by Glen Downey, Comics in Education, www.comicsineducation.com There are terms specific to comics which don't have corollaries in traditional print narratives and which may not have direct filmic equivalents. However, understanding these terms is central to understanding the genre. PanelA geometric shape that contains a scene from a visual narrative. It can occupy the whole or a part of a page. Panels are the organizational framework of comics--the moments of action--and the reader must stitch the sequence of panels together to derive meaning from the work. GutterThe gutters are the areas between panels that are sometimes referred to as the breaks or white space that separate the action of a visual narrative. Their importance cannot be underestimated though it is sometimes challenging to conceptualize this. It is in the gutters of a graphic story that the reader makes meaning of the transition from one panel to the next. They can represent the passage of time, a change of place, or no discernible movement at all. Narrative / Caption BoxThese boxes are often located at the corners of panels and provide narration to accompany the dialogue in a graphic story. These boxes are often at their most effective when they are characterized by narrative economy, quickly setting a scene, indicating a transition, or otherwise establishing the time, place, and/or circumstances that a reader must understand before making meaning of an individual panel or panel sequence. Dialogue Balloon / BubbleCharacters in a graphic novel or comic use dialogue balloons to talk to one another. Often these balloons are oblate (flattened) ellipses that allow typewritten dialogue to fit within them while avoiding an overabundance of white space. Whispers can sometimes be conveyed through dialogue balloons that are formed from dashed lines while dialogue "bubbles" that look like miniature clouds are almost always reserved for things that a character is thinking rather than saying aloud. Sound EffectsAnother characteristic of graphic stories that is unique to visual narrative is the use of onomatopoeic sound effects, typically written as highly stylized words across a page in a form that serves as an echo to the sense. Hence, an artist attempting to depict an explosion might use a thick, sans serif font to construct the word "BOOM!" across a panel. These sound effects provide an aural accompaniment to a narrative sequence or individual moment in a graphic story and help the reader more fully understand and process what is happening.
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Perhaps you were a comics fan when you were a kid and haven't read them in a while. Things have probably changed a bit since then. Or maybe you'd like to use them in the classroom with your students but feel like you don't have a great background in reading them. The following list should help get you started on the road to becoming an expert on the hottest and most exciting genre on the market! The Mysterious Underground Men (1948), by Osamu Tezuka
A Contract with God (1978), by Will Eisner
Maus (1986), by Art Spiegelman
The Dark Knight Returns (1986), by Frank Miller
Watchmen (1986), by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
Finder (1996-present), by Carla Speed McNeil
Transmetropolitan, Volume 1 (1997), by Warren Ellis and Darcik Robertson
Persepolis (2004), by Marjane Satrapi
Building Stories (2012), by Chris Ware
Boxers & Saints (2013), by Gene Luen Yang
"Graphic Poetry" Activity
3/21/2014
DescriptionStudents read, examine, and create graphic poems, and consider both the implications of using the visual in connection with poetry, and whether an artist or poet/artist can visually represent the intricacies of literal and figurative language. The hope is that students will recognize the beauty of graphic poetry and thereby develop a greater fondness for and appreciation of poetry proper. SkillsSelf Awareness, Metacognition, Critical Thinking, Navigation Skills, Making Connections PurposeBy the end of the activity, students should see that there is something to be gained and something to be lost in marrying a poem with its graphic illustration. What is gained is a visual context that the reader can use to help him or her understand what is actually happening in a poem. What is also gained is the recognition of what art can and cannot do with pictures in order to mimic or represent the figurative. What is lost, perhaps, is precisely what is lost when the curtain rises for the presentation of play and we see the gradual unfolding of the directorial decisions that will define how the performance in front of us will interpret the stage directions and dialogue of the playwright. Critical Thinking Questions
Self-Awareness and Metacognition Questions
Navigation Skills and Making Connections Questions
How Can Visual Narrative Foster Inquiry in This ActivityReading graphic poetry can help students to make sense of some of the complexities of the poems they examine, even if those complexities are what is literally “happening” in a given work. In my experience, though, a student is far more likely to want to bring their critical thinking and inquiry skills to bear on a poem that they believe they understand than one they don’t. As students move through the process of reading, analyzing, and creating graphic poetry, it is essential that teachers encourage students to develop an ongoing dialogue with the work they are studying.
Thank You for Your Wonderful Support!
3/21/2014
We Salute You!Comics in Education wanted to take a moment to thank once again for all of the wonderful visitors to our website. We've now officially reached 10,000 of you and more are visiting the site every day. Our mission is to nurture and develop a love of visual narrative in the K-12 classroom, and we're delighted that so many of you out there are as well. In truth, we expected you would be, but you're doing such wonderful things! In addition to the "Our Supporters" tab we now have one for "Corporate Support." If you are a business or organization whose goals align with ours, we'd be happy to feature your icon, company description, and a link to your business. You can find both of these pages under the "About" tab on our website or just click the links above. This service is free of charge and lets the wider comics and education communities know of your support. If you are interested in additional services that Comics and Education can provide, like interviews, author visits, product reviews, or advertising, please contact us here for a brochure. Once again, thank you for your support of Comics in Education. We'll let you get back to all of the great work you're doing! Sincerely, Comics in Education A Rationale for Comics in Education
3/19/2014
When it comes to comics and the broader tradition of visual narrative, it is incumbent upon educators to teach students about the genre and its history. If we talk to students about how poetry developed from an oral tradition, or about the resurgence of the drama during themiddle ages, we must also talk to them about how sequential art has evolved over time. We must treat the genre with the same degree of seriousness with which treat other genres, because not doing so would be to suggest that there is something nobler or far more worthy of our consideration in poetry or in drama than in visual narrative. That, however, is rubbish. Great works of literature are great because they merit such distinction--not because they happen to be of one particular genre and not another. We don't look down our nose at War and Peace because it's a novel and not poetry. We don't think less of King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail" because it's "only a letter." Visual narrative is a genre worthy of study, both for ourselves and for our students. Comics in Education (www.comicsineducation.com) is dedicated to proving that. Comics in Education Says Thank You!
3/18/2014
You absolutely rock!Comics in Education would like to thank the thousands of visitors to its website in only its first week of operation. We wanted to let you know that we have a new page up on the site called "Our Supporters" under the "About" tab. If you are doing great work in the field of comics in education, want to celebrate visual narrative and the impact it has on popular culture, or hope to promote the great work you're doing in the comics industry, please consider sending us a message on Twitter or through our contacts page and we'll put a link to you and your work as a thank you for visiting our site! If it sounds like free advertising, well...I guess it is! Comics in Education wants earnestly to promote the use of visual narrative in the K-12 classroom, and for that we need an industry that is dynamic and receptive to the needs of all readers, from those who are young to those who are young at heart. Fortunately, we seem to have just that! Thanks everyone for all your support! Sincerely, Comics in Education Visual Narrative and YouTube, Part 2
3/17/2014
Chaney also gets into the whole idea of how we tend to process cartoonish representations of the human form in a different way than we would still photography. Photography suggests an image captured in the a past that no longer exists. We know that something in a photograph is not happening to the person "in the here and now" because the photo had to have been previously taken. However, Satrapi's cartooning shows us a character that we, as readers, are willing to believe is in "the present" of the narrative. This is such an insightful idea and one that can generate really excellent discussions with students. Chaney's talk and the ideas it raises also allow for a lot of cross-polination depending on the other writers your students are studying. For example, Margaret Atwood's poetry is filled with references to the problematic nature of photography: how photographs capture an instant in time, but don't tell us what happened to the subject in the time before or the time since the click of the camera's shutter. Think, for instance of "This is a Photograph of Me" or "Girl and Horse, 1928." Satrapi also focuses on photographs as a visual record, with a memorable full-page panel of her father taking photos of the violence, and other panels in which a character is looking at a photograph from the past and pointing out something about it. Chaney's talk, then, is a wonderful starting point for such discussions. Be sure to check it out! The Literary Features of Graphic Novels
3/15/2014
We want students in a junior or middle school classroom to begin to develop an understanding of what they read, how language works to make meaning, and how they can figure such things out. Graphic novels can therefore pose an additional level of challenge, because the visual and its impact on meaning must be worked out at the same time that the language is being examined. Even something as simple as this prototype I designed for the Graphic Poetry series is instructive (don't worry...I didn't illustrate any of the titles, and the series has won two awards). A student might be comfortable reading a short story and analyzing its setting—the time, place, and prevailing circumstances of the story—but how do they analyze the setting of the poem presented here as a visual narrative? They would have to talk about the colour of the half-page panel at the top, and how it seems to suggest that the events of the poem will take place in the early evening or at twilight. They would also need to talk about how the title of the poem, juxtaposed with the tree, implies that the reader is looking at the poison tree in the opening panel. And what is to be made of the fact that the tree is entirely black and blends in with the gutter between each of the panels and the page borders as well? Is the author/illustrator making a comment about how quickly and dangerously poison can spread? What are we to make of the close up of the male figure in the bottom left-hand panel and the eerie red background colour? He looks angry and the black words on the red background reinforce that, but his fixed gaze almost seems to peer right through the gutter and at the “friend” who is shot in a medium-long to long shot, presumably looking back at him, albeit tentatively. All of this is happening and we’ve only reached the end of the poem’s first line, at which point—if we were simply looking at the text of the poem—we wouldn’t normally have begun debating its meaning. It is crucial, then, when teaching graphica that we don’t just acquaint students with the terminology they might use to talk about how a shot is composed, but look carefully with them at the various features of the verbal and visual canvas before them. If you're looking for some of this terminology by the way, you can find it under Terms and Terminology on the Introduction tab.
Why Doing the Opposite is Attractive...
3/14/2014
At the 2014 Reading for the Love of It conference in Toronto, I mentioned an activity to participants that struck them as being a new idea in teaching the graphic novel. Here's what I said: "We should teach kids how the form and structure of a graphic novel is related to the form and structure of other genres they might read in a junior or middle school classroom. However, we need to go beyond just having students create a graphic story out of a chapter or scene from a traditional novel. Probably the coolest exercise you can do with a group of students is to have them turn the pages of a graphic novel into a traditional narrative. The advantage of this is that it forces students to think far more about traditional narrative and about how very complicated it can be for a writer to use only words to represent the simplest ideas or concepts." A number of participants remarked afterwards that they wanted to try this activity right away and inquired about good starting points in terms of choosing a graphic novel that would lend itself well to such an activity. I gave them some of my own suggestions (Persepolis, Watchmen, Maus, The Silence of Our Friends, Are You My Mother?), but for the benefit of those who might be taking a look at this post, I'd love comments from experienced comics educators who have either done this activity with their students or who have a suggestion about a great comic or graphic novel that would work well. Thanks in advance, and see you next time! Welcome to Comics in Education
3/13/2014
Welcome to Comics in Education, a new site devoted to advancing the use, understanding, and appreciation of comics and graphic novels in the K-12 classroom. Motivated by the insightful questions and great feedback I received from the 2014 Reading for the Love of It conference in Toronto, I was inspired to get this site up and going. Comics in Education is a work in progress, but things are progressing well and I hope to have it fully functional in short order. Because this site is for teachers, students, school administrators, curriculum specialists, educational publishers, library professionals, academics, and for folks within and outside of the comics industry, I welcome as much feedback and as many suggestions as you can send my way. Updates are coming soon to the "Classroom" tab, and there'll be a lot more on the website in the days ahead. Thanks for dropping by and check back again soon for the updates. |
Glen DowneyDr. Glen Downey is an award-winning children's author, educator, and academic from Oakville, Ontario. He works as a children's writer for Rubicon Publishing, a reviewer for PW Comics World, an editor for the Sequart Organization, and serves as the Chair of English and Drama at The York School in Toronto. If you've found this site useful and would like to donate to Comics in Education, we'd really appreciate the support!
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