Research: Moonshadow

Book title: Moonshadow

Pages: 468

Duration: 1 week

Author: John Marc DeMatties

Artist: Jon J Muth

As part of my research for this project I decided to look at a graphic novel called Moonshadow. It is an exiting story of adventure, love, life, death and incorporates alot of pop culture in to the plot such as books, music, films, people and much more. The story's protagonist and the story's namesake Moonshadow is a boy who was born and spent the first 12 years of his life in the zoo: a strange world created by the godlike race called the G'l dosses who abduct creatures from all over the universe including his mother. Monshadow is then told by his father that he is leaving the zoo to venture out in to the universe on a journey of self discovery, accompanying him are his mother, his cat and his reluctant friend Ira.

I thought that this story would be perfect to look at for this project for a number of reasons: the book features very beautiful art which is painted using watercolours and is very interesting to look at, I didn't at any point whilst reading this get bored with the art and I feel it will be very useful throughout this project as inspiration and for ideas of what style of art to use for my own comic. One of the great things about this story is that to compliment the art is very good writing, there is a very poetic theme in Moonshadow and there are constant refferences to pop culture, especially books making the reading experiance alot more interesting as well as exciting. Because my skills for this project lie mostly in the art this will really help my writing skills.