I decided to shape my story after my biggest stressor currently, being deadlines. I have a lot due this week, so I let the story in my comic for this week help me express the stress. This was engaging with the readings in McCloud’s “Understanding Comics,” as it gave me the opportunity to experiment and practice with the linguistic mode, as well the appearance of my diction. With this, my comic uses interdependent word-picture combinations throughout almost each frame as they refer to the topic of “social distancing.” However, the images themselves did not physically represent or show a person separating themselves from a group of people, but instead showed things such as a table and plate, a Nintendo switch, and a bed. With familiarity of the current situation we are all facing, many can recognize these visuals to be things the speaker might be doing while social distancing. However, as these visuals go hand in hand with the my linguistic decisions, interdependent word-picture combination is visual throughout my comic. A more specific combination I want to point out in my comic is within the very last frame, being montage. The words here take up the space in the frame and appear as though they were surrounding, or flying towards the individual represented. This was my attempt to make the words seem significant to story, and the impact this linguistic mode has on the individual in the frame. I often used the pencil tool and its fill option, and the shaping tools consisting of the rectangle tool, ellipses tool, and straight line tool. Finally, the textbook tool which made me realize that I did not necessarily have to create a square for my linguistic mode. These were extremely beneficial with my experimentation with words as I was able to make it appear as though the words throughout the comic were more of the speaker’s thoughts, rather than an actual conversation. I was also able to choose a font that seemed more similar to thoughts, or journaling as it looks like handwriting. However, within the last frame, the words are bolded, large, red or black, and surrounded by lines to express aggression, giving the linguistic mode a frightening feel. Finally, some other observations I made with the techniques I used this week is that red is a scary color! So I used it to my advantage in my comic. Also, distance between the frames are important as they make it feel more comic like and guide the reader, things I learned as I experimented with different size squares. In terms of closure and time in my comic, I tried to ask for some reader participation, especially as it is in reference to current issues today. With this, the reader can identify all of these frames to either represent one single moment, such as forgotten food due to a video game seen in frames two and three, or a series of things done throughout a day, or even a week or two. With this, it is a lot of either aspect-to-aspect, or subject-to-subject which is more supported by the the linguistic mode used in the comic.