Me...a comic book creator?

As a graduate school student for the past three years, I have been required over and over to write. This process has been about stating a point and backing it up with research. However, this semester I have been immersed in stories. I get to take a storytelling class as well as a young adult literature class and these classes have activated a creative side of my brain that has been dormant for a long time. As I approached the task for this week to create a storyboard/comic of a life experience, I felt much more excitement for this assignment than the standard scholarly essay.

I saw the benefits of Mutlimodal Literacies firsthand. As I created the comic strip I thought of my writing in an entirely different way. I was visualizing the event, imagining the arc of the story, and enjoying the process. The National Council for Teachers of English Multimodal Literacy statement has this as their first point: "integration of multiple modes of communication and expression can enhance or transform the meaning of the work beyond illustration or decoration." My little sketch of dogsitting for friends is scribbled on a piece of scrap paper and the illustrations are of the quality that it is hard to determine who is the person and who is the dog, but this form of expressing an idea really enhanced and framed my story in a new way. When I tell stories, I usually can create a good setting and draw the listener into the tale, but the ending always falls apart. However, with this story created in comic strip form, I am communicating a whole complete strong idea with a solid beginning, middle, and end. Creating comics is a brand new experience for me, and I can how it would have been beneficial in classes like social studies or English. Overall, the visual and narration aspects combined engaged me in the creative process and allowed me to create something that had more interest and meaning for me.