Hey, Hey!

Hi there, readers. You may have noticed I don't update here as often as I have in the past. The blog's not dead. When I read a comic or graphic novel about which I think the public needs to know more, I'll post a review. In the meantime, here are ways to keep up with my work:

1. See a version of my online vita here: http://virginia.academia.edu/JamesBuckyCarter

2. I have a Google Scholar profile now! You should be able to access it at this address: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=v_YyMagAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao. According to information gleaned from Google Scholar on November 3, 2015, my works have been cited at least 270 times, and I have an h-index of 8 and an i10-index of 7.

The latest *SANE* features cover art by
Gene Kannenberg, Jr. 

3. I'm scheduled as featured speaker at 2016's Michigan Reading Association. In Detroit, I'll give a rundown of where I see the next decade of comics evolution and how teachers can tap into growing and emergent trends. For more information, visit http://michiganreading.org/conferences/annual-conference/2016speakers.

4. I'm still writing! I have work with ALAN's "Under the Radar" team in development, as well as entries for edited collections from academic presses. For one such project, I was deemed a "pioneering figure" regarding comics and education. That was quite an honor.

5. SANEjournal is still going strong. My latest peer-reviewed article, "PIM Pedagogy," was downloaded 17 times in September and had views from across the globe. Richard Graham is the managing editor of the journal now, and his first issue went live earlier this fall. SANEjournal now has four issues worth of research and practitioner-based texts, lesson plans, rationales, and more on the subject of comics and education.

Now for some miscellaneous comics considerations en mi cabeza, presented in stream of consciousness for your bemusement:

Learn to code! 

Saga still rocks; Sex Criminals is fun reading;  G. Willow Wilson's work on Ms. Marvel is awesome but G-Force is over-rated; Gene Yang is amazing and his Secret Coders is such a great idea for a book. I'm puzzled that Nimona is getting as much critical attention as it has based on its quality, which is, well, "meh," in my opinion. I'd hoped reading Stevenson, Ellis, Watters and Allen's Lumberjanes would reveal that Nimona was a working space for a new comics writer to hone their skills before nailing it with their next efforts, but I've read enough summer camp comics already. I do feel Lumberjanes has merited the positive attention it has received, though. Bitch Planet continues to challenge me, engage me and enrage me (Well, consternate me, anyway). Writers and critics need to let a series actually debut before they critique it for shortfalls. Also, it would be nice if writers would address a character's entire history and mediated representations before making claims about race, gender, or privilege within their articles -- or at the very least acknowledge the narrowed focus of their articles. Squirrel Girl is a fun, fun series, though I didn't like seeing it get a new #1 so soon after debuting. Raina Telgemeier is a full-fledged phenomenon now, as is Nick Sousanis. All comics are flawed in some way, as are all texts, and this is good news to scholars, as it gives us something to talk about. I'm eager to see fan reaction to the new comics featuring Red Wolf and Spider-Woman. I miss the Jaime Reyes Blue Beetle being in our critical consciousness. I still want to make more comics. I'm about to start reading Phoebe Gloeckner's The Diary of a Teenage Girl, the one with the "Now a Major Motion Picture" label on its cover.  First Second seems to have become more corporate in attitude and marketing recently. I am curious to see how Preacher works as a TV series. I want to want to watch Supergirl, but I didn't watch Smallville, Gotham, Arrow or The Flash, so I probably won't.  As comics readership demographics shift, keep an eye on who appears, reappears, and (particularly) disappears in their pages. Doing so will help you see if we're experiencing a more open medium or one happy to replace old powered discourses with new ones. Swamp Thing is still DC's most interesting character, to me. Most floppy comics that I'm not reading but would like to read look like they'd be better read in trade paperback or graphic novel form. Definitely, I can see generational preferences emerge regarding what young people like in comics versus what I like in them, My oldest son is on a Doug TenNapel kick. I'm still hip to Derf Backderf, Nate Powell, and Ed Piskor. Have any comics works of the last five year had as much power as David Mazzucchelli's Asterious Polpy or Jaime Hernandez' The Love Bunglers? Maybe the Tamaki's This One Summer. Maybe.  Otherwise, not that I've seen. I need to read more grown-up comics, though. When it comes to comics-and-literacy scholarship, I often feel overlooked, discarded and disrespected within the education and literacy communities. A good job would fix that for me, though, I'm sure. I picked up the first issue of Gene Yang's Superman but haven't read any other issues in the series.  The news of a Dark Knight III intrigues me more than excites me.

Squirrel Girl has an entertaining set of eponymous titles and the best catch phrase ever.