Joyland - A Comics Anthology (2026)

This project is a collaborative 48-page comics anthology adapting Saim Sadiq’s film Joyland (2022). I was one of 12 artists involved in the project and was responsible for pages 21–24.

My section follows a moment of emotional hesitation between Haider, Mumtaz, and Biba. Rather than simply translating the film scene panel by panel, I focused on how cinematic tension could be reinterpreted through the language of comics: pacing, composition, panel rhythm, body language, and color-coded character relationships.

For these scenes, there wasn’t as much dialogue as emotional peaks. So my key problem was: how to visualize the emotional tensions in a creative way? One idea I came up with was using the star as a recurring motif. It was inspired by both the original movie poster and the disco lights in this specific scene, so it felt like a natural visual element to pull from.

I also developed these distorted, almost warped patterns to represent Mumtaz’s sense of disorientation. She’s dealing with her pregnancy, but she’s also feeling uncertain about where she is in life, so I wanted the pages to have that same sense of instability and discomfort.

What was really exciting was that these ideas ended up going beyond just my section. When I shared the star motif and distorted patterns with the group, everyone responded really well to them, and we decided to carry those elements into other pages throughout the book. Since each person was illustrating a different section, we had to coordinate closely on how these motifs would repeat and evolve without making everyone’s pages look the same. That helped give the final book a much stronger visual connection from one section to the next, while still letting each illustrator keep their own style.

Because this was a collaborative anthology, I also communicated with the larger group to maintain visual harmony and narrative coherence across the book, especially with the pages immediately before and after mine.

The full anthology was created collectively by the class; the pages shown here represent my individual contribution to the project.