The Secret Language of Comics

Oftentimes when I write I feel that their is a disconnect between the words I write and my subconscious thoughts. However, the literacy narrative process- writing the first draft, translating it into a comic, and then translating the comic back into an essay format- allowed me to better understand my subconscious thoughts to ensure that the final essay conveyed the narrative I intended. Additionally, I learned new strategies that I would use in writing future essays like creating a small visual to better outline what I want to cover within my essay. 

The narrative process included many setbacks. One was finding the medium that I was going to visualize the comic with. After multiple attempts of trying to draw the comic and failing, I decided that I had to take a leap of faith and trust my creativity in a new medium. I did this by using Canva images as the main medium for my graphic novels completed by hand-drawn images to further the rhetorical strategies I wanted to implement. After creating the comic, the writing process was a lot smoother than I expected. I felt that the visual medium forced me to focus on the main arguments I was trying to claim which in turn allowed for me to have a better structured essay with more relevant details to enhance the story. When looking at the difference between the first draft of the essay compared to the final copy, my final copy has a much clearer direction throughout the essay explaining the complicated relationship I had with the english language and how I finally found that natural interest in it that I always wanted.

https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/lost-dog/pl.u-AkAmvxyTle5e0XA

Since I was 11 I have been playing in concerts and music competitions. When I was in high school I was part of a vocal jazz group that won the largest High School Jazz festivals in the country for 9 straight years. Last summer I started playing, as a solo act, paid gigs for restaurants, private parties, and weddings, and got offered to play on a cruise line. While all of this may sound impressive I found that my love for music dwindled when the start of performing was mixed with the pressure to succeed and live up to either the money that was promised or the judges who would give review and criticize. This year I have been burnt out musically and am taking the semester off from voice lessons. With new-found time, I started my own band here at Emory. While we don’t have a name yet we have enjoyed practicing together and have some gigs in the pipeline for Spring 2024.

The reason the playlist is so long is because I took the time to put together a playlist that covers most of my musical tastes combined with songs that are feasible to perform in a live setting. I have already played live for money 75% of the songs on the mix tape and am working on the other 25%. I enjoyed making this playlist as it let me reflect on my time performing and reminded me why I love to play live. I remember each song I have played, so going through the mix tape filled me with nostalgia.

One music taste that was severely left off of the playlist and should be noted was Jazz. As I said earlier my background with Vocal Jazz as a genre is extensive and I even wrote a personal statement in High School about Titled “The Jazz Thinker,” a play on the “The Jazz Singer.”

This is my mix tape cover. It is a graphic I used for a live performance last year. The BayWalkers is the name of my family band. My older brother pictured above plays bass and my twin brother plays drums. We do not have a current guitar player but use a different one for different gigs.

The entire creation of this narrative has allowed me to think more critically as I write from my own personal experiences, using and evaluating the writing we have read from comic memoirs like Stitches and Spinning. I was also able to practice writing as a process, continuing to edit my work even after the final comic was drawn. By doing so, I was able to approach my essay through another lens, which helped me to reconstruct my essay to highlight the main points that became visible during the visual aspect of the project.

Returning to my project after having created the comic made the message that I was trying to communicate a lot more visible, and I was able to easily pinpoint how I needed to better organize my essay for it to convey what was shown in the illustrations.

I see my narrative to be placing most emphasis on how my AP Lang teacher impacted my reading and writing experience most positively. So, I tried to refocus my essay in a way where it doesn’t make my elementary and middle school experiences too overpowering. I also tried to steer away from my writing to be so chronological, which is why I edited most of the paragraphs before I got into the quarantine/zoom class experience.

1. Cigarette Daydreams – Cage The Elephant
2. hospital beach – Cottonwood Firing Squad
3. Halfway Up – The Brook & The Bluff
4. Get On – Racoma
5. Motel 6 – River Whyless
6. Clay Pigeons – Michael Cera
7. Surface Tension – Genevieve Stokes
8. Before Dawn – Unflirt
9. High Tops – Del Water Gap
10. Wasteland, Baby! – Hozier
11. Moon Song – Phoebe Bridgers
12. Beach Baby – Bon Iver
13. No Complaints – Noah Kahan

The rhetorical situation that I’m addressing is the “stick season”, which describes the period of time between late October and early December. During this time, the leaves start to fall, the weather gets colder, and you start getting this weird, yet familiar, happy-sad sensation. The specific rule that I set for my mix is that all of the songs have to be 2 words (with the exception of “Motel 6”). I think that there is no way to really “solve” the problem that my rhetorical situation presents, rather it’s a matter of validating and sitting with those complex feelings that overcome you during this time of year. So, I ordered the songs going from most happy to most sad, following the path of emotions during “the season of the sticks.” I hope that my mix conveys the natural course of how humans respond to changes in the environment… weather and all.

Link to Spotify Playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1uKBO1RAS7wt2LAE9wRCrB?si=4df9ed67a39c44ff

The rhetorical situation I’m taking listeners through is one that resembles the love cycle that everyone is bound to experience. It has 6 main phases which are meeting someone, falling in love, dating/solidifying a relationship, the relationships struggles, there’s a breaking up, and finally each party ideally moves on. I wanted each song I chose in this mix to explicitly mention love as I feel it helps connect listeners to this “love cycle” more deeply, encouraging them to really contemplate a situation in which they were in love and the story of it going awry if it did. The choices I made regarding song selection are made to take the listeners through each phase, for example, in the “breaking up” phase of the love cycle, I used the song Strange by Celeste which talks of the strangeness of how two people can move from “strangers to friends, friends into lovers, then strangers again.” From this song selection I wanted listeners to be brought into the melancholic state following a break up when two partners become cold, almost complete strangers, towards each other. As for the cover of my mixtape, one of the choices I made and would like to point out is in the left group of hearts that have become incompatible after they broke up. This communicates the idea that once a strong bond between two people is broken, it’s hard to reinstate that connection as the two parts don’t fit together anymore. My mix conveys the idea that the process of falling in and out of love is a continuous cycle that follows a general pattern. It does so by highlighting each of these major phases through the collection of sounds and lyrics that induce deep thought of love. Hearing others feel this strong emotion encourages listeners to contemplate how this feeling has found its way into their own life. This pattern is called the “Sadder Cycle of Love”. Breaking this cycle is congruent to one finding their true love.