For the past four months, my Language Arts class read, summarized, and carefully created comics based on one wisdom tale from the wisdom tales book by Heather Forest. Wisdom tales are short parables, each one teaching a strong life lesson. All of them have different settings and characters based on their origin. While we were working on our comic, one of my classmates had her dad Brittain Peck, who is a professional artist, speak to us on ways to change our comic drawings and ways to put a message out through our drawings.
I created a comic about a parable called a Dispute in Sign Language. This story is from Japan. A Dispute in Sign Language is about how two monks talk in sign language but they both interpret the conversation differently. It starts with a young monk who decides he wants to study with an old wise master. The master tells him to go talk to his other one eyed student who is in the garden to aid him in his decision. He decides to converse with the student in sign language to show off his intelligence. They both interpret the conversation very differently, and the young monk decides he is not smart enough to stay there. He thought the one eyed student was talking about all of these different things that he couldn’t comprehend, but the one eyed student thought the young monk was saying mean and offensive things to him. The moral of this story is that people interpret things differently, and assume best intentions.
I chose this wisdom tale because it teaches us to consider what somebody else might be thinking or feeling, and that other people might have a different opinion than you. I think this is a moral that anyone could follow, and it can make people kinder, and more considerate. For my images in comics, I used an online drawing app called Sketchbook. Sketchbook is a great online app with a wide variety of tools and brushes to draw with. It is super simple, and makes drawing a lot of fun! Then, I used another online app called comic life 3 to put all of the drawings together and to add the writing. In comic life, they have many options for backgrounds, and comic pages that already have all of the boxes and all you need to do is insert drawings and words! Once my comic was finished online, I printed it out in color, and my comic was done! Overall, this was a super fun and engaging project, and I encourage anybody who is interested in this to try it!