In a graduate literacy course, the author as the teacher educator conceptualized "Visual Literacy" into the course. In-service and pre-service teachers from inner-city schools in Georgia and Virginia invited struggling writers to create graphic novels by envisioning life activities, using drawings, and invented spellings as well as conventional words to tell their family stories. This paradigm shift from a print-based curriculum to multimodal transmediation opened an alternate pathway to literacy, and the children became enthusiastically engaged. Their graphic novels vivified their life experiences, alleviated their pent-up emotions, and made their struggles visible and their inner voices audible. "Visual Literacy" enabled them to transcend the hardships that confronted them and ushered them into academic success.