Come the end of finals week, Charles Agbaje won’t be sleeping off this quarter’s classes. Instead, he’ll be teaching one.
Agbaje applied to host a panel on digital distribution at Chicago’s upcoming comic and entertainment expo, C2E2, where he will have a booth to sell his work.
The Communication junior collaborates on an online graphic novel called Project 0 with his brother John, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. They update their website, Central City Tower, with new pages from the project each week.
“We’re trying to turn this from a hobby into being an actual craft,” Agbaje says.
Their other series, Spider Stories, is an experimental animation project that Agbaje created for his animate arts class last year. Agbaje wanted to tell his story using the way the eye tracks naturally across a page, rather than panels or words.
He looked to West African folk tales -– like the ones he heard from his Nigerian parents -– for a simple tale that could be told with only a soundtrack. The one he decided on centered around a magical talking drum.
“People would use [talking drums] to communicate ideas more broadly before the age of telecommunication,” says Agbaje. “People would be able to understand what you were saying based on the way you played it.”
The digital animation moves through a series of full color murals with no breaks or cuts. Though it is still being revised, Agbaje says he plans to adapt more folk tales for animation.
“You often don’t see a lot of fantasy stories or cartoons or heroes that come out of an African tradition,” says Agbaje. “It fills a niche that’s not really established.”
