Category: Student Posts

Turning my literacy narrative into a comic proved to be more difficult than I had expected. I struggled to combine the visual aspect with the narration in a way that told a coherent story. It felt like I was still relying on the words to convey most of the information, so I tried to put as much detail into the drawings to support the ideas in each panel. 

I was unsure if my narrative felt like it was a comic because for the majority of the panels, I used text to narrate my thoughts and actions. I wasn’t sure how else to convey my ideas, but I think I was able to compensate for this by having my drawings support and complete the ideas written as narration. 

Although there were several reasons why I felt like I struggled with this assignment, I believe that by taking the time I needed to convey my ideas, despite how hard that proved to be, is the reason why I was able to demonstrate several of the learning objectives. In specific, I think this assignment has helped me reach the goals for writing as a process and visual thinking. I spent a lot of time trying to translate my essay into the medium of comics, and after finishing my draft, I realized how essential that draft was to my final vision. It helped me come up with new ideas and patterns I could experiment with. For example, I tried to juxtapose the panels on page 2 of my literacy narrative comic with the panels on page 3. The first frame ties the pages together by showing the same image of my high school. The second frames show the difference between how I felt about many of my other classes compared to my junior year English class. I also repeated a specific visual style in the 4th frames of each page to establish the change in my mindset throughout high school. I only incorporated these visual connections after I was able to step back and think about what edits I wanted to make from my draft. 

During the process of writing my literacy narrative as a comic, I realized I felt much more comfortable expressing my thoughts and feelings with words because I could control the flow of the narrative easily and transition from one idea to another seamlessly. When it came time to create my comic, I knew I wouldn’t be able to convey every sentence I had written, but I felt unsure how to transition from one idea to another. I think in that way, if I could have had more time to expand on my comic narrative, I would have stretched out specific scenes to have several moment to moment transitions from panel to panel. Throughout the essay and the comic, my perspective was to split the narrative into 3 sections. I viewed the beginning as a way to convey my passion for reading as a child. Then, in the middle, I would transition to how school and other influences in my life caused me to lose my love of reading. Finally, I’d express how I was fortunate enough to have a teacher who really cared about making an impact on her students and how that sparked my interest in reading. Due to this beginning-middle-end structure I was attempting, I decided not to stretch out specific scenes/experiences, and instead aimed to convey the bigger picture of how my connection to reading has constantly evolved as I’ve grown. 

Creating this literacy comic started off with thinking how I could shapeshift my words into images. This part of the process encouraged me to think critically about what I should emphasize in my comic and what I should omit, in order to effectively tell the story of how my viewpoint on reading shifted. It was very different creating a comic when compared to writing out an essay because you learn quickly that expressing what you want to in a panel is much more difficult if you lack the skills in drawing. For example, if I had a better skill set in drawing I could have drawn my characters with more human-like form, being able to focus on capturing emotion and facial expressions with greater detail and emphasis. I feel that I spent more time making my drawing make sense than I wanted to, which I felt limited the depth of the story because I had to simplify so much, even the little details of what book I was reading on page 4 and why the story was so compelling to me. Thoughts regarding my literacy narrative have changed in the sense that I still have much more to discover about myself when it comes to my interactions with English in and outside the class. I feel that in creating this comic, I gained an interest in comics and how they can be utilized as an effective tool of expression in fewer words than an essay or any other conventional piece of literature.

Focusing more on the final product of this process, I wanted to talk about some of the choices I made. While reading through the comic you’ll notice that any book pictured in a panel is drawn in grayscale and without any highlighted, gold accent or color. You’ll notice however, that after I made the decision to change my approach to how I treated reading, “discovering the gold” in it, the books pictured have this yellow accent or an addition of color in some form. I made this choice in order to show how reading had been enhanced and made more enjoyable through my growing interest in reading beyond the surface and truly experiencing literature. This brings me to the decision I made on page 2 where I show how reading had become more visual to me, showing a panel with a book that translates to “When did reading become this way? I can [see] the [world] I’m reading.” I made the words “see”  and “world” into pictures to show this visualization of words. I also want readers to notice how my house shifted from “Home (Not So) Sweet Home” to “Home Sweet Home” ” after I began playing around with my newfound interest in books, reading The Family Across the Street by Nicole Trope. This book is what I wanted to capture in the final panel of my comic. The process of making this comic had many different steps like drawing out a first draft, receiving feedback, and revising your product. This aligns with our learning objective of writing as a process as we are encouraged to take our time and the necessary steps to produce something we can be proud of. All in all, creating this comic has been a layered process that has taught me a lot about myself and I can say that I’m happy with what I produced.