When I was a sixth grader at Walden, since it was our last year there, one of the perks was getting assigned a younger class to help out by mentoring on Thursdays and other designated days. I was assigned The K/1 Spiny Lobsters. I chose this moment for my comic because over my time of leading the classes, making games for them to play, and even sometimes giving them little gifts, I realized how important I was to them. I want to show my time as a mentor to show you can be a leader and someone people look up to by just being kind to people.

My steps to develop ideas were first brainstorming some important moments from my time as a mentor and then drafting images. One example of my writing decisions is of the final moment showing the message I wanted my mentees to come away with from my final gift to them, which was being kind is always the answer. An example of my visual decisions is the scene where I handed out the silly putty.

My graphic memoir was inspired by Persepolis because I focused on my values and how they shaped my experience mentoring.  This is similar to Persepolis because Marji’s values shaped how she experienced the revolution. For example, when Marji was younger, Marji’s strong sense of forgiveness influenced her view of the executioners.  Marji did not see them as evil people, but as people who had done bad things and should be forgiven for their actions.  Over time, Marji came to have a more complex view about forgiveness.  She eventually would not forgive executioners in the Ayatollah, possibly because it was harder to do so after they executed her uncle.

When I wrote my graphic novel, I considered how my values shaped my experience mentoring the K/1 Spiny Lobsters.  I wanted to teach my mentees that kindness was the most important answer.  Over time, I learned that leadership itself could be simple acts of kindness.  I have never experienced suffering like Marji experienced, so I could not include that similarity in my graphic novel.

I used Chatgpt to generate all of the images in my graphic novel. I chose to do so because drawing is not my strength.  It is very difficult for me to draw because I have dysgraphia.  I spent a lot of time adding other details to the AI generated images, to enhance the images and make them better reflect my experience.  For example, I drew the glasses on the images of me, and added color and paint to each image.