The idea I had for this project took around 10 minutes, but going about implementing this project, from the ideas in my head to actual words on paper took much longer.  I thought of a graphic novel, having seen a graphic novel as one of the examples of class, and having seen many graphic novels in the past and also having made a graphic novel page in middle school.  I thought it would be a fun way to add creativity in my project and do some drawing. I probably have drawn nothing for any project since 11th grade in high school!  I enjoyed the process and it showed me how a writer goes through a process. I would start drawing, then take a break for like a day, and go back to it the next day, and I realized that this is how writing is like. Sometimes I would be out of ideas, like what the next page should be about.  Sometimes, I would have some ideas in mind, and after a couple of day's I would be like 'What was I thinking back then? I've got no clue what this is about'.  Then I would rework some portion of the novel or add some portion, and then finally realize 'Oh! That's what I actually meant' in my mind, and then it would be a process of connecting the two ideas together.  

Given the concept of Nihilism in the courses theme, and showing the different kinds of Nihilism along with the different ways the Neverending Story portrayed Nihilism, I decided to show this Nihilism in the form of a dystopia.  I also figured I'd play around with the idea of escapism, and show it being done in a dystopian sense that would give the reader a new perspective regarding escapism and how it can overlap with dystopia.  I was also planning on giving my project some content on fairy tales since much of the content we covered in the course, especially near the beginning was fairy tales, but I thought just showing Nihilism in a futuristic world and showing some escapism would be enough.  I had some plot lines in mind, especially from the RIP project outline we had to do, but could not implement all of it, due to the lack of time.  I remember when I finished my rough draft, I hadn't even done this page (the most important part to my graphic novel):

I also later had to make the graphic novel only like a preview, but still covering the essential story and the dystopian-like ending.  In the essay, I couldn't really go into more depth about all the concepts within the graphic novel, but only some of the more important ones that I thought be included in a rhetorical analysis of the graphical novel.

The Essay

The essay was the most dreaded portion of this project for me.  It took me a while to fully understand it.  After doing the essay, it helped strengthen my writing process though, and showed me how to write better and how to get credible resources quickly in a short time crunch. I also found the most important thing I could in order to get to the next paragraph of my essay or figure out the structure was to really analyze this portion of my essay - 

This portion is between the first page and the second page of my RIP essay, and that is where the structure of the essay is located; the thesis, or at least the partial thesis.  This would really help me increase my writing performance when I go deeper into the essay. I have provided both my RIP Project and my essay in a pdf format below for readers to see.