Lady Lindy

Lady Lindy is A short graphic novel based on Amelia Earhart. For this short, I decided to focus on two concepts for Amelia. The first being how she reflected on her own life and possible death, and as well as the work she had done speaking for not only women pilots, but women in any profession. For the first concept, I chose to represent Amelia’s life reflection as a flashback just as her plane stops in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. To keep with the aviation theme, a cloud effect is used to transition between the past and the present. To push the flashback imagery even further, I decided to switch from a full colour page style to greyscale colouring. Grey scale is commonly associated with flashbacks and it also happens to keep with the media broadcasting at the time of Amelia Earhart’s life. Within the flash back, I wanted to focus on the issue of sexism which Amelia had constantly fought against. This is brought up through fictional dialogue from both Amelia’s mother, and George Putnam who was both Amelia’s PR personal and later on in life, spouse. Putnam’s request to have Amelia only smile with her mouth closed gives the impression that Amelia would only be successful due to her appearance. Even the nickname “Lady Lindy” was given because she looked similar to Lindbergh, the first pilot to make it across this Atlantic on his own. While Amelia constantly fought to show her skills as a pilot she was still judged as just a pretty face. To go against this sexist judgment of Amelia’s character, I tried to always show her tooth-gap smile as a reminder that she would be evaluated by her skills in the sky rather than her looks. Another design choice made was the frame of the pages. On the pages taking place in the present, the panels are surrounded by black to represent Amelia’s inevitable death. Meanwhile, the flashback pages have white to symbolize her life that we are revising.