The authors present research findings from a collective case study (n=5) conducted in a multimodal composition course for pre-service English teachers. Researchers studied how a course focused on how multimodal composition influenced pre-service teachers' identities as writers and their stances on literacy instruction. Data consisted of students' reflective writing on a graphic narrative assignment and were analyzed using constructivist grounded theory (Charmaz, 2006). Five themes characterize the data: the varied rhetorical decisions used to compose the graphic narrative; the recognition of multimodal composition as process-oriented; the paralleling of "writing" and "composing"; the interrogation of what counts as academic text; and the misreading and misunderstanding of the rhetorical situation and of multimodality. Implications for the field are offered as well.