Lonnie – The Secret Language of Comics: Visual Thinking and Writing

Literacy Narrative Part 3 Reflection

December 21, 2019 Lonnie Student Posts

The literacy narrative as project as a whole has been a process where I did not think about making a story into a paper, then a comic, and then back into a paper would be as informative as it has been. The entire project easily encompassed all of the learning outcomes for this class. The text was made into a comic and an alphabetic text, pushing use of the different elements of both genres. The entirety of all three parts felt like a giant editing and revision process as we got feedback from peers and our professors and edited it accordingly or on our own terms. Part two of the narrative shows off our visual thinking abilities as we had to make our own comics and make sure that every panel had coherent placement, pictures, and text to create a story. While reading other texts throughout the semester we could choose to incorporate elements from the them that work in their favor such as panel structure, line of sight for the images, etc. This narrative also created our digital identity for our WordPress sight as this was one of the first major glimpses into our lives for anyone who happens to click on our site to see. After working on the comic for my literacy narrative, I realized that reading definitely has had more of an impact on my life than writing, since I choose to visual my childhood as a reader. I think that going back to literacy narrative and focusing solely on reading made it stronger than it was before. I also think that added my own flair with jokes littered throughout the narrative this time around, makes me like my own work more and hopefully others will enjoy it too.

The link to part 3 of my narrative is here

Literacy Narrative Pt.2 Reflection

December 17, 2019 Lonnie Student Posts

Turning my literacy narrative into a three-page comic was difficult at first because I packed a lot of information into my formal essay of the literacy narrative. I had to choose which part of my narrative was worth converting into a short comic. My original literacy narrative detailed how I interacted with reading and writing both as a young child and throughout high school. I ended up choosing to make my comic about how reading shaped me throughout my childhood and through high school. I strayed from the original narrative by focusing more on the different novels and comics that shaped me as a child. I have Spiderman, Batman, The Three Musketeers, and even stories from the Bible and important tales that helped to shape my imagination as a kid. In the first part of my narrative, I just glaze over these books since I had a lot to cram into the paper, but I had more room to explore in the comic. In my opinion, it seems that the books have more emphasis when there is a picture to go along with the text. In my paper I could have gone on and on about the different ways the books helped me grow but having pictures of the different varieties of books along with text seems to have a stronger effect to me.

Changing my narrative comic form, I also added a bit of humor into the story. In the second panel I made a joke that I’ve been reading ever since I could remember and I drew a picture of myself in the womb with the text “Ok, maybe not that young”. I also think that the crouching Batman with a Batarang in his hand is a funny image as he breaks the frame. I felt that the original narrative just states a lot of facts while the comic gave me more freedom to change how the information was received.

I found that creating the comic was much harder than writing a paper. With a paper you can have an idea and write away and edit new ideas in as you go. However, when I was making my comic, I found that I needed to have a solid idea where the story would go so that I would not have to erase the sketches every time I thought of something new to add to the comic. I laid out a firm plan of what I wanted my drawings to be and added some of the accompanying text too.

Link to Literacy Narrative Part 2 is here

Learning is Like a Pencil

December 17, 2019 Lonnie Student Posts

Out of all of the possibilities of what to compare the learning outcomes of this class I chose a pencil, pen and pencil sharpener. It sounds lazy but in actuality, those are probably the three tools I have used the most for this class. For most of the Sunday Sketches I favored drawing them out to digital work if I could help it and I went through a few inches of my pencils this way. Then there was part 2 of the literacy narrative and tracing pages. Honestly, even though this class required a moderate use of technology, my pencils and pens were Ol’ Reliable.

Teen Slasher

December 17, 2019 Lonnie Student Posts

If I’m being quite honest, I haven’t seen one of the Friday the 13th movies, but I had the mask and machete from Halloween so I decided that’s what I would go with. I’ve seen a couple video games with Jason decapitating people so I figured they got it from the movies, I was wrong. It took me a while to find a clip of Jason slashing someone’s throat so and the fake blood was already on my friends neck so that’s what we had to go with. The photo was nowhere near an exact replica but it gets the gist of the scene and I think that it has its own flair.

Sekiro: Shadows Die Then Rage Quit

December 17, 2019 Lonnie Student Posts

This was probably the Sunday Sketch that took me the longest to figure out what I was going to do for it, but it is definitely my favorite. I decided to make my true story, five paged comic about the current video game that I’m playing. When I have free time on weekends I tend to play Sekiro and it is one of the hardest, most rewarding games that I have played in years. I figured since I’ve played it so much that there would have to be at least one funny moment. I chose the final boss fight that I have been stuck on for a few weeks now. One time I got so mad that I’m surprised my controller is still in one piece. There was a lot happening within the boss fight so I just made sure to put the important parts of the fight starting, me getting killed, and then my rage quit. Making this comic a true story was hard just because I couldn’t think of anything interesting at first and then this idea just hit me while I was eating breakfast one morning.

Dream Dream Dream Dream Dream Dream

December 17, 2019 Lonnie Student Posts

For my data visualization, I wanted to track my dreams over the span of a week and see how my daily life influences what my dreams are. I decided to make my visualization in the form a bar graph and for the three types of dreams: violent, inappropriate, and slice of life, I drew the bar as something that represents the type of dream. One note is the bar graph has eight dreams because certain dreams overlapped in terms of content.

One of the slice of life dreams I had was that my credit card declined when I attempted to buy some food. It was kind of funny because I was stressing over spending too much money during that week so that dream made a lot sense to me. Another dream in that category was that I was back at my high school, it was prom, and my friends were playing in the live band. The weekend before I started tracking my dreams, I went back to my high school to see their rendition of Mamma Mia, which a LOT of my friends were in. The slice of life dreams seemed to be fairly explainable.

Since this is for a school project I’m going to skip over some of the dreams and just go straight to the violent ones. One dream that I had was that me and my sister were younger, like 10 and 8, and we were being chased through our house by a man with a gun and gas mask. To gloss over some of the more graphic details we killed him and ran. This dream came right after I watched a Call of Duty stream where in one of the campaign missions, you were a little girl trying to stop a soldier from killing her brother.

Going over my dreams, it seemed that there is a correlation to what I did that day or sometime the week before. Usually I feel like this isn’t the case. From what I remember before tracking my dreams, they had little correlation to what I did during the week. In would tend to see my friends and other people who I interact with on the daily but other than that the dreams were usually pretty random.

Confession

December 17, 2019 Lonnie Student Posts

Text: “He confessed American. Cruder than life, vivid discrimination, irrelevant, ominously grim, insidious.”

This was honestly a hard assignment to think of a picture to draw. I couldn’t come up with anything after staring at my page for a few hours. I came back to it late at night and decided just to focus on the word ‘American’ and I began underlining words. For some reason I was drawn towards the darker adjectives and I think it works with today’s political climate. I feel that the poem thingy, reflects how many people inside and outside of America currently view the country and many of the people living within it.

Confession

December 17, 2019 Lonnie Student Posts

Text: “He confessed American. Cruder than life, vivid discrimination, irrelevant, ominously grim, insidious.”

Evolution of Brothers

December 17, 2019 Lonnie Student Posts

I decided to make a comic about my band in high school. I chose some of highlight photos of a band I was in during high school. I decided to make a comic about this because I was talking to a few of the guys recently and we agreed this was the best time of high school. For the composition of the piece, I decided to choose chronological pictures of our performances. The first picture is from sophomore year homecoming, the next is junior year homecoming, a charity event we played at, and our senior prom. I thought that making the triptych was easier because the middle is just one page instead of two but it still felt natural with two in the quadriptych.

Bag o’ Stuff

December 17, 2019 Lonnie Student Posts

A quick description of the items contained in my bag:

My laptop and charger which I never leave my dorm room without.

A sketchbook and set of lead pencils for when I decide to draw in my free time.

My lab notebook for chemistry which haunts me in my sleep.

Two spiral notebooks and a calculator for classes.

A Slipknot and Starset t-shirt. Both of these bands I live this semester and have decent stories behind each of the shows.

Finally a sticker that reads “Follow @MC.SUCC”, a meme page that a friend of a friend runs.

After cataloging the items in my bag, I would say that this is a decent representation of myself. Starset and Slipknot are bands that I like to listen to often and the meme page sticker I have in my bag is a good representation of the dark humor that make sometimes. I actually did not anything to my bag because I felt that there was nothing that I needed to add to the post. In hindsight though, I might’ve added my 3DS. Probably the most challenging part of the assignment was arranging my items to make them pleasing to the eye. I don’t photograph much unless I’m taking pictures for someone so it was just kinda new for me. I feel that representing myself in a catalogue of items from my bag is form of writing because it gives a reader a glimpse into my everyday life and what I do for fun or school.