Dragon and Captain
by P. R. Allabach (Author) and Lucas Turnbloom (Illustrator)
Booktalk: Armed with a (toy watch) compass, a (paper-towel tube) telescope, and a (hand-drawn) map, Dragon and Captain set off on a great adventure. Dragon is a boy in pajamas and a dragon robe. Captain is a boy with a three-sided hat. But as the boys’ imaginations take over, we see them as they see themselves and the backyard as the boys see it: a dark forest, a craggy cliff, and the immense sea.
Snippet:
DRAGON: Ahoy there, fellow pirate. We’re here to, umm, inspect the ropes on this ship.
CAPTION: The pirate guard stared at them but didn’t say a word.
Six Traits Mini Lesson
Trait: Voice This picture book is illustrated as a comic. The words in the story are shown in the matching panels.
The Glossary of Comic Terms at Free Comic Book Day defines a panel this way:
The basic unit of storytelling in a comic book. Usually square or rectangular, panels frame the action of a comic book and graphic novel. The placement and construction of panels on a page can represent anything from movement to time.
This picture book comic book page has two panels. In each panel, we hear a different person speaking.
In the first panel, the word balloon tail points to the dragon. That means the dragon is speaking.
The Glossary of Comic Terms defines a word balloon as:
The text-filled “bubbles” that contain a story’s spoken dialogue.
In the manuscript, spoken dialogue looks like this:
DRAGON: Ahoy there, fellow pirate. We’re here to, umm, inspect the ropes on this ship.
The words in the second panel on this page are in a box. That means it is a caption.
Acording to the Glossary of Comic Terms, captions are:
Text-filled boxes that typically narrate a comics story.
When you see a captions box, the narrator is speaking. In the manuscript, captions look like this:
CAPTION: The pirate guard stared at them but didn’t say a word.
Most of the action in a comic is shown in the art. Captions are only used if the narrator needs to give readers more information. This caption shows that time passes while the two boys wait for an answer–and that the answer was silence.
Copyright © 2015 Anastasia Suen All Rights Reserved.