This section of English 177: Literature and Popular Culture, The Graphic Novel was designed to teach students to "make compelling arguments about and in various media" and to produce a "professional-like final product that represents their work to the world at large." While twice weekly lectures by Professor Robin Valenza explored the development of the graphic novel as a genre, my section meetings focused on multimodal composition, helping students hone analytical skills and guiding them to create multimodal texts. After analyzing comics as multimodal texts, students worked in teams to interview members of the comics community--cartoonists, librarians, comics store owners, researchers, etc.--and craft documentary videos. The course mobilized the analytic potential of the comics form and its multimodal nature to encourage production of authentic texts that students viewed as having value beyond the classroom.