The article narrates a personal journey of learning and unlearning the images in school textbooks, its uses potentials and challenges as experienced by the author. It reflects upon the experiences of the process of selection of these images within the context of political science as a discipline. These experiences have been formed over a decade…

In this interview with author and educator Nick Sousanis, he discusses his PhD dissertation, which was written and drawn entirely in comic book form and later published by Harvard University Press under the title "Unflattening." He describes how he proceeded with the idea of producing a dissertation in comic form and the support he…

This interview with 2015 Caldecott Medal winner Dan Santat explores matters of influence, familial and cultural background, the creative process, and the children's book marketplace.

This report discusses the answer to the question: What might comic studies learn from the slightly older field of composition and rhetoric? The author asks the question as a member of both fields. It is clear that both disciplines struggle for legitimacy within the academy. While comics studies strives for respectability given the popular nature…

When teachers work with students to construct a metalanguage that they can draw on to describe and analyze graphic novels, and then invite students to apply that metalanguage in the service of composing multimodal texts of their own, teachers broaden students' analytical frameworks. In the process of doing so, teachers empower students. In this…

"Bhimayana" is a graphic novel that narrates Dr. B.R. Ambedkar's experiences of being discriminated against. Using a graphic form inspired by Pardhan Gond art, "Bhimayana" breaks popular conventions of graphic narratives published in the West. The narrative of "Bhimayana" is interlaced with contemporary events and…

Thus far, attention to comics in academia has been focused "on" comics as a subject of literary (Chute; Gardner; Hatfield), theoretical (Cohn; Groensteen, "The System of Comics" and "Comics and Narration"; Postema), or pedagogical studies (Bakis; Carter; Jacobs). There has been less emphasis on scholarly composing…

Of its millions of readers worldwide, why individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) in particular love manga--and its animated cousin, anime--remains mostly unexplored. Therefore, it is critical for English teachers to ask two questions: (1) What does the preference for manga reveal about the way adolescents with ASD view and process the…

In this essay, the authors present a case study that demonstrates how graphic novels can be utilized in the history classroom. More specifically, they discuss the benefits (and challenges) of using comic books to teach undergraduates about war and violence. While much of their discussion focuses on the historical particularities of Uganda, their…

Incidental vocabulary learning has attracted a great deal of attention in ELT research. However, it is important that teacher and researcher exploitation of vocabulary developments be guided by more than replication of previous research designs. For conclusions based on empirical research to be valid, it is important to be clear about exactly what…

In this cartoon essay, the author shares his experience from a travel to Paris to see the French higher education system. From his travel, he learned that in France, "degree" inflation may be an issue, but not grade inflation. On the flight home, the author reflects how French and American academics answer one question about the state of…

People speculate with the fantastic. Fantasy is a celebrity and money-making machine. As a module in people's brains, it has the capacity to transform plain junk into gold that glitters. Fantasy mobilizes and instrumentalizes the fantastic to form and celebrate spectacles that exist and have always existed--illusions of social relations of…

This essay theorizes the ways in which comics, and Marvel Comics in particular, acted as sponsors of multimodal literacy for the author. In doing so, the essay demonstrates the possibilities that exist in examining comics more closely and in thinking about how literacy sponsorship happens in multimodal texts. (Contains 1 figure and 13 notes.)

In this article David Lewis talks to Posy Simmonds about her career in illustration, cartooning and the writing and illustration of picturebooks. Together they discuss her early experience of working as an illustrator for newspapers and magazines; her first attempt at creating a weekly adult cartoon strip and her subsequent career as a regular…

Spider Man and the Green Lantern are not the first images that most people conjure up when someone mentions "important art." In the world of fine art, comic books are often viewed as the bottom rung of the artistic ladder. In the early half of the 1900s, such an assessment would not have been unreasonable. With their rudimentary visuals and…