Number 53

#53 (also known as "Number 53") is a webcomic started on January 3, 2006, by Daniel Creamer. Updates are weekly and it is hosted by Blogspot.

Plot

Official summary

The tagline is:

"The Webcomic for starving university students everywhere"

The comic introduces the unnamed protagonist as a first-year University undergraduate and follows him through his oft-comical experiences settling into the University setting, particularly college social factors and elements of boarding, both foreign to him. The timeline is decompressed, with 1 #53 week having elapsed between the 19th update and the comic's inception.

The author, Creamer, is a first-year University student studying a Bachelor's honors course in Information Technology at the Queensland University of Technology. It can be said that #53's protagonist is the digital projection of Creamer himself, though incidents appearing in the comic are not all analogous with his own.

At present the comic is yet to introduce any element of third-person narration, with most perceptions of the protagonists experiences being drawn from his speech and the comic's art. This is not especially unusual and makes for the observer's more involved identification with the protagonist.

Characters

Main characters

The chief protagonist is a slightly neurotic, under-confident and worrysome teen, anxious about his new University environment, which admittedly he has difficulty adjusting to. He is also the nerdy type, expressing interest in network gaming and is an avid computer user. He appears to be rather reserved and is only ever regularly accompanied by another unnamed accomplice, his roommate. Said accomplice is infinitely more streetwise and informed regarding the city/University sphere and offers advice and guidance, though (comically) is not always helpful. As a result of their experiential differences, the chief protagonist often finds his accomplice's mannerisms at odds with his own.

Nineteen strips into #53, the chief protagonist has experienced the following extraordinary events:

• Being bitten by a city hobo,
• Having a personal vendetta formed against him by a highly pedantic and temperamental bus driver,
• Severe insomnia and subsequent caffiene-loading, and
• Locking himself out of his boarding room at the University.

Art

Background information

#53 is edited using Flash and sketched using a Wacom Graphire 3 tablet.

The artistic style of #53 is largely simplistic and dichromatic (black & white), making for a bold and undistracting focus on key elements of the comic. Superfluous details, especially in the backgrounds are often ignored or left out entirely. #53 has, since its inception, gone through distinct stages in artistic style.

Stage 1: Learning experiences

#53's first eight strips (all in January) were entitled "Learning Experiences Parts I-VIII" in respective order. As such titles suggest, this was a time that Creamer used to "find his feet" in employing a suitable style for #53. Compared with the style of Stage 2, the classic strips were more clean-cut and wider-angled in viewing with less contrast and focus on central characters.

Continuation of Stage 1

Strips 009-014 continued the simplistic (though far from minimalisitic) style employed in "Learning Experiences", with some observable changes including increased background detailing and a wider frame. These changes would be made obsolete by the dramatic changes seen in Stage 2.

Stage 2

Strip 015 saw a major revolution in the artistic style of #53. Abandoning the square, clean-cut art seen in previous strips, Creamer opted for a smoother, bolder finish with exaggerated emphasis on certain features and a considerable amount of "zoom in" on the central happenings. Dichromatism was retained and further exacerbated with increased contrast and shadowing. This style also further excluded superfluous background detail, placing further emphasis on the characters. Creamer exploited this style change in successfully bettering the degree of emotional emphasis conveyed by the characters.

Etymology

The relevance of the comic's title was revealed in strip 007. #53 is the number of the protagonist's boarding room in the University he attends.

Hosting and page layout

#53 is hosted by Blogspot and entries are in the form of a typical blog update, text included. Beneath the new strip Creamer includes personal reflections on it as well as unrelated blog-like updates regarding his personal affairs. Entries are concluded with 2-4 lines of song lyrics. As a result of exploiting Blogspot, #53 has an easily-syndicated RSS feed.

External links

• #53 Webcomic
• #53 RSS feed
• #53 at The Webcomics List.com

This article contains content from Wikipedia. Current versions of the GNU FDL article Number 53 (webcomic) on WP may contain information useful to the improvement of this article

WP