Comic Strip Conversations

A visual-support technique developed by Carol Gray (1994) for autistic children and adolescents, in which a social interaction is illustrated as a short comic strip with simple stick figures, speech bubbles, thought bubbles, and colour codes for emotion. By externalising who said what, what each person was thinking or feeling, and the sequence of events, Comic Strip Conversations make tacit social information explicit and available for review, revision, and rehearsal. They are a sibling technique to Social Stories (also Gray) and are widely used in education and therapy to unpack confusing past events, prepare for upcoming ones, and scaffold perspective-taking. Modern AI-assisted tools such as Autiverse adapt the Comic Strip Conversation format as a visual scaffold for journaling and narrative construction.