Inspired by my mentor, Lynda Barry, and in an attempt to “practice what I preach,” in Fall 2017, I transformed an article I had been shopping around into a comic. The LGBTQ Correspondence Zone: Thinking Seriality with José Muñoz uses the tension between simultaneity and sequentiality on the comics page to explore how serial publication has historically helped marginalized audiences form community through serial comics. While the comic itself is drawn by hand, much like my sketchnotes, its open access visual nature has allowed it to travel further in the digital realm than my other academic publications. It, thus, serves as a case study, providing evidence that comics, particularly digitally shared comics, can reach a broader audience because people are more likely to look through a comic than an academic article. Editing the comic based on peer review comments also involved digital editing using Adobe Photoshop, where I erased pen smudges, revised and added text, fixed punctuation mistakes, and darkened the colored pencil used behind the Muñoz quotes. Digital editing is part of most comics making practices, and going through the process myself helped me see how much labor and time goes into comic creation.
I now share my experience of the comics making process, including the digital editing, with my students when I have them make comics. The above image provides a sample of the original thumbnails transformed into the final comic that I used in a slide presentation for my Comics and Civic Engagement course when introducing a storyboarding process assignment. The fact that we were all editing our first comics during this course created a sense of solidarity. The stylistic simplicity used to convey complex ideas in my comic helped convince them that they weren’t producing a work of art, but a form of communication. In this Facebook album, you can view some of the comics they created to educate the Georgia Tech community about urban development issues in Atlanta (all student work shared with permission).