NCTE, Others Collaborate on "The Code of Best Practices for Fair Use of Media Literacy Education"

So, you've got this great comic that you want to share with the class, but you've only got one copy and an opaque projector. Or, you want to share scenes from a graphic novel in excerpt, but you don't know how much is too much to share. Or, you've noticed that Watchmen seems to have a soundtrack, and you'd like to have students listen to the songs mentioned in the text, but how much of the song can you play? Your principal keeps telling you all these stories about lawsuits and is giving you one more reason to be paranoid. What to do?

Well, I've been teaching my students about fair use and using the advice found on page 228 of Mary T. Christel and Scott Sullivan's NCTE-published collection Lesson Plans for Creating Media-Rich Classrooms, but now NCTE and other media organizations have joined together to bring greater clarity and ease of mind to classroom teachers who want to make the most of media resources.

(and Traci Gardner of NCTE is blogging about fair use this week too, if you don't have a copy of the Christel and Sullivan handy).


The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Use of Media Literacy seeks to help by offering explanations, resources, definitions, and myths about Fair Use. Should I be able to embed the following video from the Center for Social Media without worry? Well, it gives me the option to embed, just like some comic strip sites are now offering, so it seems OK... but guess I'll have to read the new NCTE code to better know...

My New Home State Set To Impress Me -- and Take a Lead in Gaphic Novels in Education

The Diamond Bookshelf reports that the Texas Library Association will soon release a "Maverick Graphic Novel List" to help librarians get graphic novels in their collections and in their schools.

Not too shabby for a state that sometimes seems behind the times when it comes to progressive pedagogy! As history has shown us, once the librarians get going with graphic novels, more and more teachers will follow.

Typically, this is how it seems to go:

1. Librarians take the lead and get graphic novels in their collections

2. Librarians note amazing interest and huge gains in circulation numbers.

3. Librarians start talking with teachers, or visa-versa, about how graphic novels can engage reluctant readers.

4. Teachers come to see graphic novels as good for reluctant readers.

5. Hopefully teachers read more about graphic novels, learn that they are good for all sort of readers, from ELL to gifted student populations.

Review of Cleopatra: The Life of an Egyptian Queen

Another in Rosen's series of graphic biographies/graphic nonfiction, Gary Jeffrey, Anita Ganeri, and Ross Watton's Cleopatra: The Life of an Egyptian Queen is an impressive text.

It blends prose exposition, graphic storytelling, vocabulary and character charts, glossary and art in such a way as to really give the reader a complete feeling for the history of this enigmatic Egyptian.

It's an excellent complement to any prose textbook or encyclopedia entry on the subject of the Roman Empire and has well-rendered sequential panels featuring characters, clothing and auxiliaries that look historically accurate.

The graphic novel is not going to win an Eisner any time soon, but I was truly impressed by its breadth, its use of multiple formats, and the sincere effort and craft behind the book. One doesn't always expect much from these types of graphic novels, but this one, intended for upper elementary and middle school readers, delivers.

"Verily, so sayeth me, in yon scroll resembing fair word balloon"

Thanks to P. Coogan and J. Tondro for reminding me that the use of word balloon technology goes back a long way, even if the balloon itself has done some evolving:
Click here, scroll a bit, and enjoy.







"Tis your day to dispose of the refuse via trans-
port to yonder corner!"

More on Vocabulary

What to call sequential art narratives, especially comics and graphic novels, has been on the mind of various populations who study or who have recently "discovered" the form. I prefer sequential art narratives, obviously, but the term hasn't caught on because of its length and, my guess is, because it has the word "art" in it, and that tweaks literary-minded folks (I sort of laugh at this. Literature isn't art?). Others don't want nonfiction labeled under the heading of novel. We see "graphica," "graphic nonfiction," "poetry comics," etc. popping up to try to distinguish one form of comics-based sequential art from another. A recent discussion on a comics list serve brought up a redefining of the term "comics" as a shortening of the verb "co-mixing" since comics mix together words and images. Very cool idea, I think.

More Comics-Making Software and Programs!

so, you might know about ComicLife, but there are many other comics-making applications out there as well! One is Pikistrips, a web-based application that allows folks to upload their own photos and make photo-essays using the comic strip format. Comeeko is apparently very similar, if not the same thing as Pikistrips. Lou Novachek recently drew my attention to this article, which details a new program called Pixton. Pixton even offers a virtual classroom sort of cartooning!



And thanks to Meera for mentioning toondoo, yet another exciting application!

PCA/ACA looking for Proposals

CFP/Press release from Wendy Goldberg:

Conference: PCA/ACA 2008 National Conference (www.pcaaca.org)
Place: New Orleans Marriott, New Orleans, LA
Dates: April 8-11, 2009
Submission Deadline for proposals: Friday, November 21

This is the national meeting of the Popular Culture Association andthe American Culture Association, and this submission is under thearea "Asian Popular Culture."

Panel #1:Title: Horror Anime and MangaThis panel invites papers on any aspect of horror anime or manga.Essays may use texts that can be classically defined as "horror"(i.e., ghost stories) and may also explore the use of horror figures(i.e., vampires) in other genres (i.e., shoujo).

Panel #2Title: Anime and MangaOpen call for papers on any aspect of anime and manga studies.

We welcome submissions from a variety of academic and criticalapproaches.Submissions should be sent in the form of a 150-250 word abstract,outlining what you would like to present.

Include contact information,any audio-visual needs, and a CV.Submit by Friday, November 21, 2008 to Wendy Goldberge-mail: wendy.d.goldberg@uscga.edu

or snail mail:
Wendy Goldberg
Dept. of Humanities
United States Coast Guard Academy
27 Mohegan Ave.
New London, CT 06320

"Looks Good to Me": The Adventures of Rabbi Harvey

My students recently finished a 3-week stint learning about graphic novels and their pedagogical uses. One of the activities they had to do was bring in reviews of graphic novels they thought kids would find interesting. The Rabbi's Cat, a great series, was a popular choice. Well, here's a book about a Rabbi who doesn't need a feline to run his household. The Adventures of Rabbi Harvey is described as a combination of Jewish and American folklore.

It looks like a good read to me. It also helps me remember just how much sequential art in America owes to Jewish Americans. So, I'm glad to see some graphic novels exploring Jewish history, customs, and folklore directly.

Amazon and PW "Best Of" lists

The Election's Over. Now what?

Well, we've seen comic book creators and character supporting nominees, and we've seen comic book biographies of the candidates. Now that the race is over, what does sequential art have to offer us? How about a recap of the whole thing? That's what Dan Goldman's upcoming graphic novel appears to offer. A piece of history in the making, dealing with the topic of history in the making!

The Drive to Focus more on 21st Century Literacies

From the latest NCTE INBOX:

School Leaders: Focus on New-Age Skills
A new survey says that 21st century assessments should be at the top of policymakers' lists. eSchool News, November 4, 2008

NCTE recently changed its "move toward a definition of 21st century literacies" statement to an actual "definition of 21st century literacies," so it is good to see these sort of articles in the inbox.

"Yes We Can" Engage in Visual Literacy

So, after the electoral votes tallied in favor of Obama, you immediately turned off your televisions and radios and eagerly awaited the transcript of Obama's victory speech and McCain's concession, right? It was hypertext that moved you to tears when you read about the 106 year old lady voting in Atlanta. It was the print out that inspired you more than you've been inspired in years, correct?




Not for most of you. Admit it: it was the visual, the auditory experience that made this so critical a moment. SEEING him take the stage, hearing his words, noting the expression in the audience's faces. Noting how the press visually represented the votes, the results, and how they framed the speech events that came shortly thereafter. If only for a moment, admit that on this day, listening, speaking, visualizing and visually representing made up the bulk of your READING experience. Sure you went straight to CNN afterwards; sure you blogged and e-mailed and twittered once you heard the news. You engaged in a complete, multimodal literacy experience. As the nation rediscovered its potential for change in the 21st century, you pulled from all of your critical literacy skills and fully read it, savored its visual cues, its print, and its auditory stimulus.

CBR Examines Comics on Their Cell Phones

Graphic Novel Reporter to Debut Soon

Another entity wanting to bring you information on comics and graphic novels for the teen set.

Publishers Weekly "Best Of" List

Scroll down a bit for the list of best comics. Good to see Lynda Barry and Jaime Hernandez on the list.

CBR Story/Collection of Images Connecting Comics and the Campaigns

A couple of my favorites gathered from the story at Comic Book Resources. Check out the link!

Must Read: The Best American Comics 2008

Guest-edited by Lynda Barry, this installment of the Best American Comics series is just as good as the previous two and better than Brunetti's An Anthology of Graphic Fiction volume 1 (I hear a second volume is underway). Barry introduces the text with an ode to comics and cartoons that inspired and confused her and with wording that makes an educator think of Louise Rosenblatt's thoughts on poetry and Reader Response theory.

Barry essentially espouses a transactionalist theory of reading comics when she states, "No matter how carefully a comic strip is constructed, the reader's experience of it cannot be predicted/ There are as many version of each comic strip as there are readers./Where is a comic strip located?/Reading a comic strip more than once seems to change it as well, but of course, it's not the conic strip that is doing the changing." Rosenblatt says of the transaction that takes place between text and reader: "emphasizing the essentially of both reader and text, in contrast to other theories that make one or the other determinate....'Transaction'...permits emphasis on the to-and-fro, spiraling, nonlinear, continuously reciprocal influence or reader and text in the making of meaning. The meaning — the poem — 'happens' during the transaction between the reader and the signs on the page" (source).

Rosenblatt says of reading in general (particularly in reading poetry): "The special meaning, and more particularly, the submerged associations that these words and images have for the individual reader will largely determine what the work communicates to him. The reader brings to the work personality traits, memories of past events, present needs and preoccupations, a particular mood of the moment, and a particular physical condition. These and many other elements in a never-to-be-duplicated combination determine his response to the peculiar contribution of the text."

She defines two forms of reading, efferent and aesthetic, and mentions that most reading is done via a sliding scale between the two types:"despite the mix of private and public aspects of meaning in each stance, the two dominant stances are clearly distinguishable: someone else can read a text efferently for us, and acceptably paraphrase, but no one else can read aesthetically—that is, experience the evocation of—a literary work of art for us."


Barry says in her introduction, "When we notice new things in a story, something is being forgotten that we don't notice./Sometimes not getting the story the way it was intended can be the very thing that makes it usable." Time, experience, lack of both those things, and emotional state are just some of what affects one's reading of a comic, Barry asserts.

The comics Barry has selected certainly lend themselves to aesthetic readings, from those of-the-moment (or of-the-age) works like the selections on war and politics by Alison Bechdel and David Axe and Steve Olexa, to the parables and fables, to Pablo Picasso's naked penis and the wounded bird syndrome of Sarah Oleksyk's copy girl in "Grave-Yard," the collection drips diverse pathemata but never gets so saturated that one has to get away from it from time to time (a weakness of the Brunetti collection, which might as well have had 'insert your own cartoon character here' screaming on an otherwise empty page, "I'm so fucking lonely!!!!" Still, though, the Brunetti is worth purchasing as well).

Besides for "Salon," in which Picasso and friends attempt to find a new essential art, the most enduring comic of the collection for me, beating out the Ware and Yang and Bechdel contributions, is Joseph Lambert's "Turtle Keep it Steady," a retelling of the tortoise and the hare fable and a surprising choice for inclusion due to its simplicity and surface-level lack of seriousness. Full of tender art and little text, the economy of its message makes it all the more powerful: some are great but burn out on their own weakness for success. Better the slow burn, baby, the slow and steady beat.

The Best American Comics 2008 is a must-read for comics fans who like their sequential art with a little less capes and drapes (though it has those too!) and enough diversity of substance to keep one engaged but not overwhelmed with emotion or by common theme.

What Could Have Happened....

Go Kill Some Aztecs, Why Don'tchya?

Nothing says "Halloween" more like the bloody massacre of an indigenous people with land and abundant natural resources and precious ore.

Just ask Hernan Cortes, who, according to the graphic novel Hernan Cortes and the Fall of the Aztec Empire, used Montezuma like a stooge and then cleaned up the mess his Number 2, Pedro De Alvarado, made when Alvarado staged an attack on the Aztecs that really just sort of pissed them off. How'd he clean house? By taking his armored men with their guns and swords and essentially killing off an entire city and culture. Tenochtitlan fell, but Cortes built Mexico City on the site. Politics, money, land -- that's frightening stuff.

Yeah, it's simplistic, but this is a graphic novel for younger readers. It's a good supplement to a traditional text book, but oh does it does need supplementing. Did Cortes call the city Mexico City? Why, if the land was considered New Spain? A glossary of terms and a timeline are in this text and help younger readers, but this graphic novel isn't one of those sources that can stand on its own. Sometimes things are simplified to the point of raising more questions than they resolve.

But, hey, if you're still looking for a scary Halloween costume and want to be original, try going out as a conquistador. Having just read this tiny graphic novel on Halloween, I think Cortes would make a fine addition to your trick or treat parade.

New Conference on "Graphica" in the Classroom

Graphica in Education: Bringing the Discussion of Graphic Novels Out from Under the Desk

January 31, 2009
Fordham University
Lincoln Center Campus: New York, NY

Hosted by the Graduate School of Education at Fordham University

General Information

The inaugural Graphica in Education conference is designed to open a discussion among educators about the place of graphica in the field of education. It will serve teachers, instructional designers, administrators, librarians, and other interested individuals who would like to explore the use of graphic novels and other graphica in the classroom. Participants in the conference will have the opportunity to hear from authors, teachers, and researchers about the nature of writing, reading, and teaching graphic novels. The conference will offer a full day of workshops to complement a keynote address and panel discussion. The conference will also include sponsor presentations and exhibits. Lunch will be included with conference registration.

Invitation to Respond to the Call for Proposals

The Graphica in Education Conference planning committee seeks interactive and engaging proposals for presentations in the breakout workshops of the conference. Workshops will be approximately 60 minutes in length. Paper presentations may be combined into panel discussions. Proposals from practicing teachers about pedagogical methodologies and from researchers about application of graphica in the classroom are encouraged.

Proposals should include:

* The type of presentation (e.g., paper presentation, teaching demonstration, panel discussion)
* A brief description (50 words or less) of the presentation or workshop
* A summary (500 words or less) of the workshop, including rationale/theoretical grounding, practical application, and participant involvement (the benefit to participants)
* The name(s), contact information, and affiliation of presenter(s)

Proposal submission deadline: December 1, 2008

Proposals should be submitted electronically to krturner@fordham.edu.
Conference Registration Presenters for accepted proposals will receive free registration to the conference.

For More Information For more information on the proposal submission process or the conference in general contact Kristen Turner at krturner@fordham.edu.

(Yours Truly just accepted the keynote role for this conference!)

Nate Fisher Back To Work Teaching Kids

Thanks to The Beat for posting a "resolution" link about Nate Fisher, an English teacher who was let go after asking a student to read Eightball #22 (do a search of this blog of his name and the comic title for more info). According to this story, he's found another teaching gig and is doing well. Good for him, and even better for his students! Yay, happy endings and new beginnings!

PAPERCUTZ Brings Back Classics Illustrated

Below are a series of press releases from the past year or so detailing Papercutz publishing's attempts to revive the Classics Illustrated series. They look like they're doing it up right too, but on to the official press release barrage:

Good News for Students:

Classics Illustrated returns after a 10-year hiatus -- just in time for the new semester

In January, kids will reluctantly return to school. Luckily, Classics Illustrated will join them. Generations of students have been introduced to the great classics by this legendary series of comics, their appetites whetted for the real thing.

These comic-book editions of great literature sold about 200 million copies from 1941 through 1998. Papercutz -- publisher of graphic-novel series such as The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and Tales from the Crypt -- is reviving the series in two formats. Classics Illustrated presents abridged versions of classic novels, while Classics Illustrated Deluxe features longer, more expansive adaptations.

The last few years have seen quickly growing recognition amongst librarians and especially educators of the power of comics to bring kids to reading and away from video, video games and the internet. Many publishers, including in the educational field, have successfully launched expansive graphic novel programs with widely varying degrees of quality.

The works from Papercutz are not for hire but loving adaptations by top artists. The line begins with Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, adapted by Michel Plessix. Later volumes will include Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations by Rick Geary, followed by Grimm’s Fairy Tales and The Invisible Man. Each adaptation will come from an artist with a special expertise in the book’s tone and topic. Great Expectations’ Geary, for example, is the writer-artist of the Treasury of Victorian Murder graphic-novel series and an expert in Dickensian England.The 144-page book is available in both hardcover ($17.95) and trade paperback editions ($13.95).

Plessix’s elaborately painted pages, precise storytelling, and style that can best be called “detailed impressionism” have earned shining reviews such as “adds dramatic flair to the beloved story” (Publishers Weekly), “brings to mind the best storybooks of our childhood” (Memphis Commercial Appeal) and “Excellent! Lively and fun!”(Children’s Bookwatch).

**F.Y.I., 2008 is The Wind in the Willows’ 100th anniversary!**

Classics Illustrated was the creation of Albert Lewis Kanter (1897-1973), a visionary publisher. Kanter believed that comics could introduce young readers to great literature. In 1941, he launched Classic Comics (changed to Classics Illustrated in 1947). For thirty years, Kanter produced more than 200 Classics Illustrated and Classics Illustrated Junior publications. They introduced young readers worldwide to fiction, history, folklore, mythology, and science --

In 1990, the Berkley Publishing Group and First Publishing revived Classics Illustrated as a series of graphic novels featuring new adaptations by such top graphic novelists as Rick Geary, Bill Sienkiewicz, Kyle Baker, and Gahan Wilson.

Papercutz will reprint many of these books. Papercutz has also obtained rights to new adaptations of the classics by some of the world's finest graphic novelists. Published under the Classics Illustrated Deluxe imprint, they devote three to five times as many pages as the previous series and more fully capture the depth of the original novels.

The Wind in the Willows: 6 ½ x 9”, 144pp., full color hardcover, $17.95, ISBN 978-1-59707-095-9, trade pb.: $13.95. ISBN 978-59707-096-6; publication: February ’08. Distributed by Macmillan.For more information please contact Papercutz publicist David Seidman at davidseidman@earthlink.net or 310-652-4369.

CLASSICS ILLUSTRATED PRESENTS: The Invisible Man

With coverage going from USA Today to a rapturous article in Newsweek, Papercutz’ rebirth of the great Classics Illustrated comics line continues with another superb adaptation by Rick Geary, who did Dickens’ Great Expectations which Papercutz revived a few months ago.

Taken from the vaults of the great quality line of short adaptations tried by First Comics in conjunction with Berkley back in the eighties, this adaptation has not seen the light in quite a few years.

And since then, Rick Geary has slowly but surely made quite a name for himself. Winner in 2007 of an Eisner Award (the comics’ industry’s Oscars) for his revival of Gumby comics with Bob (“Flaming Carrot”) Burden, he has also been recently published by Hill & Wang, with a biography of J. Edgar Hoover.

The main series Geary has become increasingly recognized for is the Treasury of Victorian Murder (NBM Publishing). Meticulously researched and comprising 9 volumes, it has presented that era’s most famous murders, from the Lizzie Borden double axe murder to the one of Abraham Lincoln, not to miss Jack the Ripper. All with tongue firmly in cheek.

And this adaptation injects a good deal of whimsy as well into the horror classic by the great Wells. The story is of a scientist who discovers the secret to making things invisible. There’s only one problem: he cannot undo it! As a result, he becomes stark raving mad and seriously dangerous.

Papercutz’ new line is actually two: one regular collection of which this is the second volume, the first one being Geary’s Great Expectations, and a Deluxe collection which presents much lengthier adaptations such as the first volume which had Plessix’ The Wind in the Willows. Saying “The Wind in the Willows has met its Michelangelo,” Newsweek went on to set the challenge: "Papercutz has set very high standards for its new series." The Deluxe series also has recently brought out a collection of Grimm Tales.

6 ½ x 9”, 56pp. full color hardcover, $9.95, ISBN 978-1-59707-106-2, publication date: August. Distributed by Macmillan.

Classics Illustrated’s Grimm Fairy Tales: Papercutz offers all-new comics adaptation

PAPERCUTZ Press Release:

You’ve never seen fairy tales quite like this.

In May, Papercutz will ship Tales from the Brothers Grimm to bookstores and comic-book shops. The 144-page full-color book presents the first official North American appearance of four stories adapted by some of Europe’s finest comics artists.

• Philip Petit combines a painter’s mastery of color, a campfire storyteller’s command of suspense, and a cartoonist’s touch of humor to retell the famous “Hansel and Gretel.”

• In “Learning How to Shudder” by Mazan (the pen name of Pierre Lavaud, artist of a volume of Lewis Trondheim and Joann Sfar’s popular series Dungeon), a boy tries to learn how to be afraid, but nothing scares him -- not even a scarlet-skinned man with horns and a tail -- until he gets a lesson from a very unexpected source

.• “The Devil and the Three Golden Hairs” is the first comic-book work by fine artist Cecile Chicault. It’s about a peasant boy who wants to marry a king’s daughter – but the king won’t let him do it unless the boy brings him three hairs from the devil’s head.

• And when the hero of Mazan’s “The Valiant Little Tailor” announces too proudly that he’s killed seven with one blow -- and doesn’t mention that the seven are flies -- he’s called on to fight some very grumpy giants.The paperback edition (ISBN-13: 978-159707-100-0) retails for $13.95, and the hardcover (ISBN-13: 978-159707-101-7) for $17.95.

"If the first two, “Great Expectations” and “Wind in the Willows,” are any indication, Papercutz has set very high standards for its new series.” -- Malcolm Jones, NEWSWEEK

Classics Illustrated has introduced generations of students to great literature. These comic-book editions of novels, plays, and poems sold about 200 million copies from 1941 through 1998. Tales of the Brothers Grimm is the third volume in Papercutz’s revival of the line.

“The volumes are perfectly designed for library shelves, with sturdy bindings and a large enough size for kids to get a good look at the contents,” School Library Journal has written about Papercutz’s new editions. “The artwork is beautifully reproduced -- crisp and clear -- and each book contains background about the series’ history and a brief bio of the artist/adaptor.”

Papercutz publishes comic books and graphic novels for kids. The company’s titles range from new adventures of the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew to Tales from the Crypt.

For more information, please visit http://www.papercutz.com or http://myspace.com/papercutzcomics, or contact Papercutz publicist David Seidman at davidseidman@earthlink.net or 310-652-4369.

I got some PAPERCUTZ: Great Expectations in the GN Form

NEWS FROM PAPERCUTZ (Press Release)

Great Expectations, the Graphic Novel

Best-selling Treasury of Victorian Murder creator Rick Geary adapts Charles Dickens’ tale of mystery and obsessive love, the next book in Papercutz’ Classics Illustrated re-launch.It’s been made into movies nearly a dozen times. School systems worldwide tell their students to read it. It’s in the top one-tenth of one percent of Amazon.com’s bestsellers. And in April, Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations appears under the Papercutz Classics Illustrated imprint as a graphic novel by Rick Geary, creator of the popular series Treasury of Victorian Murder.In both the prose novel and the graphic novel, the homeless orphan Pip falls desperately in love with the beautiful but shallow Estella. Pip struggles to prove himself worthy of Estella while a mysterious benefactor intervenes in the boy’s life.

Geary has won the 2007 “Best Title for a Younger Audience” Eisner award (the comic-book Oscar) and the National Cartoonists Society’s Book and Magazine Illustration Award. His Treasury of Victorian Murder graphic novels have inspired praise such as:

• “First rate. Superb as always.”--Publishers Weekly

• “Meticulously researched, beautifully drawn, and quite entertaining. My highest recommendation!”--Comics Buyer’s Guide

• “A must read!”--Andrew Smith, Scripps-Howard Newspapers

• “ Will have even reluctant readers immersed in history.”--School Library Journal

• “Geary relies not on gore but on the scrupulously drawn detail and the droll, telling expression.”--Booklist

• “A keen sense of period detail and sharp pacing.”--Kirkus Reviews

• “Filled with rich detail and told with the tightness of a thriller.”--Time.comix•

“Geary shows a true talent for capturing the images, mood and even language of Victorian society.”--Washington Post

Classics Illustrated has introduced generations of students to great literature. These comic-book editions of novels, plays, and epic poems sold about 200 million copies from 1941 through 1998. Geary originally created his version of Great Expectations for a Classics Illustrated series published by Berkley Publishing and First Publishing in 1990. It has been out of print for more than a decade, and Papercutz is proud to bring it back.

Great Expectations is a full-color hardcover, 56 pages long, at a size of 6 1/2” by 9”, a cover price of $9.95, ISBN 978-1-59707-097-3. Publication: April ’08. It is the second of Papercutz’s new Classics Illustrated volumes. The first was Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, adapted by Michel Plessix.

For more information please contact Papercutz publicist David Seidman at davidseidman@earthlink.net or 310-652-4369.

Thanks, NCETA!

I'm wrapping up here in Winston-Salem, NC, where I was the keynote speaker at the North Carolina English Teacher's Association. It's always interesting to go home and visit with North Carolina's teachers. Thanks, NCETA for having me!



Now to get ready for my presentations on graphic novels at the national NCTE conference in San Antonio! :)

I JUST VOTED DURING TEXAS' EARLY VOTING PERIOD

... and I was wearing a Captain America shirt while I did it! Now you vote, too. Captain America shirt optional, but damn-well able to make you feel even better once you pull the level/press the button/swipe the card/etc.

Blue Dot, Red Dot #2: "Giving"

Blue Dot, Red Dot #1: "Rule"

Blotchmen "24 Hour Comic Book Day" Story

24 hour Comic Book Day is an annual event that asks people to hole themselves up in their favorite creative spots, either alone or with the similarly-inclined, and produce a fully drawn, inked, and lettered story of sequential art in the span of 24 consecutive hours. I hope to try it out someday. The most recent was on October 18, and Tom Spurgeon has already found a gem among the pages in this Watchmen spoof, Blotchmen, in which a masked marauder must face the secret evil of...... William Carlos Williams????? It's just a plum good riff from Kevin Cannon, I tell you.

Review of Pitch Black

The morlocks are real, and some of them are even artistic. The rumors of people living beneath the streets of New York City, well below the subway lines, are true. The morlocks of Cinco Punto press's recent graphic novel release, Pitch Black, may not be as disfigured or scary as those in Wells' The Time Machine, but they are just as forgotten, just as shocking to surface-level sensabilities of class and standards of living, and, in the case of Anthony Horton, just as resourceful.

Horton's resources are his artistic ability and friendly, if sometimes guarded, spirit, and when paired with the talents of Youme Landowne, his story of living on the streets, then underneath them, becomes compelling, and unsettling. Horton seemed to have a doomed life from the start. An unwanted child soon became an invisible youth in a megalopolis where people have to look out for themselves. The social services he found seemed just as dangerous as living alone, and he eventually found himself in the subterrain of the Big Apple. If not for a chance encounter with fellow artist Landowne, his story might never have been told.

As it happened, though, that fated meeting in the subway system produced an intriguing, sometimes stimyying work of sequential art.

Check out The ALAN Review 36.1 (Fall 08)

See my thoughts on the graphic novel as genre vs. the graphic novel as form or medium in the latest ALAN Review. Also included: a visual literacy activity sure to help you and others see that sequential art is not a genre in and of itself, but a format that supports multiple genres. Read The Alan Review 36.1 now, and be sure to check out my article "Die a Graphic Death: Revisiting the Death of Genre with Graphic novels or 'Why won't you just die already?'" -- perhaps the longest title ever to appear in an ALAN publication! ;)

The Education of Hopey Glass

Douglas Wolk can do no wrong nowadays, mostly becuase of his great book Reading Comics, so it's not surprising that his review of The Education of Hopey Glass is getting some attention. Thanks to D. Myers for sending me the link to the NY Times review, which is worthy of the praise it is getting. As someone who will be using the new Jaime Hernandez graphic novel in a college-level class next semester, I was very happy to see it getting some love, though it has been out for a while now.

Woot!: Obama'El

"This Looks Like Fun!": Mascot to the Rescue

From the HarperCollins website:

Josh Miller, sixth grader at Demarest Elementary School, has a secret. Everything that happens to Mascot, the superhero sidekick in the Captain Major comic books, also happens to Josh. So when Josh finds out that Mascot is slated to die in the next Captain Major adventure, he knows he has to do something—and fast! A budding comics artist and writer himself, Josh and his new friend, Kelsey (aka Large Lass), take off to find Stan Kirby, the creator of the Captain Major series, so they can save Mascot—and Josh's life.

Comic-book legend Peter David teams up with the renowned comics artist Colleen Doran in their first book for young readers.

Comics fans will note the reference/reverence to super-hero creators Stan Lee and Jack Kirby , and it's about time sidekicks got in on the action since so many YA and traditional print novels have been exploring super-hero themes and tropes as of late. And as someone who shares a name with one of comics' all-time mascots (Captain America's Bucky), I'm partial to this sort of thing.

Soo fun! I wish they'd send me a review copy (hint, hint, if you're reading.....)

Papercutz' Frankenstein

A revamped version of the Classics Illustrated Frankenstein will soon be releases by imprint Papercutz, which apparently has several graphic novel adaptations from the series for sale. For some interesting contrasting visuals, do a search for "Frankenstein" on my blog and take a look at some excellent artwork.

O My! Sequential Art Students Create O. Henry Collection

Let's face it, if you've been an English teacher long enough, you've taught an O. Henry story. It's relatively easy to get readers to feel the pathos of his stories, but now there's a resource to help you get them to visualize the characters, their reactions, their emotions, etc:

Students from SVA Comic Book Storytelling Workshop have compiled a graphic anthology of his works, including stories like "The Green Door" and "The Whirligig of Life."

"Looks Good To Me:" I Live Here

Comics have a long history of detailing the plight of the poor and displaced, or those looking for a new home and life after dealing with crisis or disaster, from Will Eisner to Joe Kubert to adaptations of Kafka to Joe Sacco to the upcoming Hurricane Katrina tale After the Deluge to the following new title, as detailed in a press release from Pantheon:

"Gut–wrenching and hauntingly beautiful" —Glamour

For the past two months, you've listened to me tell you how excited I was about I Live Here. I couldn't be more pleased now to tell you that it's finally on sale! If you don't already know what I Live Here is about, here's the short version: the book—or more precisely the four books that are contained within a slipcase—is a stunning visual documentary, in which the lives of refugees and displaced people become at once personal and universal. I Live Here is a raw and intimate journey to crises in four corners of the world: war in Chechnya, ethnic cleansing in Burma, globalization in Mexico, and AIDS in Malawi.

The voices we encounter are those of displaced women and children, told in their own words or by noted writers and artists, including Joe Sacco, Ann–Marie MacDonald, Phoebe Gloeckner, Chris Abani, and many others. The stories unfold in an avalanche: an orphan goes to jail for stealing leftovers. A grieving mother snaps photos of spaces left vacant by her vanished teenaged daughter. A child soldier escapes his army only to be saved by the people he was trained to kill. An elderly woman recounts the tumultuous history of fellow refugees. Threaded throughout these accounts is Mia Kirshner's intimate travel narrative, brought vividly to life in collaboration with writer J.B. MacKinnon and designers Paul Shoebridge and Michael Simons.

I Live Here is a truly groundbreaking work.

Visit the official site

Watch a video that contains images from the Ingushetia section of the book

Join the cause on Facebook

Order your copy here Happy Reading!

--Hillary Tisman

Powell's City of Books (Portland, Oregon)

This weekend I had a dream come true, literally. For years now, I've had a recurring dream where I visit the largest bookstore in the world. Stacks are stories high, the ladders are enormous, and long velvet drapes cover many of the sections until one asks for them to be revealed. That wasn't exactly the layout of Powell's City of Books, but the bookstore in Portland, Oregon, is the largest in the world and was certainly worth the visit.

Imagine being a bookstore that encompasses and entire block, one with graphic novels on shelf after shelf, from the floor to twenty feet above your head -- and that was just *one* section of GN's. Powell's had several sections -a couple of Manga sections (one for general Manga, another for adolescents favorites), an adult graphic novels section (not what you think, but they probably had a section of those too somewhere), and a kids graphic novel section.

Twas bliss. Never have I been in a bookstore so big, they give you a map of the place when you walk in the door. And despite the inexplicable absence of copies of Maus I (II was in abundance), the graphic novel section was impressive. If only I could visit Powell's again as easily as I do that bookstore in my dreams...

Thanks, OCTE!

Thanks to all the folks in Lake Oswego, Oregon, for hosting me this weekend. I hope my keynote was OK. The audience certainly was attentive, and I think the early-career teachers in the audience might have particularly gained some direction, based on questions and such. I had a great time and appreciate everyone's efforts, and I'm happy to have made a new friend in Bob Hamm.

One more keynote to go (North Carolina) before my appearances at the national NCTE conference in San Antonio!

Political Fun w/ Microsoft Publisher

See, you don't need fancy programs like Comic Life to create comics art with your students (but it is a great application!). Using Microsoft Word and even Microsoft Publisher can be an effective way of creating pieces, for example, the political comic strip I made:

(Surely I'm not the only classic car buff to have noticed the muscle car undertones of the recent political campaigns. My thoughts? As the cartoon clearly implies, "Nobody ever bought a Maverick if they could afford a Mustang!")

I Found This Stimulating (Intelectually): Portillo's Gabriel

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

"Stop Staring at Me, Swann!"

The Swann Foundation for Caricature and Cartoon, Library of Congress, is now accepting applications for the Swann Fellowship for the 2009-2010 academic year. Annual award up to $15,000 to support scholarly graduate research in caricature and cartoon. Applicants must be enrolled in an accredited M.A. or Ph.D program in a university in the U.S., Canada, or Mexico. Deadline: Feb. 13, 2009. Access guidelines and application at:
http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/swann/swann-fellow.html

Contact Martha Kennedy with questions at 202/707-9115 or email swann@loc.gov.

What's Wrong with Calling them Proto-comics?

Or precursors? Or sequential art? Critic Domingos Isabelinho discusses Medieval painting and book illustration, the wordless engraving cycle, Modern and Post-Modern painting and Concrete and Visual Poetry as entities that can help "expand comics as an art form," then critiques each one for how it is or is not comics. Something doesn't have to be the thing itself to have the traits of the thing; nor do we need to worry so much on giving something from the 15th century a 19th or 21st century label. No, there weren't comic books in the Middle Ages, but there was sequential art and visual narrative. Acknowledging the precursors to something seems to inherently suggest that there are going to evolutions an devolutions throughout the ages, but at least Isabelinho is attempting an interesting vivisection of the intersections of myriad art forms with multiple similarities.

Non-Fiction Manga on Japanese Power and War

Thanks to Tom Spurgeon for offering the above link. You'll have to scroll down a bit to get the the translated manga, but it's worth it. Too often school children in America only get the American-European viewpoint on politics and war, so it is good to see other viewpoints expressed. Here's a take on WWII-era Japan we might not often see. It reminds me a little of Barefoot Gen.

See You in San Antonio -- If Not Earlier!

Thanks, ICTE!

I'm currently in Johnston, Iowa, working with the Iowa Council of Teachers of English and am having a blast. Some members wanted me to post a "top ten" recommended reading list, so here it is in no particular order!:

Maus by Art Spiegelman
Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
Bone by Jeff Smith
The Tale of One Bad Rat by Bryan Talbot
Ultimate Spider-Man Volume 1 by Marvel
American Born Chinese by Gene Yang
Deogratias: A Tale of Rwanda by J.P. Stassen
Runaways by Brian K. Vaughan and Marvel
Pride of Baghdad by Brian K. Vaughan
Pedro and Me by Judd Winick

Now, I often rotate titles in and out of my ten favorites, and these represent middle-and high school-friendly titles. If you want more titles and more mature titles, just ask.

The Cost of Prison

The Comics Reporter has posted a link to The Real Cost of Prison Project. The organization offers 3 different comic books about prison life and its large, scary reach beyond the facility walls. PDF's of their titles are available for download, but the comics can be obtained for free with a quick e-mail or letter to their home office. I'm not sure everyone's politics will match well with their message, but their work is interesting, one has to admit.

"You Gotta See This!": Tom Spurgeon's "50 Things That Every Great Comics Collection Needs to Have"

Tom Spurgeon has an extensive and fascinating list of must-have items for the comics collector over on his website The Comics Reporter. My somewhat-nearby-neighbor has some great items listed too. Here's the text for item 38:

38. A Stack of Comics You Can Hand To Anybody's Kid

If I were President, I would mandate that every household in America must have a white wicker basket holding an approximately 24-inch tall pile of beat up old comic books for kids to read. So certainly someone with a sizable comics collection should be able to offer a stack of old funnybooks to their sister's kids -- or their neighbor's, or their employer's and so on. I don't think the comics have to be rigorously excellent when they're aimed at this audience, because the repetition that signifies such comics as uninspired might be lost on fresh eyes. That being said, really bad comics might not have what it takes to capture anyone's attention, let alone a kid soaked in today's visually-saturated media offerings.

I'm happy to say I've got a little of many of the things I should have according to Spurgeon (and am excited to rise to the challenge to get the other things!), and I'm not afraid to prove it. My entry for "Item 22: A Selection of Comics That Interest You That You Can't Explain To Anyone Else:"? A Pearl Jam comic book that I am proud to own. PJ fans understand, but anyone else? And how can I defend my stack of Defenders comics?

"I Will Be Buying This:" Breakdowns

I love Art Spiegelman (perhaps you saw that I ranked him as the most important contemporary graphic novelist in an earlier post? It's not like that's a revolutionary statement to make, or anything, though he may not like the term "graphic novelist.") and have been reading selections of his newest autobiographical book Breakdowns since my UVa days (the shorts appeared in VQR, or Virginia Quarterly Review).

Here's some information on the book from the Pantheon newsletter "Notes from Hillary." Thanks, Hillary, for adding me to your distribution list! :)

You'll have to wait until October 7 to get your copy of Breakdowns but, as those of you who saw the excerpt in the September 15 issue of The New Yorker know, it's well worth it. Breakdowns is the chronicle of Art Spiegelman's story, told in three ways—in 20 pages of new comix that give us the story of his evolution from a MAD–comics obsessed boy to a neurotic adult examining the effect of his parents' memories in Auschwitz on his own son, in a section on the work that he did in the 1970s as an underground comix artist, and in an illustrated essay that looks back at the sixties as Art pushes sixty and explains the obsessions that brought his works into being. Funny, complex, inventive and poignant, Breakdowns is everything you've come to expect from Art Spiegelman. You won't want to miss it. And, you don't want to miss the opportunity to hear Art speak, either. Starting on October 7, he'll be crisscrossing the country and making appearances in Austin, New York, California, Philadelphia, and everywhere in between. If you're in the New York area, you can also catch Art at this year's New Yorker Festival. He'll be giving a talk called "Breakdowns: Comix 101" on Saturday, October 4 at 4:30 pm. Purchase your tickets here.

DC Knows the Future --- almost.....

The "big event" of DC comics' super-hero universe stories for the last year (though it seems like it has been going on forever) has been entitled "Final Crisis." Looks like they were only a "anci" away from being prophets. Ozymandias would have gotten it exactly right.....

Pictured here: Supergirl wonders if her assets in the global marketplace will be enough to overcome the economic downturn of domestic economies and if she should diversify her portfolio while rolling over her 401K into a Swiss-Kryptonian off-planet holding firm account. "And then there's social security to worry about......" she mutters.

"Looks Good to Me": Alan's War

Tom Spurgeon reveals this new title from :01. Looks like a good one: a story about a WWII soldier's "past-present."

No More Minx

DC's fledgling imprint Minx Comics, a graphic novel line designed to target the YA literature/female readership, has failed to garner enough interest to continue production. So, it has been axed. The Beat covers the story pretty well, as does Comic Book Resources.

But let's face it, this is probably the first time you've ever heard of Minx, right? I have a few of the samplers, and while the stories weren't terrible, they weren't exactly earth-shattering either. But, then again, they weren't being marketed to me. But, then again, apparently they weren't too popular among those to whom they were being marketed, either.....

It is worth noting that the imprint marked a strong effort from a major comics publisher to offer multiple graphic novel titles to young female readers. Though there are plenty of women who enjoy super-hero comics and plenty of strong super-heroines out there, the perception is prevalent that the form -- or at least the super-hero genre of it -- is a man's domain.

But there are some excellent female graphic novelists out there. I don't care for Alison Bechdel's writing style, but I do respect her work. Jessica Abel is a rising star, and Marjane Satrapi makes my top 4 most important current graphic novelists list (the others are men: Art Spiegelman, James Sterm, and Chris Ware). Lynda Barry also has a growing opus of interesting sequential art. They tend to focus on the same sorts of genres all great graphic novelists seem drawn to -- autobiography, memoir, autobiographical fiction, coming of age in turmoil - rather than capes and tights, of course.

The market is out there, but it looks like it'll take future efforts to solidify it.

It Worked for YA Lit

Eisner award winning graphic novels and nominees can now place an informative medal on their covers. Well, the people who sell them can, anyway. ICV2 has the details here.

Many YA titles benefit from the placement of a National Book award or Printz award or King award label on their covers. This is a smart way to help legitimize graphic novels in the eyes of hesitant but curious readers, in my opinion. Might it also contribute to canon formation? Probably, but that's not a new phenomena among any form of media, graphic novels included.

"Looks Good to Me": La Perdida

This looks like a great book that might have some local interest for my students at UTEP. Here's how Pantheon starts its press release on this latest work from growing super-start Jessica Abel:

"From the Harvey and Lulu award–winning creator of Artbabe comes this riveting story of a young woman’s misadventures in Mexico City. Carla, an American estranged from her Mexican father, heads to Mexico City to “find herself.” She crashes with a former fling, Harry, who has been drinking his way through the capital in the great tradition of his heroes, William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac. Harry is good—humored about Carla’s reappearance on his doorstep—until he realizes that Carla, who spends her days soaking in the city, exploring Frida Kahlo’s house, and learning Spanish, has no intention of leaving."

"Looks Good To Me": Chiggers

Ah, real Southerners know what chiggers are. Well, there are probably multiple definitions. The one I know is "tiny little things that get under your skin and itch like crazy." Maybe that's what is going on as the female lead in this new graphic novel deals with changes in friendship and identity at a summer camp in my home state of North Carolina. For more on Old North Stater Hope Larson's graphic novel Chiggers, visit Comic Book Resources.

Dark Horse Donates Collection to Portland State

As some one wanting to build a comcis collection at his own university, I was very happy to see this press release:

News: Dark Horse Comics, Inc., Donates Complete Collection to Portland State University Library

Author: Office of University Communications, 503-725-3711 (PSU)

Posted: September 17, 2008

Portland State University alumni Mike Richardson, founder and president of Dark Horse Comics, Inc., and Neil Hankerson, executive vice president, have donated copies of all publications generated by Dark Horse over the years to Portland State, and will continue to provide copies of all future items produced by the company. This generous gift will result in a complete collection of the Dark Horse corpus to be preserved in the Portland State University Library Special Collections.

"As a Portland State University alumnus, I am elated to be part of this monumental Dark Horse archive event," said Neil Hankerson. "Being able to bring this locally grown publishing company together with PSU exemplifies the unifying nature of Oregon and demonstrates the amazing advantages of having comics in schools. This archival program solidifies Dark Horse Comics' legacy, not only as a company dedicated to organic growth, but also as one of the world's foremost comic book publishing companies, committed to contributing quality works to the comic literary canon."

This valuable collection will be a destination resource for researchers in American studies, popular culture, art, sociology, gender studies, English literature and many other fields. So far, more than 2,000 Dark Horse comics, manga and books have been received, catalogued and made available for students and faculty to check out at the Millar Library. Dark Horse publications in more than 15 different languages are already being used as a resource by students studying foreign languages, and by international students enjoying material in their own languages.

"Neil Hankerson and Mike Richardson are stellar examples of engaged Portland State University alumni who give back to their community and to their university," said Helen H. Spalding, PSU's university librarian. "Their generous gift of the corpus of the Dark Horse Comics, Inc., is a significant destination collection for those researching the history of comics, popular culture, sequential art and many more facets of inquiry. Because of the reputation and size of the Dark Horse collection, the Library hopes to attract additional comic collections from other publishers and collectors, creating one of the largest research collections of its kind."

One copy of each available title or product given to the Portland State University Library will be catalogued, preserved and housed in Special Collections with supervised access. An additional copy will be added to the general Library collection, where they will be available to more than 207,000 students and faculty in Oregon and Washington through the Orbis Cascade Alliance, and internationally through the Library's interlibrary loan services.

Coinciding with PSU Weekend, Portland State will recognize and celebrate the gift with a special event on October 16, 2008, at 7 p.m. in the Smith Memorial Student Union ballroom. The event is free and open to the public, and will feature Dark Horse materials and a keynote by Mike Richardson. Media inquiries should be directed to Scott Gallagher at (503) 725-8789 or svg@pdx.edu.

Dark Horse Comics, Inc.
Founded in 1986 by Mike Richardson, who sought to establish an ideal atmosphere for creative professionals, Dark Horse Comics has grown to become the third-largest comics publisher in the United States and is acclaimed internationally for the quality and diversity of its line. By attracting the top talent in the comics field, Dark Horse continues to change the shape of the industry and grow its brand throughout the world. In conjunction with its sister company Dark Horse Entertainment, Dark Horse Comics has more than 350 properties currently represented under the Dark Horse banner, serving as the jumping-off point for comics, books, films, television, electronic games, toys and collectibles. In 2008, Dark Horse distributed its characters and concepts to more than 50 countries, continuing its mission of content creation and distribution in all of its forms throughout the world.

Portland State University Library
At the heart of an engaged university, the Portland State University Library supports the information, research, teaching and learning needs for more than 1,800 faculty members and 27,000 students at Portland State, covering 125 undergraduate, master's and doctoral degrees as well as graduate certificates and continuing education programs. The Portland State Library has over 1.4 million volumes, subscribes to almost 19,000 journals with access to over 45,600 electronic journals and over 32,000 electronic books. In addition, Portland State Library is a collaborative regional depository for federal documents and a member of the Portals and Orbis/Cascade Alliance library consortia, collaborating with other libraries to serve the region and scholarly community at large.

Image Comics Gets into the All-Ages Comics Game

PRESS RELEASE – SHADOWLINE LAUNCHES ALL-AGES LINE, SILVERLINE BOOKS!
New Shadowline imprint to exclusively feature all-ages graphic novels and books!

16 September, 2008 (Berkeley, CA) - This October, Image Comics’ Shadowline will debut Image’s first ever all-ages graphic novel and books imprint, Silverline Books.

“Silverline Books is dedicated to publishing quality all-ages books that bridge the gap between traditional storybooks and comics,” said Publisher Jim Valentino. “We believe that there’s a strong need to reach out to younger readers and introduce them to comics with uplifting, non-violent stories in a format they’re familiar with.”

Silverline Books officially begins October 29th with its first all-new release, DEAR DRACULA by Joshua Williamson and Vicente Navarrete; a Halloween-themed story about a boy who gets visited by his hero, the king of all vampires. It continues in November with BRUCE, THE LITTLE BLUE SPRUCE by Shadowline editor Kristen Simon and Image co-founder Jim Valentino, in which the titular tree wants nothing more than a family to take him in on Christmas.

The year ends with two more Silverline titles, including December’s MISSING THE BOAT by Justin Shady (aka Wayne Chinsang) and Dwellephant, about two lazy animals who are too late for Noah’s Ark, and the softcover follow-up to last years double Eisner award nominee PX! BOOK TWO: IN THE SERVICE OF THE QUEEN by Eric A. Anderson and Manny Trembley.

For more about Silverline Books, including five page previews, SRP, page count, format and ISBNs, please visit www.shadowlinecomics.com/silverline.


Thursday, August 14, 2008

PRESS RELEASE - VALENTINO, SIMON AND SILVERLINE SPROUT BRUCE: THE LITTLE BLUE SPRUCE!
Image Comics' Silverline, Kristen Koerner Simon and Jim Valentino tell the tale of a blue spruce searching for a home!

13 August 2008 (Berkeley, CA) - This holiday season Silverline Books, the all-ages book division of Image Comics' Shadowline, presents Kristen Koerner Simon and Jim Valentino's all-ages story of a little blue tree without a home, but not without hope; BRUCE: THE LITTLE BLUE SPRUCE.

"One of my unattained career goals was to do a children's book and when Kris brought BRUCE: THE LITTLE BLUE SPRUCE to me, I instantly knew this would be it," said Valentino. "Not only did I love the gentle message of accepting the differences in ourselves and others but the challenge of drawing a story where the principal character was a tree was too much to pass up!"

Just in time for the Holidays comes BRUCE: THE LITTLE BLUE SPRUCE, a heartwarming tale of Bruce, a blue spruce who wants nothing more than to be chosen by a special family as their Christmas tree. Engagingly written by Kristen Koerner Simon, illustrated by Image Comics co-founder and award-winning artist Jim Valentino and featuring painted color by THE SURREAL ADVENTURES OF EDGAR ALLAN POO's Avery Butterworth, BRUCE: THE LITTLE BLUE SPRUCE will charm even the most cynical of Scrooge's all year long.

BRUCE: THE LITTLE BLUE SPRUCE (ISBN: 978-1-60706-008-6), a 32-page square-sized hardcover for $9.99, will be in stores November 5, 2008.

(cover image courtesy of the Beat)

They Start so Young!

Doug Fisher draws our attention to this video from Youtube in which a young creator asks for help in getting his graphic novel project off the ground:

Comic Artist Kyle Baker's X-Spoofs

It's a sign that a form has been established and has its own canons when those involved in its continued creation start to trope and spoof it. Here's an excellent example circa 1989-1999 from Kyle Baker in which a collection of his cartoons poke fun of the by-then mega-popular X-Men characters. This is super-hero comics genre-specific, so if you don't get the in-jokes, you probably have too much back reading to do and should probably just find a geek to explain them to you.

My Web Seminar Coming Up!: September 23,

Doug Fisher and Nancy Frey will be joining me in an NCTE-sponsored web seminar in which we'll discuss ways we use comics to get kids considering the writing process. It's gonna be a cool, so join up today. Heck, bring your entire class along!

Need Help Explaining that Super-Collider To Your Students?

The particle-accelerator/ super-collider that was supposed to suck the earth into a giant worm hole hasn't done so -- yet. So, you may be interested in sharing a little info about it with your students -- before it sucks us all into a giant worm hole. "But physics is hard!" you proclaim, like a politically incorrect Barbie doll. The folks at PhD comics have tried to resolve your lack of clarity before you're pulled particle by particle into the abyss (which has cheap gas and great hotel rates, by the way). Visit the link embedded in the post's title and see if PhD's take on this amazing experiment which will surely doom us all represents yet another example of sequential art narrative's ability to inform and teach.

9/11 Graphic Novel Getting Good Reviews

Gutierrez on a Roll!

A single story in the Diamond Bookshelf section? Feh! Single entries are for weaklings. See Peter Gutierrez follow up on the story I described below with an interview detailing comics' connections to the New Literacies and media studies! He's a Hulk of a sequential art narrative in education advocate, I tell you! And a good interview, too!

Gutierrez Sees Comics as Preferable Medium For Teaching Media Literacy

Montclair, New Jersey media specialist and comics creator Peter Gutierrez has gained my attention and the notice of the NCTE Inbox for his words about using comics to teach media literacy. Posted on the Diamond Bookshelf website in the "School Articles" section, the piece "make[s] the argument for revisiting comics as an inherently effective teaching gateway to a variety of media as well as a means to address broader issues of process and the role of media in society."

Compelling, and completely agreeable to the views of EN/SANE world, it may be read in full here.

OK, I'm off to send Mr. G an e-mail about my SANE SIG idea....

Review Material and Press Releases Wanted

So I recently asked a more established comics blogger about how he gets books sent to him for review. He replied that he didn't do anything special; he just put some contact info on his page. Well, my profile has been updated with my work address.

If you publish comics or graphic novels that you think are appropriate for k-12 students and you'd like to send me copies for review, I'll certainly try to review them or mention them in appropriate articles or even write lesson plans/articles about them.

As well, if you have comics-and-education-related press releases, I'll be happy to consider posting them to the blog and/or commenting on them here as well.

EN/SANE world covers a very specific niche in the comics blogging community, the education community, and the English language arts community. No other site that I know of focuses as exclusively on sequential art narrative's intersections with literacy and education issues as does this one. As of yet, no academic journal exists that focuses exclusively on SANE issues either, so the site can do a real service for those interested in comics and pedagogy.

UF Conference on Comics and Graphic Novels 09

Thanks to Aaron Kashtan for sending the press release below. I attended the first-ever UF CCGN but haven't made it back since. It's a fun conference if you can get on the schedule. North Florida is a neat place, and the UF campus is worth the visit alone. They got real live gators on campus! And in a little lake right beside freshman housing. How many a drunken newbie has stumbled back to his or her dorm, only to end up wrasslin' a reptile? I don't know, but the University of Florida is a great place for comics studies, and the conference, if you can involved, is a good one. Here's Aaron's press release.


The University of Florida's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences is pleased to announce the 2008 UF Conference on Comics and Graphic Novels: "Convergences: Comics, Culture and Globalization," which will be held in Gainesville, Florida, on March 21-22, 2009.

This seventh annual conference on comics will focus on issues of globalization and reception. Comics are, now more than ever, an international phenomenon, but scholarly accounts of comics are often limited by an exclusive focus on examples from a single national or continental comics industry. This problem is exacerbated by the scarcity of translations. Furthermore, one of the many obstacles facing the emergent discipline of comics studies is the difficulty of communication between scholars working in different national and cultural contexts. This conference is intended as a small step toward meeting these challenges.

The goal of this conference, therefore, is to consider the history and reception of comics on a global level. We are interested in papers that focus on international comics and animation markets, cross-cultural reception of comics, and the differential status of comics in different cultures (e.g. as a children’s/mass medium or as a mainstream form of literature). Here we are using "comics" in its broadest sense, embracing animation, manga, anime, graphic novels, webcomics, political cartoons, and even some "fine art." In addition to theoretically grounded work, we encourage submission of archival and historical research.

Special guests will include Susan Napier (From Impressionism to Anime: Japan as Fantasy and Fan Cult in the Mind of the West), Jessica Abel (La Perdida), Matt Madden (99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style) and Sara Cooper (Founder, MLA Discussion Group on Cuban and Cuban Diaspora Cultural Production).

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

The reception of comics outside their original cultural context, both by fans (e.g. manga fandom in the United States) and by creators (e.g. American comics’ influence on the development of manga and BD, the “nouvelle manga” movement).

Connections between comics form and cultural status. How have views of the cultural position of comics (e.g. as a children’s versus an adult medium or as a mass-cultural versus a literary medium) evolved differently in various cultures? What does this have to do with the formal properties of the medium, such as sequentiality and hybrid image-textuality?

Comics as a global market: migrations of talent between multiple comics industries (e.g. the Spanish and Filipino “invasions” of British and American comics in the 1960s and 1970s, the Korean influence on U.S. animation) and cross-national collaborations (e.g. mangakas working for Marvel and DC).

Comics studies as a global discipline. What barriers exist to the study of comics from a global perspective and to collaborations between comics scholars from different cultures? How might such barriers be removed?

The impact of the internet on the global comics market. How have scanlations and filesharing helped or hindered global comics industries?

Canon formation and expansion. What happens when works from unfamiliar cultural contexts (e.g. Persepolis and Epileptic) enter a national comics canon?

Comics and travel/tourism, e.g. in Craig Thompson’s Carnet de Voyage.

Comics and issues of postcolonial identity, e.g. in Abouet & Oubrerie’s Aya, Baru’s Road to America, Horrocks’s Hicksville.

Translations of comics, both official and unofficial, e.g. scanlation. What are the unique difficulties and advantages of comics translation as opposed to prose translation? What are the unique difficulties and approaches to translating comics from different cultures? How, if at all, do “official” and “unofficial” translators approach comics translations differently?

Abstract submissions should be approximately 250-500 words in length. Presentations will be 15 minutes with 5 minutes of question and answer.

The deadline for abstract submissions is December 1, 2008. Abstracts or questions should be submitted to Aaron Kashtan at akashtan@english.ufl.edu or Tania Darlington at tdarlington1@ufl.edu. See the conference website for schedules and additional information: http://global.comic-studies.org/.

Google Teaches About Chrome via Scott McCloud Sequential Art

Thanks to Dr. Brunk-Chavez for sending me the link to this dandy little web comic from a company you may have heard of. According to The Beat, the comic, designed to introduce the world to Google Chrome, an apparently better and more efficient way to surf the web, was leaked before it was supposed to go public, but now that it is out there, Google doesn't seem to mind.

The layout is typical Scott McCloud too. Informative, fun, and full of graphs. And people drawn to explain them to you. ;)

So comics have been used to educate the military, protect the innocent, inform about safety and health issues, and now, to launch a new web browser. That's pedagogical diversity from an formidable form, I tell you!

Early Hernandez Bros Art

I was excited to see Heidi at the Beat cover this bevvy of barely-viewed old treasures from the Hernandez Bros. I recently read Locas and have a few Penny Centuries lying around, have read Sloth and have enjoyed their anthologized work, and now that I'm at UTEP, I'm trying to learn more about Hispanic comic artists.

It's a dream of mine to get Jaime and Gilbert to visit campus, so if you're reading, fellows, drop me a line!