A Well-Told Story: Using Cartoons to Share an Experience

Beaton, like other cartoonists, uses drawings to enhance—and often to stand in for—written descriptions of actions, people, or thoughts. She also uses word balloons instead of speaker tags for dialogue, as well as separate frames to convey new scenes or the passage of time. Even though the conventions that she follows are different from those followed by writers of purely textual narratives, Beaton creates a compelling story of a remembered event.