My comic is an autobiography that highlights the major changes in my life that influenced and defined my reading and writing habits. In this comic, I wanted to clearly convey how my experiences with reading and writing drastically changed as a result of the change of environments within my life. To do so, I adopted more of a traditional narrative style where the narrator, which is myself, tells the story with the aid of the images in the panels. Due to this, one may notice that there is very little dialogue between the characters depicted in the comic but rather the story is carried along by the text either found below or above the images—the voice of the narrator.
As mentioned previously, in this comic I attempted to highlight the change in my attitude and outlook on reading and writing due to various experiences within my life. I believe that this emphasis was much more present in my visual comic than in my original alphabetic text. Once the visual aspect was added, it allowed for easier story-telling and the role of envisioning now fell on myself as the illustrator rather than the reader. As the illustrator, I was now suddenly forced to think about what I want the reader to see and then place that on the page as a drawing to the best of my ability. Not only that, but my thinking process was different as well as I started to invest more thought into what I specifically wanted to say and show rather than the general story that I originally gave in my alphabetic text. The transformation of my literacy narrative from plain alphabetic text to a comic filled with images as well as text gave rise to an extra layer of depth and content which ultimately bettered the story in my opinion.
Creating this literacy narrative comic allowed for the use of various modes of composing text, namely written, visual, and digital. Because of this, I was forced to step outside of my comfort zone to be able to utilize these differing techniques in writing. Additionally, various techniques and ideas seen in comics which we have read this semester have been used in my comic. For example, the varying perspectives seen in my comic was inspired by panels seen in Stitches and Spinning. This comic also had several different versions which took multiple drafts and rereading to finish showing its process of creation, and critique received from others was also taken into consideration. Lastly, as shown throughout my comic, visual thinking strategies were used as I created each panel. I constantly questioned whether the images and text in each panel properly served its purpose and flowed into the next panel.
The creation of my Literacy Narrative Comic came around in a rather difficult manner. This is mainly because of the time I spent on the visual aspect of the comic. After drawing each panel out to the point where I wanted it, I went back to detail and shade each image to give it more of an effect when the reader views it. Still, my ideal vision for my comic could not be realized due to time constraints as well as a lack of skill on my part. If I was given more time and a professional illustrator, I would have liked to make the visuals less cartoon-like in order to correspond with the slow and semi-serious tone I was trying to accomplish with the narration. Additionally, I would have included a couple more pages to get even more detailed into how exactly my reading and writing habits changed due to moving.
