The comic takes place in our classroom, and follows the crime of our TA Aman’s hot cocoa getting stolen.

It also made me think about how information can be manipulated based on how it’s presented to the audience. 

While reading, the audience is too caught up in the story and can only process how the information is given to them, and might not notice the less obvious clues. The way I decided to do that is by having Prof. Ward hold the cup of hot cocoa in his hands on the third page on the second panel. 

Another way I incorporated the class material into the comic is on the third page, where the witnesses give their accounts. The first witness is exaggerating their memories based on the detective’s question’s wording. This example is just like how witnesses give higher speed estimates when asked “how fast did the cars smash into each other?” compared to “how fast did the cars touch each other?”. 

The second witness is a victim of confirmation bias, by assuming who the suspect is based on what they think their motivations might be. Another reason why their memory is not correct is because their memory got contaminated when they talked to their friend about the case. 

The third witness is having trouble recalling the time the crime occurred, because they are overworking their working memory. 

The fourth witness is calling the suspect “crazy tall”, which might be true, but I don’t remember Prof. Ward’s height. Just like the witness, I am pretty short and I would also call him “crazy tall”! However, this is very subjective and doesn’t mean anything for his height. 

Lastly, when Aman says “Prof. Ward wouldn’t do that…!!!”, they exhibit cognitive bias based on their emotions. 

This was a great experiment for me to see how well I can utilize what we learnt in class and imitate it just like in the amazing demos we see. I would love to try and do something like this again. Thank you Prof. Nathan Ward and Aman Shah for being a part of my story!