English 3 FINAL ESSAY

For my final project of English III, my partner, Alex Sykas, and I had to construct a 10 page graphic novel about three different books we read. We opted for a 20 page comic about one of the books, with two very brief cameos of one book and movie we read and watched. The main book the comic focuses around on is The Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, and Apocalypse Now directed by Francis Ford Coppola were the other book and movie we chose to be our brief cameos, respectively. To begin, Alex and I bounced ideas off of each other on how we could make The Metamorphosis more interesting. One of the initial ideas we had planned for Gregor Samson, the protagonist of The Metamorphosis and of our comic, was to have Gregor throw an apple at his father, because after watching an absolutely abysmal video rendition of The Metamorphosis, where Gregor’s father throws an apple at him (which was shot in a really bad camera perspective), that was all me and Alex were thinking about after the movie. The thought stuck with us long enough for us to come up with the idea that Gregor should throw an apple at his father. Then we decided, “he’s going to need some sort of device or be strong enough to throw the apple, what should we do?” We immediately came up with the idea that Gregor should be super strong by the end of the book, strong enough to throw the apple at his father. After a lot of bouncing of ideas back and forth between us, we decided to give Gregor’s final design six stick arms. Near the beginning, we put him throw a Rocky-esque training montage. In the first Rocky movie, Rocky’s training montage ended with him running up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Naturally, Gregor was going to end off his montage like this, but by climbing his flight of stairs in his own house. We decided that the best way to transition Gregor from scrawny to amazingly strong, was to have him crack a few dozen eggs into a cup and drink it (like Rocky did.) After Gregor eats the eggs (and the glass), he becomes super strong, kills his entire family by punching his father’s head off and have his head fly through the house, collecting the heads of his family by having the father’s head come at their heads so fast, they break off and form an air-born train of heads, joins the League of Extraordinary Insects, and gets clonked in the head with an apple and dies. Then I drew this all out and Alex sat beside me and told me if something in a panel did not look like something it was intended to look like and I made corrections. While the initial plan of the father dying by getting hit by an apple thrown or launched by Gregor in some manner, we were still able to bounce enough ideas off of each other to establish an awesome story for an otherwise pitiful character.