The Mini-Comic as a Group Project

Let me start by saying that I absolutely hate working on group projects for many of the reasons we mentioned in class: I usually like to come up with my own ideas so I can remain interested in what I'm working on, I don't appreciate it when others try to take on a position of authority, and the final product resulting from such group work is usually not so great in comparison to tasks taken on individually. I remember having to write a group research paper on animal life in Asia a couple semesters ago, and despite the fact that I tried to make that paper as stylistically uniform as possible, different sections still felt very disconnected, and we ended up with a B.

That being said, the mini-comic is a much more appropriate assignment for working in a group context. My reasoning for this is that there are a number of elements that come with constructing a comic book different enough from one another that they can be taken on by different people and brought together at the end without creating a sense of disconnect. In my group, for example, which consisted of two people, we both collaborated on the story we were trying to tell, I took on the task of creating the artwork, and my partner completed all the lettering. These final two tasks were performed individually but did not create a strong sense of disconnect because they are different enough from one another that they did not clash in any significant ways.

That's the beauty of multimodal group projects. If people are responsible for their own modes within that project, the sense of disconnect becomes weaker. Other groups had a member responsible for shading, and even lettering and the actual words of the story could be taken on seperately from one another. For these reasons, I believe the mini-comic was probably one of the most successful group projects of which I have ever been a part.