“My first victim was a woman”: Student Project for Graphic Narrative/Script Assignment

In my previous post, I wrote about the graphic narrative/script assignment in my “Monsters, Race, and Comics” course this semester. Today, I want to look at one of the products that students created for this assignment. Specifically, I want to look at the finished product and how it relates to themes we discussed during the course but also how it interacts within a broader context of texts and themes that I have taught over the past few years, specifically John Jennings, Damian Duffy, and Robert Love’s “Profile” and Brent Staples’ “Just Walk on By: Black Men and Public Space.”

For the assignment, I gave students the option of collaborating with a peer. The product that two of my students constructed in a 5 page graphic narrative. The narrative takes place in 1995. We see a Black man talking on a pay phone with his wife, and as he steps out of the phone booth he accidentally hits a white woman, who is walking by, with the door. She drops the contents of her purse, and he helps her pick them up. The lady walks on, but the man realizes she left her change purse. So, he walks after her, trying to return her change purse. The woman sees him as a threat and calls the police. The police arrive and see the man approaching the woman. They draw their guns and shoot the man.