Literacy Narrative Pt.2 Reflection
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
