Literacy narrative
My first comic I fell in love with was Baby Mouse— a sassy elementary schooler going through the ups and downs of early public education. She was funny, the stories were fun, but more importantly, I loved the look of the books. Every comic had a limited color palette of black, white, and pink, which I found to be the coolest thing. The speech bubbles were distinguished, the text had a unique font, the art was cute— sometimes I didn’t even need to read it, just looking through the book was so satisfying. Baby Mouse was the only comic I owned as a child, having a good 5 to 10 of those books.
My other childhood sweetheart was Captain Underpants, a book that I never owned but would often check out from my school's library. Revolving around two fourth graders and their superhero the boys accidentally brought to life, Captain Underpants was a silly book overflowing with potty humor that I found invigorating. Similar to Baby Mouse, I also loved the doodly art style and the way dialogue and text were presented. Looking back, it’s interesting that I was so captured by art styles and choices from such an early age. For a long time this theme continued, as the most exciting element of comics by far was how it looked.
I remember …show more content…
Unfortunately I did not begin the large stack I seemed to always have, but instead began reading web comics. It seemed less stressful than opening a book, since my anxiety was pretty severe at that time. Reading webcomics made me excited and inspired again— finding small creators with such beautiful comics was invigorating. I loved to see the formatting and especially the art styles. Looking at such unique styles portraying more complex posing and backgrounds really made me want to work on my own art at the time. The stories weren’t so bad either, I found myself reading entire comics in one go, not being able to put them down for a