center of the rings around the Buddha to show his significance and draw the eye to him. I decided to not use a gutter in between my panels in reference to chapter 3 of Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. In it, he states that the idea of gutters is to give the view closure of that particular scene or moment. From my research of Buddhism, I noticed that a lot of the biography of the Buddha was often contradictory which drew me to the conclusion that we really don’t know much about his life. The non-use of gutters gives a feeling of continuity and feeling that there is always more to know about who the Buddha was and how the events of his life took place.