Before you can transform Eudora Welty’s short story into a graphical story or comic strip, you will need to analyze the story and identify all of its parts, from characters, to setting, to plot. Start by asking yourself the following questions and making a list of all the things you can identify in the story, especially those that you can visualize and turn into images and pictures.
Before starting this activity, take a look at the ReadWriteThink interactive comic vocabulary. You can learn more about the techniques of graphical storytelling and the history of comics by checking links on the following websites:
Choose a single moment or episode of the story A Worn Path and experiment with different ways of combining text and imagery to create a comic book panel. You can use this worksheet to get started. Consider the following possibilities from least to most complex:
After experimenting with individual scenes, your teacher may ask you to try something more ambitious. This time choose some single aspect or series of events from the story and represent them in a sequence of frames through comic strips. You may decide to choose between telling the story through a series of portraits of Phoenix at various stages in her journey, or through a broader selection of the plot, highlighted images with quoted passages. In any case, try to make your comic more graphical by filling in some of the details of the setting as well. You may find it helpful to use this worksheet to help you plan your comic strip.