ASSIGNMENT: Combining your creative and critical energies, you will work with a team to “adapt” content from a non-comic genre of your choice into a graphic/comic format. Your creative team will consist of writers, artists, and designers/editors, and the group grade will be based on the project quality, as well as evidence of strong collaborative effort and equity of participation. Students will submit self-evaluations and receive peer response. All projects will be presented at the mandatory FSEM Symposium on Wednesday, Dec. 4.

STRUCTURE: there are six components to this assignment, with different due dates. The total project is worth 35% of your grade. Groups will receive one grade for most components of the assignment, based on project quality, collaborative effort, and equity of labor/participation.

1. Proposal, due Thursday, Sept. 5, 11:59pm—5% of total grade for the course. Your proposal can be as short as a paragraph; all you need to do is identify what you are planning to adapt and what appeals to you about it. The source material should be short so that you don’t get overwhelmed. Think of a popular song, a single scene from a novel/television show/film/play, a poem, a newspaper story, etc.
2. Storyboard, due Tuesday, Sept. 17, at the start of class (8:40am)—5% of total grade for the course. This is a preliminary visual plan for your project. It does not need to be very detailed, but it should include elements that are important for comics, particularly a plan for the layout of panels, including a sketch and/or description of what will be shown in each panel (see POINTERS below).
3. Finished adaptation, due Tuesday, Sept. 24, at the start of class (8:40am)—10% of total grade for the course. This is the completed visual project, either a zine or a poster (see POINTERS below).
4. Metanarrative draft, due Tuesday, Sept. 24, to the Writing Colleague with a copy to me—5% of total grade for the course. This is a co-authored explanation of all of the group’s choices in executing this project (see POINTERS below). Your group meeting with your Writing Colleague about the draft counts as a participation assignment.
5. Metanarrative revision, due Tuesday, Oct. 8, 11:59pm—10% of total grade for the course. This revision of the draft should incorporate feedback from the Writing Colleague.
6. Presentation at First-Year Symposium, due Wednesday, Dec. 4, 7:00pm (attendance required). This counts as a participation assignment and will be graded individually. At the symposium, your work will be on display, and you may be asked questions about it, so be prepared to explain your adaptation.

POINTERS for a successful storyboard and adaptation:

• Discuss your source material thoroughly, first, so that you all understand its meanings before you adapt it to a new medium;
• Determine how to translate the ideas in your source material to graphic panels;
• Decide what kind of format you intend to use: It can either be a large-format poster [11” x 17” minimum] or a folded booklet/zine [reproducible];
• Decide which element or elements of your source material your adaptation will emphasize (theme, character, setting, point-of-view, for example);
• Decide how your group will represent the source material visually, either through drawing or collaging (NOTE: your adaptation must be handmade);
• Decide where and how your project will integrate text from your source material;
• Use Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics to trace specific strategies for structure and form, time and sequences of events, characters, dialogue/narration/thoughts, emotions/moods;
• Use vocabulary and notes from class lectures and readings to plan how images and text will work together on the page;
• Decide how you will delegate all tasks in order to share labor equitably;
• Create a storyboard that will work as a rough draft/ plan for your finished project. NOTE: Storyboards must be submitted for professor’s approval by Tuesday, Sept. 17.
• Incorporate feedback on storyboard before you complete final adaptation project.

POINTERS for metanarrative:

• Track (take notes) all of the decisions your group makes along the way – this will help you compose the metanarrative;
• The metanarrative describes and assesses the finished product. The meta-narrative is your “artists’ statement,” in which your group explains, contextualizes, and defends the choices it made for the adaptation project. Please plan to answer some of the following questions, depending on which ones seem most relevant to your project: Which format did you choose, and why? What choices did you make in terms of line, text, image, figure, foreground, background, composition, color, and why? What did you need to add to your source material to make the story work visually? What did you choose to leave out, and why? What choices did you make in terms of how to delegate labor? What were some of the challenges you encountered in adapting the text to a visual format? What do you think are the particular strengths of your adaptation? How is your adaptation loyal to your source material? How is it different?
• The metanarrative is co-authored—I only require one per group—and should use the first-person plural (“We”) to answer the above questions.
• The metanarrative should be 300 words.

PURPOSE: This assignment asks you to take on an artist’s role: to start with a meaningful text and adapt it into the graphic narrative form. This creative adaptation assignment will help you consider the relationship between form and content and apply what you have learned about graphic forms. The assignment also gives you experience with co-authoring and collaborative work, which is not only common in comics production, but also in college classrooms and the “real world” of the workplace after college.