Awake - Self Published comic

Story and art by me.

Awake is a silent horror story based on my own personal experiences with Sleep Paralysis. I wanted to create more personal and vulnerable work, without being too revealing about my private life. I also wanted to draw a project focussed in a specific environment so I could focus on developing my environment and perspective skills, building on feedback I’d received from a one to one with a senior editor at a major publisher.

Cover image the comic Awake. The silhouette of a demon frames the face of a terrified man. Story and art by Bren

Four panel comic page, with black and white ink drawings. The first panel is a splash panel, full size of the page, showing a man lying on a couch looking drowsy and exhausted. In front of him is a laptop on a coffee table, and we can see the background of a TV in the foreground. Laundry is drying on a clothes rack to the left of the couch. The second panel shows the mans reflection in the laptop screen. The third panel is a framed photo. The fourth panel is a phone screen with lots of notifications.

Interior artwork

A black and white comic book page, showing a demon appearing at the foot of someone's bed

Black and white ink drawing, a 4 panel comic page showing a demon crawling onto a bed

Thumbnails and pencilled artwork

Since this was a self-directed project, I printed my thumbnails as a mock up and showed this to my peers for feedback, and to ensure the storytelling and page flow was clear. I did the same with my pencilled artwork, before committing to ink on paper, to gauge peoples reaction to the comic.

Drawing comics for me is very much an iterative and collaborative process, I refine the compositions as finalise my artwork.

Printed mock up of Awake, showing two pages of thumbnails

Printed mock up of Awake, showing two pages of pencilled artwork

The first version of my thumbnails for Awake had a 5 page sequence of foxes running through a London residential street at night. As attached as I was to this idea it did nothing for the story, and I wanted to keep my page count to 24 pages. In the end I abandoned these pages and focussed the story on interior of the building and the sleep paralysis experience.

Character designs

I had a specific image of the demon character based on my own experiences, however I did do some research on gods and demons, before finding an image of the islamic demon Pazuzu, which was pretty close to my own experiences. I iterated on this image a few times before I had a design I was happy with. This design later became the inspiration for one of the final splash pages in the comic.

A drawing of a demon standing behind a man sitting at a drawing board