Freestyle Academy proudly presents

The Cheaters: A Junior Visual Narrative Comic by Payton Millet (2016)

My story is an exploration of the thought process of a young dean at a prestigious private school. Our main character, Jason Allemann, is tasked by the administration to make an executive decision on which of two suspects to expel after a cheating scandal. However, this decision becomes more difficult than he could have possibly imagined, as the personalities of the two suspects become representative of the two warring ideologies of jason himself, with one student representing a brutal practicality, and the other representing a freedom of artistic expression. In the end, it comes down to Jason's choice.

The project of this illustration has been quite the journey, as adapting a plot this experimental and abstract to comic was particularly difficult. The initial sketches in my sketchpad began focusing the story less on Jason, and more on the two suspects of the scandal, Lucy and Link. The panels represent scenes from their lives that portray their distinct ideologies. The linear perspective is used to show how the entire story actually takes place within Jason's mind, all contained in his office on a cold, rainy, winter's night. In a bit of a twist, instead of a wide establishing shot it represents how claustrophobic the tale really is. On the illustration boards, I came up with the concept of a nonlinear layout, creating a story that could be read in any direction you feel. I ended up doing most of the art right on the illustration board, as my nonlinear concept came to me too late to do initial sketches on graph paper. Using copic pens on the illustration board, I was able to create a very appealing hand drawn aesthetic with long, thick brush strokes. After scanning the board into illustrator with an app called genius scan, I was set to start using the program. to maintain the hand drawn motif I was going for, I had to outline all my pen strokes with the pen tool, which while quite time consuming, payed off for the aesthetic appeal. In the end, I feel this was quite a successful and faithful adaptation of my original flash fiction. Enjoy this work as it was intended, with no distinct beginning, middle, or end, but simply as a thought process, just as Jason experienced
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