The Secret Language of Comics: Visual Thinking and Writing

For this weeks assignment I had a quite daunting task. I had to turn a written account of my reading and writing journey into a visual comic. At first I struggled with this because my writing narrative did not contain a main event. Instead it was just a sires of less significant small events. Before long I realized that the main idea of my narrative was the pattern, the pattern of liking literature to hating it to learning to love it again. This U-shaped paradigm was why my relationship to literature was so complicated.

So I came to the conclusion that I needed to find a way to visualize this complicated nature. First I played around with the ideas of putting all the positive memories on one side and all my negative memories on one side of the page. Upon further consideration I decided to depict my positive memories from my childhood first, then describe the negative experiences and finally end with illustrations of an improved relationship with literature. In order to highlight that the love of literature had not died completely, I placed the caterpillar among the grim boxes of negative experiences. Also, in the final positive experiences I removed the boxes and put the caterpillar in the actual scene to show that caterpillars, or a love of reading, had once again become a part of my life.

To view my literacy narrative comic, Caterpillars and Literature, click here.

The process of converting my alphabetic text to a comic and then revising my first draft with peer feedback increased my comfort with seeing writing as a process. Until I made my own comic, I never knew the many steps involved in putting together a narrative in comic form. Getting feedback on the first version of my comic was somewhat unsettling since I don’t know everyone in our class as well as I knew my pool of peer reviewers in high school, so I worried more about others’ judgment. Despite the discomfort, the peer reviews I received had perhaps the most influence on how I revised my comic. While I was initially unsure about the three by three, repetitive panels on my second page, the positive feedback I got made me confident in my decision to keep the same structure in my final draft. Moreover, reading through other students’ comics gave me lots of inspiration for how I could make my comic more visually interesting. In particular, Dean’s humor and use of abstract imagery completely broadened my idea of what could be in a comic. I emulated his abstract “road to adulthood” in one of my last illustrations where I depicted “measuring up to others” as a drawing of me standing next to an enlarge ruler. During the process of revising my comic is when I felt that my skills in visual thinking truly flourished because I let go of the confines of an alphabetic narrative that I was holding onto. By embracing comics’ ability to have panels arranged not just chronologically but also through space, I was able to access the full potential of telling a story in a comic form.

My initial impression was that by converting my alphabetic text to a comic, I lost a lot of the details. However, through the process of editing and arranging my comic in a more interesting way, I realized that the details were simply shown in different ways. Although I lost some of the descriptions of the setting and how I felt, I was able to capture the most important parts of the narrative through drawing. In fact, the process of adding in detail through imagery actually helped me cut out unnecessary elements because I realized that it wasn’t that important to give my reader some details like exactly what my Kindergarten classroom looked like. Rather, the details I incorporated focussed on my experience at that moment. On the bottom of my first page, I drew myself balancing on balls that represented the lower reading levels, in order to portray how unsteady my reading skills were as I reached for the advanced level Amelia Bedelia. Converting my narrative into a comic also allowed me to incorporate some humor into my comic, which I had attempted to do in my alphabetic text but struggled to achieve. Perhaps the more free-form medium made me more comfortable adding comedy, especially compared to a traditional alphabetic text in which I’ve been taught to always be serious. 

My greatest challenge during this project was completing the illustrations because I had specific visions of what I wanted my drawing to look like, but I lacked the skill necessary to execute it. I ended up spending way too much time drawing and redrawing certain panels in order to make the characters look better. When drawing my final draft, the first page was the greatest challenge for me because I spent hours trying to get it right, only to eventually realize that the skill level of my drawing was not what would determine the success of my comic. If I were to do this project again, I might consider only using stick figures, in order to force myself to focus less on the individual drawings of people and more on the pages as a whole.

You can see my final comic here, and the first draft of my comic here.

Creating the Literacy Narrative Comic has been a very strenuous process for me. Making any kind of comic was something that I felt very intimidated by because it was such a new and unfamiliar medium for me. I believe the process of turning my narrative into this visual representation was extremely beneficial for my personal development, not only as a writer, but as a human being as well. This assignment really took me out of my comfort zone, but ultimately gave me a deeper understanding of literature in all types of mediums and made me proud of my accomplishment in such a novel field. 

Adding illustrations to my literacy narrative felt like it turned an essay about my literacy journey into a deeper and more interesting piece of work. Once the visual component was incorporated, reading my narrative became a more emotive experience for me. I was able to get a better understanding of the deeper feelings behind my journey into reading and writing and hopefully provide my audience with some emotional context through my drawings. During the peer editing workshop, one piece of feedback that I received was that they felt as if the facial expressions drawn provided them with the emotion of the panels without even reading the text. This was a great confirmation that my comic was on the right track to what I had been picturing in my head. It was my goal to create something that would hopefully depict the strong feelings in my story and what reading and writing truly meant to me. Ultimately, I believe I achieved these goals and created a comic that speaks louder than any essay of mine could’ve possibly done.

My original literacy narrative was much different than the story that my comic portrays now. When I first wrote my narrative it was difficult to think about all the internal reasons that I began to love reading and writing so I focused on some of the external factors that influenced my literacy journal. However, after a one on one conference that I had, I realized that it was important to dive deeper into the true story that I knew was hidden underneath. As this is a class that is rooted in trauma, I felt that I was only right to share some of mine through this comic. I wanted to make it very personal to me and provide my audience with a further understanding of who I am and what I have gone through in my life. While making my comic I spent a lot of time trying to create illustrations that were aesthetic and easy to understand. I’ve never been the best at drawing, but I tried really hard to display something that showed details and the emotion behind each of the characters. I decided not to write out my text, but to type it in instead in order to make the comic look more presentable and professional for my audience. Although this process has been slightly difficult for me both physically and emotionally, I feel very proud about the outcome and the work that I put in to make this comic the best that it could be. This assignment has definitely helped me grow and has showed me so much about the value of visual thinking as a whole.

Even though the comic making process took up most of my free time of the week, I enjoyed it so much. At the beginning of the project, I was told that it could be a ton of work to convert my story board into a final version because I basically included all contents from my alphabetic version in my comic. However, since I’ve been trying to draw random comics from a young age, I found most of the process went through smoothly, and I ended up spent most of my time coloring and polishing my final piece instead of struggling about the overall structure. Similar to my alphabetic narrative, my comic is organized in a chronological order which reflects on my growth as a reader and writer from childhood to adolescence. In the original essay, I divided my narrative into three parts with different onomatopoeias as titles, each symbolizing a specific period of my reading and writing experiences. Transforming that into visual representation was, surprisingly, natural. For example, there is a paragraph in my essay describing how I climbed up and down the squeaky little ladder repeatedly to get the books off of the shelf. And in my comic, I actually managed to draw four parallel panels showing this “up-and-down” cycle in a row to better represent the idea of the repeating motion. I also added the onomatopoeias alongside the actions depicted (inspired by Stitches), which I was not able to do in alphabetic text, and it worked so well by making the figures seem to actually move within the panels.

The peer editing process we had last week was very helpful in terms of providing me with new insights into my work. In my original story board, I added the narrative text directly onto my images, which was not that visually aesthetic. I was then suggested to create a section for the texts on each panel (just like Spinning and Kindred do), and the comics turned out to be much clearer and organized. On the other hand, my peers seem to enjoy the way I incorporated sound into my narrative, so I knew I should probably emphasize the visual representation of sound in my final comic to make it enjoyable to read.

This assignment (although in the end it didn’t really seem like one but rather something that I would genuinely give all my efforts to make it better and better) really shows me how hard it is to make a comic, and thus I now view comics from an entirely different perspective than before since I know every visual element presented is a thought-through choice. To my biggest surprise, I found my way of recreating the alphabetic narrative through visual representation was, in fact, largely influenced by the comics I read before, as you can tell from this reflection how some of my choices are inspired by them. Again, the power of visuals I guess.

My Literacy Narrative Comic naturally met the learning outcomes for this class. My narrative itself was about the writing process and the guidelines for the project allowed me to explore visual thinking and my digital identity. The least familiar aspect of this assignment was its medium. Though some assignments in high school required the use of drawings and pictures, none specifically required the description of an original narrative through comics. My comic narrative is about my discovery of the true messiness of the writing process and the benefit of asking for help. My first written narrative was about feeling gratified through teacher recognition. The process of writing the first draft and refocusing my story for the comic version after getting help is a direct example of the writing process that I discover in my comic. I was struggling to edit my written draft until I needed to focus on which elements I should portray in my comics. Once I had to visualize specific moments to draw, I was able to come up with a clearer story that responded to my professor’s original notes. 

I only had so much time to draw–an activity I enjoy– and so I decided to use stick figures, though I must admit my artistic ego took a hit. By saving time with stick figures, I was able to allot time towards experimenting with different framing ideas, something that my peers noticed and enjoyed. My comic as a whole is a diverse mixture of panel structures, wordy briefs, and out-of-the-box frames. Within each frame I mostly switched between focusing on either my face to show my emotions, or the back of my head to show what I was looking at. I made all of these decisions with the reader in mind because I felt that the mixture would allow for a captivating flow.  

Having my peers view a draft of my comic was both beneficial to my work and the class dynamic. It was nice to see everyone working together and accepting suggestions. Most of the comments on my peer editing form were about the transition between my second and third page. Some of the frames in the second page were cramped and then the theme of larger ideas on the third page was too abrupt a change from the small technical ideas in the second page. This was the major change I made in my final comic. Instead of only three pages, I know have four. I shifted some of the frames from the second page onto the third to give greater emphasis to each visual idea. My most creative edit was in the transition between the original frames from the second and third frames. I decided to use the drawing of my diary writing in the first page to foreshadow my use of diary writing in later panels to smooth transitions. Now, the “Personal Timeline” and “perfect essay formula” that were once out of place had a home within the writings of my diary.