During a study conducted in two Grade 4 classrooms, the students were provided with numerous opportunities to engage with multimodal print and digital texts, and various compositional tools and devices. The eight- and nine-year-old students' participation in the research included the reading and discussing of, and writing about graphic novels. Instruction during the study included a variety of activities that focused on a selection of elements of visual art and design, and conventions of the medium of comics. The content analysis of students' responses to a selection of graphic novels revealed how their aesthetic understanding of and critical thinking about the graphic novels was influenced by learning about the what, why and how of the mode of image and the medium of comics.