Fishy [ yufei wang's art space. ] Space
Lethal Descent, 2022
Copic marker on paper
Is lethal injection a painless way of killing?
My research investigating the ethicality of lethal injection in AP seminar revealed that the US general public regards it as the most humane method.
However, in reality, it is deeply flawed, with the highest botch rate among all methods. I found that my research paper piqued little interest from my peers, so I decided to create Lethal Descent as a comic to discuss the same moral question from a more personal/subjective perspective.
The comic is divided into three layers:
The first layer is based on the reported experience of Charles Warner who said “My body is on fire” and “it feels like acid” after he was administered Midazolam, on January 16, 2014 in Oklahoma.
The second layer explores suffocation caused by both 20 years in prison awaiting death and drug-induced respiratory paralysis.
The third layer symbolizes the end of the inmate’s stream of consciousness as their heart is stopped by a lethal dose of potassium chloride.
This is an eleven-page comic drawn with Copic markers. I chose this medium for its bendability and because it is used by many manga artists in Japan.
I scanned and printed the manuscript onto watercolor paper to resemble the thickness and texture of the original marker paper in the final pamphlet.
I bound the A4 pages into a long strip pamphlet. The pamphlet can be flipped like a book, as seen in the video, or opened completely to display the whole comic in one long strip.
The creation of the comic was a multistep process beginning with thumbnail sketches followed by a rough draft that was traced to achieve a clean pencil line art. Then I traced the pencil line art onto marker paper for coloring.