Although the popularity and use of graphic novels in literacy instruction has increased in the last decade, few sustained analyses have examined adolescents’ reading processes with informational texts in social studies classrooms. Recent research that has foregrounded visual, emotional, and embodied textual responses situates this qualitative study, in which three eighth‐grade students learned about the graphic novel format, responded in writing to interpretive prompts, and thought aloud during their reading of Gettysburg: A Graphic Novel by C.M. Butzer. Analyses of students’ responses to the multimodal text revealed how constructing inferences between visual and linguistic sign systems mediated their emotive empathy—a central, if limited, component of historical empathy.