Graphic Narrative/Script Assignment

A few years back, I taught a course focusing on graphic memoirs. For their final assignment, students had to create their own graphic memoirs, either illustrating it or using picture and an app. The assignment went well, and I was thoroughly impressed with the products that the students produced. This semester, since I was teaching “Monsters, Race, and Comics,” I wanted to do a similar type of assignment. This time, however, students could choose between creating an illustrated graphic narrative or writing a script. As well, I gave them the option of working in pairs to complete the project. Along with the product, each student had to write a reflection essay about the decisions they made in the creation of the product and how the product connected with themes we discussed in class. Today, I want to share that project and some of the students’ products.

This is the assignment prompt I provided to students for the graphic narrative/script and the reflection paper. I did have a rubric for the reflection paper.

Assignment:

Over the course of this semester, we have used horror and comics as a lens to examine issues of race, xenophobia, sexism, history, and more through works such as Deathlok, Killadelphia, and The Low, Low Woods. You have seen how graphic narratives work to convey information through the juxtaposition of words and images, and how that juxtaposition leads us to thinking about various issues.

For this assignment, you will take what we have learned and create your own graphic narrative. You must think about and incorporate the themes we have examined over the course of the semester, and you need to consider the ways to construct and read a graphic narrative that we have discussed.

You have two options for this assignment:

One: You can write a five to ten-page script for a graphic narrative. If you choose this option, you need to break down each page and detail what you would want an illustrator to do for the page. On my blog, I have a five-page breakdown of how I’d want to do the opening for a graphic narrative adaptation of Frank Yerby’s The Foxes of Harrow. You can also find a wide variety of scripts at Comics Experience. You’ll notice that no two scripts are the same, but they have the same information: page layout, panel…