Graphic Novels and Multimodal Literacy: A High School Study with American Born Chinese

Abstract

Meshing print literacy and visual literacy, graphic novels exemplify a type of multimodal text demanding multimodal literacy skills. The comics format of graphic novels requires the reader to know the conventions that constitute the unique language of the medium. These visual conventions are comparable to genre conventions of traditional print texts. This article discusses these conventions and relates literary theory to graphic novels. It also presents a reader response study conducted with American high school students using Gene Yang’s American Born Chinese.