American Born Chinese identity project info.

Logistics.
We will have lab time with "Comic Life" this week Wednesday and Thursday to work on your American Born Chinese identity projects. You must have a sketched draft of your project completed by class time on Wednesday. I will check to see that you've completed it at the beginning of class. Bring your ABC note-taking handout, too; I will check it as well.

Project Suggestions.
Images.
In a medium such as graphic literature, you'll want to emphasize image over text. Allow the visual aspects of each panel to narrate. This includes, for instance, color, line, and form. To gather image content for your project, you may ...

1. use photographs* (as I've done)
   
2. images or avatars from the web (a Google Image search would work well to this end)
   
3. draw your images by hand
4. use any combination of the above
   

* If you would like to use digital photographs, bring them in on a disc, flash drive, email them to yourself, or upload them to a web-based photo gallery such as Picasa or Flickr. If you have hard copies of photographs that you would like to use and do not have a scanner, bring them to school and you can scan them in using the scanner in the Classroom Lab or the one in the LW office.

Text.
Supplement your images with minimal text. Text should add to, rather than reiterate, what your images are "saying."

See above right (or see the attachment in my recent email) for my own example. (Click on the image to enlarge it. I'll post my Didactic Statement soon, too.) You'll notice that I've taken some artistic liberties. For instance, there is no dialogue; the strip is exclusively narrated in third-person. Also, the narration is a poem. Here, one might argue that the images are supplementing the text and not the other way around. (Or, perhaps one may say that the images and text are complements.) That is a fair argument, however, given the poetic form, I believe it works. It's like where graphic art meets poetry. Hence the title of the strip: "Poetic License." Way baller, I know. So wizard.

Here's another example, featuring my cat, Tolstoy.