Torn between two trains of thought and comic strips.

I have been having my students use Desmos quite often because it allows them to graph without knowing how parts of the equations provide information for graphing.  A fellow teacher of mine told me that his college professor had them graph everything because in the real world everyone uses a calculator.  I understand that but I also think students should be able to look at a graph and know if what they put in is actually close to what it should be.  Many students forget the exponent, the x or other term and it doesn't come out properly and they don't realize it is the wrong equation. 
The second thing I realized is that my students do not read much and may not have any idea how comic strips are put together.  So I did a search to see if I could find something on providing the elements of a comic strip.  I found a lovely document from Plain local school district that has the essential elements of a comic strip.  Since I assigned the students to create comic strips on a word problem and most of them are just putting the information on the frames without any characters, I realized they probably are not familiar with comic strips so I have to take a bit of time to build up background knowledge.