Having finished this entire process, I feel relieved. Not because the assignment is over or that I did not enjoy the process, but because making a comic is a long and arduous process that, though tiring, is an extremely gratifying thing to accomplish.
Completing this assignment helped me reach the learning outcome pertaining to practicing writing as a process. The comic was preceded by a full-length narrative that was the backbone of this comic. The first Literacy Narrative assignment allowed me to put my ideas to paper and pen and revise them as I saw fit. That process in itself required many steps that built off of each other and this assignment was only a furthering of those steps. Making these many iterations of my essay in every step of the process benefitted my comic greatly.
Going back to the difficulty of making a comic, one thing I heavily underestimated was the visual aspect. As obvious as it was, I did not give much thinking to the details of my drawings. The biggest problem about the visual aspect of my comic was choosing what I wanted to put on paper. I had a million ideas for how to show eight years passing by or what scene from my favorite comics I wanted to depict to demonstrate their sneaky complexity. I was trying to do something profound on every page but I think realizing it was probably better keeping everything simple was the right choice. The storyboard assignment helped slightly with this but even then, I was not entirely happy with my decisions and felt they were made too hastily.
With this in mind we can take a look at my comic and see why I kept in what I did. The first page is highlighted by three comics I used to read early on in my childhood. The first panel consists of three covers of each comic that I distinctly remember from my head. I did not search up images to prompt my memory, I took what I vaguely remembered and drew them out. I did the same thing for the next three panels on the first page with scenes that stuck out to me from each series. On the second page, I decided to show eight years passing by through the height markers from every year in our family room wall; again keeping with the theme of simplicity. The last panel on the last page was the one that involved the most brainstorming. I wanted to end my comic with a visual that aptly summarized my experience with texts from high school and my childhood and shedding it in a positive light. I did this by drawing characters or symbols that represent the texts that I have read (To Kill a Mockingbird, The Great Gatsby, Lord of the Flies, and Amar Chitra Katha to name a few) and surrounded them around a comical version of myself with a light switch substituted for my brain. I wanted to really capture what it felt like for me when that switch “flicked” in my head.
