Check out Huang’s project here: http://www.pixton.com/comic/vyf2bpdi
When I was told about this assignment, I felt stressed and challenged because I thought it would be difficult and boring for us to remediate the previous assignment. However, when I knew that we could create a comic, I felt delighted and passionate, as I have never made a comic before. Besides, I consider comic can make my characters become vivid and the colorful scenes can help me show the rhetorical appeals. My curiosity and careful consideration forced me to choose comic to create this rhetorical production.
As an international student, I want to try my best to eliminate the racism issue between international students and domestic students, so I create this comic in order to let students on campus pay attention to racism and develop deeper relationship with each other. I chose the students on campus instead of my previous audience ISSS organization because this time I focused on the experience of the international students and the change of the domestic student’s thought. I created three main characters: an international student Ailee, a domestic student Mike and an officer on behalf of the ISSS organization. I started my story with two events when international students felt offended and looked down upon by domestic students, which made the next scene when Ailee asked ISSS organization for help more reasonable and let the story develop smoothly till the end that international students got alone well with domestic students.
I made my comic fit the rhetorical appeals when I creating it. For the use of pathos, I concentrated on the characters’ expressions. You can see the angry face of Ailee and the uncaring face of the domestic students. These details can evoke the audiences’ feeling and let them sense the unfair treatments of the international students so that they will feel sympathy for the international students and realize the existence of racism on our campus. I also capitalized the word “racism” to emphasize its existence. For the ethos part, all of the backgrounds are the places on campus especially the real picture of The Farmer School of Business, helping my audience realize that they are part of this community and they are responsible for caring about the racism issue. I also created the office as well as an officer of the ISSS organization; and I colored the organization’s title in red. As we all know, ISSS is an organization that always helps international students solve problem and help them adapt to our school. Besides, red color is associated with power, it can make my comic become credible and trustful.
One thing I changed for this remediation is the use of the logos appeal. Firstly, the disadvantage of comic forced me to limit the dialogues and narrative, which makes the logo part inadaptable for the remediation. In the previous article, I used logo in order to prove racism happens on our campus. Fortunately, the two events Ailee experienced also proved the existence of racism on campus, helping me balance the lack of logo appeal. Besides, as my previous audience is the ISSS organization, using data related to our school will be more rational than telling them story; showing them data can convince them to take action. In this project, I changed my audience to students on campus, so showing them stories will be better than showing them data because students are more emotional. Telling them stories will also make my comic become more interesting.
My use of rhetorical appeals helped me speak out my goal, which is to let students realize the serious situation of racism on campus, and we need to take actions to solve it. Though comics are mute and without the combination of music to express emotion, the colorful scenes and strong expressions of characters fixed this flaw and enhanced the expression of emotion, making my project become effective.
Creating my first comic was challenging but also very interesting. I was obsessed about creating new characters and considering the background of the scenes. I also needed to use my imagination to create the conversations between the characters and the narrative of this comic. The most challenging part is designing their poses and their expressions, as I never tried this technique before; everything is so fresh. When I created new characters, they all have the same expressions and poses, which would make my comic become boring and disembodied; therefore, I had to move almost every part of their body and changed their looks to make them fit the expression of the scenes. Besides, I changed the color of their outfits and their skin to make them look different, as the program doesn’t have enough characters to choose.
Overall, I would like to recommend using comic to create a remediation project. As it would be a fresh try for most people, and it’s a very enjoyable process though you need to overcome some difficulties. However, it will help you create an interesting and meaningful comic and let this experience be unforgettable.