Practice the craft of storytelling through graphic narrative, a medium combining text and image. As a course community, we will address how to read graphic narratives while we boldly try our own hand at creating a short graphic narrative or at least a storyboard for a longer one. Discussions and assignments will hone your storytelling skills as you examine the construction and formal elements of this medium. We will examine the creation of character; place; panel and page layout; the passage of time; lettering and font; tone; color; structure; and style—all as carefully crafted in visual images as they are in prose. Required texts will revolve around themes such as childhood and memory; trauma and survival; queerness; telling history; becoming ill; telling another’s story; race, ethnicity, & culture. Possible texts (so please don’t purchase them yet): Yang and Gurihiru’s Superman Smashes the Klan; Tamaki & Tamaki’s This One Summer; Ferris’s Monsters; Marchetto’s Cancer Vixen; Bui’s The Best We Could Do; Thompson’s Blankets; Johnson & Pleece’s Incognegro; Flowers’ Hot Comb; Lefevre’s The Photographer; Barry’s how-to books. Students will assemble a comic or portfolio at semester’s end, which will include a written portion discussing the elements used to create the final project.