Using Graphic Novels in the English Language Arts Classroom 9781350112698, 9781350112681, 9781350112728, 9781350112704

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Using Graphic Novels in the English Language Arts Classroom

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Using Graphic Novels in the English Language Arts Classroom William Boerman-Cornell and Jung Kim

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 Copyright © William Boerman-Cornell and Jung Kim, 2020 William Boerman-Cornell and Jung Kim have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. x constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Tjasa Krivec Cover image © Andrei Ermakov / Alamy Stock Photo All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Boerman-Cornell, William, 1966- author. | Kim, Jung, 1977- author. Title: Using graphic novels in the English language arts classroom / William Boerman-Cornell and Jung Kim. Description: New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020023046 (print) | LCCN 2020023047 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350112681 (paperback) | ISBN 9781350112698 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350112704 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350112711 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Graphic novels in education. | Language arts. Classification: LCC LB1044.9.C59 B66 2020 (print) | LCC LB1044.9.C59 (ebook) | DDC 371.33–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020023046 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020023047

ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-1269-8 PB: 978-1-3501-1268-1 ePDF: 978-1-3501-1270-4 eBook: 978-1-3501-1271-1 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www​.bloomsbury​.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Dedication For Bill Teale (1947–2018) and all the other amazing teachers we have learned from.

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CONTENTS

Foreword  viii Acknowledgments  x Icons Explained  xii

Introduction  1  1 How to Read Graphic Novels as Literature  15  2 Studying Themes in Graphic Novels: Identity  25  3 Themes in Graphic Novels: The Horrors, Spoils, and Aftermath of War  39  4 Story Structure, Figurative Language, and Literary Terms  51  5 Graphic Novels and Literary Interpretation: The Basics  67  6 Graphic Novels and Literary Interpretation: More Challenging Lenses  79  7 Interdisciplinary Teaching  93  8 Graphic Novel Adaptations of Regular Books  115  9 Teaching Literary Nonfiction or Informational Text Reading with Graphic Novels  129 10 Creating Writing and Multimodal Composition  143 11 Finding Excellent Graphic Novels  159 Appendix: List of Graphic Novels  165 Index  195

FOREWORD By George O’Connor

I have the coolest job in the world. Let me backtrack; I should be more specific. Every person is different and every one of them will like different things that will help them decide what their “coolest” job is. Some people like fighting fires, some people like taming tigers. Some people like strapping themselves onto giant columns of jet fuel that blast them out beyond the gravitational pull of our planet to float around in a tiny space station eating dehydrated food and breathing recycled air for months at a time. Heck, some people probably even like filling out tax forms. (I’ll believe that when I see it.) For me, I have the coolest job in the world. Let me introduce myself more properly. My name is George O’Connor, and I was the kid who sat in the back of your class drawing pictures instead of paying attention. Now that I’m grown up, I am a cartoonist. “Cartoonist” is an imperfect term—does it mean I make animations? Do I draw gag cartoons, à la the New Yorker? Well, no, not necessarily—basically being a cartoonist means I’m a person whose job is to write and draw comics. “Comics” is another imperfect term. We all know what comics are, though they are surprisingly hard to define—essentially, they’re stories, told with words and pictures. They have panels and word bubbles and all that stuff. The imperfection comes in that not all comics are comical—that’s a linguistic throwback to the days when the first comic books were just collections of previously published humorous newspaper strips. Nowadays, comics do not have to be funny. I’d even go so far as to say the majority of comics are not funny. Imperfect term. Because “comics” is an imperfect term, and one that had additionally accrued a fair amount of a bad reputation for being “silly kids’ stuff,” an attempt was made to replace “comics” with a new, better term: “graphic novels.” Of course, it goes without saying that “graphic novels” is yet another imperfect term. The “graphic” part of graphic novels refers to the visual component of the story; that much is clear enough. But the “novel” part—a

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novel being a fictional prose narrative of considerable length—well, that’s not universal. Even a casual scan of breakout graphic novels reveals a lot of memoirs (Maus, Persepolis, Fun Home), to say nothing of all the nonfiction graphic novels of note (March, Palestine, The 9/11 Report). As of this writing, I myself have written and/or drawn fifteen so-called graphic novels, and only one of them could be considered an actual novel. But I digress. “Graphic novels” worked. This imperfect term gave an air of respectability to the art form I hold dear. No longer relegated to the realm of disreputable literature, graphic novels went from being something your teacher would confiscate to something being actively taught in classrooms! Which brings me to the book you’re holding, and yes, I know this was a long walk. I’ve never met Jung Kim (and if I did, it was in passing and I am a bad person for not remembering her), but I have met Bill Boerman-Cornell at a few different literary events. Bill’s been a big supporter of graphic novels in the classroom for a long while now and on top of that, he’s a pretty funny guy. When Bill approached me to write this foreword, it was with an email entitled “An Unreasonable Request.” Due to circumstances beyond anyone’s control the person who had previously agreed to write the foreword had to suddenly withdraw, and Bill and Jung needed someone to step in and write a new one, posthaste. Like, this book was going to the printer in a week, posthaste. Now let me say, this is not an unreasonable request. I am beyond honored to write this foreword. Because, and let me tie this all together, I HAVE THE COOLEST JOB IN THE WORLD (for me). I write, I draw, and I travel around the world talking about it. That is my life! And I owe it all to people like Bill and Jung and you, educators who were able to change the entire discourse on comics, to welcome them into classrooms and libraries with open arms. Basically, I owe my whole coolest-job-life to these people! And now they’ve written a book on using graphic novels in classrooms? Sign me up, please! And this is a great book. If you already are a comics convert or are just graphic novel curious, you will learn a lot reading this. (I know I did.) It’s been written with a knowledge and passion that is evident on every page, and it is the sort of work that will educate and guide and change the way you read graphic novels. I honestly feel this book will be a standard of comics appreciation for years to come, that is, the sort of book that could only have been created by two people who really love what they do. Hmm, maybe I’m not the only person with the coolest job in the world. George O’Connor is the best-selling author of the Olympians Series of graphic novels which beautifully retell the stories of the Greek gods and goddesses. He is also the author of Journey into Mohawk Country, a graphic novel adaptation of the journal of an explorer of early American Territory. George has written and will write other graphic novels. You should read them. He is a master at what he does.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Who knew that when we first met almost fifteen years ago that we would be finishing our second book together? From fledgling scholar-academics, former high school teachers, and always avowed nerds, our interests have intersected, diverged, and come back together. This has been a fun and rewarding project that reflects our belief in the power of graphic novels in the classroom and our belief in teachers to always want to do more and better for their students. With that said, we would like to thank our colleague and nerd, Dr. Michael Manderino, for making this journey with us. Maria Giovanna Brauzzi is our editor at Bloomsbury. She has been a joy to work with. She sent back prompt and insightful responses to all of our inquiries and apparently she never sleeps. Thank you to George O’Connor who was generous enough to write the foreword for this book. George’s work is spectacular and if you haven’t yet read his Olympians Series, you should put this book down and go buy it immediately. Your students will love it and so will you. Thanks to the creators and publishers who gave us permission to use images from several amazing graphic novels in this book. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions in the above list and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book. We are grateful to all those who answered our survey and shared their expertise, including George Biggs, Amber Funderburgh, Jill Gerber, Robert S. MacNeill, Elizabeth Eason Martin, Sara Johnson, Kristy Medema, and Ronell Whitaker. Jung is first and foremost grateful to Bill, whose “Calvinist work ethic,” as he describes it, kept them on task and focused. His ability to work endlessly is simultaneously horrifying and humbling. His humor and willingness to include food in all work meetings will always be much appreciated. Jung is also grateful to her university for the sabbatical she received, which allowed her the time and space to complete this project. While she loves teaching, it is quite something to have time to read until her eyes hurt and write about something she loves Vertigo Comics, an imprint of DC, was Jung’s gateway into the comics/ graphic novel world and it is sad to say goodbye to them.

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Jung would also like to thank her children, Wyeth and Iseul, who she only occasionally had to shove out of the way to get to the graphic novels first and her husband, Erik, who first introduced her to graphic novels; charmingly, he still asks if she’s going to be “paid back by work” for every new book that is bought and brought into the house—the answer is always no. Finally, she is grateful to her parents who always encouraged her to read and let her read wherever she wanted—from bathtub to dinner table. Bill is grateful that Jung kept him and Mike Manderino from embarrassing themselves at our first NRC Conference and that she continues to do so. He is glad she was willing to go through this book writing thing a second time and that she was willing to put up with his obsessive compulsive tendencies. Her thoughtful insights and connections to the Young Adult (YA) literature community has made this book what it is. He is also grateful for her nononsense personality and taste in coffee shops. He finds her running habit both inspiring and excessive. William Teale was an amazing mentor. Bill misses him more than he can say and is grateful for Bill and Junko Yakota’s hospitality, encouragement, and wisdom. Trinity Christian College granted Bill a sabbatical to work on this book and he is thankful for the gift of time to focus on this project. Thanks too to his colleagues who covered for him while he was gone and shared in excellent and thoughtful discussion. Thanks also to his students who put up with his absence. Several graphic novel creators were generous with their time and thoughts, including Ben Hatke, Marissa Moss, Victoria Jamieson, and George O’Connor, who were honored guests of Trinity’s Young Authors Festival, and Tillie Walden who had lunch with us at the ALAN conference in Houston. Bill is grateful to his wife Amy who put up with his distractedness when he was working on chapters in his head, with the piles of books in the study, and with the hours he spent hunched over his Surface tablet. He is also grateful for his daughters, Kathryn and Frances, who have taught him a great deal about many things, not the least of which is how they think about what they read. Bill also would like to thank his mom and dad who read to him when he was little, bought him books, and even put up with his comic book collection. They are the ones from whom he inherited his work ethic. He also thanks his friends John and Rick and his brothers Tom and Mike for helping him think about stuff. Finally, we are grateful for everyone who reads, teaches, and learns. If you do any of those things, you are this civilization’s hope for the future.

ICONS EXPLAINED

Discussion New idea Online resources Recommended reading Reflective activity Related sessions/extended activities Take note Top tips

Introduction

If you’ve been in a bookstore, library, or movie theater in the last decade, you know that graphic novels have become a big deal. Though in the United States, comic books were once seen as the realm of pale, pimply teenagers or small, grubby children, graphic novels have received hundreds of international literary and artistic awards, generated billions of dollars in revenue, and engaged millions of readers around the world. Even more interesting has been the crossover of children’s and Young Adult (YA) writers, with adult writers like Roxanne Gay and Ta-Nehisi Coates scripting graphic novels, as more writers realize the immense power behind using both words and images to convey meaning.

What Is a Graphic Novel? But what exactly is a graphic novel? In its earlier days, teachers cringed at the use of the word “graphic,” as it invoked thoughts of “graphic sex/violence.” And, in fact, when graphic novels first became popular in the early 1980s with the publication of Art Spiegelman’s Maus I (1980) teachers may have transferred their parents’ negative attitudes toward comic books influenced by Fredric Wertham’s publication Seduction of the Innocent (1954), which argued that comic books endangered youth with depictions of loose morals. In any case, graphic novels do not communicate solely through images (or graphics) and being illustrated does not automatically make something a graphic novel. Further, not all graphic novels are novels. In fact, they can include categories like nonfiction, biography, memoir, and reportage about topics ranging from biographies of physicist Richard Feynman and professional wrestler and actor Andre the Giant to explanations and descriptions of everything from genetics to Antarctic exploration. As one example, the historical graphic novel Abina and the Important Men (Getz & Clarke, 2012) includes court transcripts from a trial in which an enslaved woman in the Ivory Coast of Africa sued her enslavers for her freedom. Simply put, graphic novels are book-length narratives told using the conventions of a comic book, including panels to show the passage of time

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and movement through space; word balloons to indicate speech, thought, and narration; and an established language of symbols to bridge the gaps between text and image. The term “graphic novel” only came into existence in 1978 with the publication of Will Eisner’s A Contract with God—a text he named a “graphic novel.” That landmark text began a slow turn away from the demonization of comics that started in the late 1950s. The turn continued when Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1980) and Maus II (1991) won a Pulitzer Prize, and thus graphic novels began their ascent toward their current relatively valued status. Part of what makes the terminology so confusing is that there are many alternate names for graphic novels and some of those terms are contested. Some artists and critics prefer the term “comics” because they consider the term “graphic novel” to be pretentious. For example, American critic Hillary Chute mentions this in several of her books including Why Comics? From Underground to Everywhere (2017). Unfortunately, the term “comics” is too broad, referring to everything from the thirty-page floppy superhero periodicals one can pick up in a grocery store or comic book shop to the comic strips one sees in the newspaper. In addition, the term seems to refer to that which is funny or comic. Many graphic novels deal with very serious topics including child abuse, violence toward women, poverty, and other decidedly uncomic issues. So if the term “graphic novel” is a misnomer, so is the term “comics.” The term “graphica” has been used to cover all publications that use pictures to convey meaning. But this term is also overly broad, covering everything from children’s picture books to books that alternate between regular text and images, and to experimental art books. The term doesn’t distinguish publications that use the conventions of comic books that have been developed over a 100 years. The term “sequential art” was coined by Will Eisner to refer to anything that uses panels to tell a story. This is still too broad, as it comprises many different lengths of publications, including everything from one-panel political comics to animated films, to commix, which refers specifically to the underground comics movement that began in the 1960s, and to comic strips, which refers to short, three-to-eight panel, usually humorous comics that appear in the newspaper, in collections in books (like Zits, Boondocks, Calvin and Hobbes, etc.), and online. The fact that graphic novels are book-length means that they have the space to tell a story fully and engage in the sorts of themes we are more apt to see in longer literary forms like novels, plays, and epic poems. So while there may be much to gain by looking at comic books or comic strips, this book will focus specifically on graphic novels. You may still be puzzling over some of the different forms of sequential art and whether they fall under the domain of graphic novels. For example, is manga the same as a graphic novel? How about bound comic book collections? What do we call illustrated texts like Diary of a Wimpy Kid (2007) which use speech balloons and drawings in panel-like arrangements

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but also have blocks of regular text. What about wordless picture books like many of David Wiesner’s texts? Kind of, sometimes, no, and mostly no. To be frank, all of these could fall under the larger heading of “graphica.” However, differences in scope, length, and balance of word and images can change the answer. Take for instance, manga, which comes to us from Japan originally but has gone global in appreciation and uptake. (Korean publishers also have a version called “manhwa.”) Manga is usually printed on pulpy paper, has black-and-white art that runs all the way to the edge of the page, and a drawing style that tends to run more impressionistic than photo-realistic—such as depicting characters with overly large eyes or drawing an adult character as a small child when they are acting childishly. It’s also often read right to left, and in a fashion that those familiar with traditional Western reading consider back to front. Manga are serialized over multiple books or bound and explore a longer story line, as in a single graphic novel. The serialized formats, then, can be more akin to bound comic books than the more singular graphic novel. Manga is also different from anime, which draws on a similar drawing style, but is animated for movies or television. We would likely classify manga as a subcategory of graphic novels. The huge number of manga that come out every single month makes it much harder to discuss, study, or even choose from among them. Many middle school and high schools students are exceedingly enthusiastic about manga, but perhaps because some of them are read from right to left instead of left to right, it may be easier for teachers getting into teaching with graphic novels to start with more conventional texts. This brings us to the question of whether bound comic books are graphic novels. Let’s back up a moment and discuss what comic books are. Comic books, like graphic novels, use words and pictures in panels to tell a story. However, they are generally twenty to forty pages in magazine form. It is, in fact, the extended length of the graphic novel which allows it to compete with prose-only texts, something that comic strips or a serialized comic would struggle with. We would argue that when bound in one book and meant as a single continuous body of work though, such as with the Watchmen (1987) or Gaiman’s Sandman series, bound comics can be considered graphic novels. In fact, TIME magazine tops its “100 best English-language novels published since 1923” list with Watchmen.1 However, the argument for considering all bound comics as graphic novels becomes trickier when discussing a series like The Runaways, which has multiple variations of bound compilations but continues to have new issues come out. The endlessly serialized form means that, when bound, the story, though it may contain familiar characters, seems to start in the midst of a continuing narrative and end with much of the story and themes unresolved.

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​entertainment​.time​​.com

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So, just because a comic series is bound doesn’t necessarily mean it would fit the characteristics of a graphic novel that would make it easy and effective to use in the classroom. Finally, what about illustrated texts like Diary of a Wimpy Kid or wordless picture books? This is where we look at two characteristics of graphic novels: (1) the use of panels and (2) the balance of words and images, that is, picture-text hybridity. Both Diary of a Wimpy Kid (and similar books) and wordless picture books do not consistently use panels. More importantly for our purposes, they also do not engage in picture-text hybridity—the ways that images and text intersect and inform each other. The images in Diary of a Wimpy Kid are meant more to supplement the story rather than move it along. While the images add additional understanding to the words, there is no generative relationship between words and images. Similarly, wordless picture books rely solely on images and do not use text at all (or only incidentally). In addition, illustrated books like The Invention of Hugo Cabret (Selznick 2007) rely heavily on images only or text only to convey meaning, albeit in large alternating chunks, but do not create synergy between the two. With that said, there are a few exceptions like Shuan Tan’s The Arrival (2006), which is a beautifully illustrated graphic novel depicting the challenges of a character fleeing a monster-infested world or country and immigrating to a new land. The Arrival is both wordless and relatively short in length, but it uses panels and the density of images and meanings made through those panels makes this closer to a novella than a picture book.

Graphic Novel as Content Now that we know what graphic novels are, what do they contain? What kind of content can we expect to find between the covers of a graphic novel? We already indicated that not all graphic novels are actually novels. In fact, many are not. There are many graphic novels that are actually nonfiction such as the graphic adaptation of the 9/11 report (Jacobson & Colon, 2006) and seventeenth-century Dutch trader Van den Bogaert’s diary in Journey into Mohawk Country (O’Connor, 2006). There are multiple celebrated memoirs like Maus (Spiegelman, 1980), Persepolis (Satrapi, 2000), and El Deafo (Bell, 2014) and a number of graphic biographies and adapted graphic autobiographies like those of Malcolm X (Helfer & DuBurke, 2006) and Nat Turner (Baker, 2008). Along with these biographies, graphic novels have also emerged telling both historical fiction and historical narratives—from Boxers and Saints (Yang, 2013) to T-Minus: The Race to the Moon (Ottaviani, Cannon, & Cannon, 2009). In addition, there have been multiple adaptations of classic folktales and mythology, for example, Trickster: Native Americans Tales, A

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Graphic Collection (Dembecki, 2010). In other words, if it can be drawn and written, it can be made into a graphic novel. This vast diversity of content and structures underscores why we resist calling graphic novels a “genre.” While the format is the same, graphic novels contain within them many different genres. The term “genre” usually refers to a specific type of content, like detective stories, coming-of-age stories, or fantasy novels. What makes a graphic novel a graphic novel is not the sameness of content but the similarity of form. While all graphic novels use words and pictures, they use them in different ways for different purposes. Just as we would not call poems and novels the same because they both use words, we should be careful not to call all graphic novels the same. Graphic novels encompass too many different genres of writing, styles, content, and themes to be called a genre. The term “format” is probably more accurate.

Why Graphic Novels Now? One might ask why graphic novels have become such a huge force in media. Entire aisles of bookstores and libraries have become devoted to graphic novels. Movie theaters and media screens are awash in comic and graphic novel adaptations. Some children, including those of at least one of the authors of this book, refuse to read anything but graphic novels. So what has changed in the cultural milieu that has brought forward a literary form that was once reviled to be respected and valued? Part of the answer lies in the increasingly multimodal culture we have become and the ongoing overlap of words and pictures in everyday life. The term “multimodal” simply refers to conveying information in more than one mode (text and pictures, or images and music, or photographs and oral narration, and so on). This is particularly true of images and words. Whether the increased text in visual domains, like the running banner of news on news channels, or the increased pictures in predominantly text domains, like print newspapers or textbooks, words and pictures are becoming increasingly intertwined. Even the recent explosion of “infographics”— graphic representations of information meant for quick consumption— reveals how quickly this ethos has taken hold. Rather than relying solely on text or pictures to convey important information, multimodal texts draw upon the augmented power of words and pictures together. Literacy research has also sought to address these quickly changing times. A group of literacy researchers called the New London Group came together in the mid-1990s to discuss how the world was changing and the need to better understand the ways in which literacy was evolving as well. They coined the term “multiliteracies” to embody the many different forms of literacies being drawn upon today. They recognized that (1) literacy and meaning-making are inextricably linked with visual, audio, and/or spatial

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modes and (2) the increasing local and global connection demands new forms of literacy to be taught, nurtured, and developed in schools. Students today interact daily with multiple forms of mediated texts that require complex, nonlinear processes of meaning-making in addition to the need for processing through a critical lens. Graphic novels intersect neatly with these kinds of changing contexts, forms, and needs. These changing times, though, are not just about increased technology and pace. Both the New London Group and many other researchers and educators will attest to the quickly expanding local diversity and shrinking world in which we live. These seemingly contradictory forces of modern times—globalization and local diversification—challenge educators to meet the needs of youth today. With a school-aged population that is now majority nonwhite, there has never been a greater need to bring in diverse literature. Rudine Sims Bishop (Bishop, 1990) wrote almost thirty years ago about the potential of literature to be “mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors.” Literature transforms human experience and reflects it back to us like a mirror, and in that reflection we can see our own lives and experiences as part of the larger human experience. Books can also function as a window, letting us look out on new vistas, lands, and lives. Books also can be sliding glass doors, which we can step through to experience someone else’s life and cultural context. Despite the growing diversity of children in school, there has been a huge lag in matching this diversity in children’s literature (Figure I.1). This well-documented disparity in children’s literature shows the dearth of “mirrors” children of color have access to when compared to their white counterparts—or even to anthropomorphized animals and trucks. Graphic novels may offer more opportunities to increase the number of mirroring characters available to children. It is evermore important to make sure that they also reflect our country’s increasing diversity. Literature has the power to reflect back and validate our experiences, open windows into others’ lives, and show us the possibilities open to us.

Affordances and Constraints of the Graphic Novel Affordances Beyond the mainstream popularity of graphic novels, what else can they offer educators? As already stated, given the increasingly multimodal ways students engage in and make meaning, graphic novels lend themselves well toward encouraging and fostering these same kinds of skills and practices in classrooms and through texts.

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FIGURE I.1 Diversity in Children’s Books 2018 Infographic (Huyck & Dahlen 2019). Released for use under a Creative Commons Attribution – ShareAlike 4.0 International CC BY-SA 4.0 silence. The affordances of this picture-text hybridity seem to represent great potential for teaching students to read plays. Scripts of plays, of course, are only a plan for a theatrical production. What makes the story work is when we see it enacted on stage—where we are able to see the body positions, facial expressions, and movements of the actors and see their motivations, emotions, and reactions through those modes. Graphic novels provide all of those things, though in a static format. This allows students to better follow and understand characters and settings (Figure I.2). In this two-page spread from Gareth Hinds’s adaptation of King Lear (2009), for example, we see the blinded Gloucester, led by his son Edgar (who Gloucester thinks is Poor Tom, who is a slightly crazy peasant). Gloucester has told Edgar/Tom that he wants to die. Edgar/Tom pretends to lead Gloucester to the edge of an impossibly high cliff. When Gloucester throws himself from it, he actually falls off a rock, flat on his face. Edgar then pretends to be someone at the base of the cliff amazed at the miracle that this man fell from a great height and survived, saying, “Thy life’s a miracle,” which changes Gloucester’s mind about wanting to die. This is a fairly complicated scene to understand on the face of it. But to expect a high school student (or any reader, really) to understand solely from the words is not only a harsh requirement but also one that Shakespeare himself would likely have been astonished by. Why would anyone want to read a script when they could see the action? Hinds’s depiction of the

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FIGURE I.2  KING LEAR c. © 2007 by Gareth Hinds. Reproduced by permission of the publisher, Candlewick Press, Somerville, MA. action allows students to see, the ideas, the facial expressions, the setting, and more. And in a graphic novel format, students can turn back and reread and reconsider other moments in the play, providing excellent opportunities for them to analyze the play without having to attend multiple performances or skip forward and back in a digital recording of a performance of the play. Hinds and others have adapted a host of Shakespeare’s plays. This same kind of visual assistance can be found for older classic texts that students may struggle with, such as The Odyssey and Beowulf. By having visual accompaniment, students can free up some of their cognitive capacity from straight comprehension to interpretation and analysis. Students may also appreciate reading new graphic adaptations of beloved YA texts like Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time (Larsen, 2012) and Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak (Anderson & Carroll, 2018). There are even alternative versions of other popular books like Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies: Shay’s Story (Westerfeld & Grayson, 2012) a graphic novel that tells the same story as Westerfeld’s first book from the perspective of a different character— the rival love interest in fact. This provides some particularly interesting possibilities for discussing perspective-taking and characterization, as well as comparisons between the different formats. In all of these adaptations, there is an added interpretive layer. Adapters must choose how they will depict characters and settings, what facial expressions characters will make in response to what other characters say, how to arrange people in scenes, essentially all the elements that the

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directors and designers of a production must go through. English classes can combine different graphic novel versions of the same plays and consider the validity and effectiveness of those interpretations. Graphic novels also have the capacity to help students develop and hone various literary skills. For example, students may be better able to recognize literary elements like foreshadowing via visual elements than in print-only texts or the double meanings of a character’s speech by their contrasting facial features. The illustrations of a graphic novel alongside the print allow students to draw upon multiple layers of cues to construct meaning. This may be particularly beneficial for English language learners or struggling readers.

Constraints While graphic novels are wonderful and amazing, not every studentreader takes to them immediately and they are certainly not a panacea that will engage all readers, improve literacy skills immediately, and increase standardized test scores beyond administrators’ wildest expectations. Some teachers mistakenly believe that because graphic novels have pictures, they will automatically be suitable for reluctant readers or those reading below grade level. In reality, they can be challenging for a variety of reasons. One issue is the actual reading levels of the text itself. Because of the finite amount of writing that can be included in a panel, graphic novel writers do not have the luxury of using more words than is absolutely necessary. This means that they may use much higher-level vocabulary or expect readers to draw more heavily upon drawing inferences. Higher-level vocabulary can be a particular obstacle for students who have low vocabulary or are newly acquiring English. The need for drawing inferences from images is also important as readers construct meaning between panels. There is a visual vocabulary and grammar that readers will need to become at least somewhat familiar with to read and understand graphic novels. This includes understanding the flow of time between panels or even the seemingly basic task of knowing in which order panels should be read. This seems obvious until it isn’t. One way to test this potential point of confusion is to pick up a manga comic book. As we mentioned earlier, traditional manga, which reflects Japanese writing styles, are meant to be read from what we are used to thinking of as the back of the book to what we are used to thinking of as the front. Likewise, each page is read from the right to left. This is easier to follow when panels are equal-sized and tidily constructed. However, if panels are differently sized or meant to flow into one another, this can become increasingly difficult. Readers who rush or struggle with drawing inferences may also struggle with taking the time to fully grasp what an illustration is conveying and how it reinforces or refutes the written text. For example, a character may be

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drawn looking anxious in the panel but may say they feel just fine. Without negotiating the two conflicting messages, the reader will miss the tension in that panel. It is also difficult to read aloud from graphic novels—although not impossible as Jung’s children will attest—there is a lot of pointing and use of different voices. Because it’s an inherently visual mode, graphic novels are generally not meant to be auditory in nature. It separates the picturetext hybridity in ways that are generally disruptive to comprehension. While there may be some texts or portions of texts that lend themselves better to read aloud, it is generally difficult. This may prevent some teachers from using them as anchor texts since they can’t be classroom read-alouds, but it may just require some forethought and planning. Finally, there can be no accounting for taste—or lack thereof. While graphic novels have taken huge strides in the last several decades to be taken seriously as literature, there are many people who may still question their quality and value. Professional education organizations like the National Council for Teachers of English provide plenty of resources to help teachers choose how to broach administrators or parents that may misunderstand graphic novels.

Basic Ground Rules for Using Graphic Novels in the English Language Arts Classroom 1. In order to effectively study graphic novels, everyone needs to have

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

access to the text. This means getting a class set or several smaller text sets so students can read them in small groups. The images are as important as the text. Readers must pay attention not only to both of them but also to the way they interact. Because of this, students need to be reminded that in discussions, evidence can be given to support a position by calling upon text, image, and the intersection of the two. The gutter, or gap, between panels is where imagination plays a part. Readers must fill in the action between panels. This also means that often the space between panels is the location for interpretation. Every aspect of writing, including metaphor, authorial voice, pointof-view, story structure, and so on, are present in graphic novels but need to be considered in terms of image as well as text. Often, the expression on the character’s face and their body position, give clues of how what they are saying is to be

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understood. Facial expressions can reveal emotions, sarcasm, attitude, intensity, and more. 7. Rereading graphic novels often reveals details not noticed in the first reading. Such details can change the way we understand the overall plot, themes, characters, or settings of the story. 8. Like all reading, graphic novels are enjoyable to get yourself lost in. We encourage teachers to allow their students such an opportunity.

How This Book Will Save Your Life (Or At Least Your Planning Period) This book is written with the classroom teacher in mind—whether that person is a novice teacher, a teacher new to graphic novels, a veteran teacher, and/or a teacher who has been teaching with graphic novels for years. We hope the book can act as both a resource for a deep understanding of graphic novels and a launch pad for new ideas for teaching with graphic novels. To achieve these goals, the book is structured in several helpful chapters, with most chapters ending with a sample lesson plan demonstrating the concepts highlighted in the chapter. Chapter 2 will address how to teach the literary themes in graphic novels. The chapter begins with some major themes addressed in a variety of graphic novels. It also provides ideas for building thematic units pairing both traditional texts as well as graphic novels. Chapter 3 takes the reader further into how to use the themes in graphic novels to reach particular classroom objectives and goals. It explores example themes a bit more completely. Chapter 4 delves into more of the nitty-gritty of literature—using graphic novels to teach literary elements like story structure and figurative language, as well as identifying literary terms and intertextuality. Chapter 5 introduces the basic concepts in teaching students to look at graphic novels through the lens of literary criticism. It will cover some of the easiest-to-use critical theories including reader-response, genre criticism, and historical criticism to gain a deeper understanding of various graphic novels. Chapter 6 looks at more advanced literary criticism including feminist criticism, psychological criticism, and several others. These critical theories are best taught after students have had a chance to use some of the simpler and more familiar critical lenses covered in Chapter 5. Interdisciplinary learning is big in the education world, but how can you use graphic novels to help you teach English alongside other disciplines? Chapter 7 explores a variety of graphic novels that can be used for both

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disciplinary content as well as literary analysis. These disciplines range from science to music to physical education. While Chapter 3 hints at some literary-graphic novel pairings, Chapter 8 examines more closely the different ways graphic novels can be used to teach the classics—whether through graphic adaptations of Shakespeare or using text sets of graphic novels and traditional literature. There has been an increased focus on nonfiction and informational texts in English Language Arts classrooms the last several years; Chapter 9 helps teachers identify graphic novels that are good examples of informational texts and how teachers can use them. Chapter 10 addresses the area of writing, namely multimodal composition. This chapter will address what it means to compose across modes and what are some of the effective ways of teaching multimodal composition. Chapter 11 wraps up the book with ideas on how and where to find graphic novels, as well as other great resources for keeping up with graphic novels. Following this chapter are a variety of additional resources, such as sample lesson plans and lists of graphic novels for classroom libraries. Whether you read through the book front to back to get a comprehensive picture of how graphic novels work and how to most effectively use them in the classroom or read selected chapters to prepare for a particular unit, it is our hope that this book will help you to take full advantage of the amazing opportunities that graphic novels can offer your teaching and your students’ learning. The bottom line is that graphic novels are simply another form of storytelling, and one that anyone who loves books and stories will eventually come to love.

Works Cited Anderson, Laurie Halse, & Carroll, Emily. (2018). Speak: The Graphic Novel. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Baker, Kyle. (2008). Nat Turner. New York: Abrams. Bell, Cece. (2014). El Deafo. New York: Abrams. Bishop, Rudine Sims. (1990). “Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors: Choosing and Using Books for the Classroom.” Perspectives 6 (3): ix–xi. Chute, Hillary. (2017). Why Comics? From Underground to Everywhere. New York: Harper. Dembecki, Matt. (2010). Trickster: Native American Tales: A Graphic Collection. Fulcrum: Golden CO. Eisner, Will. (1978). A Contract with God. New York: W.W. Norton. Getz, Trevor R., & Clarke, Liz. (2012). Abina and the Important Men. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Helfer, Andrew, & DuBurke, Randy. (2006). Malcolm X: A Graphic Biography. New York: Hill and Wang. Hinds, Gareth. (2009). King Lear. Somerville, MA: Candlewick.

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Jacobson, Sid, & Colon, Ernie. (2006). 9–11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation. New York: Hill and Wang. Kinney, Jeff. (2007). Diary of a Wimpy Kid. New York: Amulet. Larsen, Hope. (2012). A Wrinkle in Time: The Graphic Novel. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Moore, Alan, & Gibbons, Dave. (1987). Watchmen. New York: DC Comics. O’Connor, George. (2006). Journey into Mohawk Country. New York: First Second. Ottaviani, Jim, Cannon, Zander, & Cannon, Kevin. (2009). T-Minus: The Race to the Moon. New York: Aladdin. Satrapi, Marjane. (2000). Persepolis. New York: Pantheon. Selznick, Brian. (2007). The Invention of Hugo Cabret. New York: Scholastic. Spiegelman, Art. (1980). Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale. New York: Pantheon Books. Spiegelman, Art. (1991). Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Began. New York: Pantheon Books. Tan, Shaun. (2006). The Arrival. London: Hodder Children’s Books. Wertham, Fredric. (1954). Seduction of the Innocent. New York: Rinehart and Company. Westerfeld, Scott, Grayson, Devin, & Cummings, Steven. (2012). Uglies: Shay’s Story. New York: Del Rey. Yang, Gene. (2013). Boxers and Saints. New York: First Second.

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C CHAPTER ONE

How to Read Graphic Novels as Literature

When those students in our classes who have never read a graphic novel before first encounter one, many of them are completely unsure of how to go about reading it. Should they read the words first, and then look at the pictures, or look at the pictures first, and then consider the words? What are they supposed to be seeing in the pictures? How are they supposed to be picturing the story in their minds? Are there steps that they should follow? How do they know if they are reading correctly? If you, as a teacher, are new to graphic novels, you may find yourself asking the same questions. Once students get past the sheer mechanics of how to read a graphic novel, the next question is how to understand it as a literary work. How should they best appreciate it? How can they think critically about the story, characterization, settings, and themes? How do they interpret a graphic novel? How is this different from the tools they use to consider the meaning of a regular text novel, play, or short story? How do they determine the validity of a particular interpretation? This chapter answers these two questions: 1. How do I teach students to read graphic novels? 2. How do I teach students to read graphic novels as literature?

The first question is more about the mechanics of reading graphic novels. The second looks at how, when we teach literature through graphic novels, it is important to understand that it is not a matter of using the same lesson plan you would for a conventional book but that we need to modify our teaching to fit the very different affordances and constraints that graphic novels have.

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The Mechanics of Reading a Graphic Novel To understand how to teach the mechanics of reading a graphic novel, it might be helpful to look at a particular page of graphic novel text, in this case, the adaptation of the medieval poem Yvain, The Knight of the Lion by M. T. Anderson and Andrea Offerman (2017, pp. 30–1) (Figure 1.1). An accomplished graphic novel reader doesn’t follow steps so much as engage in an all-at-once activity, but for beginners it may be helpful to try to break the mechanics of it down into a series of steps. To start, then, the reader needs to see how the panels flow through the page and then the reader must determine what path or plan to follow. This particular two-page spread is a bit complicated. While many graphic novels have the panels outlined in a white gutter (which makes it easier to see the divisions between panels), on this particular page, the divisions are indicated with relatively thin dark lines. An experienced graphic novel reader takes a look at the layout of the pages to determine a path to follow through the two pages. From the

FIGURE 1.1 Pages 30 and 31 of Yvain, The Knight of the Lion. YVAIN. Text copyright © 2017 by M.T. Anderson. Illustrations copyright © 2017 by Andrea Offermann. Reproduced by permission of the publisher, Candlewick Press, Somerville, MA.

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beginning, that reader uses both the pictures and the text to make sense of the story. Usually in a two-page spread like this, each page is read separately. The exception is when individual panels continue across the fold in the page, signaling that reader that the two pages are meant to be read as a single page. In this case, then we start at the top of the left page; we begin with the picture of the woman in the reddish dress (the queen) prone on the floor, clutching her hair, and the other woman (Lunette) comforting her. The reader’s eye scans the panel and sees that we seem to be in a well-appointed room of a castle. The suit of armor on the wall, the sword, the chest in the background, and the tapestry all indicate that. Based on body positions, we would guess that Lunette is comforting the queen. Lunette’s words tell us that the queen is grieving her husband’s death and that Lunette is suggesting that she consider finding a man to replace him. One panel down and on the left, the queen seems to have pulled herself off the floor. Lunette is still touching her. The queen challenges Lunette to name a single man as good as or better than her dead husband. Lunette seems to have someone in mind but worries that the queen will be angry. The queen says she will not get angry. In the next panel to the right, we look straight at Lunette’s face. She seems impassive (with maybe a slight wry smile?) as she says, “May it bring you happiness, Madam.” Then we drop down another row to the panel on the left. Part of reading graphic novels is comparing the panels to each other, especially when they show the same subject. Coming from the previous panel to this one, we see that Lunette has turned her head slightly and that her slight smile has perhaps become a slight frown and her eyes perhaps show some apprehension. She says, “Since no one is listening . . .,” which seems to be both a suggestion that they are safe and also a warning that they must be careful how they talk. One panel to the right, we have pulled back and we now see them both sitting on a bed with curtains, telling us this is most probably the queen’s bedchamber. Lunette, holding the queen’s hand asks her gently, when two knights fight and one bests the other, which is the better knight? Then at the bottom of the first page, we again see two pictures of Lunette. In the first one, her expression seems similar to before, with a small, almost mischievous smile. She proclaims that she thinks the victor of such a fight is the better man. But then in the last panel on that page, her brow furrows a bit, her eyes open wide, and the slight smile vanishes as she asks the queen which one she would choose. The reader’s eyes then move up to the top of the next page. Here the queen pulls her hand back from her lady-in-waiting and her eyebrows come down in an angry expression. She reproaches Lunette for trying to trap her. Lunette’s mouth is slightly open with surprise and yet she isn’t cowering.

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Then the next panel, the most prominent on this two-page spread, is the one with the queen’s face on the left and Lunette’s on the right. This allows us to hear how Lunette will respond to this challenge and also see how the queen reacts. The split panel also serves as a central image for these pages, showing in a single image that these two panels are about an intense and intimate conversation between these two people. Lunette finally says it directly, that the queen should consider taking as her new husband, the man who killed her late husband. In the panel below, we see the queen full of fury. Her mouth is open as she shouts. She points to the door. She towers over Lunette, who seems surprised again. Her words confirm her anger as she all but calls Lunette an idiot and orders her out. In the penultimate panel, on the bottom left corner of the second page, Lunette seems completely innocent and naive, shrugging her shoulders and staring openmouthed and hurt (though her facial expressions earlier indicate that she knew exactly what she was saying to the queen). In the final image on the page, her hands are folded and she says that she should have stayed silent. Behind her we can see the queen covering her hands with her face.

How Do Words and Pictures Interact with Each Other? Part of what makes reading graphic novels challenging is learning to recognize the ways that the words and pictures interact with each other. Scott McCloud (1993) identifies seven different types of interactions: 1. Word-specific combinations are those where the pictures

illustrate the story which is mainly told through the text. If you would read the text out loud to someone who couldn’t see the pictures, they would be able to follow the story. 2. Picture-specific combinations, in contrast, are those in which the story is told mainly by the pictures and, as McCloud puts it, the words “do little more than add a soundtrack to a visually told sequence” (p. 153). 3. Duo-specific panels are those in which the words and picture are conveying the same ideas or content. Sometimes this can seem redundant with characters, for example, explaining action that the images show. For new graphic novel readers, though, this sort of redundancy may make it easier to understand. 4. The additive combination is one in which the words “amplify or elaborate an image” or in which the images amplify or elaborate the words. So either the words or images may be carrying the main part of the narrative with the other element adding to or supporting the first.

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5. Parallel combinations are those in which the words and pictures

are telling two different stories or parts of stories. These two narratives may be related, but they are distinct. For example, think of a sequence in which two characters are discussing ambushing a third character and we see images of that third character going about their day, oblivious to the plans being made about them. 6. Montage is an interaction in which words function as part of the image. A character could be buried under a sea of words describing their emotional struggles, for example. 7. Interdependent combinations are those in which the words and pictures “go hand in hand to convey an idea that neither could convey alone.” This is perhaps the most common sort of interaction and may be the most effective. The magic of graphic novels happens when the words and pictures are each able to do what they do best. While it is helpful to understand reading graphic novels by looking at the format and structure of them, what do we know about how readers interact with graphic novels? Though there is relatively little empirical research on graphic novels, Meyer and Jiménez (2017) is one such study. Their research compared two graphic novel readers: one an experienced graphic novel reader and the other an excellent traditional print reader who had no experience in reading graphic novels. Meyer and Jiménez used eye-tracking software to follow where the readers’ attentions were going on each page and also asked the readers to think aloud and describe their process as they were reading. They found that experienced graphic novel readers used all textual, design, and visual elements to build an understanding of what they were reading. The inexperienced graphic novel readers had a harder time using these elements to navigate the graphic novel. The experienced graphic novel reader’s eyes made several sweeps of the page, looking at visual elements and textual elements together. The inexperienced graphic novel reader tried to make sense of the narrative almost exclusively with the text, and as a result had a limited understanding of what he was reading. When we think about how to read graphic novels as literature, this is the crucial difference—students need to learn to take the images fully into account. Think of how a reader would consider a standard text-only novel for English class. The teacher might start off by reading aloud or assigning as homework the first couple of chapters of the book. The teacher would hope that the student-reader would then be engaged in what they are reading and perhaps appreciate the story. Then, as the class moves through the book, the teacher might work with the student-readers to contrast the protagonist, antagonist, and supporting characters; to consider the setting; to map the

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plot, maybe using Freytag’s pyramid (inciting action, rising action, climax, falling action, denouement); to look for themes; to consider the work in relation to the context of other literary works written at the same time or about the same topic; and/or to develop an argument around some aspect of the book. When teachers and students engage in these goals and skills while reading, analyzing, and discussing a graphic novel, they need to consider how the characters’ appearances reflect their inner spirits, moral choices, and emotional dispositions generally; how the setting is rendered as an image on the page and how that reflects mood; how facial expressions give clues about how we are to interpret the tone of what they say; how facial expressions can also reflect relationships between people; how recurring images can indicate plot movement or developing themes; how the interaction between words and images can indicate irony or reveal the trustworthiness of a narrator; how panel layout can reflect the mood or pacing of a scene; how drawing style and framing can connect this literary work to others through intertextual references; and many other aspects, some of which may be unique to the particular work you are studying. This is a lot to consider. It may be a good idea to suggest that students read the graphic novel multiple times (or at least of the section they are considering) to really grasp what is going on in it.

Characterization in Graphic Novels It might be helpful to look at another example. Let’s consider characterization first. Here is a page from Jane by Aline McKenna and Ramon K. Perez (2017), which is a retelling of Jane Eyre in a modern context (Figure 1.2). In this scene, Jane (the shorter, strawberry blonde-haired character) is applying for a job so that she can continue art school. The first panel is a long shot where we see both characters from a distance. Even from this distance we can tell, just by body language, that the woman in the grey suit is confident, strong, and very familiar with her environment. Meanwhile, Jane looks out of place, taking up as little of the couch as she can because it clearly is not where she belongs. She looks like she has dressed herself as well as she could for this interview but at the same time is a little disheveled. The background speaks of wealth and corporations and it makes Jane look small. The panel below shows Jane’s surprised and nervous face. We also see the suit of the person talking to her. The suit person says, “Miss?” and Jane is startled. She also seems brave, in spite of the fact that this is not a place where she seems comfortable. The panel below and on the left shows the suit person towering over Jane and Jane rummaging in her bag. The words they speak provide insight into their characters as well. Jane offers a resume, but the suit woman says

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FIGURE 1.2 A spread from Jane shows how images and text work together to develop character. it is not necessary, because they have already checked her out. Jane says, “Wait. What?” This statement, echoed in her body language, indicates that she is behind in this conversation. She is professional, doing what you are supposed to do in a job interview. She has her resume ready. But the suit woman is not following the script. Jane, it seems, is hired, even though she hasn’t answered a single question. Our eyes then move to the top of the stack of three final panels. In the first of these three panels, the suit woman asks Jane to sign a nondisclosure agreement. When she asks this, she stands tall, with a severe face and her arms crossed. Jane seems to be frowning gently at the document and is holding her hand out palm up in an expression that is the equivalent of a shrug, indicating her confusion.

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In the second of these three stacked panels, Jane indicates that she doesn’t even know what these social media platforms are. She seems to be trying to hand the clipboard back. The suit woman’s expression has not changed since the last panel and she is holding out her hand, not to accept the clipboard back but rather to reject it. In the final panel, Jane is still protesting. She doesn’t know what the job is or what she is supposed to do. Yet at the same time, she is signing the document. Her hair covers her face, so we cannot see her expression. She says, “Signing,” perhaps in response to the suit woman’s threats or perhaps, because in the end, this is an adventure. That final image denies us the chance to see her emotions (perhaps propelling us to turn the page). Students can look at this page and learn a great deal about Jane and who she is, yet at the same time, there is much we have not been told. The characterization will continue. And as we understand the characters, we also have a window to the themes. The obvious theme in this single page is one of power. As it turns out, that theme runs through the book as well. Specifically, the book helps students ask questions about wealth, social standing, gender, and whether there are options for people to stand up to power (which Jane does later in the book). Thus, when students engage with graphic novels, they need to think, as they are reading, about the themes and ideas in the book and how those ideas and themes are realized by the words, the pictures, and the relationship between the words and pictures. When engaging in discussion about the graphic novel they are reading, they need to support their arguments with all three of these as well: words, pictures, and relation between the two. And when they write about what they have read, they again need to support their points by referencing the words, pictures, and relation between the two.

Teaching with Graphic Novels Is More Than Just Adding a Book to Your Course To recap, teaching with graphic novels is not simply a matter of adding a new book to your booklist and having students read that book, then talking about it as you do any other novel. It is important to give students the tools they will need to make meaning from the words and the pictures. Likewise, when helping students think about, analyze, and present arguments about the graphic novel they have just read, we need to help them see how the intersection of the words and pictures is the point where the strongest meanings are conveyed. If you can teach them how to read a graphic novel and how to understand literature through that format, not only will they be able to read graphic novels as fully and insightfully as they can regular texts but you also will have opened their eyes to a whole new way of reading and understanding stories. They will be stronger students and richer human beings for that experience.

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Works Cited Anderson, M. T., & Offerman, A. (2017). Yvain, The Knight of the Lion. Somerville, MA: Candlewick. McCloud, S. (1993). Understanding Comics. New York: Harper Perennial. McKenna, A., & Perez, R. K. (2017). Jane. New York: Archaia. Meyer, C. K., & Jimenez, L. M. (2017). “Using Every Word and Image: Framing Graphic Novel Instruction in the Expanded Four Resources Model.” Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy 61 (2): 153–61.

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C CHAPTER TWO

Studying Themes in Graphic Novels Identity

Graphic novels, like conventional texts, contain a wide variety of themes that can engage students in reading critically. In graphic novels, these themes are present not only in the words but also in the powerful images and in the way the words and images work together. There are, of course, such a vast number of themes covered in literature that we cannot possibly hope to cover all of them. In this chapter, we will dig into the ways that themes of identity, issues of social justice, and the impacts of war play out in multiple graphic novels. We will also take a look at a range of themes and which graphic novels develop those themes. This chapter, however, is only a hint of the possibilities. Adolescence is a tremendous time for identity development and exploration. Not surprisingly, one often-taught theme in secondary education is identity. There are almost as many options for teaching identity as there are facets of identity—from gender expression to culture to ability to race, and all the ways in which they intersect. The world of graphic novels has been a rich landscape in exploring identity. Two graphic novel classics in this vein are Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (2000) and Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese (2006). Both texts deal with racial and cultural differences, something that will be a growing area of interest as demographics in the United States continue to change rapidly. Graphic novels can act as “windows [allowing readers to see into another life, culture, or world], mirrors [allowing readers to see themselves and the society and culture they live in], and sliding glass doors [allowing readers to step into another world and feel embodied and

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situated there]” (Bishop, 1990). The opportunity for readers to play with different ideas and understandings is particularly necessary. Literature has amazing power to generate empathy within readers and to build capacity to understand both one’s self and others better. In these politically fraught times, this is evermore relevant and important. Two newer graphic novels, Jerry Craft’s New Kid (2019) and Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak (2018), provide contemporary opportunities to understand the pain, joys, and development of two very different but memorable characters. Exploring issues of justice, friendship, and identity, these books provide powerful texts for use with students.

Race and Class in New Kid From Children of Blood and Bone (Adeyemi, 2018) to The Hate U Give (Thomas, 2018), there has been a virtual explosion of YA literature representing Black or African American perspectives. While progress is being made, there is still much room to grow in graphic novels and literature in general. The widespread embrace of Black Panther and the Afro-Latino Spiderman incarnation Miles Morales have brought forward Black comics and superhero characters, but where can we find the everyday experiences of Black adolescents? Jerry Craft’s New Kid provides a fresh and smart take on contemporary black experiences that may remind readers of a certain age of the 1990s television show The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. New Kid follows Jordan Banks as he begins seventh grade at a new school, namely the prestigious Riverdale Academy Day School (or RAD for short). As one of the few kids of color in his new school, Jordan struggles to make sense of and navigate between the two very different worlds of RAD and his Washington Heights neighborhood. Jordan is also an artist, intent on going to art school, and scattered throughout the book are multiple sketches he does to work through his feelings on various issues—a theme also brought up in Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak and Jarrett Krokoczka’s Hey, Kiddo (2018), which will be discussed in a later chapter. Within the 249 pages of New Kid, Craft gets at daily microaggressions, identity politics, middle school angst, and issues of cultural authenticity through insightful situations and humorous examples. Jordan’s evolution over the year plays on the title of “new kid.” He goes from being the new kid at the beginning of the year to growing and changing over the year to being a new kid. Because of the depth of issues covered, we would suggest beginning the unit with a reading and discussion of the picture book The Day You Begin (Woodson & Lopez, 2018). As former high school English teachers, we liked to use picture books with our students to get at deeper issues via shorter

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texts. The interplay of words and pictures in a “bite-sized” text can be extremely powerful and help prime these conversations. The Day You Begin addresses feelings of discomfort and not belonging, something everyone can relate to and that definitely is an issue for Jordan in New Kid. Starting off the unit with this picture book helps students begin making connections between texts and their own lives, whether it’s discussing a time they felt like they didn’t belong or a time they felt like they weren’t good enough. One of the most difficult things for people from a dominant background to understand—whether white, upper class, able-bodied, cisgendered, heterosexual, and so on—is the daily injustices and slights marginalized folks have to endure. In some ways, outright racism may seem almost easier to endure than the death by a million cuts of microaggressions. A line from Martin Luther King Jr.’s (1968) “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” alludes to this sense of frustration: “Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.” New Kid illustrates well what this looks like and the pain and frustration it can cause individuals. Some of the more poignant or cringeworthy instances raised in the book are the ones involving Jordan’s teachers. From mixing up the Black students’ names—and then rationalizing such behavior when confronted about it—to handing “relate-able” gritty urban literature to the Black students, teachers at RAD subject Jordan and his fellow students of color to small indignities regularly. The book also hints at larger, more systemic issues that can be fueled by these smaller moments. For example, Drew is another Black student on scholarship like Jordan who is getting tired of being pushed around and harassed by Andy, a white student. Andy pushes him in the lunchroom and Drew pushes him back. Unfortunately, Andy slips on an apple and takes a big tumble. Ms. Rawle, one of the more problematic teachers, jumps in immediately and, without investigating what happened, assumes that Drew is the instigator in this situation and is getting ready to send him to the headmaster’s office. One white female student does defend Drew, but it is not until Jordan steps in to defend Drew, demanding “Who else saw it?”, that others jump in and Drew is exonerated. We see in this moment an allusion to the larger ways Black youth are over-disciplined and over-policed in and out of school. There is a particularly striking scene done mostly in black and white with Andy’s hands up that seems to reference the “hands up” cries of the Black Lives Matter movement and protests (although ironic as Andy is white). While there are a few pops of color on the students like Andy’s red hat, Jordan is the only student drawn in color and with detail. We see how he is confused about what to do in the moment; he sees the injustice but is also concerned about staying under the radar at school (Figure 2.1). This, again, is where the intersection of image and text can be such a powerful vehicle for interpretation.

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FIGURE 2.1  Page 202 from New Kid. Illustrated By: Jerry Craft. Text Copyright (c) 2019 by Jerry Craft. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Some of the sharpest cultural insights can be seen in the ways Jordan navigates the different demands of moving between Washington Heights and RAD. In one scene, while playing video games, Jordan and a neighborhood friend joke about the differences in their schools. The friend talks about a kid “packin’” (a gun) at school and Jordan counters about a kid “packin’” a Snickers in their nut-free school. One of Jordan’s sketches also documents his physical transition on the bus as he moves through neighborhoods, from wearing a hoodie and sunglasses at the start of his ride to removing all of them and exclaiming aloud how he “loves quadratic equations” (to prove that he’s a safe academic kid and not dangerous). This spread ends with Jordan explaining that this sort of thing is why he’s so exhausted before school even starts. Through his sketch, we see how complex and draining his attempts to inhabit multiple personas in multiple contexts are. Another interesting point-counterpoint is how Jordan’s parents are portrayed and the issues they struggle with. While Jordan’s mother is all about him getting all of the opportunities he can and being successful in life (mostly via traditional means), Jordan’s father chose to leave corporate America because he was tired of not getting ahead due to his race. He has a bit of an existential crisis, though, after dropping Jordan off at his friend’s house (which is really more of a mansion). There is a humorous illustration of his father holed up in a dark room listening to music, with a tipped-over “#1 DAD” mug of tea, obviously drowning his pain. His father’s response is to make sure they celebrate their Blackness “extra” that winter break (e.g., not missing any days of Kwanzaa that year—usually they miss one, rewatching Twelve Years a Slave, etc.). However, Jordan’s dad is not alone

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in wrestling with these issues. American television shows like Blackish touch upon similar situations and questions of what it means to be Black in higher socioeconomic contexts. Part of the power of New Kid is in how it raises many important issues which allow it to be paired with other texts, whether using other graphic novels or non-graphic texts. They can be as informational as studying the different days and meanings of Kwanzaa or as sensitive as investigating racial disparities within education or policing. There are numerous opportunities to delve more deeply into exploring and understanding what Jordan and other Black youth must deal with on a daily basis. The visual nature of Jordan’s social commentary opens opportunities for students to respond via either traditional text-based responses or more artistic or media-based ones. For example, early in the book, Jordan creates a drawing of “The Dude Pyramid: A Guide to Cafeteria Hierarchy,” which outlines the social hierarchy of the lunchroom and where different groups sit. It would be a fascinating response to this scene for students to create their own annotated visualizations of their school cafeterias, and perhaps to even break them down and challenge these groupings. Initiatives in schools like the buddy bench, a designated bench at school for any student looking for a friend or someone to talk to, can help open up conversations about who is excluded and ways to include others. Depending on the age level and reading ability of the class, using more upper-level texts like Beverly Daniel Tatum’s Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?: And Other Conversations About Race (2017) to further interrogate how those spaces break down would deepen the discussion. Students could also write—or even interview others—about a time they were the new kid, and detail their movement toward or away from acceptance. In these ways, even though New Kid is set in a middle school, it can be an excellent way to open up discussions about race in high school and beyond.

Discovering One’s Voice and Healing in Speak Laurie Halse Anderson’s book Speak was written as a text-only novel in 1998, more than twenty years ago, and yet it continues to be widely taught and is considered a classic in YA literature. With its multiple references to how art saves and its highly descriptive content (Melinda, the main character, finds some solace in creating art), it seems natural to adapt the book as a graphic novel. The short bullet-like delivery of paragraphs in the original text translate into graphic panels perfectly. The graphic adaptation (Anderson & Carroll, 2018) is beautifully done and is as hard-hitting and gut-wrenching as the original text. Anderson’s previous editorial background in working with picture books is evident; her rewriting of the book melds

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seamlessly with the haunting artwork of Emily Carroll. Carroll’s artistry lies in representing scenes as not just literal depictions of the words but as powerful artistic interpretations of the text. It is an unfortunate reality that sexual assault is as relevant an issue now— if not more—than it was twenty years ago. According to US Department of Justice statistics (2008), statistics already a decade old, nearly 20 percent of girls between the ages of fourteen and seventeen were victims of sexual assault or attempted sexual assault. By some measures, more than half of all secondary students will experience some form of sexual harassment in a given school year. Some students even transfer schools because it gets so bad. Yet teachers, peers, and administrators are either silent or inadequately addressing these issues. It is within this context that Anderson writes Melinda’s story. Melinda Sordino starts her first day of high school already with a bad reputation. She is known as the girl who called the cops to break up a high school party the summer before her freshman year. What people don’t know is why she did it. And, as Melinda becomes increasingly trapped in her silence, she can’t tell them that she was raped by a rising senior during the party. There are many powerful themes within the pages of Speak: from finding your voice to claiming your strength to the power of art, and themes of self-forgiveness and loss and growth. Even the somewhat nonsensical changing of the school mascot throughout the book asks the question repeatedly of, “Who am I? Who are we?” The quarterly report card also tracks the changes in Melinda over her freshman year as she wrestles with her identity and her place within the school. Before beginning to read, it is important to prepare students for the various social issues brought up in the book: depression, drug and alcohol use, sexual assault, self-harm, parental/familial dysfunction, bullying, and others. It is because of the sensitive nature of many of these issues that Speak has been repeatedly challenged or banned. Not talking about these issues or not having youth read about them does not mean it is not happening though. It is important to engage with youth about difficult issues, particularly because they are most at risk. Laurie Halse Anderson has spoken publicly about how it took her twenty-five years to finally address her own assault at the age of thirteen. The issues raised in the book allow multiple opportunities for youth to engage in them, whether exploring what they think are the most pertinent to their times, digging into the research of what exactly is going on, or even proposing possible solutions. The illustrations in the graphic adaptation are particularly powerful in amplifying the emotional impact of certain scenes. Some of the most poignant moments in the graphic novel are the flashbacks Melinda has of being a child with her parents, and the tenderness evoked in their physical and emotional interactions with her. These images are juxtaposed alongside current images, generally when her parents are fighting with each other

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or berating her for her failures at school. It is also in these scenes that we are reminded that Melinda is still a child. There is a tremendous sense of loss and longing, particularly as we see that the parents do not mean to hurt her or each other—they are all just lost. Melinda’s desire to disappear into herself both in these moments and at other times are seen as she physically shrinks inward, pulling her head and shoulders in, trying to appear as small as possible. Her sense of isolation is apparent. The use of spliced scenes—of current and memory, seen and felt—further highlight Melinda’s sense of disconnection from others and the fragility of her state of mind. The ability of the artwork to lend greater depth and nuance to the text is powerful. In another scene, there is an almost visceral reaction to the picture of a frog dissection—a disturbing image of a spread-eagled victim. This emotional reaction is heightened by Melinda’s narration of, “I have to slice open her belly. She doesn’t say a word. She is already dead” (p. 137). From the gendering of the frog as female to obvious parallels to Melinda’s own silences, one can’t help but shudder at the symbolism within this biology lesson. In fact, this moment is so emotionally fraught that Melinda becomes overwhelmed and passes out. This altered sense of self and the ways in which Melinda is beginning to see the world through art is a fascinating thread to follow. Mr. Freeman, her art teacher, randomly assigns each student a subject to be their focus for the term. Melinda’s subject is “tree” and we see her struggle with drawing even a simple tree in the beginning. However, as she channels her emotions (as directed by her art teacher) into her art, she begins to emerge in her understanding of herself. First, she creates a disturbing mute Barbie doll creation of Thanksgiving turkey bones that expresses her frustration with her parents and the silence in which she feels trapped. In a later conversation with her art teacher, he references their study of Cubism and the fractured distorted images perfectly capture Melinda’s sense of fragmentation and how she sees the world differently from their surfacelevel appearances. Throughout, she keeps trying to draw a tree, but it never comes out right, mirroring her own frustrations to find her voice. Finally, as Melinda evolves and defines herself, she is able to manifest evolution of self through her art. Characterization within the graphic adaptation is interesting as Anderson was not particularly descriptive of characters’ physical features beyond their clothing in the original text. The visual depiction of characters can be controversial as readers may have different ideas of what a character looks like. The graphic novel offers a multiracial cast of characters which is refreshing. For example, Melinda’s romantic interest, brainiac David Petrakis, is not described racially in the book but depicted as African American in the graphic novel. Similarly, Ivy, Melinda’s old friend, is African American. And finally, a few of the Marthas, the superambitious do-gooder group of girls, are nonwhite as well. The physical diversity of the characters opens more

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avenues of entry for readers instead of defaulting to white characters which sometimes happens when race is not specifically indicated. In addition, the visual element of the graphic novel allows for an additional level of interpretation. The artist can emphasize certain aspects of a character’s looks for added emotional impact. This can make a profound difference. Andy Evans, Melinda’s attacker, is larger-than-life and horrifying to her. The graphic novel can depict that horror by showing us the way Melinda sees him as well as how he is seen by others. Every encounter with him leaves her trembling and an emotional wreck, while everyone else sees him as attractive and desirable. His depiction in the book as a monstrous figure who views her as prey relays her intense fear of him that makes the reader more empathetic to her emotional state. It is one thing to read about her fear of him; it is another to see him through her eyes. When students look at the theme of identity in the graphic novel version of Speak, they can not only consider how Melinda’s sense of self is at first destroyed by the sexual assault but also consider her difficult road to rebuilding a sense of self. Students can further consider how the theme develops not only in terms of what she says and thinks but also by what she sees, how she appears, how her thoughts are reflected in her face, her body positioning, and even the tone in each scene. In this manner, the graphic adaptation provides more layers of understanding and interpretation that enrich the original text-only version.

Other Titles with Themes about Identity Peanut (2012) by Ayun Halliday and Paul Hoppe is another interesting graphic novel on identity. When Sadie has to transfer to a high school where she knows no one, she somehow comes up with the idea to say that she has a life-threatening allergy to peanuts. The story follows her misadventures trying to keep up the facade, as well as her attempts to come clean. Other intermediate/middle-grades books like Nimona (2015), Roller Girl (2015), and El Deafo (2014) grapple with issues of identity and friendships in different ways, from being a magical creature to having diverging interests to dealing with a hearing impairment.

Social Justice/Contemporary Issues Themes surrounding issues of social justice are certainly timely and important, especially in an era of global struggle with the influx of refugees, increasing incidents of racial hatred, and the continuing ramifications of post-colonialism. The next graphic novel, Kindred (2017) brings together many of these issues in unique ways.

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Kindred Octavia Butler is a giant in speculative fiction. She is heralded as one of the first African American speculative fiction writers (and the Afrofuturism genre) and is highly celebrated—including receiving a MacArthur “Genius” grant before her passing in 2006. Her best-known and most-taught work is Kindred, which follows the unsettling experiences of Dana, an African American writer who is inexplicably transported back to the antebellum South to repeatedly rescue her white slaveholding ancestor from lifethreatening situations. Originally written in 1979, Damian Duffy and John Jennings updated it for the graphic novel format (2017). While we enjoy the graphic adaptation, we feel it is better as an introduction to Butler’s original work than a stand-alone text (although others may disagree). However, the original text Kindred was not written for a YA audience and it can be difficult. We strongly encourage teachers and students to read the original text (and Butler’s other work) as well. The graphic novel begins by showing Dana and her white husband Kevin, also a writer, moving into their new home. The two met while doing manual labor through a temp agency. The original text provides more background on this work context, which we appreciate for its depiction of blue-collar people and working poor life. It also provides insight into Dana’s struggles of being a woman at a “man’s” job and her uncertainty about dating a white man during this time period. Due to space constraints, only a few pages depict this background in the graphic novel. During the move-in, Dana becomes dizzy and is suddenly transported to a place where a child, Rufus, is drowning. She saves the child, but when the child’s father thinks she is trying to hurt his son and puts a gun to her head, she is transported back to the present. Dana and Kevin realize this is real as she comes back wet and muddy from her plunge into the water to rescue Rufus. Over the next several time-traveling episodes, Dana comes to realize that she is pulled back to the past when Rufus’s life is in danger and returned to the present when her life is in danger. Frustratingly, she realizes her life must truly be in danger; a “simple” beating is not enough to return her to her time. Dana also discovers that Rufus is her white slaveholding ancestor and that her life and existence are inextricably tied to his survival—at least until he fathers her grandmother Hagar. Over the span of Rufus’s life, from young child to manhood, Dana is pulled back to him and his plantation repeatedly. While she returns to the present on the same day or even the same hour as she left, Dana spends days or even months in the past. On one trip, Kevin travels to the past with her but gets left behind for five years—the gap of time between Rufus’s need for rescues. For Dana, in the present, it is only a few days’ difference. One particularly helpful aspect of the graphic adaptation is the difference in color schemes depicting the two different time periods. It makes the time

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jumps easier to follow, something students might struggle with in the textonly version. Also, Jennings’s choice to color Dana’s life in the 1970s in sepia tones and the past in full color is interesting. It goes against the idea that we think of the past in faded browns and also alludes to the largerthan-life bloodiness and harshness of that time period. Things seem much more real to Dana and Kevin than the history books prepared them for; Dana even alludes to this difference when she is beaten and finds herself comparing how different it is from beatings in movies.

Slavery and Race Each of Dana’s journeys to the past teaches her more about slavery, how brutal the beatings were, how psychologically damaged and twisted one could become, and how easy it was to succumb to the everyday harsh realities and lose hope: I had seen people beaten on television, in the movies. I’d seen too-red blood substitute streaked across backs and heard well-rehearsed screams. But I’d never smelled their sweat, heard them pleading and praying . . . shamed before their families and themselves. (43) Similarly, she realizes that the moral superiority she had felt toward “mammy” type figures in the past have changed when she meets Sarah who had “accepted a life of slavery out of fear” (133). It is through Dana’s metacognitive moments that readers also realize that slavery and its psychology are more complicated than we generally acknowledge. Many overseers were not white; many slaves did not try to run away; house slaves felt they were better than field slaves. Both Dana and the reader discover that slavery was physical and also psychological. Dana’s decision to save Rufus each time becomes increasingly fraught and complicated. He can be selfish and racist and cowardly, but sometimes he can be kind and well-meaning. At times, Dana even wants to kill him or at least let him die, but to do so would mean her own nonexistence. This parallels the very paradoxes of slavery and race in this country. While Rufus and others in the past are dumbfounded by Dana and Kevin’s interracial marriage, in the present, both of their families reject that marriage as well. Dana at one point even realizes that Rufus (and whites in general during this time period) believe it is more shameful to love a Black woman than to have sex with her, to sell off one’s children than to acknowledge them as human beings. The contradictions of the values of both past and present make it clear that the complexities of race are never fully resolved or understood in either context. Often as readers of history, we believe we would automatically be part of the resistance, the freedom fighters, the good guys. We understand the past wearing the lenses of modern times and critique those who were products

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of their time. This is not to say we cannot critique the mistakes of the past, but even Dana at the end confesses that she cannot hate Rufus for long. Despite the many inroads Dana does make with him, he still sells off slaves, assumes ownership of bodies, and assaults Alice (her great-grandmother). Yet he is human to her; even as he is about to assault her, she speaks of forgiveness. This understanding of the importance of context will have additional resonance in Chapter 5 when we talk about Mandela and the General (Carlin & Malet, 2018), particularly the first encounter between Nelson Mandela and General Viljoen in postapartheid South Africa. Sometimes when we English teachers speak of a theme like social justice, we do not fully consider what exactly we wish students to take away from that theme. In the case of the graphic novel version of Kindred, one possible goal is that students come to understand the complexities of race and all the ways in which we both simplify and complicate it. Butler and her adapters raise these concepts in multiple ways throughout the book. One interesting example of this is the parallel idea, both in Rufus’s time and in the twenty-first century, that determining who is Black or what constitutes Blackness is a contentious, unclear, and complicated social construct. At one point, Dana is ostracized by most of the slaves because she is friendly with Rufus. She is called a “white-n*****” by Alice because she is educated and speaks standard English. Her Blackness is refuted and rejected. Ironically, Alice is also rejected by the other slaves for being Rufus’s “lover”—even though she has little choice in the matter. One can easily find modern-day scenarios of Black students today being ridiculed for “talking white” or having interests that are not considered “Black enough.” It is at one of Dana’s lowest points, though, that Carrie, a mute slave, comes to her and communicates that “the Black doesn’t come off,” and that she will always be Black (198). It can be an interesting point of discussion to ask students their own understandings of race and what has stayed the same or what has changed since slavery. In another context, Dana’s relationship with Kevin is complicated by their own racial backgrounds. In one fraught scene, Dana abruptly returns to her own time and mistakes Kevin for the white patroller who was threatening her life when she was pulled back. This troubles her deeply. Also, when Kevin time travels back with Dana, they realize they must “pass” as slave and master—roles that cause them both great discomfort. When they are reunited after Kevin has been living in the past for five years (he gets left behind when Dana is suddenly transported back), he has his own psychic wounds to recover from. After they return, Dana gets a look from Kevin, “an expression I had seen before. Something closed and ugly. Something I was used to seeing on Tom Weylin” (Rufus’s father) (173). In this moment, Kevin is not just a white man but embodies the slaveholding white man. We see how the times deeply impact them individually and as a couple. The effects of slavery are not just historical facts but have emotional reverberations for them in their daily lives. This idea, that slavery still has long-standing

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consequences for people today, is an important one as America continues to wrestle with its legacy, whether in the form of historical monuments or names of buildings or multigenerational wealth or poverty. However, just as Dana loses her arm in her final return to the present, we don’t come through unscathed; it becomes clear that the scars of her experiences and slavery will always linger with her as they do within this country.

Gender There are echoes of other themes, particularly around gender, both in the relationship between Kevin and Dana and in the ways in which Dana is positioned in Rufus’s time. There is a point in the book where Kevin and Dana have a fight because Dana refuses to type one of Kevin’s manuscripts. He throws her out of his place, and then asks her to marry him when she returns the next morning. There is not as much reference to this in the graphic novel, but the original text discusses how Dana works as hard as a man and her refusal to accept stereotypical gender expectations. One can’t help but wonder how much of this reflected Butler’s own identity. Butler also worked many blue-collar jobs until relatively late in her career and had many people question her sexuality during and after her life. In multiple instances, Dana is frustrated with how women in slavery not only had to bear the burden of physical and psychological terrorism but also had to endure the constant specter of rape. As much supposed progress we have made, there are still many contemporary parallels that can be drawn between the past and modern day.

Other Titles about Racial Justice A graphic novel like Kindred can provide opportunities for student-readers to make their own observations, to realize the ideas and concepts listed here and others, and to develop their ideas through discussion, thinking, presentations, and writing. Other graphic novels like Nat Turner (Baker, 2008), Incognegro (Johnson & Pleece, 2008), Yummy: Tales of a Southside Shorty (Neri & Duburke, 2010), and I Am Alfonso Jones (Medina, 2017) can provide historical and contemporary perspectives on racial justice.

Works Cited Adeyemi, Tomi. (2018). Children of Blood and Bone. New York: Henry Holt. Anderson, Laurie Halse, & Carroll, Emily. (2018). Speak: The Graphic Novel. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Baker, Kyle.(2008). Nat Turner. New York: Harry Abrams.

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Bell, Cece. (2014). El Deafo. New York: Harry Abrams Bishop, Rudine Sims. (1990). “Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors.” Perspectives 6(3): ix–xi. Carlin, John, & Malet, Oriol. (2018). Mandela and the General. New York: Plough Publishing. Craft, Jerry. (2019). New Kid. New York: HarperCollins. Duffy, Damien, Butler, Octavia B., & Jennings, John. (2017). Kindred. New York: Abrams. Halliday, Ayun, & Hoppe, Paul. (2012). Peanut. New York: Schwartz and Wade. Jamieson, Victoria. (2015). Roller Girl. New York: Dial. Johnson, Mat, & Pleece, Warren. (2018). Incognegro. New York: Berger Books. King, M. L., & Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change. (1968). “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” Atlanta, GA: Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change. Krosoczka, Jarett. (2018). Hey Kiddo. New York: Graphix Medina, Tony. (2017). I Am Alfonso Jones. Orem, UT: Tu Books. Neri, G., & Duburke, Randy. (2010). Yummy: The Last Days of a Southside Shorty. New York: Lee and Low. Satrapi, Marjane. (2000). Persepolis. New York: Pantheon. Stephenson, Noelle. (2015). Nimona. New York: Harper Alley. Tatum, Beverly Daniel. (2017). Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations About Race. New York: Basic Books. Thomas, Angie. (2018). The Hate U Give. New York: Walker Books. U.S. Department of Justice. (2009, October). “National Survey of Children’s Exposure to Justice.” Retrieved from https​:/​/ww​​w​.ncj​​rs​.go​​v​/pdf​​files​​1​/ojj​​dp​​/22​​ 7744.​​pdf Woodson, Jacqueline, & Lopez, Rafael. (2018). The Day You Begin. New York: Nancy Paulsen Books. Yang, Gene. (2006). American Born Chinese. New York: First Second. Yang, Gene. (2013). Boxers and Saints. New York: First Second.

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C CHAPTER THREE

Themes in Graphic Novels The Horrors, Spoils, and Aftermath of War

War is not really a theme—it is more of a topic that contains a nearly limitless range of themes within it. War is never an easy subject to discuss and in today’s digital age, it can feel both overwhelmingly close and at the same time geographically and temporally distant. There is a line in Anderson’s Speak where Melinda describes one of her teachers as someone who “suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder. Vietnam or Iraq—one of those TV wars.” Her casual dismissal of PTSD and emotional distancing of war from herself indicates how the bombardment of media can desensitize even the best of us from realizing the full impact of war. Yet, as Sun (2018) writes, Graphic novels . . . which feature complex themes on war and its atrocities, current political development, and coming-of-age in a time of revolution in different countries, can mediate historical realities with their unique visual narrative styles. (p. 24) The potential of graphic novels to better convey the physical and psychological toll of war can be seen in the large number of graphic novels that have been written depicting various wars from Joe Sacco’s Safe Area in Gorazde to Art Spiegelman’s Maus.

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War and Intergenerational Trauma in The Best We Could Do While covering the origins, battles, political motivations, social consequences, endings, and social aftereffects of war is the province of history classes, it is up to English classes to help students consider the personal, psychological, and social impacts of war on individual people. Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do (Bui, 2018) does this by bringing war to the front and center, showing us how the effects of war linger long beyond the last bullet. Her graphic memoir is a sprawling story that tells the story of her family through multiple generations. Bui is associated with two books that came out in 2017: the children’s picture book she illustrated, A Different Pond (Phi & Bui, 2017), and the graphic memoir she wrote and illustrated, The Best We Could Do. Both books address the experiences of Vietnamese refugees. A Different Pond, based on author Bao Phi’s own childhood, details a son and father on a quiet night fishing in a Minneapolis pond; it could be used as a gentle introduction to understanding a little bit about the background of Vietnamese refugees. The fishing is not just for fun, but it is about supplementing the food scarcity the family struggles with. Despite the pressure of catching something in order to eat, it is a lovely story of a father and son’s time together. Poignantly, Phi writes in the afterword that he did not recognize the value of this time when he was young, and it is only in looking back that he can truly appreciate it.

Families, Parents, and Childhood This theme of family and hardship is one that echoes throughout Bui’s memoir. It is Bui’s own emergent motherhood that brings her to explore the stories of her parents through their own childhoods and eventual parenthood through the years. Chapter 1 ends with: “Family is now something I have created—and not just something I was born into. The responsibility is immense. A wave of empathy washes over me.” In the following chapter, though, she writes, “But it’s being both a parent and a child, without acting like a child, that eludes me.” These dueling positions of being both child and parent weave throughout the book as Bui struggles with the narratives that shaped her parents as children and adults; and how this, in turn, shaped her as a child, adult, and then parent. Thi’s spare black-and-white illustrations in reddish wash lend a surprising depth of emotion to her words. For example, the immense longing she feels is apparent in the big spaces and tumultuous waters on pages 40 and 41 (Figure 3.1).

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FIGURE 3.1  The Best We Could Do, pages 40 and 42. Used by permission of Abrams ComicArts. There is a symbolic representation of the ebb and flow of expectations— both met and failed—between parent and child, repeated over and over. This circularity is evoked in the bookending of the book by Bui’s child, at his birth in the beginning and at age ten in the end. As if to ground this book in reality, though, Bui also incorporates real photographs and artifacts throughout the book, as if to remind the reader that this is not just a story, but the real-life events that happened to real people. Bui’s father is a complicated, flawed individual. It is through these oral histories that Bui finds a way to understand “how my father became the way he was. I had to learn what happened to him as a little boy.” And just as his stories “poured forth with no beginning or end,” the narrative flow of the book flashes back and forth through multiple different perspectives and points in time to create a picture that is neither complete nor finished. This juxtaposition of child and adult, not fully integrated, can be seen in the fluid depictions of her father as both old man and young boy. The illustrations alternate showing her father as an old man in the present and as a young boy in the past but also sometimes as a young boy while talking to Bui as an old man (106) (Figure 3.2). In this excerpt, the first panel shows Bui’s father as a young child as he recalls his hunger. In the second panel, though, we see them in the

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FIGURE 3.2  The Best We Could Do, page 106. Used by permission of Abrams ComicArts. present day. However, Bui’s father is still in the body of a young child and not the old man he has become. The third panel goes back to his memory. This permeability of memory and time and identity is an ongoing theme, even as Bui writes, “I had no idea that the terror I felt [as a child] was only the long shadow of his own” (129). Even as Bui’s father is a complicated individual, Bui has a harder time learning her mother’s story. While her father’s childhood was filled with threats of violence and poverty, her mother’s earlier life was vastly different, more privileged, and when she speaks of the best memories of her life, it is of a time before children, before she met her husband. It speaks to a different kind of life that could have emerged, that is, a longing for what could have been—without war, without family. This story, though, is filtered through English to Bui’s white husband Travis and not one-on-one with Bui. Even as Bui seeks out understanding and closeness with her mother, she cannot obtain it directly but in a strangely proximal way. Ironically, Bui was never afraid of her mother like she was of her father and her mother seems much less psychologically wounded than her father. Nevertheless, she struggles to process their relationship.

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History and Intergenerational Trauma This sense of fragmentation is seen in the very history of Vietnam, from its multiple foreign influences and occupations—the French, Japanese, Chinese, and American—to its division and unification as a country. War has left both physical and psychological scars on its people—scars which echo for generations. It takes something that seems impersonal—the “television war” Melinda in Speak describes the Vietnam War as—to prompt Bui’s father to say, “Every casualty in war is someone’s grandmother, grandfather, mother, father, brother, sister, child, lover” (157). Because of this complex history, it may be useful to review some major dates and background, the complicated history of colonialism, occupation, and nation-building. Before the Vietnam War was the Indochina War. Before that was a long period of occupation and colonialism. There is a two-page spread, before the story begins, that would be an excellent, although very brief, overview of some of this information. The causes and effects of war also evoke a quote from Viet Thanh Nguyen (2017): “The immigrant is the one who wants to come, unlike the refugee, who is forced to come.” What does it mean to flee a country? To look for a way to survive rather than to deliberately choose and plan and dream? And what are the effects of those non-choices? In a particularly effective scene, Bui writes about a time the family is startled by loud noises in their apartment. Their immediate reflex, their “refugee reflex,” is the ability to quickly grab their important documents and run. They are always prepared for flight. This is Bui’s inheritance, and as she wonders about what her son will inherit, whether he can escape what the war took from them, she sees the possibility for him to be free in a way that she and her parents could not have been. With the ongoing discussions of intergenerational trauma, this is not just an existential question but one studied by scientists and medical professionals. Minh Lê’s Green Lantern: Legacy (2020; illustrated by Andie Tong), while skewing to a slightly younger audience, could also be a gentle progression of the Vietnamese refugee story. Using the Green Lantern superhero story from DC Comics, it passes on the superhero and cultural heritage from grandmother to grandson while also tackling issues of gentrification and community.

Other Titles Some other graphic novels that might be useful to consider when looking at themes associated with war are: Gene Yang’s Boxers and Saints (2013) which considers the Boxer Rebellion in China from the perspectives of two different protagonists, one on each side of the conflict; Child Soldier: When Boys and Girls Are Used in War (Chikwanine, Humphreys, & Davila, 2015); and the classic Maus, which one classroom teacher in our survey

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described pairing with the film Schindler’s List successfully for “comparing/ contrasting the perspectives on war and its effects on civilians and soldiers.” Graphic novels like these put a human face on the struggle, the suffering, and other aspects of the human costs of war.

The Human Struggle of Refugees Refugees have been in the news quite a bit the last several years as unrest in multiple countries in the Middle East, northern Africa, and Central and South America has caused different peoples to flee their homes. However, the challenge of responding to refugees is not just one from the last few years— and we use the term “challenge” not to disparage the desperate plight of refugees but to emphasize the complicated ways other nations consider how to respond to a rapid influx of refugees into their counties and how they participate in a bizarre game of “Not it” among themselves. Irene N. Watts’s Seeking Refuge: A Graphic Novel (2017) reminds us that there have been refugees from other times—specifically within the contexts of her novel, during the Second World War. Seeking Refuge follows the story of Marianne, a Jewish eleven-year-old girl who is evacuated from Germany to London and then the Welsh countryside through the Kindertransport. Based partly on the author’s own experiences, the book follows the ways in which Marianne is treated by others, oftentimes rejected and shunted about from home to home. The illustrations are done mostly in sketchy greys—a choice that some readers may find disorienting or even disturbing. Some online reviewers described them as “smudgy” or “dark.” They provide a fitting tone for the piece, though, as we see through Marianne’s young eyes how she struggles to make sense of what is happening to her, from the culture shock to the disorientation of having to move several times. Throughout the book, there are multiple scenes rendered where the people do not have faces, adding to their anonymity or lack of personal connection. This adds to Marianne’s constant sense of bewilderment and confusion, whether in regard to the ways in which she is treated or the differences in language. The shifting sense of positionality is set up in the introduction to each chapter. Each chapter opens with a two-page spread that is a map, alluding to the constant sense of movement, (dis)location, and rootlessness. As Marianne is moved from Germany to London to the Welsh countryside—and multiple lodging situations there—she is adrift in the world alone. The first host family Marianne is placed with in London intends to use her as domestic labor and makes presumptions about her upbringing, asking her questions like, “Do you have running water at home?” They are cold and seem disconnected from the realities of what is happening in Germany. In one painful scene, Marianne’s father, who escaped to Prague from a

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concentration camp, sends Marianne an anonymous postcard to let her know he is safe. When she tells her host family, they ask if he is on holiday and do not believe her when she says he is escaping from Hitler. There are multiple references to how the average British citizen seems removed from the full realities of what is happening in Germany, even critiquing the declaration of war for having been done on a Sunday. Less than a year after her arrival in London, Marianne is evacuated again, this time to the Welsh countryside. There she watches all the other children, particularly the youngest and prettiest, get selected by families. She is left behind, for being Jewish and German, and forced to spend the night at a home for unmarried girls. She is promptly ejected from there when they realize that she is German and Jewish. She eventually lands in a home where the couple is looking to replace their recently deceased daughter with Marianne, even slipping and calling her “Elizabeth” in one scene. She struggles with being rejected or ridiculed by both children and adults for her background, from comments about being a Christ-killer to implications of being a spy. It is painful to see a child who is already undergoing so much to be so poorly treated by children and adults. Marianne’s isolation and confusion are amplified in something as seemingly simple as her name. Without permission or consultation, Marianne’s name is changed by various individuals to Mary Anne or Mairi or even Elizabeth. War, it seems, can even claim her identity. It is with much relief that we see Marianne reunite with her mother rather suddenly at the end. They return to London where her mother has found work, and we know not what the future holds for them. While there are a number of graphic novels, particularly from Europe, that share stories of the experiences of Jewish people during the Second World War, this is the only one documenting the experiences of a Jewish child who was part of the Kindertransport. Often just a footnote in American history textbooks, this graphic novel provides a more in-depth, firsthand understanding of this moment in time, as well as a different story from more traditional Holocaust/Second World War literature. Despite its historical context, Seeking Refuge is also a text that resonates with contemporary issues, themes relevant to the current refugee situation. It allows for a parallel context to understand the ways in which people can be cruel and kind, caring and judgmental, selfish and selfless—the full gamut of ways in which we are human in how we interact with one another. One can’t help but think of other similar situations when Marianne talks about hating the word “refugees” because of the ways in which the English keep talking about them.

Other Titles There are several other graphic novels that also address the difficult journey refugees make and the political battle over where and how they are welcomed

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or rejected. (Note: We also recommend a few other resources in Chapter 6.) Don Brown’s The Unwanted: Stories of the Syrian Refugees (2018) depicts images of refugees telling their own stories, but also remarkable images of living in a war-torn city where bombs and gunfire could erase whole blocks, buildings, homes, and especially people. Eoin Colfer, best known for his Artemis Fowl series of fictional adventure books (which have also been adapted as graphic novels), has teamed with Andrew Donkin and illustrator Giovanni Rigano to create Illegal (2018). This graphic novel tells of the journey of Ebo who is tracing his brother’s footsteps on the journey from Ghana to a better life in Europe. Along the way, he will face many challenges and difficulties that are typical of what refugees must endure or overcome. Similarly, any exploration of the refugee crisis in an English classroom might consider including Morton Durr and Lars Hornemann’s Zenobia (2018), a fictional narrative about a young refugee. This story follows Amina, a young Syrian girl who tries to escape war-torn Syria in a small boat overfilled with other refugees. When Amina falls overboard, she remembers each step of her journey and tries to draw strength from an ancient Syrian warrior queen. This graphic novel makes the plight of refugees remarkably personal and humanizes a group who are often thought of in terms of numbers, statistics, and generalizations.

Other Themes and Graphic Novel Resources to Support Them Cultural Differences The theme of differences is one often taught as part of English classes. While on the one hand we read to know that there are others like us, on the other hand, we also read to discover the lives of whose cultures and geographies are different. While some popular literature of the past represented other cultures as purely exotic or even primitive, the best YA literature, and particularly the best graphic novels, allow student-readers to catch a glimpse of what it may be like to inhabit a culture different from their own. In Vera Brosgol’s Be Prepared (2018), the main character, also named Vera, is tired of the odd ways that her Russian immigrant family does things. (This is a theme also seen in her graphic novel Anya’s Ghost.) All she wants is to fit in. When she is at a sleepover and hears the other girls talking about summer camp, she begs her mother to let her go. Her mother agrees, but because summer camps are so expensive, the only camp her mother can afford is one run by the Russian Orthodox Church they attend. And Vera, wishing only to escape her immigrant culture, finds herself immersed in it to a far greater extent than ever before. While she comes to a position of

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appreciating some aspects of her home culture, the book also holds the truth that not everything about every culture is enjoyable for every member of that culture. Nidhi Chanani’s Pashmina (2017) follows a girl named Priyanka Das who has always wondered about her mother (who left her home in India long ago) and the country from which she came. With the help of a magic pashmina scarf, Pri is able to travel to India both in a magical sense and in the real world. There she realizes some of the difficulties of being a woman in Indian society and the truth about her father. She also learns to reconcile her mother’s disconnect with the country and her own growing love of it. This graphic novel (which is written at a level that may make it more accessible to struggling high school readers) explores the difficulty of connecting with an authentic culture that one has never been a part of before. And of course, Gene Yang’s American Born Chinese (2006) may be the most well-known graphic novel for exploring issues of identity. It is a wonderful book, although complex in the way that it explores what it means individually and societally, in and out of a home culture, to grow up Chinese American. This book can lead to excellent discussions among stronger readers or readers already familiar with the complexities of racial identity. Less-advanced readers, or those who have not really thought much about racial identity, may be tripped up by the main character’s physical transformations and certainly by the arrival of his cousin, the comically stereotypical Chin-Kee. These books only scratch the surface. Because of the way the graphic novel format can emphasize outward appearance, verbal reactions from others, and internal thought, it that seems particularly well-suited to discussions of identity.

Gender Another important topic (which connects to identity as well) has to do with how society defines gender and how that definition has shifted and is shifting dramatically. While there are a great number of graphic novels appearing on a monthly basis, we will include some that we think would perhaps make a good starting point. This is another area where it is important to know your students, their parents, and your community. Understanding gender (and race and a good many other things) can be seen as a progression along a continuum. Knowing where the majority of your students, their families, and your community lie on that continuum can help you decide how to move understanding forward without resulting in your students rejecting books and discussions out of hand. There are different ways to approach the topic of gender and gender expression. One is by looking at one person’s experience. Liz Prince’s Tomboy: A Graphic Memoir (2014) is the familiar story of a girl who would

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rather play baseball than go to tea parties and who finds herself resisting gender stereotypes more and more as she grows up. The consistent theme of the individual struggling against societal expectations is well worked out here, but as the book goes on, the main character finds herself able to choose when to go along with expectations on her own terms and when to reject them. Teachers using a memoir, however, should recognize the danger in letting a single case act as representative for a wide range of experiences. Prince’s work might easily be paired with Tillie Walden’s graphic novel Spinning (2017). Spinning is a memoir describing Walden’s adolescence, her time spent as a competitive teenaged skater, and her journey to get the communities she lives in to understand her own gender identity. In this memoir, however, while developing gender identity is a theme, it is neither the only theme nor necessarily the most important theme. The main character Tillie’s relationship with her parents, the difficulty of waking early and putting in long hours in pursuit of skating excellence, and her struggles with the family’s move to a new community in Texas away from her friends and community are also important themes. Partly the book seems to be saying that gender identity and sexuality are not the only things in a young person’s life. While memoirs can cover this topic well, fiction offers other ways to consider the theme of gender expectations and identity. Walden’s fiction graphic novel On a Sunbeam (2018) is a sort of science fiction story about a group of friends doing restoration of structures in space. It includes an extensive thematic exploration of gender and how others respond to nonbinary expressions of gender. Noelle Stevenson’s Lumberjanes series, Molly Knox Ostertag’s The Witch Boy series, and Jen Wang’s The Princess and the Dressmaker (2018) are also great books to explore around these issues.

Other Resources The Best We Could Do teaching guides https​:/​/cp​​b​-us-​​e1​.wp​​mucdn​​.com/​​blogs​​.uore​​gon​.e​​du​/di​​st​/0/​​310​/f​​i les/​​2018/​​ 05​/TB​​WCD​-C​​urric​​ulum-​​Guide​​​-2018​​-19​_v​​3a​-1s​​qz8gq​​.pdf https​:/​/ww​​w​.scr​​ibd​.c​​om​/do​​cumen​​t/​ 349​​34416​​8​/The​​-Best​​-We​-C​​ould-​​D​o​-Te​​ achin​​g​-Gui​​de

Works Cited Brosgol, Vera. (2018). Be Prepared. New York: First Second. Brown, Don. (2018). The Unwanted: Stories of Syrian Refugees. Boston: HMH Books for Young Readers.

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Bui, Thi. (2018). The Best We Could Do. New York: Harry Abrams. Chanani, Nidhi. (2017). Pashmina. New York: First Second. Chikwanine, Michel, Humphreys, Jessica Dee, & Davila, Claudia. (2015). Child Soldier: When Boys and Girls Are Used in War. Toronto, ON: Kids Can Press. Colfer, Eoin, Donkin, Andrew, & Rigano, Giovanni. (2018). Illegal. Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks Jabberwocky. Durr, Morton, & Horneman, Lars. (2018). Zenobia. New York: Triangle Square. Lê, Minh. (2020). Green Lantern: Legacy. Burbank: DC Comics. Nguyen, Viet Thanh. (2017, February 3). “Viet Thanh Nguyen on Being a Refugee, an American—And a Human Being.” Financial Times. Retrieved from https​:/​/ ww​​w​.ft.​​com​/c​​onten​​t​/0cd​​9f69a​​-e89e​​-11e6​​-967b​​-​c884​​52263​​daf Phi, Bao, & Bui, Thi. (2017). A Different Pond. Mankato, MN: Capstone Young Readers. Prince, Liz. (2014). Tomboy. Minneapolis: Zest Books. Sun, L. (2018). “Critical Encounters in a Middle School English Language Arts Classroom: Using Graphic Novels to Teach Critical Thinking & Reading for Peace Education.” Multicultural Education 25 (1), 22–8. Walden, Tillie. (2017). Spinning. New York: First Second. Walden, Tillie. (2018). On a Sunbeam. New York: First Second. Wang, Jen. (2018). The Princess and the Dressmaker. New York: First Second. Watts, Irene N. (2017). Seeking Refuge. Vancouver, BC, Canada: Tradewind Books. Yang, Gene. (2006). American Born Chinese. New York: First Second. Yang, Gene. (2013). Boxers and Saints. New York: First Second.

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C CHAPTER FOUR

Story Structure, Figurative Language, and Literary Terms

English teachers help students discover themes and ideas in the content of the literature. We saw how to do that a bit in earlier chapters, but that is just a part of teaching literature. Another big part of that task is teaching students how authors create stories that move us emotionally, surprise us, or make us reconsider assumptions and ideas. Literary elements are the tools that authors use when constructing stories to reach their goals. Graphic novels allow us to see that structure play out in text, image, and image/ text interaction. This chapter will demonstrate how graphic novels can be used to teach these various elements of literature—from story structure to figurative language to literary devices like allusion and foreshadowing.

Pride of Baghdad Teaching Characterization and Foils Based partly on a real event, Brian K. Vaughan and Niko Henrichon’s Pride of Baghdad (2008) is a beautiful and moving story of a group of four lions that escape from a Baghdad zoo after the April 2003 bombings. Looking at the tragedies of war through the eyes of the animals provide a complex and emotionally packed allegory for humanity’s struggles for freedom, as well as the very real victims of those struggles. The story revolves around a small pride of lions: ●●

Zill, the patriarch;

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Safa, the older, one-eyed lioness;

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Noor, the revolutionary, younger lioness and mother to Ali; and

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Ali, the young cub.

The epitome of personification, we see very human-seeming lions grapple with questions of essential nature, captivity, and the price of freedom. These human elements provide outstanding opportunities for teaching characterization. For example, Noor and Safa provide excellent foils for one another by highlighting differences in their characters through their words, memories, attitudes, actions, and appearances. Students can see how what a character says can reveal a great deal about who they are and how they understand the world. Throughout the story, Noor and Safa argue about freedom versus safety. Even after the enclosures have been blasted open, Safa wants to stay behind because it is safer. When Zill asks her if she wants to die alone—as the other lions plan on leaving the zoo—she replies, “If the zoo is the price I have to pay for that, then so be it.” This recurring theme of the value of freedom will be explored in various ways through the experiences of the lions in the book. Memories are another way in which characters reveal themselves. In a flashback early in the book, we see why Zill challenges Noor’s romanticized view of life in the wild. While Noor talks about the thrill of her first rabbit hunt over the bland existence of the rabbit carcasses regularly provided for them, Safa remembers being raped by a group of trespassing lions. She attempts to fight back and loses an eye to this encounter. To Safa, life before the zoo was hard and cruel. She tries to stay behind in the zoo when the others leave. However, she is pulled back into the group when she saves Ali from some monkeys who have abducted him, and she no longer feels safe alone. Noor, who is younger and may have fewer memories of the hardships of freedom, chafes at their captivity. Before the bombing begins, we see her trying to convince the antelopes to work with the lions to seize their freedom. Noor wants them to gore the keepers, “the real enemy,” to get the keys. This is in stark contrast to a scene later where Safa chastises a hungry Zill for considering eating a dead human body: “How can you just turn around and make them your lunch? They’re the ones who kept us alive! Don’t you have loyalty to anything?” While Noor is willing to kill a keeper for their freedom, Safa would not even consider eating a dead one. Memories and words and attitudes are not always distinct categories of characterization but can blend together. We gain further insight into the attitudinal differences between Safa and Noor when they encounter a “pet lion,” Rashid, who is wasting away, clawless, toothless, and chained. Safa defends humanity by stating that even while people may have treated Rashid in these ways, they weren’t “our keepers,” in order to differentiate Rashid’s captors from their zoo keepers. To which, Noor responds, “Safa, no matter how they might treat us, those who would hold us captive are always

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tyrants.” Students could have an invigorating conversation about the two positions held by Safa and Noor and look for parallels in human society. There are many governments built on variations of these two different belief systems. Differences within characters in literature often represent a way of understanding more about what makes us human. The dueling characters and their accompanying beliefs provide rich opportunities for understanding human nature (albeit, through animals). Both females are presented in sympathetic, nuanced ways. Maddeningly, we see the arguments for both sides and why each character believes their side. The complexities of their beliefs are further enhanced by the views of the other animals. Zill is an interesting neutral character, taking freedom when it comes but not pursuing it otherwise. When he talks about his time before the zoo, he waxes poetic about the beauty of sunsets—but then struggles to explain what a horizon is to his captive-born son Ali. In that moment, he brushes it off, that it “doesn’t matter anyway” in comparison to the joys of eating regularly. At the end of the book, the pride finds itself on top of a hill viewing a beautiful sunset. Ali asks him if “that is a horizon” and we are reminded again of the question of the price of freedom. When Safa asks him if it was “worth it,” we never hear Zill’s answer. The next two panels are a study in contrasts—the first, his silent face reflecting the setting sun, perturbed and unsure, followed by a panel with Zill being shot. The reader is left to wonder about what his answer may have been. One of the things that makes graphic novels distinct from regular texts is the images. When we look at characterization in graphic novels, it is important to look at images, particularly how they show body language and facial expressions. In the scene mentioned earlier, Zill is looking out over the city at the sunset. We see Zill from the back but can still see both exhaustion and power. Safa is turned toward him, and we see anger and defiance in her stance as she begins, “So.” The second panel shows the two facing each other. The smudges, bruises, and exhaustion in their faces are also evident, as Safa asks, “Was it worth it, old man? For this?” In this panel, we see Zill’s facial response to Safa’s question. Students might see sadness there, or disappointment (although what Zill is disappointed about is up for interpretation). In the third panel, we then see Zill’s face from the front. Is there confusion there? Uncertainty? The final panel where Zill has been shot may show pain but seems to also show anger or annoyance or even disgust. Just as students rely on words to support their arguments about characterization in regular texts, in graphic novels, they must learn to draw support from not only words but images too. Sometimes classroom conversations can turn on an interpretation of a single line representing the set of a jaw or a furrow forehead, just as with print-only text an argument can turn on the interpretation of a single word or even the placement of a comma.

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Teaching Symbolism, Tone, and Mood The graphic novel format also offers additional tools for creators to convey symbolism, tone, mood, and even allusions to other works. When the lionesses encounter a monstrous bear, Fejar, who had been enclosed with Rashid, he reprimands Safa, “The order you enjoyed may have come at a price . . . but I’m sure you remember the cost of chaos.” Fejar is huge and obviously healthy and strong. This is in stark contrast to the effectively neutered Rashid, who has wasted away. The contrast between these two animals may be symbolic, in which each animal represents different outcomes in systems of oppression—wherein some creatures prey on others and continue to thrive. (Fejar had been stealing Rashid’s food.) In the meanwhile, others like Rashid are vulnerable and become victimized completely. It is interesting to note that the majority of the book is in hazy oranges and golds, but Safa’s flashback to her rape and the lion’s encounters in the palace with Rashid and Fejar are in darker blues, greys, and greens. The colors could symbolize the complicated brutality of freedom and the predatory nature of some. In fact, tone and mood are so clearly depicted in color and shade in graphic novels, that it is possible for teachers or students to pick almost any page and consider how the creators of the book are using tone and mood to convey emotion.

Teaching Allusions and Foreshadowing Students often struggle with allusions in literature. Within the first few pages of the book, when Ali is peppering his father with questions, Zill makes a Shakespearean allusion, “I beg you, my kingdom from deafness.” Just a scene later, when Noor is trying to convince the antelopes to trust her and join her revolution, the antelope retorts, “You’ve heard the one about the scorpion and the frog right?” While this is an explicit reference to the folktale and therefore not technically an allusion, the book does not retell the story within the confines of the pages. There are multiple variations and some dispute about the origin of this fable. In short, a scorpion begs a frog to ferry him across a river. The frog refuses, stating his fear of being stung and eaten by the scorpion. The scorpion insists it would be foolhardy to do that as they would both drown so the frog relents. However, halfway across the water, the scorpion stings the frog and they both drown. Before drowning, though, the frog demands to know why the scorpion would do such a thing. The scorpion responds, “I couldn’t help it. It’s in my nature.” By invoking this story, the antelope is emphasizing her disbelief that Noor would go against her nature and work alongside the antelopes rather than attack and eat them. Interestingly, when Noor encounters the antelope after the bombing, she lets it go rather than eat it. This question of the essential “nature” of a creature—human or otherwise—is raised again.

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Zill also references this response later in the story when he is fighting the bear Fejar. Zill arrives just in time to keep Fejar from killing the two lionesses. Before attacking Zill, Fejar says: Heh, “king of the beasts,” I’d say there’s been a regime change? You know, if you people had simply stayed where you belonged I might have protected you . . . but you just had to cut off your nose to spite your face. To this, Zill simply responds, “It’s our nature.” This allusion back to the scorpion and the frog is an interesting one for discussion about the complicated understandings of human nature. (Ironically, the bear refers to the lions as “you people”—the only use of the word “people” in the book.) What is “natural” to these animals or to people? What are the baser instincts to which we are enslaved? How much of ourselves do we have mastery of? Is it the nature of humanity to oppress and to control? Is it our nature to always seek freedom or to seek safety? There is much to unpack within this folktale and its connections to the themes within the story. Although there is no example of this in Pride of Baghdad, some graphic novels also use visual references as a way to include allusions. These are sometimes references to famous paintings or artwork, as in the fairly common inclusion in many graphic novels of a diner that resembles Edward Hopper’s painting Nighthawks in the background of a street scene. Allusions in the images of a graphic novel can also be to particular historical figures, characters from other books, or locations. The allusion to this folktale could also be seen as foreshadowing. In the folktale, both the scorpion and the frog die. In Pride, while it is not clear who or what represents the frog or the scorpion—or perhaps we are all frogs or scorpions—we see all the lions die at the end. This ambiguity of roles is also referenced in the lions’ conversations with a river turtle. (One variation of the scorpion and frog story involves a turtle instead of a frog.) The turtle tells the story of a statue depicting a lion trying to eat a man that is fabled to protect the land from invaders; as long as the statue still stands, the land will never fall to outsiders. Safa asks if they are the lions or the man in the story. The turtle answers, “Maybe you’re both. Or maybe you’re neither.” Further complicating this ambiguity is the final spread, which shows that very statue still standing—saved from the destruction of the bombings. This seems contradictory to the reality of the immediately preceding pages; we see American soldiers in Baghdad shoot and kill the lions. The lions are dead, outsiders have come into the country, and yet the statue still stands. What are we to make of all this? Another allusion that provides rich possibility for discussion is Safa’s retort to Zill’s comment that they are free after the bombs destroy their enclosure: “There’s an old saying, Zill. Freedom can’t be given, only earned.” Because it is attributed as an “old saying,” it is unclear what its origins are. However, there are a number of variants found throughout

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history that are similar, including: “In the truest sense, freedom cannot be bestowed; it must be achieved” which is attributed to US president Franklin D. Roosevelt, as well as two similar quotes attributed to African American writer and activist James Baldwin and German philosopher Max Stirner. This allusion allows for students to discuss what Safa means in that moment, but it also provides opportunities for understanding how this same idea is taken up in different time periods by different people. By examining the idea of freedom as a universal goal, students are able to make connections to history, other texts, and other events. This also raises the question of what it takes to win freedom, for example, by “any means necessary” à la Malcolm X or “with all deliberate speed” as dictated by the Supreme Court?

Teaching Elements of Plot The multilayered narratives and characters in Pride provide particularly engaging opportunities to discuss with students their understanding of typical plot conflicts within stories. When the main characters are humanlike lions, how would one classify the conflict structures—as human versus human, human versus nature, human versus society, or human versus self? This meta-layering becomes further complicated as the first real human characters enter the scene (we see fleeing human figures early in the book, but they are featureless and do not speak), only to shoot and kill all the lions. The American soldier defends his actions, saying the lions “charged right at us.” Having just seen the lions engage in a moment of calm and beauty, the reader can’t help but feel dismayed at this skewed statement. Safa’s last question to Zill of whether “it was worth it” reverberates throughout the remainder of the book and lingers. The final several scenes are a series of two-page spreads that follow a bird, presumably the same bird we see in the beginning of the book warning “the sky is falling.” The first spread shows the bird near a city on fire with military aircraft in the sky. As the bird flies further out, we see the damage from a greater distance, just some fires in the distant horizon. In tandem, the words in the second spread inform the reader, “In April of 2003, four lions escaped the Baghdad Zoo during the bombing of Iraq. The starving animals were eventually shot and killed by U.S. soldiers.” Readers may feel some distress knowing that this imagined story of personified lions has some basis in truth. By this point in the book, readers relate to the lions and are emotionally invested in their struggles. In the last spread, we see what looks like a peaceful city—no fires and only the moon and stars in the sky. It ends with: “There were other casualties as well.” The nearly hyperbolic understatement is striking in its flat tone as we understand that we have become so invested in these animals that we have not even contemplated the human toll. Depending on the estimate,

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more than 2,000 people died in this series of bombings. The juxtaposition of the death of these four lions alongside the thousands of people who died is a striking and poignant reminder of the price of relative freedom. The final image of the book is that same bird ready to alight on the statue of the lion attacking the man, and it seems less clear who is the animal and who is the man. The book allows students to take different sides of the themes and issues represented. The depth and nuance of the book lends itself to lively discussions or debates as well as more traditional analytic papers.

Hey, Kiddo Teaching Voice, Parallel Structure, Perspective, Authorial Intent, and Irony in Hey, Kiddo Hey, Kiddo (Krosoczka, 2018) is a graphic memoir that tackles some complicated issues—one kid’s experiences of growing up with a mother struggling with addiction and being raised by somewhat unconventional grandparents. Starting with the story of how his grandparents met and ending with his departure for college, we see Jarrett Krosoczka detailing the parallel journeys of his development as a kid and as an emerging artist. Best known for his Lunch Lady and Jedi Academy graphic novel series, this is Krosoczka’s first foray into more mature, serious, and powerful work which grew out of a TED Talk he gave. A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design and deeply committed to his cartooning roots, Krosoczka blends art, comics, and writing. We see his dedication to all aspects of the graphic novel process in his multiple notes afterward, addressing his process in writing the story to illustrating it (including some of his grandmother’s pineapple wallpaper) to the steps that brought it to life. Each chapter begins with images of real artifacts from his childhood—from photos with his mom to his high school graduation program—as well as real drawings and letters from those time periods. These elements ground the memoir, reminding us that these things really happened. Part of the magic of Hey, Kiddo is Krosoczka’s ability to juxtapose his adult voice looking back with the centering perspective of his voice in that moment in time. It is interesting to think about how these two different voices together contribute to a clearer picture of the story of his childhood. For example, Krosoczka relays a memory of his hand getting caught in the escalator as a child, but there is no lasting damage and is seemingly unconnected to anything larger. These flickering moments relay the kind of incomplete but vivid pictures we have of our childhoods. Some things are distinct and clear to us while others are more clouded. As Krosoczka relays some of his earliest memories of life with his mother, we

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see a host of great sensory detail, such as the feeling of his wet bath toys, the marshmallows of his sugary cereal, and the strange men who were in and out of his house. Yet we also see how vivid the nightmarish aspects of these early memories are. The two-page spread following the more innocuous early memories depict a child’s anxiety with all of the strangers in his home. He has nightmares of dark, strange monsters, all coming to get him. In heavy black washes of ink spread over two pages, we feel the looming dread and terror that awaken him. As he runs to his mother’s room for solace, we encounter the harsh reality of a young Krosoczka encountering a stranger in his mother’s bed and her harsh rebuke to get back to his room (Figure 4.1).

FIGURE 4.1  Jarrett’s nightmare at his mother’s house from Hey Kiddo. Selected art and text from Hey Kiddo by Jarrett J. Kroscosczka. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

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Readers see this larger anxiety shared by Krosoczka’s extended family, the shared looks of his aunts when they come to take him for a visit, the threats by his grandparents to take custody, all ending with Krosoczka being taken in permanently by his grandparents. In an interesting mirror to this first nightmare scene, Krosoczka shows himself having a very similar nightmare at his grandparents’ home (Figure 4.2). As in the first, it is a picture that fills the page (though limited this time to one page and not two). Again, he runs to an adult’s door for solace, but this time he is embraced and allowed to sleep between his two grandparents instead of being rebuffed. While he is alone outside his mother’s room, he is taken into his grandparents’ room when they discover him outside. The parallel structures in his storytelling highlight the clear differences between his mother and his grandparents. The way the words and pictures in this section of the book work together provides an interesting juxtaposition of the child’s view and the adult’s view. One physical representation of this is the narration running through the panels, colored in a muted orange, that differ from the regular white speech bubbles. They not only provide narration but indicate when Krosoczka is speaking with his adult voice. The earlier child-centered moments are particularly poignant as we see Krosoczka navigating life

FIGURE 4.2  Jarrett’s nightmare at his grandparent’s house. Selected art and text from Hey Kiddo by Jarrett J. Kroscosczka. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

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without his mother—from being astounded at the idea that someone would serve him breakfast (he got his own cereal at the age of three since he often woke to an empty house) to telling his teacher on the first day of preschool that he doesn’t have a mom and dad to draw. Because he does not know better, he doesn’t seem particularly troubled by this. It is through the reader’s more experienced eyes, though, that we see the quiet tragedy of these moments. Though Krosoczka is looking back with adult eyes, he remembers what it was like to have the fragmented understanding of a child: “I didn’t know any of this. I just knew I had a new home.” This provides multiple opportunities for discussing perspective and authorial intent. The tension between what is presented and what the reader might take away is a rich one. There are many scenes that Krosoczka provides without judgment or commentary and leaves up to the reader to determine their meaning. Despite his grandparents doing the best they can, we see that Krosoczka’s childhood was not necessarily idyllic. In nearly every panel his grandparents are smoking and there are also multiple allusions to Shirley’s borderline alcoholism. At a young age, Krosoczka is able to rattle off his grandparents’ drinks of choice at a restaurant. Because of the drinking, Krosoczka’s mother, Leslie, would only sign over her parental rights to her father and not to Shirley. Only Joe is technically Krosoczka’s legal guardian. On page 275, after Krosoczka yells at his mother for being absent from her life because she is an addict, Leslie explains that she wouldn’t sign over her rights to a “drunk,” referring to Shirley. This scene seems ripe for discussing irony. We also see Shirley driving a pregnant, teenaged Holly (Krosoczka’s aunt) out of the house with her constant negative commentary, mirroring a similar relationship she had with Leslie. She uses a fair amount of obscenity in her speech as well. In talks, Krosoczka will often reference her favorite phrase, “to go shit in a hat.” In a later scene, we see Shirley disparage a painting Krosoczka gives her for their wedding anniversary and implies he will never make it as an artist. Shirley is not without merit, though. Not much later, Shirley shows a rare moment of vulnerability as she laments his impending departure for college and she hugs him close. In these complicated scenes, Krosoczka’s narration withdraws to leave the reader to make sense of his grandparents and what they mean to him. He does not defend or explain their actions but merely presents what happened. It would be interesting to have students think and talk about what their interpretation of Shirley’s character is, and how they understand her as a sympathetic or unsympathetic character. Chapter 5 and 6 will discuss literacy criticism and theory; one of those, transactional theory, would be an interesting one to connect with here in terms of how students read Shirley’s character. What experiences do they draw on to view Shirley sympathetically or antagonistically? What is their transaction with the text in understanding characters?

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Teaching Foreshadowing and Authorial Choices A few moments in the book provide opportunities to discuss how Krosoczka builds narrative tension or discuss whether certain moments might be foreshadowing the future. On page 171, Leslie misses Krosoczka’s eighthgrade graduation but insists she will make it to his high school graduation. One can’t help but wonder what the empty promises of a chronic relapser might mean, or—knowing that she’s already OD’ed once—whether she’ll even live that long. And, as one may have suspected, she does not make it to his graduation because of “health reasons” which are never fully explained. In another scene, Holly notices Krosoczka comforting one of his nieces and remarks that he’ll be a good dad one day. Seeing the familial history of substance abuse, the reader wonders what Krosoczka’s future will hold, and whether he will become a good father or fall victim to the same disease as his mother. By looking at moments like these more closely, students can explore the kinds of choices an author might make in the pacing and flow of a memoir. Authors make purposeful choices to include or not include certain details. For example, we know that his mother’s boyfriend Miguel dies around the same time Shirley does. Krosoczka does not disclose the cause of his death. Nor does he go into great detail about the nature of Leslie’s death, but just implies that her addiction took her. It might make sense to infer that these deaths could be attributed to overdose, but we don’t know. These kinds of decisions seem to mirror the ways in which Krosoczka is constantly balancing the amount of detail he includes to make his story specific while also leaving enough up to his reader to make their own impressions. This is clear in an earlier scene when he describes the event that put his mother in jail. He draws his mother helping two men cover the evidence of a presumed murder, but he does not narrate in detail what actually happened—not who the men are or what they actually did. Readers must piece together what they see and draw their own conclusions.

Teaching Symbolism Another area for exploration in the book is Krosoczka’s use of symbolism in his drawings, including his actual drawings from his adolescence. At one point, he says that drawing helped him make it through adolescence and allowed him to work through his feelings, whether that was freshman stress or exploring his identity. On page 232, he draws a figure holding a magnifying glass to a picture of a figure holding a magnifying glass and so on. Each of the concentric figures seems to be getting younger and looks slightly different from the others. Presumably, these are pieces of Krosoczka puzzling through the question of who he is. While the artwork is definitely that of a teenager, it provides a glimpse into a kid who was grappling with a

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lot internally and needed a way to work through it. Art therapy is real and without naming it that, we see how Krosoczka discovers it on his own.

Other Graphic Novels for Teaching Literary Elements As noted, Hey, Kiddo would be a great example for teaching the genre of memoir. Another well-received memoir, although for a more mature audience, would be Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (Bechdel, 2007), which chronicles the complicated family life of Bechdel as she grapples with her own sexuality and that of her father’s. Fun Home also offers multiple opportunities for discussing concepts of literary allusion (there are multiple literary references as Bechdel’s father was an English teacher and literature a big part of the family’s life) and nonlinear storytelling. A few memoirs like Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Best We Could Do (2017), by the very nature of their historical context and subject matter, may also cross over into the historical nonfiction genre. These will be discussed a little later in Chapter 7. There are a number of graphic novels based on folktales, most notably Trickster (Dembicki, 2010) and Moonshot (Nicholson, 2015), which are edited volumes of Native-American stories. The edited volumes allow for rich discussions about tribal similarities and differences, including how varying animals represent different characters and how the same stories told by different tribes can be used to convey different lessons. Moonshot is particularly interesting in updating the context of folktales to futuristic settings. It reimagines native lore as alive and relevant and not just as dusty oral tradition. Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese (2006) also tells the story of the monkey king, a Chinese folktale, as one of its story lines. Gareth Hinds has masterfully tackled classic mythology and literature in his retellings of stories like The Odyssey (2010) and Beowulf (2007). George O’Connor’s Olympians Series covers many of the gods of classic Greek mythology. All of these titles offer different ways of approaching traditional stories and literature. In the past decade, there has been a surge in the number of historical nonfiction graphic novels, such as Nat Turner (Baker, 2008), The Silence of Our Friends (Long, Demonakos, & Powell, 2012), Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow Sturm & Tommaso, 2007), the previously mentioned The Best We Could Do (Bui, 2018), and the March trilogy (Lewis & Aydin, 2013). Chapter 7 will address in greater detail some informational and nonfiction texts. Graphic novels can be particularly powerful in bringing to life the individual stories and experiences of historical figures as can be seen in the now-classic Maus (Spiegelman, 1996). Students sometimes complain about history being boring and dead, and these books provide opportunities for students to see how historical events were caused by and impacted very real people. Within historical nonfiction, there is a growing body of graphic journalism including Joe Sacco’s Palestine (1994), Don Brown’s work

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The Unwanted: Stories of the Syrian Refugees (2018) and Drowned City: Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans (2015), and Josh Neufeld’s A.D.: New Orleans after the Deluge (2010). These last two examples are both graphic nonfiction books on Hurricane Katrina. Brown’s work is particularly remarkable as the storytelling is less linear and draws entirely from primary sources or news reports. His montage of facts, mini-stories, and quotes is more akin to a collage or series of snapshots than a traditional storyline. And then there are titles that cross into multiple genres. The now-classic Persepolis (Satrapi, 2000) would straddle both the genres of memoir and historical nonfiction, as Marjane Satrapi chronicles her childhood in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. This would also be applicable to Seeking Refuge (Watts & Shoemaker, 2017), which was detailed in the previous chapter, as well as The Best We Could Do (Bui, 2018) and John Lewis’s March (2013) trilogy. Gene Luen Yang’s two-volume Boxers and Saints (2013) portrays a fictionalized historical narrative of two Chinese young adults on opposite sides of the Boxer Rebellion. Yang draws upon elements of magic and fantasy in his writing to convey a bigger emotional resonance to his stories, in which the fervent wishes and beliefs of his characters are brought to life. We see this blurring of fantasy and reality in Yang’s earlier book American Born Chinese (2006) as well. In American Born Chinese, we see the main character, Jin Wang, magically transform from a Chinese boy into a white boy while he is also plagued by his visiting cousin, the hideous Asian caricature, Chin-Kee (i.e., “Chinky”) from China. Chin-Kee reveals himself to be the monkey king, who was sent to Jin to help him embrace his true identity. We also see this blurring of reality in stories like Deogratias (Stassen, 2000), which shows a young man suffering with PTSD after the Rwandan genocide; he turns into a dog each night because of the atrocities in which he participated during the genocide. It is unbearable for him to think he could be human and have done such things. Swallow Me Whole (Powell, 2008) also shows the blurring of reality through the lens of mental illness in the story of two adolescent siblings slowly succumbing to schizophrenia. Changes in narration, voice, time periods, or contexts are also easier to see in graphic novels. Authors can change font styles to indicate different voices or color in boxes to distinguish narrative voice from characters. Color schemes and variations in tone can help convey changes in time and space, as well as provide depth to a context. For example, the orange-washed pages in Pride of Baghdad (Vaughan & Henrichon, 2008) provide a sense of the hazy, hot, and dry setting of a bombed-out Baghdad. The darkened blues of Deogratias (Stassen, 2000) add to the nightmarish, dreamlike quality of the story. Chad Sell’s Cardboard Kingdom (Sell, 2018), a gentle tale about neighborhood kids playing make-believe with cardboard boxes and costumes, also deals with weightier topics like gender identity and bullying through the multiple perspectives of the characters. Using different color schemes for each of the individual narratives, allows readers to see the children as they see themselves and each other. The frames around the pages are in individual colors of each child to help set their story apart.

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Even elements like the panel framing, which can contain the action in a stable grid or by bleeding over to the edge of other panels, can lend a sense of instability. The open spaces and wordless panels in This One Summer (Tamiki & Tamiki, 2014) provide a sense of all the silences and uncertainties that exist around the main character, from the loaded interactions with her estranged parents to the awkward encounters with the teens at the local store. Even the way words are placed inside or outside frames can work toward impacting the feel of a scene. In some panels of The Graveyard Book (Gaiman & Russell, 2014), the words are squished and stacked in between panels, giving a sense of the closeness and tight spaces found in some scenes of the book. All of the visual elements—in conjunction with the words— provide more depth and complexity to the stories that words or pictures alone could not. One of the teachers who responded to our survey spoke at length about teaching Maus (Spiegelman, 1996) with upper high school students. That teacher’s unit on the literature of war specified some of the following goals: ●●

Students will use the literary devices needed for graphic novel analysis.

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Students will analyze the importance of genre to create meaning when analyzing a text.

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Students will know and be able to use for analysis the stories/plots of studied texts.

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Students will compare and contrast the perspectives of different authors and their treatment of war, considering the perspective each text is told from.

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Students will analyze the importance of author’s craft (syntax/style) to create meaning when analyzing a text.

The teacher also paired it with the film Schindler’s List in order to help students compare and contrast perspectives on war and its effects on civilians and soldiers. Drawing upon a broader understanding of “text” and capitalizing on students’ multiliteracy skills, connecting a graphic novel with a film is a great choice. Graphic novels, then, can not only be quite useful in teaching literary devices but actually also be an even better vehicle for teaching and learning in some cases.

Works Cited Baker, K. (2008). Nat Turner. New York: Abrams. Bechdel, A. (2007). Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. New York: Mariner Books. Brown, D. (2015). Drowned City: Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans. New York: HMH Books for Young Readers.

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Brown, D. (2018). The Unwanted: Stories of the Syrian Refugees. Boston: HMH Books for Young Readers. Bui, T. (2018). The Best We Could Do. New York: Harry Abrams. Dembicki, M. (2010). Trickster: Native American Tales; A Graphic Collection. Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing. Gaiman, N., & Russell, P. C. (2014). The Graveyard Book Graphic Novel. New York: HarperCollins. Hinds, G. (2007). Beowulf. New York: Candlewick. Hinds, G. (2010). The Odyssey. New York: Penguin. Krosoczka, J. (2018). Hey Kiddo. New York: Graphix. Lewis, J., & Aydin, A. (2013). March. Marietta, GA: Top Shelf. Long, M., Demonakos, J., & Powell, N. (2012). The Silence of Our Friends. New York: First Second. Neufeld, J. (2010). A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge. New York: Pantheon. Nguyen, V. T. (2017, February 3). “Viet Thanh Nguyenon Being a Reugee, and American—And a Human Being.” Financial Times, p. 3. https​:/​/ww​​w​.ft.​​com​/c​​ onten​​t​/Ocd​​9f69a​​-e89e​​-11e6​​-967b​​-c​884​​52263​​daf. Nicholson, H. (2015). Moonshot: The Indigenous Comics Collection. Toronto, ON: Alternate History Comics. Powell, N. (2008). Swallow Me Whole. Marietta, GA: Top Shelf. Sacco, J. (1994). Palestine. Seattle: Fantagraphics. Satrapi, M. (2000). Persepolis. New York: Pantheon. Sell, C. (2018). The Cardboard Kingdom. New York: Knopf. Spiegelman, A. (1996). Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale. New York: Penguin Random House. Stassen, J.-P. (2000). Deogratias. New York: First Second. Sturm, J., & Tommaso, R. (2007). Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow. New York: Hyperion. Tamiki, M., & Tamiki, J. (2014). This One Summer. New York: First Second. Vaughan, B. K., & Henrichon, N. (2008). Pride of Bagdhad. New York: Vertigo. Watts, I. N., & Shoemaker, K. E. (2017). Seeking Refuge. Vancouver, BC: Tradewind Books. Yang, G. (2006). American Born Chinese. New York: First Second. Yang, G. (2013). Boxers and Saints. New York: First Second.

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C CHAPTER FIVE

Graphic Novels and Literary Interpretation The Basics

Why Teach Literary Criticism in High School at All? If any of our first-year high school English students had come into our classrooms at the beginning of the semester and said, “I can’t wait to learn about literary criticism,” we would likely have checked that they were not having fever-driven delusions. The fact is, literary criticism gets a bad rap. Students perceive it (if they know the term at all) as a collection of hidden meanings in narratives and poems, planted there by devious and possibly alien authors, that are designed to be incomprehensible to everyone but English teachers, and whose meaning, when deciphered, is hardly worth the time required to figure it out. However, we would not have been shocked to find junior or senior students reluctantly admitting that discussing the meaning of literary works can be kind of fun. Teaching AP English has convinced many English teachers that literary criticism can help students understand literature—and not just the students in AP. Teachers have come to see that different schools of literary criticism are really just different lenses to use to see narratives and poetry more clearly. Bill would sometimes explain it to his students this way: Imagine you have a table in front of you with two collections of things on it—a bunch of fascinating photographs and artifacts, and a bunch of lenses. Not all of the lenses will bring all of the photos and artifacts into clear focus. But some will. And sometimes, holding two lenses up to an object will let

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you see it even more clearly (and sometimes it won’t). Students need to learn to recognize which lenses are helpful and which ones aren’t. And the photographs and artifacts on the table don’t have hidden meanings in them. No one altered that photograph to hide some information in there. Rather, when you look with lenses, you are able to see further into the photo, to notice things that you didn’t notice before. And the great thing about graphic novels, when you are studying literature through lenses of criticism, is that they level the playing field. “Right,” our students might say, “But why do I want to look at the photos and artifacts in the first place? I have better things to do.” The answer to that is that they are photos and artifacts from lives that are a lot like theirs. Using the lenses to look at the objects reveals truths about histories, futures, feelings, dreams, futures, and ideas of both the subjects of the artifacts and the investigators. Looking at a work of literature is a chance to look at themselves and their friends. Lenses let them see themselves and each other clearly. As Deborah Appleman puts it, “Literary theories provide lenses that sharpen one’s vision and provide alternative ways of seeing” (2015, p. 4). By the time you become an English teacher, you have had at least four years of coursework in literature, countless hours of independent reading, and a fair chunk of life experiences. By the time you teach students a particular book or poem, you have read it several times, thought about it a great deal, designed lesson plans to help students connect with it, and considered how the words work together in that piece to bring about meaning and feeling and more. Your students, on the other hand, have had only a tiny fraction of your experiences. They don’t understand all the ways that words can work together to convey meaning, they cannot catch all the cultural references, and they haven’t lived long enough to connect with some parts of the story. Many English teachers already use graphic novels to look at the same things literary criticism does. One of the English teachers who answered our survey said, “I’ve taught using graphic novels in several contexts. Initially I use them to teach students how to write literary analysis essays, but with my older students we use graphic novels to explore the themes of humanity’s place in the world and the impact society has on humanity.” Literary criticism can help you accomplish two things: it allows students to get practice in literary and visual analysis and also allows them to explore the themes of how literary works reflect and influence culture. Different schools of literary criticism also provide a vocabulary that allows the exploration of these ideas much more deeply. And graphic novels provide excellent material to apply different schools of criticism to. When you work with a graphic novel, although there are certainly layers of depth in the words and the way they work with the images, there are also the images themselves. And those images work, first and foremost, at a very accessible surface level. Students can look at them and immediately see and understand that level of meaning. When using the lenses of literary

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criticism, images can make the interpretation they are discussing with each other more obvious to see. In the chapter that follows, we will take a look at how various critical lenses work with specific graphic novels. These graphic novels are examples, but a good teacher will be able to read any graphic novel, connect it with a critical lens, and challenge students to use that lens to understand the work more completely.

Understanding Literary Criticism There are a couple of books that served as valuable resources for us in preparing this chapter that would also be excellent reading for English teachers. Earlier we quoted Deborah Appleman from her insightful book Critical Encounters in Secondary English (2015). A second valuable resource we can recommend for English teachers interested in teaching their students more about different schools of literary criticism is Tim Gillespie’s Doing Literary Criticism: Helping Students Engage with Challenging Texts (2010). In this chapter we explain the critical schools of thought, but mostly concentrate on how to use them with graphic novels. For more insight into each school, check out Gillespie’s book. It is also worth mentioning that there are more schools of criticism out there than we are covering. We will be looking at some of the more prominent ones, but the principles described here should apply to any other schools as well. In this chapter we will start out with some of the more accessible schools of literary criticism: reader-response, genre criticism, and historical criticism. In the next chapter we will move on to advocacy criticism, psychological criticism, and moral criticism.

Reader-Response Some approaches to understanding fiction emphasize the text of the book itself and argue that the only thing that matters in understanding a book is considering the words the author wrote. Other approaches emphasize what the book evokes both emotionally and intellectually in the reader, arguing that these feelings and thoughts are more important than what the text literally says or what the author intended readers to take from it. Readerresponse theory considers the intersection between the text and authorial intent of the book on the one hand, and the experiences and narrative that the reader brings to understanding that narrative on the other hand. Louise Rosenblatt (1904–2005), the foundational scholar of readerresponse criticism (or transactional theory), argues that readers bring the totality of their experiences and reflections to the descriptions, meanings, and ideas of the work to construct a combined understanding that draws

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equally on both text and reader. It is a similar process to the way the readers of graphic novels take their entire understanding of the meaning carried in the images with their full understanding of the meaning contained in the text and their understanding of the meaning created by the intersection of text and image to understand the narrative. In the same way that you cannot make sense of a graphic novel by just looking at the pictures or just reading the words, so you cannot make sense of any piece of literature by only considering the text and ignoring the feelings and experiences that the reader brings to that work, and vice versa The most important thing to remember when teaching from a readerresponse perspective is that we are talking about what the initial content is in the text, the images, and the interaction of the two but then also considering how the reader responds to those same aspects of the graphic novel. Let’s return to the graphic novel adaptation of Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak (Anderson & Carroll, 2018), which describes protagonist Melinda’s experience with sexual assault and being shunned by her peer community. If students read the regular text version of the book, we expect a classroom discussion to concentrate on not only the details of the story but also the connections readers could make to that text. With a graphic novel, we need to consider not only what the words and pictures in the text give us but also what ideas and assumptions the reader brings to both words and images. Are any of the images recurring? Do any of them connect directly with each other (sometimes across pages)? What connections can we make to those images? How do the images evoke memories of experiences, or reactions, or strong emotions in the reader? Why do they have that effect? How did Emily Carroll, the artist who adapted the original book, use images to evoke the same feelings that the book did? But it is not merely a matter of seeing what the images contain and what responses they evoke. We also need to consider how the words are used differently in a graphic novel than in a regular text book. In the case of Speak: The Graphic Novel, because the original novel is told in first person, much of the text in the graphic novel is simply Melinda’s voice written in the midst of the art, almost as if it were a voice over. When other characters talk, we get their words directly as we would expect in a graphic novel, though. Carroll has made the choice to not draw actual balloons around the speeches that these characters make. From a reader-response perspective, class discussion should give equal weight to why Carroll chose to do that and what effect it has on the reader. Student-readers should also consider what information is contained in the text and how it supports the images and vice versa. This last consideration—how text and images support or do not support each other—are also important for readers to think about and discuss in terms of how the story gets across a particular theme, idea, or emotional response, as well as how the reader responds to that interaction emotionally, cognitively, personally, and in terms of their own interactions with dating,

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date rape, bullying, shunning, self-harm, isolation, and any other way they connect to the book. For example, consider one of the earliest pages in Speak: The Graphic Novel. Most high school English students can connect with the feeling of being left out or excluded at one time or another. It is interesting to ask students where they see themselves in the pages—in the panels that show students interacting with each other or in the panels that show Melinda being excluded from those interactions. Melinda is close enough to see the dark outline of kids full of excitement and laughter, so close to each other that they overlap, yet at the same time she is completely isolated from them. That image evokes memories and feelings of isolation, or at least sympathy in readers. The text verifies all of this, particularly the larger conclusion to Melinda’s thought “I am outcast.” There is another page in the same section where Melinda’s former best friend, Rachel, is shown laughing with a group of other students. The body language of the grouping leaves no room for Melinda to enter the group. In the last panel on that page, however, Rachel is looking over her shoulder at Melinda. What do your students think will happen next? Based on her body language, will Rachel welcome Melinda into the group? Bill has asked high school English classes this question. The response is almost always unanimous. Rachel is not about to welcome Melinda into their group. Students point out that Rachel hasn’t turned her body, just her head. And the facial expression is more wistful than welcoming. There is sympathy there, according to student-readers, but not enough to let Melinda in. Then Bill asks them what is it that leads them to interpret this scene in this way. It only takes a little prodding and the stories start to come out. The student’s understanding of this scene is based on their own experiences. In short, they understand what is in the book based on what they bring to the book. Classroom activities to be used with reader-response might include having students work in groups to pick important images from a graphic novel and explain how those images connect to other points in the graphic novel, how they connect to other literature that students have read, and how they connect to the student’s own experiences. After each person in the group has had a chance to speak, the group can work together to identify themes or motifs that are common to the connections they identified. It may be helpful to remind students that while not all students will be able to relate completely to the main character or prominent theme (male students who are still learning empathy may not immediately be able to put themselves in the female protagonist’s perspective, and not all students will have had direct [or indirect] experience with sexual assault or shunning), they all should be able to either connect the story to someone they know or use their imaginations to put themselves into those situations.

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Another activity to consider would be for the teacher to select particularly strong images from the graphic novel being studied and project those onto a screen in the front of the room one at a time. For each image, encourage students (perhaps using pair-share or individual writing first to give students time to think) to engage in a whole-class discussion about what it is that makes each of those pivotal images important, how the text contributes to our understanding, and why that particular combination of image and text is so evocative. Teaching reader-response criticism with graphic novels not only allows students to connect the narratives and insights in the text to stories and understandings from their own lives but also allows the images from the graphic novels to give form and clarity to what students are thinking about where their lives have been and where they are going.

Genre Criticism As we mentioned in the introduction, although graphic novels are sometimes mistakenly classified as a genre, they are not. Instead, graphic novels are examples of a format that includes many genres. It is an understandable mistake, however, since the definition of genre tends to be so fluid, and genres often contain subgenres within themselves. When we think of genres, the first categories that come to mind might be mystery, adventure, romantic comedy, dramatic tragedy, science fiction fantasy, comedy, realistic fiction, historical novel, or literary fiction. But we have also been to bookstores that make up their own examples of genres, with collections on tables labeled as “Stories featuring heroines with long flowing hair,” “Sports novels with protagonists living in dire economic straits.” Or consider Bill’s friend John who, as an engineer and new father, had limited time for making selections of science fiction novels and decided for a time to read only science fiction books that had the words “Ice,” “Snow,” or Winter” in the title. The Harry Potter series spurred a genre of stories about young orphans in magic academies and the Twilight series produced a lengthy run of vampire and werewolf stories. The forebears of graphic novels, comic books, for a long time represented a narrow range of genres, with superhero stories and funny animal stories (like Donald Duck) comprising the vast majority of comics published and smaller genres like Western comics, horror comics, and romance comics claiming only a tiny share of the market. Because graphic novels are relatively new in attaining worldwide popularity (though France, Belgium, and Japan have been way ahead of that curve), the field is an exciting mix of established, new, and evolving genres. Memoirs like Maus (Spiegelman, 1996), Fun Home (Bechdel, 2007), or Spinning (Walden, 2017); historical fictions like Incognegro (Johnson & Pleece, 2008), Boxers and Saints

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(Yang,  2013), and Laika (Abadzis, 2014); and coming-of-age stories like This One Summer (Tamiki & Tamiki, 2014), Blankets (Thompson, 2015), and A Tale of One Bad Rat (Talbot, 2008) share the shelves with books like On a Sunbeam (Walden, 2018), American Born Chinese (Yang, 2006), and Deogratias (Stassen, 2000) which are much harder to categorize. So what value is there for young readers in seeing graphic novels through the lens of genre criticism? Genre criticism clarifies the structure and parameters of each particular story form which helps students understand when (and why) individual works break with that form. Genre criticism, like all critical lenses, gives student-readers the tools (language and ideas) with which to analyze, talk, and consider what they read. Knowing the genre also makes starting a new book easier because the reader knows, in a limited way, what to expect in a book, what to pay closest attention to, and what matters. We read science fiction novels differently than we read a realistic sports book, expecting different elements and evaluating the story’s success differently. What makes graphic novels an interesting tool for genre study is the way that the genre is telegraphed to the reader from the first page. For example, the way the characters are drawn almost immediately indicates whether this will be a comedy or lighthearted piece (the characters might look more like caricatures), or a more realistic or serious piece (faces and bodies might be rendered in a much more realistic way). Similarly, the way the artist renders the setting and atmosphere of the book can indicate the tone (especially in how much shading is used), historical period (by the rendering of costumes, buildings, and vehicles), and degree of tension being felt by the characters (by the coloring, perspective, and often the way the images evoke cultural or literary references). As the reader proceeds through the book, these elements and others conveyed in images, text, and the interaction of the two will continue to reinforce or sometimes subvert the genre of the work. Possible methods for teaching genre with graphic novels include having students (individually or in groups) pick a graphic novel genre and develop a list of characteristics that determine whether a particular graphic novel will fit in that genre or not. The value of this project, of course is not so much in coming up with a definitive set of characteristics as it is the discussion about making those decisions. Kristy, an Illinois high school teacher who responded to our survey, gave us the idea of using sticky notes so that she can ask her students questions about the characteristics of a book. In genre criticism one useful activity we developed from this idea is having students use sticky notes to identify and mark characteristics of a particular genre in a graphic novel. The sticky notes allow the student to indicate not only text but also images. If the teacher divides the class into small groups and distributes a graphic novel within a particular genre to each of the groups, students can mark characteristics with sticky notes, then rotate the books around the room. That way each group gets to see the genre characteristics the other groups

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identify and confirm, add on, or question them. Once they have determined the characteristics, the next question (which could be asked of groups or individually) is how each book affirms those characteristics, how it goes against them, and what interpretation we can draw from this. Another activity is to ask students (again individually or in groups) to identify a new genre, give examples of that genre, and discuss the characteristics of that new genre.

Historical Criticism To understand any graphic novel, you need to understand its historical context. Even a graphic novel set in the future, like Nathan Hale’s One Trick Pony (2017) is an extrapolation of the history we live in now. All graphic novels have to be set somewhere and somewhen. Further, while a graphic novel is usually written about a particular time period, it is also written in a particular time period and read by a reader (often in still another time period). This makes understanding the historical context and interpretation of any graphic novel one is reading really important. Although graphic novels are fairly new, Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1996), for example, was written in serial form in the early 1980s, was published in book form in 1991, and then won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992. So it was written around four decades ago, at least twenty years before today’s high school students were born. Andrew Aydin and John Lewis’s graphic novel March (2013) was published fairly recently, but when it was written, Barack Obama was the president of the United States, Brexit was only a theoretical idea, and thousands of refugees were fleeing Syria every day. In our global world, even a handful of years can drastically alter the historical landscape, and a graphic novel like March, about the civil rights movement in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, can take on very different resonances as the political climate of the reader changes. Each of these contexts—the time period the graphic novel is about, the time in which it was created, and the time in which the reader reads it— affect the reader’s ability to comprehend the text, images, and the way the two interact on the page. Likewise, historical criticism also considers the perspective (or bias) of the creator and the context in which that perspective sits, an insight that helps readers understand what they read. Literature also can give us insight into the thought and emotion of a particular era. As Gillespie (2010) puts it: The main premise of historical criticism is that literature is not only the product of one artist’s urge to say something, but also the product of its historical circumstances. . . . A key task of the historic critic, then, is to

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try to recover knowledge about how humans in a particular place lived, thought, and felt when the work was written. (Gillespie, 2010, p. 83) Georg Hegel (1770–1830) argued that culture and cultural artifacts, including the arts, are the result of political and social pressures and influences that ebb and flow as human history unfolds. So literature, including graphic novels, is a reflection of the zeitgeist, or spirit of the age. Graphic novels, then, can be a window into understanding what people of a particular time aspired to, abhorred, delighted in, hoped to change, understood, and how they expressed themselves. That idea of zeitgeist manifested itself in early historical criticism as literary movements. When Jung and Bill first taught high school English, they remember textbooks that were divided chronologically into these literary movements. The notion was that everyone who was writing toward the end of the eighteenth century, for example, was part of the Romantic Era and their work exhibited common characteristics (sometimes listed as five elements) all focused on emotion and sentiment. More recently, however, critics like David Perkins (1992) have questioned whether it makes sense to view everything written during a period through such a narrow lens. His argument is essentially that if you looked at all the artists working now (graphic novelists in this case), you could hardly characterize their work as being part of a single school of thought or easily falling into a small number of ideological categories. Such an approach would ignore the differences, varying perceptions, and opposing viewpoints and insights that such works contain. The categorization by literary movement seems foolish in light of the current emergent period for graphic novels which are exploding into a bewildering array of topics, genres, artistic styles, perspectives, and voices. Contrast Illegal: A Graphic Novel Telling One Boy’s Epic Journey to Europe (Donkin, Colfer, & Rigano, 2018), which is a realistic graphic novel that addresses the global refugee crisis, with Noelle Stevenson’s Nimona (2015), which is a fantasy novel about a girl with superpowers who wheedles her way into a sidekick position working for a super villain. Or consider the range between This One Summer (Tamiki & Tamiki, 2014), which is a realistic coming-of-age story about two girls vacationing with their families at a summer lake, and Stan Sakai’s Usagi Yojimbo (Sakai, 2015), which is a cartoony epic of a rabbit samurai protecting the defenseless in feudal Japan. As a final example, compare Tillie Walden’s On a Sunbeam (2018),which is a gorgeously illustrated story of love, friendship, and architectural restoration in outer space, with Jean-Phillippe Stassen’s Deogratias: A Tale of Rwanda (2000), which is the story of a Hutu teenager driven to instability after the loss of two of his friends to the Rwandan genocide. While it could be argued that there are common themes or structures represented in all of these works that are illustrative of this historical literary era, it would be easy to find ways that each of

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these graphic novels speak in different ways to life in twenty-first-century global culture. One branch of historical literary criticism, New Historicism, brings a focus on problematizing the notion that any creator or work can be objective in how they view history. Creators are affected, new historicists argue, by their politics, economic vantage point, ideology, religious perspective, and cultural biases. New historicists are particularly interested in literature that complicates generalities. Because graphic novels currently are so hard to categorize, they are good subjects for this sort of lens. Gene Yang’s Boxers and Saints (2013), for example, is a two-volume set that looks at the Boxer Rebellion in China at the end of the nineteenth century. Yang tells the story from two perspectives: Little Bao, who becomes the leader of the rebellion and draws on amazing powers from his ancestors, and Vibiana, a Chinese girl who converts to Catholicism and has visions of Joan of Arc. Both main characters see the conflict from very different perspectives, but Yang also shows how faith and belief influence perception. Students could consider not only the context of the war but also the differences between Bao’s and Vibiana’s perspectives, as well as Yang’s overall themes, including the futility and pointlessness of war. This book can lead to very fruitful discussions (if not necessarily any clear conclusions). Overall then, historical criticism can help student-readers with comprehension of graphic novels by focusing on context delivered through both text and image. This awareness of context can help student-readers recognize humor, connections between texts, and irony. It can also help student-readers be aware of how the creator’s background and perspective, as well as the zeitgeist at the time the graphic novel was written, and the zeitgeist of the reader’s own time can determine how the graphic novel was written and how it is read. Historical criticism also allows readers to recognize connections to members of a historical setting or culture on a personal basis rather than an overall summary of major political forces acting on the people of that time. Graphic novels in particular allow us to see emotion on faces, actions in the face of horror, relief and triumph seen in body language, and other aspects of history in a visual manner. However, sometimes historical interpretation can get in the way of seeing the story. The chance to see one of Shakespeare’s plays acted out in the pages of a graphic novel, like seeing it on stage, allows the reader to see all of the story as Shakespeare envisioned it, not just the script. This may be way more important for high school audiences than trying to figure out the historical basis of The Merchant of Venice or connecting Romeo and Juliet to palace intrigues and national politics in England during Shakespeare’s time. How can historical criticism of graphic novels be effectively used in the classroom? Students can work through a graphic novel looking for ways in which the work gives them historical context, indicating as they go whether the context is being related through the words, the images, or a combination

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of the two. Students could use sticky notes as they work through the book to indicate where they are seeing such contextualization, then to transfer that information to a chart of their own devising. Through in-class writing and discussion, the teacher can ask students what they notice about the kinds of contextualization that the graphic novel creator uses and how that contextualization affects their reading of the work. Students could also consider the effect of drawing historical figures rather than describing them in text or including a photograph. The teacher can project a particular panel or page featuring a historical figure from a work of literature, then ask students: Does the drawing add a layer of interpretation (and hence bias) or is there as much interpretation in the setting up, taking, and selection of photographs or the choosing of words in descriptions? Students can then write an essay or make a presentation about similar questions in other graphic novels related to the theme or period they are studying. Teachers might consider a unit that contrasts a conventional novel about a particular time period, Elie Weisel’s Night (1960), a graphic novel on the same topic, Speigelman’s Maus (1996), and a description of the same period or content from a history book. What affordances and constraints do the various formats bring to the depiction of that moment in history? How does each work provide context? What does literature add to the study of history? One could also look at a particular graphic novel like Boxers and Saints (Yang, 2013) and consider what that work tells the reader about the time period in which the work is set, the time period in which the work was created, and the reader’s own time period. If it seems as though all of these suggestions are based in discussion, that is correct. Historical criticism’s chief value for teachers lies in the way that it supports thoughtful and interesting discussion, and graphic novels are an excellent resource to focus on.

Why Start with These Three Lenses? These three lenses, reader-response, genre criticism, and historical criticism, are some of the most accessible to your students because they are perhaps the three lenses that teachers use even when they don’t think they are engaging in literary criticism. When we ask students to think about what a given graphic novel means and how their own life intersects with that graphic novel, we are engaged in reader-response criticism. When we ask students to consider a graphic novel in terms of how other similar works are structured, we are engaged in genre criticism. And when we provide a historical context so students can understand how the graphic novel they are reading fits into what is going on historically at the time, we are engaging in historical

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criticism. In the next chapter we will consider how to use more challenging lenses to look further into what meanings graphic novels hold.

Works Cited Abadzis, N. (2014). Laika. New York: Square Fish. Anderson, L. H., & Carroll, E. (2018). Speak: The Graphic Novel. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Appleman, D. (2015). Critical Encounters in Secondary English: Teaching Literary Theory to Adolescents, 3rd ed. New York: Teachers College Press Bechdel, A. (2007). Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. New York: Mariner Books. Donkin, A., Colfer, E., & Rigano, G. (2018). Illegal: A Graphic Novel Telling One Boy’s Epic Journey to Europe. Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks. Gillespie, T. (2010). Doing Literary Criticism: Helping Students Engage with Challenging Texts. Portsmouth, NH: Stenhouse Publishers. Hale, N. (2017). One Trick Pony. New York: Harry D. Abrams. Johnson, M., & Pleece, W. (2008). Incognegro. New York: Vertigo. Lewis, J., & Aydin, A. (2013). March I. Marietta, GA: Top Shelf. Perkins, D. (1992). Is Literary History Possible. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Sakai, S. (2015). Usagi Yojimbo Special Edition. Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics. Spiegelman, A. (1996). Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale. New York: Penguin Random House. Stassen, J. P. (2000). Deogratias. New York: First Second. Stevenson, N. (2015). Nimona. New York: Harper Collins. Talbot, B. (2008). The Tale of One Bad Rat. London: Jonathan Cape. Tamiki, M., & Tamiki, J. (2014). This One Summer. New York: First Second. Thompson, C. (2015). Blankets. Montreal, Quebec: Drawn and Quarterly. Walden, T. (2017). Spinning. New York: First Second. Walden, T. (2018). On a Sunbeam. New York: First Second. Wiesel, E. (1960). Night. New York: Hill and Wang. Yang, G. (2006). American Born Chinese. New York: First Second. Yang, G. (2013). Boxers and Saints. New York: First Second.

C CHAPTER SIX

Graphic Novels and Literary Interpretation More Challenging Lenses

The last chapter suggested three schools of criticism that might be good choices to start with. In this chapter we will look at three lenses that are a little more challenging to work with but may offer new and greater insights to your students. These three lenses, gender and advocacy criticism, psychological criticism, and moral criticism, are more challenging for a couple of reasons. First, these approaches may be less familiar to students because they may not have been taught to them in their earlier schooling. Second, students may have more resistance to thinking in the ways afforded by these lenses. Gender and advocacy criticism include feminist criticism which some students push back against even before they know what it is. Some students may have similar responses to psychological criticism and moral criticism as well. As in the previous chapter, graphic novels have particular advantages and limitations when we consider how to understand them through these lenses.

Gender and Advocacy Criticism All of the previous schools of criticism are concerned first and foremost with interpretation. What makes schools of advocacy criticism different is that they are concerned first and foremost with change. These schools include feminist criticism, which blazed a trail for the advocacy movements that followed and include gender criticism, African American criticism, LGBTQIA

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criticism, Latinx criticism, environmental criticism, disabilities criticism, and other schools of criticism that concern themselves with social change. Sometimes this entire area is referred to as political criticism. It is worth pointing out that labels of marginalized groups tend to take on a pejorative sense in a larger society that marginalizes them, so each of the terms we have just listed are contested by those within that movement. When considering teaching this school of criticism, it is important to note that fighting that pejorative response is a very real part of helping students get past the label and on to what each perspective can bring. Take feminism, for example. Often mischaracterized as antimale, extremist, and overly defensive, feminist criticism runs afoul of misconceptions which will need to be debunked before students can have a reasonable discussion. As Tim Gillespie explains, Feminism is not some zero-sum game where the advance of women necessarily signals the diminishment of men. In fact, the opposite is true. Interrogating gender roles is a potentially liberating activity for everyone. (2010, p. 190) In fact, it might be better to think of feminism as a way of interrogating social structures that reinforce unequal treatment. For example, Bill makes breakfast for his family every morning. On different days he prepares homemade bread, pancakes, oatmeal porridge, French toast, eggs, cinnamon rolls, sausage and grits. His wife makes amazing dinners most of the nights of the week making a variety of American, Indonesian, Chinese, Mexican, Italian, Greek, and other cuisines. When this comes up in conversation, Bill, who is a white, cisgendered male, is often praised for how much he must love his family to do this for them. His wife, who is a white, cisgendered female, is never praised for cooking for her family after a hard day of teaching fourth grade, even though the dinners she makes are more time-consuming than what Bill does. The difference is that societal expectations assume that cooking dinner is, in mainstream white North American culture, traditionally part of a woman’s responsibilities. Breakfast too. The structures that are in place result in Bill’s work being celebrated and Amy’s work being dismissed as meeting expectations. High school students discussing this topic will quickly acknowledge that Bill isn’t at fault for making breakfast nor is his wife at fault for making dinner. Their division of labor is relatively equitable (particularly since Bill is a morning person). The fault is in the societal structures that take his wife’s contribution for granted. These schools of criticism seek not only to interpret literary work but also to promote equality and justice by making people aware of inequality and injustice. Feminism and related critical foci have an overt agenda, which opens them up to more intense criticism than the previous schools of critical thought.

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Advocacy criticism has brought about significant changes. The literary canon, as taught in secondary schools, was once virtually free of women and people of color but has now expanded across the globe. Publishing companies have been challenged in terms of unfair gender representations and underrepresentation of women and people of color in literary awards. YA literature now features a higher proportion of books that include LGBTQIA characters in significant roles. Along with each of these changes can come an awareness of the assumptions within our curricula and classrooms which perpetuate a system of inequity. The bottom line is that advocacy criticism is about making sure that no one is silenced, marginalized, or misrepresented. That applies to speakers and listeners, writers and readers, all genders, all cultures, all types of ability, and all other distinctions. Graphic novels present some interesting paradoxes when it comes to advocacy criticism. Because graphic novels are multimodal, they deal with the images and representations of what characters look like. On the one hand, this can lead to an overemphasis on appearance and to depictions that may seem inauthentic or objectifying. On the other hand, that very focus on appearance allows graphic novels to be uniquely positioned to question our assumptions. For example, in Tillie Walden’s On a Sunbeam (2018), the character Elliott may appear to be male but is, in fact, of nonbinary gender. Because this is part of the story, with an authority figure refusing to use Elliot’s preferred pronoun, readers of the work question their own assumptions in an initial read. Or in Jason Walz’s Last Pick (2018) we cannot tell initially upon seeing the character of Wyatt, that he has some cognitive differences. As the story progresses, we see the way some characters dismiss him because of his differences, but others value him for that. Before we talk about teaching advocacy criticism with graphic novels, we should consider a couple of caveats. First, it is important to remind students that the goal of advocacy criticism is not that all depictions of marginalized people are positive, honorable, powerful, influential, or anything of the sort. It is, rather that the whole range of human cultured, gendered experience be represented. For example, when considering gender, there is room for the protagonist in Ayun Halliday’s Peanut (2012) who fakes a peanut allergy to get attention; for the empowered heroine in Shannon Hale’s Rapunzel’s Revenge (2008) who takes on the injustice of her stepmother’s rule over the kingdom; for Melinda in the graphic novel version of Speak (Anderson & Carroll, 2018) who is shunned by her peers after a date rape and retreats inside herself; for young, scared Zita in Zita the Space Girl (Hatke, 2011) who, overwhelmed after her best friend is kidnapped by aliens, runs into the woods to cry; and for the deep female friendships and relationships in Tillie Walden’s On a Sunbeam (2018). Second, some graphic novels work better than others for applying advocacy criticism. Advocacy criticism is sometimes challenged for having too narrow of a focus. Some graphic novels bear this better than others.

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Phoebe Gloechner’s memoir, A Child’s Life and Other Stories (2000) depicts the abuse she suffered as a child and how that deeply influenced her life. Alison Bechdel’s self-investigative memoir, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2007) focuses on her complex relationship with her gay father. Walden’s On a Sunbeam (2018) is a novel with almost exclusively non-male characters (there is one male cat) that explores female friendship and love. Each of these graphic novels would be easy to focus a feminist or advocacy analysis on. Similarly books like March (Lewis & Aydin, 2013), Deogratias (Stassen, 2000), and Abina and the Important Men (Getz & Clarke, 2012) are good choices for advocacy criticism because they each bear witness to injustice. For students just beginning with this sort of analysis, however, asking them to critique graphic novels whose primary foci are not advocacy—like Jeff Smith’s Bone series, Victoria Jamieson’s All’s Faire in Middle School (2017), and One Trick Pony (N. Hale, 2017)—could generate feelings of resentment and frustration. While such texts can still be analyzed from an advocacy criticism perspective, doing so may cause student-readers to feel that such an analysis is forced. Teaching advocacy criticism with graphic novels starts and ends with questioning. A typical lesson might start with the following observation questions: How are characters depicted in this graphic novel? In terms of body shape? Clothing? Body language? Facial expression? Something else? What actions do characters take? Which characters get to speak? What do they say? Who is silenced? How do characters perceive each other? What else do you notice about characters and how they are presented in this graphic novel? What comparison can we make between this graphic novel’s depiction of characters and other graphic novels or works? Once students have gathered observational data from the graphic novel they are working with, they can develop categories based on depictions of characters or actions that address a particular injustice. Another possibility is to send students on a stereotyping hunt. Break them up into pairs or small groups and have them look for stereotyping in terms of depictions, actions, or words. Groups then present their findings which leads into a discussion about what counts as stereotyping. Students could also look to a particular graphic novel and try to determine how that graphic novel defines by example terms like male, female, white, black, refugee, illegal immigrant, and so on. Possible discussion questions in response to a graphic novel when considering it from an advocacy perspective might include the following: What does this graphic novel bear witness to? Is this graphic novel making a political point? A point about social justice? Both? Who holds power in this graphic novel? How do you know? How do they exercise that power? Whose story is this? Who gets to speak? Who does not? Who in this text is marginalized or underrepresented? Who in this story needs help? How does this story relate to your community? Your nation? Yourself?

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One warning—teaching with advocacy criticism can lead to students getting interested in advocacy; in fighting injustice; in getting involved with local, national, and even global politics; and in taking their concerns and passions as far as they can and trying to change the world. If this should happen in your classroom, our advice is to make room for it. Don’t belittle student’s ideas or try to help them to understand that the real world will crush them before things can change. It is true that such a thing is possible, but it is equally possible that, with guidance and encouragement, they may be able to take part in democratic change. That might be one of the most important lessons they ever learn.

Psychological Criticism Bryan Talbot’s graphic novel The Tale of One Bad Rat (2008) tells the story of Helen, who runs away from home and from her sexually abusive father and, through a series of experiences, gains the strength and health to be able to confront her family about what happened. The graphic novel form renders her thoughts into visualized reality, shows us people as she actually sees them (at one point a lascivious and manipulative man on the London streets is shown as a hungry fox), and intermittently uses an illustrative style from the classic Beatrix Potter picture books to indicate shifts in what Helen is thinking and feeling. Early in the story Helen sits on the platform of a train station. Moments before an express train roars through, Helen throws herself in front of the train, shielding her eyes from the impact. In the next panel, the woman who had been standing next to her reacts in horror and several other people wince. The next panel shows blood splashed upon a billboard on the other side of the tracks. The following panel shows Helen back on the platform with a backpack and a cardboard sign that reads “Homeless and Hungry, Please Help” (Figure 6.1). The final panel on that page shows Helen being ignored by Christmas shoppers boarding the train as she stays where she is. What is going on in this panel? We seem to be seeing an image of what Helen is imagining. Why is she homeless? Why is she thinking about suicide? The story in the rest of the book unravels that question. Psychological criticism is yet another lens through which we can look at graphic novels. This lens capitalizes on some of the reasons we read in the first place. We read to feel what others feel. We read to recognize thoughts, feelings, and understandings within ourselves. We read to get lost in a world of another human’s invention, and to slip into another human’s life and walk around in it for a while, even if that life is wholly fictional. As The Tale of One Bad Rat demonstrates, graphic novels can reveal the psychology of characters in some different ways than conventional

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FIGURE 6.1 In The Tale of One Bad Rat, Helen reveals her thoughts. books can. We can see what is happening in someone else’s perceptions, dreams, fears, or imaginings. We can, on the same page, see what appears to be objective reality as well. Similarly, a graphic novel can use the text to describe what is happening in someone’s mind, while the images illustrate what everyone else perceives, or vice versa. One psychologist, Joseph Campbell (1904–1987), worked so directly with stories that his work, originally a subset of psychological criticism, has become a separate school of critical thought. Archetypal critics believe that there is power in what Campbell calls myth (though most English teachers prefer the term “story”). That power derives from a deep resonance that some stories have with readers. Readers understand that there are aspects of stories that connect to a kind of truth that is hard to express. Campbell recognized recurring characters, images, and plots that are connected to the collective human consciousness. Thus, according to archetypal criticism, writers not only express their own thoughts, feelings,

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and ideas but also express the thoughts, ideas, and feelings of part or whole of society. Archetypal criticism tries to identify the parts of a story that resonate deeply with larger societal movements of thought. Gene Yang’s American Born Chinese (2006) combines multiple storylines (including the traditional Chinese stories of the monkey king and the stories of three different variations of a single character) to examine themes of identity, culture, tradition, and individual expression. Yang not only employs both archetypal characters and plots but also uses archetypal images. Student-readers could use a single image as a starting point to discuss how Yang’s graphic novel accesses collective human feelings, thoughts, and ideas. But why do we need to spend time with our students considering psychological criticism? How can it help readers gain a fuller understanding of graphic novels? First, readers can explore the psychology of the writer as expressed in the art of the graphic novel—sometimes directly as in the sessions with Alison’s psychologist in Fun Home (Bechdel, 2007), the scenes of the psychologist working with Rorschach after his capture in Watchmen (Moore & Gibbons, 1995), and the moments when Art reflects on his own struggles in Maus (Spiegelman, 1996)—and sometimes more subtly as in Spinning (Walden, 2017), when the readers have to draw their own conclusions. Second, readers can explore the psychology of fictional and biographical characters, as in The Tale of One Bad Rat we just discussed or Derf Backderf’s My Friend Dahmer (2012). Third, readers can consider the psychology of a particular culture in a particular period. (See the previous chapter on historical criticism, particularly the explanation of the zeitgeist.) However, when considering using psychological criticism, there are some limitations and considerations for teachers. First, when we think of psychology, we often think of the ideas of Sigmund Freud. While this can be fruitful territory, and while ideas like the id, ego, and superego can help put the thinking and emotions of characters and graphic novel creators both into a useful context, the visual nature of graphic novels makes them particularly susceptible to Freud’s ideas of phallic and maternal imagery. At times, this can be insightful, but it is easy for students to take this to an extreme where, at first, they are seeing everything as either phallic or maternal, and soon thereafter it is difficult to retain any rationality or dignity in trying to apply those ideas to what they see. Simply put, such interpretation runs the risk of missing the more important surface themes of the work. More broadly, psychological criticism’s desire to link images in a one-toone correspondence with symbolic interpretation or individual psychological meaning can miss both the artistry of the graphic novel and the overt themes more clearly woven into it. For example, in the graphic novel Hereville, How Mirka Got Her Sword (Deutch, 2012), it could be easy to get lost in a discussion about whether the sword symbolizes Mirka’s defiance against the oppressive culture in which she lives; Mirka’s imagination, which allows her to escape that tradition; Mirka’s acceptance of her heritage and the power it

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brings her; or a phallic symbol of the male power she wishes to usurp and use against those who do not take her seriously because of her gender. But ultimately the point is not whether the sword is functioning exclusively within one or two or all of those interpretations. It is more important to consider the overall story and what it tells us about Mirka and who she is as a person. And this leads directly into a third consideration. There is no clear path for nonprofessionals dabbling in psychology to determine the validity of one interpretation over the other. Over the years, psychological fads within critical interpretations have come and gone. When Bill was an undergraduate in the late 1980s, Jungian interpretation had led to a host of characters in literature from Shakespeare’s Hamlet to Peter Schaffer’s Alan, the main character in the play Equus (Schaffer, 1973), being interpreted as Christ figures because they sacrificed for others and sometimes had other connections to the biblical story of Jesus. That interpretation has, of late, fallen out of favor. Is the interpretation no longer correct or is it merely unfashionable? There is no clear way to answer that. So psychological criticism offers some insights and opportunities for readers and also offers some cautions. How can it be used in teaching? A good place is to provide students with content knowledge of psychological frameworks that they can apply to particular works. One way to do this is to have students research psychological terms like identity, gestalt, repression, wish fulfillment, id, ego, superego, denial, regression, depression, rationalization, projection, addiction, suppression, and archetypes. From there, teachers can lead students into discussion with big questions like What psychological insights can we gain from reading this graphic novel? What can we learn about human behavior and ourselves from this story? What do the characters in this graphic novel want or fear? What brings these characters joy? What angers them? What makes them sad or angry? What insights or epiphanies do they have about themselves? Assessments can include papers, presentations, vlogs, blogs, or other media detailing a psychological analysis of one or more graphic novels. Another option is for students to contrast the way the feelings, thoughts, and identities of characters are presented in an original work and a graphic novel adaptation.

Moral Criticism While most readers would agree that it is not the province of good literature to offer didactic moral lessons, most readers would also agree that good literature provides an opportunity to consider and explore the rightness or wrongness of the actions that characters in books undertake. Moral criticism provides an opportunity for readers to question characters’ opinions, motivations, and actions.

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In an earlier chapter, we referenced M. T. Anderson and Andrea Offerman’s graphic novel version of the story of Yvain, the Knight of the Lion (2017), which is originally an 800-year-old poem based on an Arthurian legend. In the story, Yvain, a knight of King Arthur’s court, is challenged by and accidentally kills the husband of Queen Laudine. One of her serving women helps him to hide as Laudine searches the castle for the one who killed her husband. Seeing her, Yvain falls in love with her, though she hates him for killing her husband. Yvain then sets about trying to earn her love. Throughout the book, characters must either aid people they hate or hurt people they love. Promises and laws go against feelings of love and hate. There are ample opportunities to consider whether actions, motivations, choices, and thoughts are in the right or in the wrong. Offerman uses facial expressions to convey emotion and colors and shading to indicate mood. Students can select a scene or a particular character and consider the rightness or wrongness of a particular moment. Considering the moral actions of characters provides students an opportunity to discuss ethics in a way that moves the conversation away from simplistic black-and-white thinking to an understanding of the complexity of human problems and the importance of considering how our actions hurt or help others. Yvain has enough strong themes in it to sustain valuable in-class discussions, but also student projects that might take themes, actions, and results found in the graphic novel and compare them with contemporary movies, shows, or YA literature to contrast different understandings of right and wrong.

Are There Other Critical Schools of Thought I Might Want to Use to Teach with Graphic Novels? These three more challenging lenses combined with the three discussed in the previous chapter have only scratched the surface and haven’t even touched on Marxism, formalism, or several other schools of critical thought. The bottom line, though, is that different approaches to literary criticism offer us a set of remarkable tools to bring to bear on understanding stories, and graphic novels, by allowing the reader to enter into that criticism at three different points (words, images, and the intersection of the two) can be an excellent way to introduce these approaches. In order to use these tools to understand graphic novels in the best way possible though, the teacher needs to help students select the best tools for the job and needs to show students how to use those tools. A hammer is a valuable tool for framing a house but not so helpful for changing a lightbulb. A screwdriver is necessary if you are going to replace an electrical outlet but

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not as useful for driving a nail. Using the wrong tool, in understanding stories as well as in home repair, tends to result in the thing you are working on becoming bent out of shape, ugly, and useless. But the right tool allows you to build something useful and valuable. And the more tools you have, the easier it will be to build. In other words, use these chapters as a starting point, but feel free to bring in other approaches by applying the basic principles we have introduced here. Always remember that lenses should help your students see the work clearly. If these seem to make the work fuzzy or distorted, you may want to use a different lens. We are including a unit sketch of what it might look like to teach literary criticism using graphic novels. Class: Seventh–Tenth Grade English Language Arts Unit: Using Literary Theory Lenses with John Lewis’s March Goals Resources

Approaches

Students will be able to understand and apply literary theories to better understand the John Lewis’s graphic novel trilogy March. ●●

The Cat in the Hat

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Resources from Lisa Rowe Fraustino’s The Cat in the Hat Goes to Graduate School (found online)

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March 1–3

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Articles about women and LGBTQIA people during civil rights. (There are a number of articles and books about how certain groups had to “take a back seat” in terms of advocating for their rights during civil rights. Racial rights came first and groups, like women, were told their time would come later.)

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Article/videos about John Lewis’s “children’s march” at San Diego’s Comic-Con

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A good opening activity for introducing the idea of literary theory as lens is to use homemade lenses—like colored saran wrap or transparencies in cardboard frames—to show how “lenses” shape the way we see the words and image in a text. They each “color” a work and our understanding of it. Just like we can choose different colored lenses to look at something, we can use different literary theories as lenses to examine a work of literature.

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Lisa Rowe Fraustino has a blog post (as of this writing) called The Cat in the Hat Goes to Graduate School that lists ten theoretical perspectives taught in many college English classes. She then applies these perspectives to Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat. Jung has modified this to the top three–four

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theories that are most relevant (or might be the most familiar to her students) to her Children’s/YA literature class. She provides a short synopsis of the theories to small groups. Each group then is tasked with applying their specific theoretical perspective to reading and critiquing The Cat in the Hat. Students are surprised by the subversive depths that can be read into what they thought was an innocuous text. Considering some of the biographical information about Theodore Geisel, some of his drawings for adults, and critiques about the potential prejudice in some of his texts, some of these interpretations may not exactly be a stretch. In a graduate course, this happens easily within the confines of one class meeting, but obviously this will vary depending on the age levels of the students. ●●

Beyond the usual literary discussions of a text around discussions of character, plot, and so on, students can work either in groups or individually to focus in on specific literary theories. By having small groups of students focus in on applying one literary theory and then sharing out in whole-class discussions how we see evidence of those theories in practice, all students will get a chance to see how the different critical lenses work when reading a text. This can be done through the use of a graphic organizer to track understanding or something as simple as sticky notes or colored highlighting to help students track evidence of their learning, At the end of the book, students can debate the utility of the different theories and how they provide (or don’t) deeper understanding of texts.

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Literary theories: ●●

Reader-response: How do you connect with the experiences of John Lewis? Have you ever been in a similar situation? Do any of the characters remind you of anyone? Why do you think the author wrote the story? What would you have done in some of the same situations? How did you feel about the choices the author (or others) made? What were some of your favorite (or the ones you found most powerful) images from the book? How did these images help you make connections? Are there certain themes or motifs you find in your connections to the text?

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Genre criticism: What are the elements of the memoir genre? How does this fit (or not) into your understanding of the genre of memoir? What are some of the illustration choices made to indicate the passage of time—of looking back or of being in the present? Can we determine differences in time periods based upon characters’ dress, vehicles, and so on? How might March be different if it were written as straight historical fiction or biography or as a textbook?

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Historical criticism: What was the importance of the civil rights? What happened to some of the figures we see (i.e., what is their “future,” that is, our present?)? What progress was made from the work of civil right activists? What were some of the successes and failures of the movement? What was the context in which Lewis wrote the book (i.e., what was going on during the time period in which he wrote it?)? What is the context in which you are reading from (i.e., what is going on in the country/world now?)? Are there stories/voices missing from Lewis’s book(s)? What do we not see/know/hear from his retelling?

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Gender/advocacy criticism: What is the role of women in the story? LGBTQIA people? How are they represented in the text? Is it accurate/fair/appropriate? What other voices/perspectives do we not hear from? How do we see people physically represented? What might it mean to hear the story of the civil rights movement from other voices/ perspectives? How do the different characters interact and perceive one another, particularly those from marginalized groups? Are any of the depictions stereotypical? All of the individuals involved in the creation of the trilogy were male—do you think this matters? Whose voice would you be interested in hearing more from and how might that change the story? How does this story relate to you and the country/world today?

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Psychological criticism: Consider the hopes, dreams, conflicts, desires, and insecurities of the characters. How do we see these driving certain choices or actions? How do we see John Lewis’s earlier experiences shape his character development over time? How do we see “into” Lewis’s (or others’) interior? What do we learn about the psychology of Lewis, other characters, or the time period? What can we learn about human behavior and ourselves from the story? What parts of the story resonate deeply with larger societal movements of thought (from archetypal theory)? What recurring images or themes do we see throughout the book? Are there symbols imbued with deeper meaning?

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Moral criticism: What actions, motivations, choices, and thoughts are in the right or in the wrong in the story? How do we see character’s emotions or mood about a situation through the illustrations? How the actions of the characters help or hurt others?

After applying and discussing the various literary interpretations to March, it may be helpful to bring in some supplementary readings about how the rights of LGBTQIA individuals and women were left out of the civil rights

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movement. John Lewis alludes to some of this in the book as to why certain individuals were chosen or not chosen for public leader roles. These readings may help students see that literary theories aren’t just theories but useful tools for uncovering hidden truths behind a story or text. ●●

Similarly, articles about Lewis’s “children’s march” at ComicCon allow students to understand the historical connections to the civil rights movement.

Picture/Text As noted in the sample questions for each literary theory, students Hybridity can be directed to look for how physical representations of the literary theories are found in March. How is our understanding of the text using specific literary theories developed or enhanced by the images in March? What are some different choices that could have been made that would have further enhanced or diminished understanding? Inquiry

This unit asks the question: How can understanding and applying literary theories to a graphic novel help us to both better understand literary theory and the text to which it is applied? Also, are there certain literary theories that may be more useful or appropriate for certain texts than others?

Critical Throughout the unit, students will be asked to interrogate the text Response repeatedly by applying different literary theories. At the end of the unit, students will be able to critically respond to March by writing an analysis paper using one of the literary theories.

Works Cited Anderson, Laurie Halse, & Carroll, Emily. (2018). Speak: The Graphic Novel. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Anderson, M. T., & Offermann, Andrea. (2017). Yvain, The Knight of the Lion. Somerville, MA: Candlewick. Backderf, Derf. (2012). My Friend Dahmer. New York: Harry Abrams. Bechdel, Alison. (2007). Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. New York: Mariner Books. Deutch, Barry. (2012). Hereville: How Mirka Got Her Sword. New York: Amulet. Getz, Trevor R., & Clarke, Liz. (2012). Abina and the Important Men. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Gillespie, Tim. (2010). Doing Literary Criticism: Helping Students Engage with Challenging Texts. Portsmouth, NH: Stenhouse Publishers. Gloechner, Phoebe. (2000). A Child’s Life and Other Stories. Berkeley, CA: Frog Books. Hale, Nathan. (2017). One Trick Pony. New York: Harry D. Abrams.

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Hale, Shannon, Hale, Dean, & Hale, Nathan. (2008). Rapunzel’s Revenge. New York: Bloomsbury. Halliday, Ayun, & Hoppe, Paul. (2012). Peanut. New York: Penguin Random House. Hatke, Ben. (2011). Zita the Space Girl. New York: First Second. Jamieson, Victoria. (2017). All’s Faire in Middle School. New York: Dial Books. Lewis, John, & Aydin, Andrew. (2013). March I. Marietta, GA: Top Shelf. Moore, Alan, & Gibbons, Dave. (1995). Watchmen. New York: DC Comics. Schaffer, Peter. (1973). Equus. London: National Theater. Spiegelman, Art. (1996). Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale. New York: Penguin Random House. Stassen, Jean-Phillippe. (2000). Deogratias. New York: First Second. Suess, Theodore Geisel. (1957). The Cat in the Hat. New York: Random House. Talbot, Bryan. (2008). The Tale of One Bad Rat. London: Jonathan Cape. Walden, Tillie. (2017). Spinning. New York: First Second. Walden, Tillie. (2018). On a Sunbeam. New York: First Second. Walz, Jason. (2018). Last Pick. New York: First Second. Yang, Gene. (2006). American Born Chinese. New York: First Second.

C CHAPTER SEVEN

Interdisciplinary Teaching

While this book is primarily about teaching with graphic novels for the English Language Arts, we know that English Language Arts teachers often have the opportunity to co-teach or collaborate with teachers of other disciplines because English fits so well with all the disciplines. Graphic novels also have great disciplinary and interdisciplinary potential. In fact, there is so much potential and material to discuss that we could fill a book— and did. Graphic Novels in High School and Middle School Classrooms: A Disciplinary Literacies Approach (Boerman-Cornell, Kim, & Manderino, 2017) is an entire book about ways to use graphic novels in all the academic disciplines. In this chapter we will concentrate on how English teachers can use graphic novels in connection with teachers of other disciplines. The increased importance of multimodal learning and the popularity and diversity of graphic novels today—ranging from human evolution to volcanos; from dinosaur hunters to the space program; and from ancient Greek mythology to modern-day slavery—provide the perfect opportunity for English Language Arts teachers to collaborate across a wide variety of texts, subject matters, and ideas. In the last decade or so, schools have moved away from content area literacy to disciplinary literacy. While content area literacy encourages the use of generic methods to teach reading in history, math, science, and other content areas, disciplinary literacy recognizes that each discipline (math, history, science, etc.) has its own distinctive goals and methods of reading. For example, you may find yourself pulling out your hair deciphering government forms for your parents while berating your inadequate literacy skills despite having a PhD in literacy (as happened to one of the authors). Or maybe you find scientific journal articles fascinating but struggle with pop culture articles because you can’t keep the Kardashians straight (as is

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the case with the other author of this book). Literacy is not a set of static skills but highly dependent on context. Each text has different ways of being structured and conveying information and requires different sets of literacy skills to navigate. Thus, a one-size-fits-all theory of content area literacy does not work in different, specialized contexts. While practicing cognitive strategies like previewing the text or summarizing what’s been read can be helpful, these more generalized strategies tend not to consider textual and discourse differences in the various content areas. And although previewing the text might be a universally helpful strategy, it will look different in biology class than in history class. The tasks might be so different that it would be hard to argue they are the same thing. In other words, reading in biology is different than reading in history. Disciplinary literacy instruction focuses on differences in language and text demands. Its premise is that a learner needs to understand how texts and talks are created and used in a discipline in order to fully participate in that discipline. Ultimately then, we approach the different disciplines by considering how reading can advance the goals of each discipline. Students learn to read the way insiders in that academic discipline read, how those texts are produced, and the ways of communicating that are specific to that discipline. To show how graphic novels can be used in conjunction with English Language Arts classes for disciplinary or interdisciplinary opportunities, we draw upon a framework we wrote about in our first book, GRAPHIC. GRAPHIC is an acronym that stands for: G

Goals that graphic novels can help readers meet.

R

Resources that can help meet those goals. These may be excerpts of a graphic novel, a complete graphic novel, or excerpts from multiple graphic novels.

A

Approaches that can focus learning (e.g., disciplinary thinking and practices, inquiry strategies, and so on).

P

Pictures and texts work together and students will have to focus on both.

H

Hybridity—the ways that images and text intersect and inform each other.

I

Inquiry—tasks and strategies that support student inquiry, comprehension, and understanding.

C

Critical Response—Opportunities students have to critically interrogate the text and its ideas.

The GRAPHIC framework helps conceptualize how to approach teaching graphic novels in a way that addresses the unique opportunities of the form. It is a recursive process rather than a linear set of steps to follow in order.

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FIGURE 7.1  The GRAPHIC planning approach. GRAPHIC employs solid pedagogical design principles for disciplinary learning but with a specific focus on the use of graphic novels (Figure 7.1). This framework is not meant to be rigid or dictate what should or should not happen; rather, it is meant to help teachers consider what their purposes are in using graphic novels in different disciplines and how to best capitalize upon their affordances. Below is a sample planning guide using the GRAPHIC framework in a history class. The unit sketch at the end of this chapter (and at the end of Chapter 6) also uses this structure, (Figure 7.2).

English and History Next to English Language Arts, history probably has the greatest potential in which to use graphic novels. As already partly discussed in Chapters 2 and 4, there are a wealth of graphic novels that can be used for teaching issues in both modern and historical times. Too often, though, students and teachers alike see history as an endless succession of meaningless wars or as a dry series of names and dates. The complexities and nuances—and horrors— of war are sometimes underestimated or underappreciated by modern

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Class: US History Unit: Civil Rights Movements Goals

Students will be able to source, contextualize, and corroborate sources to construct an interpretation of why the civil rights movement was successful.

Resources

Textbook, Primary accounts, Eyes on the Prize documentary, March I & II

Approaches

Because the Civil Rights Movement is complex, I want to start with some questions. Because the past is not fixed but rather full of various interpretations, I want students to recognize points of view. Therefore I will

start the unit with March I to engage my students from a particular perspective. Then we will look at other perspectives through Eyes on the Prize and primary accounts such as Malcolm X, Melba Patillo Beals, and Angela Davis. After investigating these multiple accounts we will return to

March II and look specifically at the Selma March. Picture/Text

In March IandII it will be important for readers to recognize how John Lewis

Hybridity

is narrating the past from the present and through the lens of his preparing to attend President Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2008.

Inquiry

We will begin with a causal inquiry question, Why was the Civil Rights Movement successful? To spark the inquiry, we will read March I. Throughout the inquiry we will use March I and II and compare and contrast with other sources to investigate the inquiry question. Throughout the unit, students will be asked to critically interrogate John

Critical Response

Lewis’ accounts based on his position in the movement. At the end of the inquiry, students will create their own response to the question, Why was the Civil Rights Movement successful?

FIGURE 7.2  An example of the graphic sample planning grid.

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secondary students. Graphic novels have the immense ability to provide a context, to connect faces to names, to temper facts with stories, and to provide opportunities for deeper learning and engagement by students. As one teacher in our study wrote, “I have found that students have a lot to say when asked to reflect on graphic novels, both about the story and about the way that the story is told. This also allows for greater connection with the narrative sometimes.” One tendency of humans is our desire to simplify complex ideas and situations to make them more palatable or digestible. We like to think of good guys and bad guys, heroes and villains, winners and losers. In the current global political climate, we see this tendency echoed over and over. The reality is much messier, though. Graphic novels can work marvelously to help reveal the importance of not oversimplifying issues and help push back against thoughtless binaries. Two graphic novels provide rich opportunities to do just that: Gene Yang’s boxed set Boxers and Saints (2013) and John Carlin and Oriol Malet’s Mandela and the General (2018). These two titles cover very different countries and time periods: the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 China and postapartheid South Africa respectively. However, both graphic novels show how our desire for the simple binary of heroes and villains does not reflect the humanity behind the various players in these very different contexts. Gene Yang’s Boxers and Saints is actually two separate graphic novels boxed together. Covering the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, which was an uprising by some Chinese people to push all foreigners (and foreign ideas like Christianity) out of China, each book looks at a side in the rebellion. On one side is Little Bao, a “boxer” (actually a member of the Righteous and Harmonious Fists), and on the other side is Vibiana, a young girl converted to Christianity. Both are Chinese teenagers trying to make sense of themselves and their quickly changing world. Both characters find their identity and purpose through their causes—causes so all-consuming, mentally and emotionally, that they spark visions in Bao and Vibiana. The two characters hurtle toward one another until their paths collide tragically. Yang not only tells the story of an event that usually only gets a line or two in world history textbooks but also provides a depth to that storytelling that allows Boxers and Saints to teach the value of multiple perspectives, compassion for all, and understanding the basic humanity of all parties in a conflict. Students may be particularly intrigued because of the relevant ages of Bao and Vibiana; youth like them were the actors in history just as much its victims. Mandela and the General is a fascinating portrayal of the complex aftermath of postapartheid South Africa. Told not from the perspective of Mandela as the title might imply but from the perspective of retired general Constand Viljoen, the story follows the very complex decisions Viljoen negotiates as the unofficial leader of the white nationalist party. He loves his country and believes whites are superior and deserve to retain

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control. However, he is also loathe to take up arms to do so (ideas that seem contradictory to many). A private meeting with Nelson Mandela (at Mandela’s request) moves Viljoen to further question the violence advocated by those supporting him and catalyzes a begrudging respect for Mandela. Viljoen is moved most by the way Mandela recognizes Viljoen’s inherent humanity and how he is a product of his context; he does not immediately condemn him as an evil and racist man but is open to learning more about him. You may remember a similar sentiment in Chapter 2 when we discussed Kindred. The longer Dana stays in the antebellum South, the more she realizes how people are shaped by their times. She has compassion for Rufus, even at the moment where he is about to assault her (Figure 7.3). Despite the inherently inequitable beliefs Viljoen holds, Mandela looks for common ground and treats Viljoen with respect. It is this grounding of shared humanity, more than angry accusations or pointed attacks, that convinces Viljoen to not advocate for violence from the group he leads— although a faction decides to be violent despite his calls for peace. The

FIGURE 7.3 From Mandela and the General by John Carlin and Oriol Malet, copyright 2018 by Seuil-Delacourt. English text copyright 2018 by John Carlin. Used with permission.

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lessons of empathy and dialogue are just as important as the historic lessons of this pivotal moment in history. Another graphic novel that explores the complexities of the human experience in an historic moment is The Silence of Our Friends (2012). Written by Mark Long and Jim Demonakos, the semi-fictional story is based loosely on that of Long’s father, a journalist at the height of the civil rights movement. The story alternates between two families in 1967 Houston, one black and one white, as they negotiate the rising racial tensions in their communities. We see the black family’s frustration with the slow pace of change and the white family’s fear of being overly public in their support for racial equality. The white family grapples with their privilege and the negotiations they must make to truly be an ally and not only provide lip service. As things come to a head in the community, the families must decide what their parts will be. This is a good example of what the English/ Language Arts discipline can offer the discipline of history by including literature in the study of a given historical movement. While these last two graphic novels look more closely at the “every man” in history, Gettysburg: The Graphic Novel (Butzer, 2008) takes broader strokes in its approach. It zooms in on some intimate moments—such as Lincoln penning the Gettysburg Address one solemn evening—but also provides insight into larger and more pivotal moments in the battle. Butzer’s attention to detail and thoughtfulness are seen not only in the work but also in the extensive author’s notes at the end of the book. All of the text he uses are from primary sources, as well as some of the images. He pulls from letters, diary entries, speeches, and even photographs to create a moving portrayal of the devastating toll the Battle of Gettysburg commanded. Jung took a seventh-grade field trip to Gettysburg as a kid and was relatively unmoved by the sheer horror of it. Some of that might have been age and maturity, but reading a text like this graphic novel could have made the experience much more meaningful than seeing animatronic figures in the museums or looking at empty fields and trying to imagine a bloody battle. Through the use of its images, the book conveys the depth of the sheer numbers of casualties and the contemporary relevance of Lincoln’s words till today. George O’Connor’s Olympians Series is a brilliantly illustrated collection of stories about the Greek gods and might seem like a strange choice to highlight when talking about history. However the books are remarkably well-researched and O’Connor provides detailed notes in the back of each book concerning archaeology, ancient Greek culture, history, and art. The series is an excellent way for students to learn that historical investigation involves looking at cultures, belief systems, and understandings as much as it is about dates and maps. One more suggestion for a historic graphic novel to pair in English Language Arts classes is Don Brown’s Drowned City (2015). Brown’s most recent work about Syrian refuges, The Unwanted (2018), has been

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referenced multiple times throughout this book. Drowned City is his work about Hurricane Katrina. Drawing upon interviews and newspaper articles, every piece of text in his work has a citation or attribution. Through this journalistic approach, he weaves together a narrative that is both epic in scope and intimately detailed. This book offers multiple perspectives on the natural disaster—from emergency workers to everyday people to government officials. Brown’s book provides opportunities to discuss what journalism looks like, how writers make choices about which content to include or exclude, how to provide a multifaceted perspective, and how to always foreground the humanity in a story. There are also a number of online sites with full units in which to teach Hurricane Katrina. From the Classroom Bookshelf, this resource “Drowned City—2016 Orbis Pictus Winner, Sibert Honor” has several ideas for teaching the book as a stand-alone text or as part of a text set. It also provides multiple interdisciplinary opportunities for working with the text, through English Language Arts, social studies, or science.1 The second resource, “Milwaukee Inquiry Unit and Resources for Teaching Hurricane Katrina,” originated in a social studies class in a Milwaukee high school. It connects aspects of the city’s own civil rights movement to Hurricane Katrina.2 Drowned City could also be taught as part of a science unit around climate change and global weather. It might also be interesting to compare it to A.D.: New Orleans after the Deluge (Neufeld, 2010), which is another journalistic graphic novel about the same topic. Finally, one could easily incorporate the multiple graphic novels about the status of refugees globally (and we said as much in Chapter 2). There are many titles—some of which have already been discussed: Zenobia (Durr & Horneman, 2018), Illegal (Colfer, Donkin, & Rigano, 2018), The Unwanted (Brown, 2018), and The Best We Could Do (Bui, 2018). There are two online comics that may be more accessible for classroom use because of their public access and length: Jake Halpern and Michael Sloan’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Welcome to the New World and Karrie Fransman’s Over Under Sideways Down for the British Red Cross. Both can be found online for free. Halpern and Sloan’s comic also has an explanatory NY Times article that can be used in conjunction with the comic. Using a variety of texts around a theme can provide a robust and meaningful way to help students read and learn more about the world around them and its issues. ​http:​/​/www​​.thec​​lassr​​oombo​​okshe​​lf​.co​​m​/201​​6​/02/​​drown​​ed​-ci​​ty​-20​​16​-or​​bis​-p​​ictus​​-​winn​​er​-si​​ bert-​​honor​/ 2 ​https​:/​/me​​dium.​​com/@​​hanna​​h​.lip​​pstre​​uer95​​/milw​​aukee​​-inqu​​iry​-u​​nit​-a​​nd​-re​​sourc​​es​-fo​​r​-tea​​ ching​​-hurr​​ican​e​​-katr​​ina​-1​​8f218​​44af0​c 1

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English and Science There are a fantastic number of graphic novels depicting science through fiction and nonfiction. There does seem to be a tendency for multiple graphic novels to address the same content like space travel, bugs, evolution, and famous scientists. One of our favorites—not because it packed in the most facts but because it haunted us long after we closed the book—is Nick Abadzis’s Laika (2014). Laika was the first animal shot into space—a dog who served as an experimental animal for the former Soviet Union. Mixing in some fiction along with historical facts, the book teaches readers about the Cold War and space race but also about humanity and the nonmonetary costs of science. Other graphic novels about space include T-Minus: The Race to the Moon (Ottaviani, Cannon, & Cannon, 2009), Apollo (Fitch, Baker, & Collins, 2018), and the American space agency NASA’s own graphic novel/comics series Astrobiology: The Story of Our Search for Life in the Universe that you can access for free online. There are a number of graphic novels that, like Laika, foster the connection between science and emotion. Jay Hosler’s Clan Apis (1998), which will soon be released under the title The Way of the Hive (2022) opens with a quote from Stephen Jay Gould: “We cannot win this battle to save species and environments without forging an emotional bond between ourselves and nature as well—for we will not fight to save what we do not love.” Clan Apis is a charming graphic novel packed with information about honeybees but also told through a very anthropomorphic bee. (We will discuss this text a bit more in Chapter 9 on informational texts as well.) Hosler, a trained entomologist, continues this trend in his graphic novel The Last of the Sandwalkers (2015)—not to be confused with his work The Sandwalk Adventures (2013) which explains evolution through dust mites that live in Darwin’s eyebrows and talk to him. While Clan Apis still sticks pretty much within the confines of real honeybee actions, Sandwalkers involves scientist beetles—of which one is also a robot—traveling beyond their oasis in search of life beyond themselves. In using the scientific method and drawing upon some newly acquired knowledge, Lucy, the plucky heroine, surmises that a human skeleton they find must look like a giant bunny. Lucy, with what we find out later is her family, is on the search for more life beyond their isolated oasis of Coleopolis. Along the way, they encounter a great variety of other insects, as well as some birds, humorously referred to as “dyno-soars” by the insects (it may be no surprise that Hosler also wrote a couple of books on evolution), bats, worms, and dead mice. It is fascinating to see what a rich variety of insect life there is and the tremendous adaptations each has made to fit within their various biological niches. While we would probably not use this book specifically to teach science or a large amount of scientific content, it would work well in an interdisciplinary unit on insects. Science teachers would agree that one cannot overemphasize

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the importance of learning to appreciate and even love the things that need saving and may seem unlovable as well. In a slightly different vein, there are a number of books about famous scientists: Suspended in Language (Ottaviani & Purvis, 2009) about Neils Bohr, Feynman (Ottaviani & Myrick, 2011) about Richard Feynman, The Imitation Game: Alan Turing Decoded (Ottoviani & Purvis, 2016), Dignifying Science: Stories about Women Scientists (Ottaviani, Barr, & Gladden, 2009), and Primates: The Fearless Science of Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Biruté Galdikas (Ottaviani & Wicks, 2013). Dignifying Science is an interesting concept, but the multiple illustrators— sometimes even within the same story line, as in the story about Dr. Rosalind Franklin—can be a bit disorienting initially. The book is bookended by a prologue and epilogue based on Marie Curie. The body of the book is made up of portraits of six different female scientists over time. They are a varied group of white women from different times and Western countries (though it would have been nice to see a woman of color or non-Western country represented). Some stories are more explicit in their science, while others focused more on their struggles. The author, Jim Ottaviani, is meticulous and thoughtful in his research and writing process; furthermore, he is generous in providing additional explanations and comments in an appendix. His author’s notes for each of the scientists are great supplementary information about the scientists and illuminate the choices he made in writing about or even selecting the scientists. The Biruté Galdikas story was particularly interesting as all of the text in the panels was presented as field notes over a twenty-year span. So much additional information was left out in that presentation, though, that Ottaviani actually embeds detailed contextual information for many of the panels before the story actually ends. They are almost like massive footnotes embedded a few pages before the end. In addition, there are even more notes in the appendix. As a literary connection, it would be interesting to pair this story with the Primates book to compare how he writes about Dr. Galdikas. Primates offers a more human view of Galdikas (as well as Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall). The stories of the three women are fascinating as Galdikas was the only one who had even close to any formal training to study primates before going off to do it. The book shows how their scientific minds work, though, and their immense passion for their work through all of the obstacles they encounter. As mentioned earlier, the Rosalind Franklin story is the most complex. There are multiple illustrators involved and it is easily the longest story in the book; the illustrators switch with each different narrator as the story unfolds. It is not unlike a graphic narrative relay race, moving the story forward from person to person. Each change draws from different perspectives around Rosalind Franklin’s work life at the time (probably because Franklin’s contributions were contested by her fellow scientists who won the Nobel Prize later). The first reading of this can be confusing,

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but reading it with the author’s notes side by side a second time helps tremendously. Franklin’s story also contains the most science within the book and reveals how academic science works (or doesn’t) within its pages. Franklin’s work with x-rays contributed significantly to the eventual understanding of the DNA structure as a double helix. Some would argue that she should have been named alongside the trio that received the Nobel Prize for that work. Unfortunately, she passed away from cancer in her late thirties, a few years prior to that award. As folks who believe in science but are not science teachers, it would be hard for us to say whether we could replace a textbook with a graphic novel. Most of the graphic novels we are recommending would work best alongside of traditional textbooks. However, if we could suggest a text that might be a candidate to replace a textbook completely, it would be Mark Schultz’s The Stuff of Life: A Graphic Guide to Genetics and DNA (Schultz, Cannon, & Cannon, 2008). With a glossary of terms at the end of the book and several chapters, it is not wholly unimaginable. At least one Amazon reviewer uses it to teach high school science. The Stuff of Life is an extremely informative graphic novel that exemplifies picture-text hybridity perfectly. The balance of text to pictures works to increase the value of each exponentially. The slight irreverence Schultz takes to structuring the text brings some humor to it as well. In a galaxy far away, sea-cucumber-like alien life forms have been studying Earth to learn more about genetics in the hopes of curing their own genetic problem. Their main biologist is relaying their findings to the planetary leaders, which is the conceit for how we, the reader, come to encounter all this information. Since the alien leader is not terribly knowledgeable, he asks lots of clarifying questions about how genetics work, questions that the readers may be wondering about as well. Schultz anticipates the trickier parts readers might struggle with and uses the structure of the story to address it. There are historical pieces scattered throughout the book that provide greater context and the illustrations really are top-notch. One of these includes the contributions of Rosalind Franklin and how she was overlooked. We love when connections like this happen! All of these elements work together to create a text that is gratifying to read and highly effective. There is a series put out by Macmillan, Science Comics, which covers things from cats to skyscrapers to the brain. They are geared a bit more toward intermediate or middle grades, but they could be used well for covering some basic foundational material with older students. Finally, don’t forget we referenced the potential of using Drowned City as part of a unit to teach climate change or global weather. There are a host of other graphic novels that could be used to teach the real or potential effects of science “in action.” Just like some educators have suggested using speculative fiction YA books to address how authors get the science right or wrong, graphic novels could be used for similar purposes.

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English and Math There are graphic novels with mathematical content, but there are far fewer than those for social studies or science. The two that are the best examples but very different are Gene Luen Yang and Mike Holmes’s Secret Coders (20152019) and Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos Papadimitriou’s Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth (2008). Secret Coders is a series following the adventures of a misfit group of students at Stately Academy. They must fight bad guys and solve problems by working logic puzzles and coding programs. The series is mostly geared toward intermediate grades but can be used as a basic introduction to coding. For those of us familiar with the old turtle and coding commands, you’ll be pleasantly surprised. Yang is a former math and computer teacher, so his background of education, math, and graphic novel writing are the perfect mix for this project. Logicomix follows the story of Bertrand Russell, an influential philosopher and mathematician. The dense book provides insight into the habits and practices of mind mathematicians engage in. It is particularly illuminating to see how passionate and engaged the mathematicians are in critiquing or supporting one another’s ideas. We see how mathematicians are not just clinical, cold academics but products of their time. The book details how war, culture, and social thoughts of the time shape the ups and downs of the field of mathematics and those invested in it. It would be interesting to pair a book like Logicomix alongside those of other scientists/mathematicians like Neils Bohr in Suspended in Language or Alan Turing in The Imitation Game: Alan Turing Decoded. While we don’t delve too much into manga in this book for the sake of simplicity, we would be remiss for not noting that the The Manga Guide To . . . series has been well-received. There are large number of titles ranging in content from linear algebra to calculus to databases and regression analysis. These are much more intentional in teaching content, and one of us may have recently purchased a copy to stay up on our understanding of statistics. We have encountered at least one published piece on teaching math to students with one of these manga guides.

English and the Arts Despite the seemingly obvious connections between graphic novels and the arts, there are surprisingly few graphic novels suitable for use in schools that touch on this topic. There are a growing number of biographies about famous musicians: California Dreamin’: Cass Elliot Before the Mamas and the Papas (Bagieu & McGuinness, 2017), Love in Vain: Robert Johnson 1911–1938 (Dupont & Mezzo, 2016), Glenn Gould: A Life Off Tempo (Revel, 2016), Coltrane (Parisi, 2012), The Carter Family: Don’t Forget This

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Song (Young & Lasky, 2012), and two books about the Beatles—Baby’s in Black: Astrid Kirchherr, Stuart Sutcliffe, and The Beatles (Ballstorf, 2014) and The Fifth Beatle (Tiwary, Simon, & Robinson, 2013). These would all make effective supplemental books, but we haven’t found any graphic novels yet that that teach either broader musical history or theory. The fourbook Hip Hop Family Tree series is probably the most informative about the background of any musical genre, but it focuses only on hip-hop. The Carter Family book does span many decades and asserts that the family is the root of commercial country music so perhaps it could arguably cover that genre. These graphic novels may be problematic for teachers because, to put it bluntly, they contain a lot of sex and drugs. None of these graphic novels were written for a YA audience, so they are not squeamish about including naked bodies, promiscuity, or heroin use in front of the reader. For the adult or more mature adolescent music aficionado, though, many of the books are beautifully illustrated and provide a fascinating look into the life and times of important musicians. There is a free graphic novel resource that can be found online that teaches music history through a specific lens. Theft: A History of Music by James Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins (2017) looks at the complicated history of music “ownership” from Plato to modern times. The book covers how philosophy, law, and society dictate how music is passed on, what is considered original or stealing, and what is just “borrowing” or “being inspired by” (Figure 7.4). As James Boyle is a law professor at Duke University, the legal history and ideas are probably pretty solid. Coming in around 250 pages and without chapter breaks, it can be a bit overwhelming. It is very readable, though, and inexpensive. If downloading and reading a giant PDF is too much, though, a print copy is available. There are also audio clips of the music addressed in the book available on the website as well. All of the links to various resolutions of downloads, print copies, and audio can be found on the website.3 Because of the nature of hip-hop and its history of borrowing heavily from other musical forms, it would be interesting to read excerpts of The Hip Hop Family Tree alongside pieces from Theft to look at ideas of musical genealogy, inspiration, and ownership. To Dance: A Ballerina’s Graphic Novel (Siegel & Siegel, 2006) tells the real-life story of Siena Cherson Siegel, who went from the beaches of Puerto Rico to the stages of New York City as a ballerina. Beautifully illustrated and engaging, it is relatively short (sixty-four pages) and probably geared more toward intermediate to middle-grade readers. Pairing this text along with one of the multiple picture books portraying famous ballet dancers such as Misty Copeland and Janet Collins would provide a fascinating window into the struggles and successes of professional dancers—

​https:/​/law​.duke​.edu​/music​comic/

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FIGURE 7.4  Theft! A History of Music by James Boyle, Jennifer Jenkins, & Keith Aoki, copyright 2017. particularly if they are not white. In fact, the historical/contextual background of a dancer like Janet Collins, one of the first black ballet dancers, who struggled to find acceptance, not just as a dancer but as a human being, offers many interdisciplinary opportunities to teach her personal story alongside history. Finally, we can’t help but mention some graphic novels that aren’t explicitly about teaching art but about how art can help students recover from anxiety, abuse, and neglect: Plain Janes (Castellucci & Rugg, 2007), Speak: The Graphic Novel (Anderson & Carroll, 2018), and Hey, Kiddo (Krokoczka, 2019). All three include protagonists struggling with various difficulties—the aftermath of a terrorist bombing followed by a move to the suburbs, the confrontation of a sexual assault, and living with unconventional grandparents and a drug-addicted mother. All of the main characters use art to make sense of their development and the confusing world around them. The art teacher in Speak gets a fair amount of time

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in the book and there are references to some different art movements and ideas. Similarly, Krosoczka’s comics teacher has some strong opinions about different comics styles. With that said, pretty much any graphic novel could be used to teach various elements of art.

English and Physical Education or Health While there are some books about sporty characters or athletes—Check, Please! (Ukazu, 2018), The Breakaways (Johnson, 2019), Muhammad Ali (Sybille & Ameziane, 2016), Sports Illustrated’s graphic novel series teaching different life lessons based on various sports scenarios—there are few books that will teach actual physical education content. Sex education, which seems like a most robust area for graphic novel exploration, is relatively spare. There are a few books around the topic: Drawn to Sex: The Basics (Moen & Nolan, 2018), Not Your Mother’s Meatloaf: A Sex Education Comic Book (Miller & Bley, 2013), and What Does Consent Really Mean? (Wallis, Wilkins, & Wallis, 2017). This is somewhat surprising as the visual nature of the topic and the more approachable storytelling model could help make the material be more accessible. Where graphic novels may make more sense, though, is in relaying the emotional impact of a biological or physical condition. Some graphic novels present the perspectives of friends or family living with those who are sick, such as Mom’s Cancer (Fies, 2009), Pedro and Me (Winick, 2000), Last Things (Moss, 2017), and others are first-person perspectives of individuals living through difficult situations such as Epileptic (B., 2006), Smile (Telgemeier, 2010), The True Story of a Teenage Mom (Arnoldi, 2016), and El Deafo (Bell, 2014). Graphic novels about physical activity are not only nonfiction but include fiction titles like Last Pick (Walz, 2018) and The Baby-Sitters Club series. One complex graphic novel that we would also recommend is Nate Powell’s Swallow Me Whole (Powell, 2008). Powell’s body of artistic work is brilliant and haunting. He writes his own work but has also illustrated well-received texts like John Lewis’s March trilogy and The Silence of Our Friends. Swallow Me Whole follows the story of two adolescent siblings slowly wading into schizophrenia while experiencing the regular everyday angst of being teenagers. The brilliance of the novel is the disorienting confusion around what is real and what is a product of the characters’ mental illness. The huge insects that literally swarm over the page—one of the characters is obsessed with capturing and organizing them—create a constant sense of unease and tension. The smokelike lettering underscores the mental haziness and confusion of the characters, sometimes taking up entire pages. While the text does not strive to answer any questions per se,

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it does provide a haunting glimpse into what mental illness looks like for some. It is perhaps less the sort of graphic novel you enjoy reading and more the sort that shows its power and gets under your skin. Sexual abuse is never an easy topic to discuss, particularly when it happens within families. The Tale of One Bad Rat (1994) by Bryan Talbot tackles this issue with great sensitivity. As introduced on Chapter 6, the story follows a young girl in England who runs away from her abusive father. She attempts to live on the streets but finds them frightening and possibly just as dangerous as living at home. She continues to be haunted by memories of her father and has trouble moving forward. Her love of Beatrix Potter finally brings her to the Lake District where Potter lived for many years. There, among a caring couple, hard work, and beautiful surroundings, she begins her healing process. Reading books like these allows students to see their own stories and learn compassion for those around them. Many YA writers have been censored or critiqued for writing on issues that teachers or parents see as controversial—sex, drugs, and violence—yet those same writers have talked about how youth repeatedly come up to them to thank them for telling their story, for allowing themselves to be seen in literature. As strong advocates of YA literature, we highly reinforce this idea that literature must be “mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors” (Bishop, 1990). Graphic novels allow for a range of ways to read and learn about the world around us and can offer more opportunities for inclusion and multiple perspectives. Here again is a unit sketch of how to use graphic novels to collaborate on a English/History course. Class: Eleventh–twelfth grade English and Social Studies Unit: Memory. History, and Refugees: The Best We Could Do Goals

Resources

Students will be able to articulate the emotional, mental, and physical effects of international refugee policy on individuals and families. Students will consider the importance of memory and voice in formulating a memoir. ●●

“The Boat” (in multimedia) by Nam Le http://www​.sbs​.com​.au​ /theboat/

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Karrie Fransman’s graphic short “Over Under Sideways Down” (http​:/​/ww​​w​.kar​​riefr​​ansma​​n​.com​​/proj​​ect​/b​​ritis​​h​-red​​-cros​​s​-com​​ic​ -ov​​er​-un​​​der​-s​​idewa​​ys​-do​​wn/)

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The Best We Could Do

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Jake Halpern and Michael Sloan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning comic series Welcome to the New World https​:/​/ww​​w​.nyt​​imes.​​com​/s​​ eries​​/syri​​an​-re​​fugee​​-fami​​ly​-we​​​lcome​​-amer​​ica

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Film: Sentenced Home

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As noted in our book, the issue of refugees globally in the twenty-first century is significant, but this is obviously not just a recent phenomenon. Allan Gratz’s Refugee provides an excellent interwoven story of three different waves of refugees—Jews during the Second World War, Cubans in the mid-1990s, and Syrians more recently. This is a middle-grades text that is being taught more frequently in schools and that students may have encountered. It could be an easy suggested extra credit activity to have students read the text before and during this unit to help build this knowledge.

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Beginning with a discussion of the meaning of the word “refugee” and students’ prior connections, understandings, and experiences with it. It may be helpful to draw upon what students already know about different groups of refugees historically.

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There is some significant historical background to The Best We Could Do, and teachers may find it helpful to work with history teachers in an interdisciplinary unit to provide the relevant background—or a guest lecture from them at least.

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Introduce the genre of memoir. However, this is not a typical memoir as it also involves Bui telling the stories of her own parents’ childhoods and includes a significant amount of historical context.

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Beginning the unit with the two graphic shorts “The Boat” (a short story by Nam Le and adapted for multimedia by Matt Huyn), about a young girl fleeing Vietnam on a boat, and Karrie Fransman’s “Over Under Sideways Down,” which was developed for the British Red Cross’ Refugee Week and is the retold story of a Kurdish Iranian teenager fleeing violence. They are both short, moving, and show the experiences of two teenagers fleeing violence and risking their lives to do so. ●●

Because “The Boat” is originally a short story, it may be interesting to read the story first before viewing the multimedia version to compare the experiences of both. This may be particularly helpful as an intro to reading graphic novels for the students and helping them navigate the affordances and constraints of text-only versus text and image.

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Depending on how involved history teachers may be or how much background knowledge English teachers have, there are opportunities for delving into the social and historical aspects of the different groups of refugees discussed— from the trauma that drives them from their home countries to their acceptance or rejection from potential receiving countries.

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Picture/Text Hybridity

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There are many great online teaching guides for The Best We Could Do available on the Scribd, and a number of schools have used the book as a school-wide read. Rather than reinvent the wheel, we suggest reviewing some of them to see which best fits your needs.

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Although we do see how this family tries to survive in the United States, how do other refugees survive? What are others’ experiences? The comic series by Halpern and Sloan looks at the everyday things one Syrian family encounters as they try to adjust to life in the United States. There are supplemental materials that can be found on the NY Times site that can be used as well.

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If time permits, the film Sentenced Home can add some additional background and information about the experiences of refugees—particularly those who arrived as children. Sentenced Home follows the stories of three young men who were involved in a violent crime as youth who get caught up in the immigration system and are considered for deportation. Two are deported back to Cambodia, from whence they had fled with their families as small children. The film investigates the status of refugees in our country and the United States’ immigration policies. There is a particularly moving scene where one of the men, Manny, is reunited with a primary school teacher who becomes emotional talking about not knowing how to help such small children process the violence they witnessed.

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At the end of Refugee, Gratz cites scholar Beverly Crawford’s work that discusses the “three lives” of refugees—(1) surviving the violence or horrors of their homes, (2) the journey to find refuge, and (3) their attempts to adjust to life in their new homes. We see all three of these stages in Bui’s book, as well as what life looks like for the generation after. The additional resources of the online graphic shorts, comics, and multimedia help supplement these various stages as well. Bui’s shifting narrative structure and the intersplicing of different time periods in her storytelling makes these three lives more recursive or concurrent than strictly linear or chronological. Having students notice the ways in which this can be seen, such as her depiction of her father as a young boy retelling a story even though he is an older man, can help emphasize how the picture/text hybridity can be so powerful in graphic novels.

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One recommended activity we came across was to have students choose a favorite panel or quote to make a shareable image or poster. Doing so allows students to engage deeply with one or two examples of powerful images and text, particularly if students are asked to respond to why they were so moved by it.

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Critical Response

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Bui’s memoir is an interesting one because she documents not only her own life experiences but also those of her parents before she was born. Even as she is interviewing her parents for the years it took her to research and write her book, she is constantly making connections between things they tell her and things she remembers. This is particularly poignant as she understands how their own childhoods and early experiences shaped hers much later. Asking students to think about memory and how the writing of a memoir is not just a sorting of memories but also a recreation and refinement that can help them understand the novel as well as possibly provide insight into their own lives. This could be extended into asking family members about their own childhood experiences and understanding family histories. This also dovetails well with the complicated nature of representation in history. Whose perspective is represented? How is accuracy maintained? How can we get the full story or what is considered true? How can we corroborate what we learn?

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While the investigation of memory is more of a personal connection to the story, students can also conduct inquiry into the larger political and social issues of refugees in the world. This can vary from discussions of what is a refugee (consider the debates around those impacted by Hurricane Katrina and what they should be called) to questions of why are there millions trapped in refugee camps, who is responsible for taking them in, and what can we do to help. There may be opportunities to investigate local organizations that help with refugee resettlement or talk with those who have direct experience.

Similar to the two paths described in the inquiry section, there are (at least) two routes that could be taken by students for a critical response. One could involve a more traditional literary analysis paper addressing issues of theme, characterization, or genre. Another would be to dig into the larger global issues of refugees and their struggles. Both options allow students to engage with the text in a variety of ways, as well as expand upon their learning.

Works Cited Abadzis, N. (2014). Laika. New York: Square Fish. Anderson, L. H., & Carroll, E. (2018). Speak: The Graphic Novel. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Arnoldi, K. (2016). Amazing True Story of a Teenage Single Mom. Los Angeles: Greymalkin Media.

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B., D. (2006). Epileptic. New York: Pantheon. Bagieu, P., & McGuinness, N. (2017). California Dreamin’; Cass Elliot Before the Mamas and the Papas. New York: First Second. Ballstorf, A. (2014). Baby’s in Black: Astrid Kirshherr, Stuart Sutcliffe, and the Beatles. New York: First Second. Bell, C. (2014). El Deafo. New York: Abrams. Bishop, R. S. (1990). “Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors.” Perspectives 6 (3), ix–xi. Boerman-Cornell, W., Kim, J., & Manderino, M. L. (2017). Graphic Novels in High School and Middle School Classrooms: A Disciplinary Literacies Approach. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Boyle, J., & Jenkins, J. (2017). Theft: A History of Music. Scotts Valley, CA: CreateSpace. Brown, D. (2015). Drowned City: Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans. Boston: HMH Books for Young Readers. Brown, D. (2018). The Unwanted: Stories of the Syrian Refugees. Boston: HMH Books for Young Readers. Bui, T. (2018). The Best We Could Do. New York: Harry Abrams. Butzer, C. (2008). Gettysburg: The Graphic Novel. New York: HarperCollins. Carlin, J., & Malet, O. (2018). Mandela and the General. Walden, NY: Plough Publishing. Castellucci, C., & Rugg, J. (2007). The Plain Janes. New York: Minx. Colfer, E., Donkin, A., & Rigano, G. (2018). Illegal: A Graphic Novel Telling One Boy’s Epic Journey to Europe. Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks. Doxadis, A. (2008). Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth. New York: Bloomsbury. Dupont, J., & Mezzo. (2016). Love in Vain: Robert Johnson 1911–1938. New York: Faber and Faber Social. Durr, M., & Horneman, L. (2018). Zenobia. Triangle Square. Fies, B. (2009). Mom’s Cancer. New York: Harry N. Abrams. Fitch, M., Baker, C., & Collins, M. (2018). Apollo. London: Selfmadehero. Gratz, A. (2017). Refugee. New York: Scholastic. Hosler, J. (1998). Clan Apis. Active Synapse. Hosler, J. (2013). The Sandwalk Adventures. CreateSpace. Hosler, J. (2015). Last of the Sandwalkers. New York: Last of the Sandwalkers. Johnson, C. G. (2019). The Breakaways. New York: First Second. Krokoczka, J. (2019). Hey, Kiddo. New York: First Second. Long, M., Demonakos, J., & Powell, N. (2012). The Silence of Our Friends. New York: First Second. Miller, S., & Bley, L. (2013). Not Your Mother’s Meatloaf: A Sex Education Comic Book. New York: Soft Skull Press. Moen, E., & Nolan, M. (2018). Drawn to Sex: The Basics. Limerence Press. Moss, M. (2017). Last Things. San Francisco: Conari Press. Neufeld, J. (2010). A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge. New York: Pantheon. O’Connor, G. (2010–2019). The Olympians Series. New York: First Second. Ottaviani, J., & Myrick, L. (2011). Feynman. New York: First Second. Ottaviani, J., & Purvis, L. L. (2009). Suspended in Language: Neils Bohr’s Life, Discoveries, and the Century He Shaped. Ann Arbor: G.T. Labs. Ottoviani, J., & Purvis, L. (2016). The Imitation Game: Alan Turing Decoded. New York: Harry N. Abrams.

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Ottaviani, J., & Wicks, M. (2013). Primates: The Fearless Science of Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Birute Galdikos. New York: First Second. Ottaviani, J., Barr, D., & Gladden, S. (2009). Dignifying Science: Stories About Women Scientists. Ann Arbor, MI: GT Labs. Ottaviani, J., Cannon, Z., & Cannon, K. (2009). T-Minus: The Race to the Moon. New York: Aladdin. Parisi, P. (2012). Coltrane. London: Jonathan Cape. Powell, N. (2008). Swallow Me Whole. Marietta, GA: Top Shelf. Revel, S. (2016). Glenn Gould: A Life Off Tempo. New York: NBM Publishing. Schultz, M., Cannon, K., & Cannon, X. (2008). The Stuff of Life: A Graphic Guide to Genetics and DNA. New York: Hill and Wang. Siegel, S. C., & Siegel, M. (2006). To Dance: A Ballerina’s Graphic Novel. New York: First Second. Sybille, T., & Ameziane, A. (2016). Muhammad Ali. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse. Talbot, B. (1994). The Tale of One Bad Rat. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse. Telgemeier, R. (2010). Smile. New York: Scholastic. Tiwary, V., Simon, P., & Robinson, A. C. (2013). The Fifth Beatle: The Brian Epstein Story. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse. Ukazu, N. (2018). Check Please!. New York: First Second. Wallis, P., Wilkins, J., & Wallis, T. (2017). What Does Consent Really Mean. Vancouver, BC, Canada: Singing Dragon. Walz, J. (2018). Last Pick. New York: First Second. Winick, J. (2000). Pedro and Me. New York: Henry Holt. Yang, G. (2013). Boxers and Saints. New York: First Second. Yang, G., & Holmes, M. (2015–2019). The Secret Coders Series. New York: First Second. Young, F. M., & Lasky, D. (2012). The Carter Family: Don’t Forget This Song. New York: Harry Abrams.

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C CHAPTER EIGHT

Graphic Novel Adaptations of Regular Books

Bill’s daughter loved the Harry Potter books. She was young when the books first came out and Bill’s wife Amy read them aloud to her when each book was published. (Bill was reading aloud with her through the Lord of the Rings books.) When news came that the first book had been turned into a movie, Bill and Amy warned their daughter (speaking from experience) that the movie would probably not be as good as the book. Then when they saw the movie as a family, they found it was, on the whole, an excellent adaptation. Although not every scene matched the way they had pictured it in their heads when they read the book, they found that the movie version was very close. When the same daughter also fell in love with Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series and devoured them, then learned that there would be a movie version of the first in that series, she was delighted. Bill still remembers her anger when she returned from the movie, frustrated that they hadn’t even bothered to get Anabel’s distinctive eye color right. The same sort of dynamic can be seen in the way that audiences worldwide reacted passionately to Peter Jackson’s film adaptations of the Lord of the Rings series. Some fans proclaimed that Jackson had been remarkably faithful to the books and were delighted to see beloved characters come alive with excellent acting, a convincing depiction of the world of Middle Earth, and outstanding special effects. Others raged against Jackson’s choices to leave out characters like Tom Bombadil, to change endings to fit the film format, and to add scenes that were not in the books.

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Why Are We So Passionate about Adaptations? Part of the reason may be that when we read a regular text-only book (if it is well-written and we are good at imagining) we picture the action in our heads. The author of that book hasn’t given us all the details (to do so would make books ten or twenty times the usual length) but just enough for our minds to fill in the rest. We know that Harry Potter is small, skinny, has glasses, unruly hair, and a scar on his forehead. Each reader’s mind fills in the other details. But that means that if ten people read the same book, they may have ten very different pictures of exactly what Harry looks like. Multiply that by all the characters and all the settings and all the possible readers and you have a huge amount of variance. So why would anyone bother to make an adaptation at all, and why would we as teachers have any interest in anything but the original text version? Wouldn’t graphic novel adaptations of Homer, Shakespeare, Mary Shelley, or Louisa May Alcott’s works just be dumbed-down versions of the original work? Why not have students read the real thing? First, an adaptation affords readers a rare opportunity to see how another excellent reader interprets and understands the same words and sentences. Think of it as a discussion with someone whose opinions you respect and who has read the same book you did. You share the moments in the book you loved, sympathize about the characters that perplexed you, ask for clarification about scenes or plot turns you didn’t understand, and discuss (sometimes happily disagreeing) endings, themes, and messages that the work might have had for you. Adaptations, at their best, can function exactly that way. Second, an adaptation from one form to another (e.g., from regular text to graphic novel) gives the story a chance to be expressed in a different way. Each format affords certain excellent ways to get the idea and themes of the story across, and also limitations or constraints that make it difficult to get other parts of the story across. It is fascinating to see how each format can expand and develop some parts of the story and struggle to capture others. One of Bill’s (and Jung’s) favorite books as a kid was Madeliene L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time (1962). He remembers being riveted by the story when he read it as a grade-schooler. Years later, he attended a stage adaptation of the book put on by Chicago’s remarkable Lifeline Theater and was amazed at the way they were able to capture the beauty of the book on a tiny stage. When he reread the book, he found that his memory of the adaptation seemed much more vibrant and alive than the original prose. He concluded that L’Engle’s sparse descriptions made it hard to picture some scenes. More recently, Hope Larsen’s excellent graphic novel adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time (2012) does an amazing job of preserving the original dialogue but provides images to help readers visualize the action while keeping the

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depiction of the characters open-ended enough to fit the varying perceptions that readers have. And unlike a stage show or a movie, a graphic novel requires the reader to use their imaginations to fill in the gaps between what happens in one panel and what happens in the next. In fact, it is this ability to jump-start imagination that may be incredibly useful for teaching high school English. There have been many educational studies that have documented the achievement gap between active readers and those that, for whatever reason, stop reading for fun somewhere around the middle of grade school. Perhaps the key to reawakening interest in reading is helping readers picture scenes in their imaginations as they read. Graphic novels seem uniquely suited to engage that ability and perhaps reawakening the imagination. The notion that graphic novels represent a dumbing down of literature is not a new accusation, nor is it an accurate one. That assertion comes from a misunderstanding of what is required to make sense of a graphic novel. Those who have never read a graphic novel before may equate it to flipping through a magazine or a social media feed, where you are looking at individual images with associated captions. In actuality though, like conventional books, graphic novels consist of hundreds of pages of a single narrative through line. As we have said before, in order to make sense of that narrative, readers must constantly interpret not only text but also body language, facial expressions, panel-to-panel transitions, recurring images, and much, much more. In the 1990s and early 2000s, after initial research suggested that graphic novels might help struggling readers, follow-up studies showed that in order for students to read them effectively, they actually need more decoding and interpretative skills than they would bring to bear on a regular text book. So now that we are on the same page, so to speak, let’s have a look at teaching with graphic novels adaptations.

Selecting Good Adaptations One of the keys to a good adaptation is how well it uses the new medium (in this case the graphic novel format) to capture the spirit, style, ideas, and themes of the original work. For the purposes of teaching English, however, an adaptation that strays from any of these can result in an excellent discussion of what it is that the adaptation got wrong or right (in the opinion of various students). In our survey of English teachers who use graphic novels in their classroom, those who responded identified the following qualities as aspects of a good graphic novel adaptation. (This is also an excellent list of the qualities of any good graphic novel.) When you are looking for a graphic novel to use, consider these things:

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1. How well do the themes and symbolism match with the original? 2. Is there depth of visual literacy in the graphic elements involved? 3. Are the themes in the original work relevant to current events and

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

universal ideas? Does the adaptation preserve or further develop that relevance? Is the story in the adaptation engaging? Is the story powerful? Is the relationship between the text and the art strong and clear? Do my students like it? Has the adaptation won awards? Was it recommended to me by readers I trust? Does it have something to say about injustice in our culture? Is the book challenging and does it require skills to navigate? Does the graphic novel help me represent a variety of voices or feature a diverse set of characters? Does it fit within the larger objectives and themes of the course?

Keeping these questions in mind when selecting a text can help you narrow your options quickly.

Adaptations of Classics An amazing amount of classic literature has already been adapted into the graphic novel format with much more on the way. Those adaptations also cover a remarkable variety of different types, periods, and topics of literature. Gareth Hinds has created beautiful adaptations of Beowulf (2007), The Odyssey (2010), and Shakespeare’s King Lear (2009). Damien Duffy and John Jennings have produced an excellent graphic novel version of Octavia Butler’s science fiction classic Kindred (2017). Mariah Marsden and Brenna Thumler’s Anne of Green Gables (2017) captures the goofiness and emotional strength of the original perfectly. Peter Kuper has done some faithful adaptations of Kafka’s short stories (2018) and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (2004). Teachers considering using a graphic novel adaptation of a book will want to know more than whether the adaptation is good. It is also important to consider how well it will meet the needs of what the students are studying. The best place to start might be to sit down and write out what it is about the original work that you find compelling, interesting, or that drives you to want to share it with your students. This will likely take the form of a list and might include favorite scenes, ways in which characters change, moments that lead to good discussion with your class, particular lines or quotes from the book that you think are important, or anything else you

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find particularly compelling. This would also be a good time to think about the goals you have for the lesson or unit that this particular graphic novel adaptation would be supporting. Once you have that list, read the graphic novel adaptation. Pay attention to whether it hits those points that matter deeply to you, but also keep your mind open and your pen or keyboard ready for anything that you notice that it adds to the original, either in terms of visualizing clearly something you hadn’t noticed when you read the original version or an interpretation that might give your students something to think about or anything else that takes your attention. As with a movie adaptation, if there is an interpretation that you disagree with, that may afford an excellent opportunity for the students to wrestle with the ideas being presented and to discuss whether they find that interpretation legitimate. For example, the Manga Shakespeare series often sets the plays in very different time periods or settings than they were originally written in. (Stage productions do this too.) The Manga Shakespeare version of King Lear (Ilya, 2009) is set in the American West with the characters depicted as indigenous Americans. Manga Shakespeare Macbeth (Deas, 2008) takes place in a postapocalyptic techno-future. Either of these versions can lend to interesting conversations about whether those setting changes hamper or enhance Shakespeare’s work to connect with modern audiences. Most graphic novel adaptations retain much of the original language of the work they are adapting, usually cutting only descriptions which are rendered unnecessary by the images in the panels. There are some graphic novel versions of Shakespeare that offer paraphrased versions, but most use the original language. Here again, consider whether your goal is for students to interact with Shakespeare’s words or if you are using the graphic novel as a way to introduce the story. The Stratford Zoo Midnight Revue Presents Macbeth (Lendler & Giallongo, 2014) is a brilliantly done, relatively short, lighthearted version of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. It does not use the original language much, though it occasionally makes a joke of a famous line, but would be an excellent and enjoyable way for a class to get a sense for the story of Macbeth before diving into Shakespeare’s original language. Lendler and Giallongo also have a similar version of Romeo and Juliet out. Another consideration for teachers is how well the adaptation makes use of the graphic novel format. Just as when English teachers select regular text novels for their students to read, it is important that the work is a good example of what is best in that format. When teaching with regular text novels, teachers look for a story that is strong stylistically, uses the right words, and builds the sentences into paragraphs in such a way that it is a good example of what good writing should be. Similarly, graphic novels should use the format effectively. Teachers can look for effective panel-topanel transitions, good use of point of view and voice, and effective picture/ text hybridity.

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For graphic novels, panels function similarly to how paragraphs do in regular text narratives. They break up the movement of the story through the page, but they also do a little bit more. As we mentioned earlier, when a reader’s eyes move from one panel to the next, they are moving through time and sometimes space. Scott McCloud has perhaps the most effective analysis of how panel-to-panel transitions work (McCloud, 1994). In short, when we move from one panel to the next, we might be covering anywhere from a millisecond of time to hundreds or even thousands of years or miles. A good graphic novel will vary panel-to-panel transitions as a way of controlling the pace of the novel. So if a graphic novel had only transitions that take the reader to a new place of time each time we move from panel to panel, the pace of the narrative tends to be slower and the narrative through line harder to get into. Likewise if all the transitions separate time by only a matter of seconds, or distance by a matter of feet, the story is likely to seem simplistic and move at lightning speed but leave the reader feeling like there isn’t much substance there. To see what we mean, let’s consider these panels from the Anne of Green Gables adaptation mentioned earlier in the chapter (Marsden & Thummler, 2017, pp. 12–13) (Figure 8.1). In the first panel on this page, we see a hand knocking on the door. The second panel is likely occurring at the exact same time but on the other

FIGURE 8.1  Rachel visits Marilla in this scene from Anne of Green Gables.

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side of the door. The words that Marilla is uttering, however, connect the two panels. “Here we go” gives us a sense that Marilla is not necessarily expecting a pleasant visit. In the next page, Rachel, the pink-clad visitor, is coming through the door. The panel-to-panel transitions are, so far, making it easy for the reader to understand where the characters are and how they are moving through the scene. In the fourth panel we see Rachel looking at the table and seeing three places set. We easily conclude that Rachel knows that Marilla is expecting an additional person for dinner besides her brother. It also tells us that Rachel is a bit of a busybody. The final panel on that page is a close up of Rachel’s face which confirms that she is, in fact, a busybody. These transitions all take place in the same location and within seconds of each other. In none of these panels so far does the reader have to puzzle out when and where we are. On the facing page, the first panel switches to a vantage point where we can see Marilla. Without stopping her knitting or turning to face Rachel, Marilla reports that she and her brother Matthew are getting an orphan from an asylum. Marilla seems utterly calm while reporting this, as if there was nothing particularly notable about it. The next several panels are part of a dialogue, so while we keep switching vantage point (think of vantage point as the angle from which a camera would be positioned if this were a film), we are staying in the same location and not much time is passing between panels—three or four seconds at most. In the second panel on that page we see Rachel, her head tilted slightly to the side as if her world was off-balance, with an expression of what might be surprise, shock, or horror, saying only “an orphan?” The shift to the next panel serves as a pause before Rachel continues in the next panel reporting first on the awful things that orphan boys do, before finishing up in a second word balloon (again to leave room for a pause) about how at least orphan boys don’t poison their whole families. Marilla continues knitting calmly, and still hasn’t even bothered to turn toward Rachel. In the fourth panel on that second page, Rachel looks even more stricken as she relates the story of the orphan girl who dropped poison down her foster family’s well. Her head is still canted to the side and her face seems to show even more fear and anger. The next panel takes us back to Marilla who has a wry smile on her face, her head tipped slightly in the opposite direction as Rachel’s, and who explains that they are not getting a girl (perhaps easier than questioning the truth of the rumor that Rachel is circulating). The dialogue continues in the next panel with Rachel standing, arms folded, defiant toward Marilla’s lack of concern for her own safety. Unlike on the previous page, each moment-to-moment panel transition on this page is both connecting to what was said by the other character in the previous panel and also referring back two panels to what the speaker looked like the last time we saw them. Within this panel, we contrast Rachel’s arms-folded stance with her previous stance two panels back. We also contrast her facial expression in which her anger has deepened and perhaps turned to disgust.

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The final panel on the page skips ahead in time, perhaps several minutes. We don’t see the end of the conversation or Rachel moving toward the door, taking leave of Marilla, or Marilla’s expression. The reader must imagine all that (which isn’t hard since the direction of the conversation is very clear). Students in an English class might speculate about what additional panels between the second-to-last and last panel on the page might look like. In the final panel, we see Rachel lumbering off into a beautiful spring day, muttering about what a “glorious disaster” it will be, and, in a reversal of focus, pitying the poor orphan boy who will come into Marilla’s household. It isn’t just that moment-to-moment transitions make the graphic novel easier to read—it is more that they take advantage of the panel-to-panel comparison that readers use to make sense of graphic novels. Adaptations that ignore this seem more like a series of disconnected illustrations stringing the words of the original together and will be less enjoyable and understandable. It is also important that the adaptation captures whatever makes the original classic great. When Jung first picked up the Anne of Green Gables graphic novel, she was skeptical that it could achieve the wry voice of the original regular text novel, and she also doubted that a couple of key scenes could pull at her heartstrings as the original novel had. As the illustration shows, however, the adapters manage to capture the funny dynamics not only with the words but also with the expressions of the characters. And Jung found the emotional scenes also did the original proud. But of course, what makes a classic great varies with each book. Gareth Hind’s adaptation of The Odyssey (2010) relies on beautiful portrait-style illustration and full-page panorama splash pages to give his work an epic feel to it, and realistic illustrations to make the monsters and fantastical elements seem real. Both of these aspects help him capture the sweeping majesty of The Odyssey. Sometimes an adaptation can help a classic text connect more deeply with modern young readers. Rey Tercico and Bre Indigo created a brilliant graphic novel retelling of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women called Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy (2019). While the book is arguably as reductionist about its characters as the original (Jo loves reading, Amy draws, Beth loves to play music, and Meg wants to marry rich), it does a great job of updating the settings and contexts of the original and retaining the emotionally moving and socially interesting aspects of the original. In the graphic novel version, the sisters and their mom live in a fifth floor Brooklyn walk-up apartment. Money is tight because their father is overseas with the army. Unlike the original, the girls form a multiracial blended family—their dad is Black and mom white; Meg and Jo are from earlier relationships and are Black and white, respectively. The girls deal with boys, illness, and other themes from the original, yet also have to deal with racism, the fear of coming out as a gay person, and the difficulty of choosing a career. This adaptation captures the spirit of the original if not the language. Its diverse, modernized cast offers

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multiple avenues of access to the story and may prove an excellent bridge to carry readers from the world they live in to the world of the original where many of the same timeless themes are developed. A similar updating of a classic is Neil Gaiman and P. Craig Russell’s excellent adaptation (2014) of Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book (2008), which itself is a very loose adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book (1894). Whereas Kipling’s original is about a young orphaned boy raised by the animals in the jungle, Gaiman’s story follows a young orphaned boy raised by the ghosts and other inhabitants of a graveyard. The graphic novel adaptation puts the story into a modern setting (at least partly—many of the ghosts are ancient) and replaces Kipling’s antagonist, a snake, with a murderer who has already killed the boy’s family and is looking for him. The graphic novel version is a good enough story to stand on its own and warrants in-class study with strong themes developed in words and pictures. Teachers could also do some comparisons between The Graveyard Book and The Jungle Book which, like all of the adaptations we have talked about, have great potential to engage student-readers in fruitful discussions about interpretation from one version to the other.

Teaching with Adaptations of Classics One of the most effective ways to teach classic literature is to use a strategy like the one we just described. Pairing a classic work with a modern graphic novel adaptation can help students understand the relevance of the original. Another option is to pair the classic with a different modern book that has the same theme. For example, as we mentioned before, the Manga Shakespeare version of The Tempest (Duffield, 2008) does an excellent job of turning a dry script into a visual realization of what happens on stage. But even doing so may still leave students unclear about what a story about a wizard on an island has to do with their lives. It can be hard to get students to think about some of the themes in The Tempest like revenge, forgiveness, and grace. However, pairing it (either in reading or in discussion) with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Rowling, 2007) provides an opportunity for student-readers to consider parallels between Prospero’s desire for revenge against the brother who marooned him on the island and Harry’s desire to destroy Voldemort after all he has done to Harry’s friends. Further, readers might draw parallels between Prospero’s decision to show mercy to his brother and his brother’s friends when he has the opportunity to destroy them, and Harry’s encounter with the helpless creature that is Voldemort when Harry talks with Dumbledore in the ethereal version of King’s Cross station. The number of possible pairings is as limitless as the breadth of each teacher’s reading list and the creativity of their imagination in seeing parallels

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and connections between them. Hunger Games (Collins, 2008) could be paired with Miles Hyman’s graphic novel adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s short story The Lottery (2016), as both of them concern a societally enforced system of sacrifice. Sometimes a graphic novel can be the primary text, with the classic taking a secondary role. Christopher Marlow and Goethe both wrote about the Faust legend, in which a scholar makes a deal with the devil. While this story has become an enduring part of literary culture, neither manuscript was written with high school students in mind. (In fact, Marlowe is difficult for a college student to get through.) Scott McCloud, however, wrote about the Faust legend in a contemporary setting. His graphic novel, Sculptor (2015), describes young down-on-his-luck sculptor David Smith whose dead uncle appears to him and offers him a deal: unlimited artistic power in exchange for death at the end of 200 days. David faces many of the same challenges that Dr. Faustus does. It is also possible to pair graphic novels that are not direct adaptations with classics and contemporary YA to explore particular themes. One teacher who responded to our survey wrote, “We do mostly literature circles, so I’ve never done a whole-class study of a graphic novel. I teach [the graphic novel] Persepolis (Satrapi, 2007) as part of a Bildungsroman book club along with The Catcher in the Rye (Salinger, 1951), The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian (Alexie, 2007), Jane Eyre (Bronte, 1999), and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time (Haddon, 2003).” Such an approach makes the most of the differences between the books to clarify and illuminate the thread that they have in common—the development of the artistic skills of the main character. It is perhaps worth taking a moment to acknowledge the special value of graphic novel adaptations of play scripts. Another teacher who responded to our survey explained that “when teaching Shakespeare, we use graphic novels to help give our students a better idea of what is going on in the play.” Most people who have seen William Shakespeare’s plays will acknowledge that he was an amazing playwright. But students first encounter Shakespeare in the pages of one of his scripts. We suspect that if Shakespeare were alive, he would be horrified to learn that millions of students are forced every year to read the scripts of his plays. He would likely point out that the script does not equal the play. The script is merely an outline of one part of a multimodal presentation. In order for a play to come alive, actors learn the lines and match them to facial expressions and body movements and emotions on stage. Light, sound, costume, and set designers read the script to use their crafts to highlight the story. A director brings the designers, cast, and crew together under a single unifying interpretation, and then an audience watches the whole thing play out on a stage where the audience can see, through facial expressions, voices, body movements, sound, lights, costumes, sets, and other elements, how characters feel, speak, interact with each other, and live out their stories.

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Although they don’t usually involve quite so many creators, graphic novels do the same thing. They use drawing, inking for shadow, color, panel design, and word balloon placements to convey settings, costumes, tone, atmosphere, facial expressions, body movement, voice and emphasis, emotion, light, and other elements. Emboldening, line breaks, word balloons, and other devices can convey the voice with more expression that a straight script can. Students reading the graphic novel can much more easily connect characters, lines, emotions, motivations, actions, and reactions. And all of these aspects are very helpful for comprehension of both the story and the subtext under the story. This discussion is a reminder that since different formats have different strengths and weaknesses and affordances and constraints, one fruitful activity is to have students contrast, for example, how a graphic novel presents a script as compared to what a stage production or a film does with the same script. Similarly, students can look at two different graphic novel adaptations of the same script and compare how characters are depicted more or less sympathetically.

Adaptations of Popular Modern Works Along with the general boom of graphic novels being published, there has also been a boom in graphic novel adaptations of contemporary YA and middle-grade favorites. Teachers haven’t missed the value of popular graphic novels for teaching a wide variety of literary concepts. Another teacher in our survey commented, “We do reading workshop where students choose their own books to read for the majority of the year. I teach mini-lessons throughout the year and use graphic novels as the mentor texts for the lessons. The lessons are usually about reading skills: visualization, listening, expecting, and so on.” Walter Dean Meyers’s award-winning book Monster (1999) tells the story of Steve Harmon, a teenaged boy, being tried for his part in a robbery and murder. The original text version is told partly in the form of a screenplay that Steve is writing. The graphic novel version (Sims & Anyabwile, 2015) retains that form, while at the same time emphasizing throughout the book in every scene that Steve is Black, and that those who are deciding his fate often are not. Another graphic novel adaptation with robust themes for your students to dig into is Duffy, Butler, and Jenning’s adaptation of Octavia Butler’s Kindred (2017), discussed earlier in this book. Philip Pullman’s Golden Compass series has also been adapted into graphic novels. Rich themes in Pullman’s work include loss of innocence, morality and ethical decisions, identity, fate and free will, truth and lies, the interaction of politics and religion, and other ideas. Here too, tracking how those themes are realized in a graphic novel can lead to fruitful discussion.

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While less rich with themes, some graphic novel adaptations may be more useful in connecting student-readers who like reading graphic novels back to the original works. Rick Riordan’s beloved Percy Jackson series is an excellent way to get students interested in Greek mythology. The series has been adapted into graphic novel form. Lightning Thief (Venditti, Futaki, & Riordan, 2010) and The Sea of Monsters (Venditti & Riordan, 2013) both showcase how well-suited Riordan’s stories are to the graphic novel format. The illustrations bring the characters of mythology to life and Venditti and Futaki make use of Greek architecture and art in their drawings so that the resulting graphic novel is not only as gripping as the original but also has many applications to Greek mythology. YA fantasy writer Marissa Meyer has developed the graphic novel Wires and Nerve series (2019) alongside her best-selling Lunar Chronicles series (2014). The two series are set in the same world, and some characters crossover, but the graphic novels are separate works, not really adaptations. Because of the difference between the way stories are told in a regular text novel and the way they are told in a graphic novel, there are reasons why student-readers would want to read both. In Marissa Meyer’s work, for example, while both regular text and graphic novel formats feature action, intrigue, and a chance to see inside a character, they do so in very different ways. The regular text novel allows readers, generally speaking, more access to what characters are thinking and feeling internally. Graphic novels can make actions clearer and easier to picture. For the teenaged reader, what this means is that each version gives them more insight and understanding into their favorite characters and a chance to spend more time in the world of those books.

Final Thoughts on Teaching with Graphic Novel Adaptations Any adaptation of anything involves interpretations. That is what makes adaptations so interesting to consider with a high school class. Any study of graphic novel adaptations then should teach students to be aware of interpretive layers. This means understanding that any interpretation of a literary work starts with the adapter looking for what the original work is trying to say and how it is saying it. This might be called the first interpretive layer. A second interpretive layer has to do with the shift of format. To go from a description of a character’s appearance in a conventional book to their appearance in a graphic novel requires not only some literal choices (if we know the character wears a leather jacket, what does that jacket look like) but also choices based on the illustrator’s interpretation of what this character’s overall disposition is like. In some graphic novels, the artist will

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include sketches in the back of the book showing the thought processes of how that character developed. A third interpretive layer has to do with what the adapter decides to emphasize in the book in terms of plot and theme. This might include choices the adapter makes about not only what to include or not include but also that which they are going to emphasize. Graphic novel creators might choose to emphasize some themes over others, and in fact, they might notice a theme which other readers have missed that they want to emphasize. This may be a matter of preference but may also be a matter of which theme fits well with visual representation. One way to get at these interpretive layers is to have students read chapters of the regular text novel first and imagine how they would adapt it. Then have them contrast that with what the graphic novel adapter did and note the parts that are different, then think about why the adapters made those choices. Students could then read another chapter of both the original and the adaptation and make a list of all the interpretive decisions they see there. This could again lead to a discussion of which choices seem valid. Students could then respond on their own to a later chapter in the book through an essay, blog, poster, video, or other media and highlight what overall interpretations of character, themes, plot, and overall message they are seeing. Graphic novel adaptations can build interest, interpretive understanding, and appreciation for a variety of classic and contemporary works.

Works Cited Alexie, S. (2007). The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. New York: Little Brown. Bronte, C. (1999). Jane Eyre. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press. Collins, S. (2008). The Hunger Games. New York: Scholastic. Deas, R. (2008). Manga Shakespeare Macbeth. New York: Harry Abrams. Duffield, P. (2008). Manga Shakespeare: The Tempest. New York: Amulet. Duffy, D., Butler, O. B., & Jennings, J. (2017). Kindred. New York: Abrams. Gaiman, N. (2008). The Graveyard Book. New York: HarperCollins. Gaiman, N., & Russell, P. C. (2014). The Graveyard Book Graphic Novel. New York: HarperCollins. Haddon, M. (2003). The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. New York: Vintage. Hinds, G. (2007). Beowulf. New York: Candlewick. Hinds, G. (2009). King Lear. Somerville, MA: Candlewick. Hinds, G. (2010). The Odyssey. New York: Penguin. Hyman, M. (2016). Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”: The Authorized Graphic Adaptation. New York: Hill and Wang. Ilya. (2009). Manga Shakespeare King Lear. New York: Harry Abrams.

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Kipling, R. (1894). The Jungle Book. London: Macmillan. Kuper, P. (2004). Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. New York: NBM Publishing. Kuper, P. (2018). Kafkaesque. New York: W.W. Norton. Larsen, H. (2012). A Wrinkle in Time: The Graphic Novel. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Lendler, I., & Giallongo, Z. (2014). The Stratford Zoo Midnight Revue Presents Macbeth. New York: First Second. L’Engle, M. (1962). A Wrinkle in Time. New York: Ariel. Marsden, M., & Thummler, B. (2017). Anne of Green Gables. Kansas City, MO: Andrews McMeel. McCloud, S. (1994). Understanding Comics. New York: Harper Perennial. McCloud, S. (2015). Sculptor. New York: First Second. Meyer, M. (2014). Cinder. Macmillan: New Years. Meyer, M. (2019). Wires and Nerve: Volume 1. New York: Square Fish. Meyers, W. D. (1999). Monster. New York: Harper Collins. Rowling, J. (2007). Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. New York: Scholastic. Salinger, J. (1951). The Catcher in the Rye. Boston: Little Brown. Satrapi, M. (2007). The Complete Persepolis. New York: Pantheon. Sims, G. A., & Anyabwile, D. (2015). Walter Dean Meyer’s Monster. New York: Amistad. Sinclair, U., & Kuper, P. (2004). The Jungle. New York City: Comics Lit. Terciero, R., & Indigo, B. (2019). Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy. New York: Little Brown and Company. Venditti, R., Futaki, A., & Riordan, R. (2010). The Lightning Thief. New York: Hyperion. Venditti, R. Futaki, A., & Riordan, R. (2013). The Sea of Monsters. New York: Hyperion.

C CHAPTER NINE

Teaching Literary Nonfiction or Informational Text Reading with Graphic Novels

When people think of a literature class, they tend to think about novels, plays, and short stories. Literature class is about studying fiction—made-up stories. In fact, however, nonfiction essays, op-ed pieces from a newspaper, reportage, biography, and creative nonfiction have been part of many English curricula for decades. Similarly, when people think of graphic novels, they think of fiction ranging from American Born Chinese (Yang, 2006) to Zita the Spacegirl (Hatke, 2011). As we mentioned in Chapter 1, the term “graphic novel,” however, has come to refer to nonfiction informational texts as well. These books come in a remarkable variety, just as regular text nonfiction does, covering subjects as diverse as auto repair, Danish physicist Niels Bohr, the American civil rights movement, the Irish Easter Uprising of 1916, the history of aviation, genetics, polar bears, and nearly any other topic you can think of. Many of these graphic novels work well for teaching within academic disciplines other than English Language Arts. To find out more about teaching with graphic novels in the disciplines, we recommend our previous book Graphic Novels in High School and Middle School Classrooms: A Disciplinary Literacies Approach (Boerman-Cornell, Kim, & Manderino, 2017). For our purposes in this chapter, however, we will be looking at nonfiction books that would be effective in the English Language Arts classroom.

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Why Teach with Nonfiction Graphic Novels? In nonfiction narratives, English teachers perhaps have two general areas of focus. The first is helping students see how a nonfiction story is constructed and told differently than a fictional story and as a result how we talk about them and understand them differently. In addressing this focus, we might ask the following questions: How does plot function differently when life, rather than an author, dictates how the story goes? How does an author make sense of what can seem like an unconnected series of events? What genres exist in nonfiction writing and what are their characteristics? How does character development happen in a nonfiction narrative? What themes or motifs do you notice that run throughout the work? A second focus has to do with how we determine truth in informational writing. By the time they reach high school, students have often been taught that nonfiction stories are true and fictional stories are made up. Neither of those positions is exactly correct. Thinking that nonfiction is true is to miss the way in which most nonfiction contains elements of argument, opinion, perspective, or bias. Emphasizing that fiction is made up is to miss the point that fiction stories can hold profound truths, insights, and factual knowledge. Both nonfiction and fiction are still directed by the perspective of the author, may have particular agendas, and sometimes may be intentionally deceptive. It often falls to English teachers to prepare students to be savvy readers of all fiction and nonfiction everything from historical novels to the tangled world of internet news.

Which Informational Graphic Novel Is Best in Your Classroom? Just like regular trade books, some informational graphic novels are wellwritten, fascinating, and organized in a way that makes them easy to read. Other informational graphic novels seem poorly researched, disorganized, or written without precision, care, or style. The only way to be absolutely certain whether an informational graphic novel is suited to your students, your goals for teaching, and your curriculum, is to read it. But there are some guidelines that can help you narrow the search.

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First, avoid graphic novel series that do not list the author and/or artist on the front cover. These tend to be mass-produced books where the objective is more about getting the book out on the market than really digging into the material. A casual look at the pages of these books will often reveal a lack of connection between panels—such that each panel is like a disconnected image and corresponding bit of information, but there is no real connection of story, character, or image from one panel to the next. One series that we read featured a superhero-like scientist who would, for example, hang from a helicopter at the end of a rope ladder over an active volcano while narrating a textbook-like expository speech about the layers of the earth’s crust. In the next panel he would be running full speed across a plateau and talking about geological uplift of mountains. The book contained no clues as to why he was doing these things, and did not offer much of a connection between the two topics. The depth of the information being related by this superhero-scientist went no deeper than the most basic Wikipedia article. Well-done graphic novels are usually created by a creative person or team that is interested and curious about their topic. They think carefully about how to present the information in a way that connects with their audience because they want their audience to care as deeply as they do. As already introduced in Chapter 7, Jay Hosler’s The Way of the Hive (forthcoming, 2021) is the story of Nyuki, a honeybee, as she moves through her life cycle. The Way of the Hive was originally titled Clan Apis. Nyuki learns how to serve the hive, not get eaten by predators, and enjoy her relatively brief life. Along the way, Nyuki’s actions and conversations with other bees explain a great many things about honeybees in general. Partly because the creator, Hosler, did his PhD on honeybees, and partly because he is a gifted storyteller, the story the book tells does not seem stilted, awkward, or contrived. And while bees might not be the first topic you think of when you are looking for an interesting nonfiction topic, Hosler’s writing and drawing style is remarkably engaging. Consider this image from the book: (Figure 9.1). Look at this page and you will see that while it is describing the life cycle of a bee, it does so by having Nyuki (who is, at this point in the book, a larva) interact with Dvorah, an older bee in the process of going about a bee’s daily business. Their dialogue reveals Hosler’s interest and expertise in the subject and at the same time doesn’t talk down to its readers (whether they are high school students or adults). For example, when Nyuki chides Dvorah for giving up the easy life of a larva she says, “Where’s your sense of hedonism?” Hostler assumes that his readers will either know what hedonism is or can look it up. You can also see the creativity and passion that Hosler has for his subject in the inventive layout of the page, which uses the hexagonal shape of the honeycomb cells as a unifying element on the page so that the cutaway showing the larva in their cells seems like a natural part of the flow of the page.

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FIGURE 9.1  Selected art and text from chapter 9 of The Way of the Hive by Jay Hosler and illustrated by Jay Hosler. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. That page is also a good illustration of a second aspect to consider. Does the book use the connection between words and images effectively? When you look at the page, you notice that, while there are a lot of words on that page, they do not overwhelm the visual elements. It is also clear who is speaking not only because of the placement of the word bubbles but also by the difference in the voices. For one thing, young Nyuki is asking the questions and older Dvorah is answering them. For another thing, Dvorah’s voice sounds more authoritative and Nyuki seems to speak with more of a childish voice (e.g., in the question, “Did you get fired or somethin’?”). Third, a good informational graphic novel will have a well-integrated narrative or thematic flow. In the case of The Way of the Hive, the story

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follows Nyuki through her whole life. While we are learning about honeybee biology, social behavior, and life cycles, we are also watching a friendship develop between Nyuki and Dvorah—and we will see that friendship weathers threats from predators, life changes, and even the end of its season. A fourth quality of a well-developed informational graphic novel is that it will use the graphic novel format effectively—often in a way that could not fruitfully be presented in other formats. In the page from The Way of the Hive, while the main text moves the story along and the graphics guide the reader’s eye down the page, the graphics also allow us to see Dvorah capping the larvae’s cells, both in an overhead view that lets us know how many of them she is capping and in a cutaway view so we can see what a typical larva looks like in its cell. To render this same scene with just text would take more paragraphs or even pages of description, and even then, the concept might not be nearly as clear. A science textbook might include photographs of similar scenes, or even drawings, but would lack the story connection. In the last image on the page, the reader can actually see Nyuki’s exasperation at the idea of having to give up her cushy life—both by the way her mouth is open, screaming her words, and by the sweat lines above her. On the one hand, one might argue that giving Nyuki human emotions distorts our understanding of the nature of bees. On the other hand, by making a bee into a character in a narrative, Hosler greatly increases the chances that the reader will be deeply engaged in both the story and the information. Perhaps a well-written and well-produced movie or video could accomplish all of these things, you might point out. While that is true, the graphic novel format has the advantage of allowing readers to proceed at their own pace. Imagine the scene from The Way of the Hive as a scene in a video. Based on the length of time it would take to read the dialogue aloud, we might expect that scene to run perhaps forty-five seconds. Then the video would move on to another scene. If the viewer did not understand what was going on, the viewer could, of course, back up the video and rewatch the scene. But when we watch videos, we tend to be swept along by the narrative and seldom go back. The graphic novel format makes it much easier to consider a scene a second time. All that is required is for the reader to move their eyes back a page and read it again until it makes sense. Finally, a good informational graphic novel will evidence an interesting perspective or perspectives of the subject at hand. This not only means that such a book gets its facts straight, though that is a part of it, but also means that there is a clarity of narrative such that the story being told evidences a deeper understanding of the important themes of that story. For example, in Nick Bertozzi’s graphic novel Shackleton: Antarctic Odyssey (2014), it is not only that the text contains the right dates and the right details about Shackleton’s expedition but also that the text and image combine to reinforce the sense of loneliness, openness, and vulnerability in the snowfields of the South Pole. In fact, while Bertozzi’s book is generally applauded for its

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attention to historic detail, as of this writing, there has been some online critiques questioning the accuracy and appropriateness of some Inuit images in the book. In John Lewis’s March series, the story not only accurately covers the American civil rights movement but does so in a way that emphasizes Lewis’s perspective as a student member of the movement. As a student, Lewis’s experiences were sometimes very different from those of the leaders of the movement, like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Abernathy. Also, the graphic novel distinguishes between Lewis’s ground level descriptions of what happened factually and Lewis’s reflections after a whole life of working toward equality for African Americans (with both successes and setbacks). But these are all general things to look for. The most important consideration is whether that book will be well-suited to help your students reach the specific goals in the lesson plan or unit plan you are working with. Depending on the goal, you may find that many graphic novels will suit your needs, or only a few. For example, if your goal for the unit is for a student to engage in critical thinking about a nonfiction multimodal text, any good informational graphic novel (or novels) will probably suffice. If you are looking for a graphic novel that will allow students to consider the difference between characters in biographies as opposed to fiction works, or if your goal is to have students determine the qualities of good writing about the process of making or doing something, or if you want students to look at informational graphic novels that present two contrasting theses in the same book, you may have to look harder to find the three or four graphic novels that would fit the bill. Actually, for the second goal—students considering the difference between characters in biographies as opposed to fiction works—teachers could give students a choice between several good biographical graphic novels including Logicomix (Doxadis, 2008), a biography of British mathematician Bertrand Russell; Primates (Ottaviani & Wicks, 2013), which contains biographies of primate biologists Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Biruté Galdikas; Ho Che Anderson’s King (2005), which is a biography of American civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; Louis Riel: A Comic Strip Biography (Brown C., 2006), a biography of the Canadian Metis freedom fighter; Feynman (Ottaviani & Myrick, 2011), a biography of the quirky American nuclear physicist; Andre the Giant: Life and Legend (Brown B., 2014), a biography of the French-born actor, wrestler, and entertainer; and March (Lewis & Aydin, 2013). There are many others, of course, but students could easily contrast these graphic novel biographies with either realistic fiction graphic novels or regular texts. For the third example, to help students determine the qualities of good process writing, it would be most effective to select excerpts from a variety of different sorts of graphic novels that deal with process. First Second

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publishes two excellent series that might be helpful: Science Comics and Maker Comics. The more graphic novel reading a teacher does, though, the more likely they are to stumble upon some other good examples. Lucy Knisley’s books Relish: My Life in the Kitchen (2013) and Something New: Tales from a Makeshift Bride (2016) are not how-to books, but contain several excellent examples of process writing. Science-based graphic novels like the earlier example of The Way of the Hive (Hosler forthcoming 2021) or The Stuff of Life: A Graphic Guide to Genetics and DNA (Schultz, Cannon, & Cannon, 2008), while probably not one’s first thought when thinking of a book for English class, contain multiple excerpts that could serve as excellent examples for process and how-to writing assignments. The final goal mentioned earlier—if you want students to see an example of an informational graphic novel that presents two contrasting theses in the same book—is a more difficult task because graphic novels that do that are not as plentiful. Laird, Laird, and Bey’s Still I Rise: A Cartoon History of African-Americans (2009) might be the single best graphic novel suited to this goal. In Still I Rise, there are two main characters: an elderly African American man and woman. As the book gives relatively objective historical narratives of important events, the man argues that the events show that life has been slowly getting better for African American people. The woman, using the same examples, argues that not much progress has been made at all. Some goals, like this one, may have only one or two graphic novels that fit the requirements to be used in class. Some goals may not have any graphic novels that can helpfully support students seek that understanding. We will include a list of graphic novels at the end of this book and a link to a site where we will add additional graphic novels as we read them. The bottom line for selection of nonfiction graphic novels for use in class is really no different than the approach you use for selecting regular novels and trade books. The more suggestions you can get, the more discussions you can have with other teachers, and above all, the more books you can check out, the greater number of resources you will have at hand as you plan a new unit.

What Types of Informational Graphic Novels Are There? There are lots of different ways to categorize informational graphic novels including artistic styles, how well they connect to other academic disciplines, overall quality, and others. For our purposes, though, it might be useful to consider the more general genre categories of informational graphic novels and some subcategories within each, along with some examples.

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Biography One of the most important issues of any biography is that human lives are so complex that they inevitably can only be understood through some degree of interpretation. Within a graphic novel, that interpretation includes trying to makes sense of attitudes, actions, motivation, what the person said and how they said it, and what they might have been thinking; it also includes how they stood, what their face looked like, how the artist imagines locations and moods when particular scenes were occurring—and all this is true not only for the subject of the biography but also for the other people who are depicted in the book. We have mentioned US representative John Lewis’s autobiographical trilogy March (Lewis & Aydin, 2013) several times already. Upon first glance, an autobiography, coming as it does from the person who lived that life, would be the most free from interpretation. However, a book like March has multiple layers of interpretation for student-readers to consider. First, when the events described in the books actually occurred, Lewis, like all humans, would have interpreted the meaning of those events for his life, emphasizing some scenes as important and minimizing or forgetting others. Second, since Lewis is recalling these events decades after they occurred, there is the level of interpretation that occurs with the passage of time and the accumulation of history. Some events gain more significance based on how they contribute to historical moments down the line. Others take on different meanings in those contexts. Third, because this is a graphic novel, the artist also makes choices of interpretation when deciding what to depict and how to depict it. It would be a mistake, however, when teaching biography to students, to view additional layers of interpretation as a liability when selecting a text. We teach English Language Arts. Interpretation is what we do. Helping students untangle the layers, recognize when something is an interpretation, and appreciate how that helps us understand a person’s life is a good thing. One of the ways we can best understand biography is to pair a series like March with other graphic or regular text biographies of the same subject or the same period. For example, Ho Che Anderson’s King: A Comics Biography of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (2005) and Helfer and DuBurke’s Malcolm X: A Graphic Biography (2006) both come at the same civil rights movement as March does, but with different perspectives, approaches, drawing styles, and understandings. Many characters crossover between the three books so that it is possible for student-readers to compare, for example, the ways in which Dr. King, President Kennedy, and Malcolm X are referred to, represented, and reflected upon. Similarly, one could examine a series of graphic biographies of scientists involved with the development of an atomic bomb, including Richard Feynman (Ottaviani, 2011), Robert Oppenheimer (Ottaviani, 2015), and Niels Bohr (Ottaviani 2009). Such an examination might be more interesting

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when you consider that all three of these books were written by the same person, Jim Ottaviani. Students might also compare biographies of different subjects. Teachers might ask students what differences they notice between the graphic biography Feynman (which was written after Richard Feynman had died) and March (which John Lewis participated in the creation of). Which one is likely to be more accurate? Why? Biographies offer an excellent place to start because while students have likely read many biographies in their educational journey, it is not as likely that they will have compared them with each other. There is as much to be learned about the form of a graphic novel biography and the process of writing it as there is about the subject of that biography.

Description of Event Nonfiction graphic novels that offer descriptions of events vary widely in the way they present that information. Some are more transparent than others about where their information comes from. In order to understand the narrative, it is important that student-readers consider the sources from which information comes to them. Some graphic novels make their sources very transparent. For example, in Getz and Clarke’s Abina and the Important Men (2012), the book opens with a graphic novel narrative of the events the book is concerned with. Abina, a young woman living in Britishcontrolled Ivory Coast, is sold into slavery by her family—despite the fact that the British had outlawed it—and seeks justice in a British court. The next section of the book contains the court transcripts, so that readers can check out the original document. Then the book contains several articles that present the historical, geopolitical, cultural context of that event, as well as the author’s descriptions of their process in creating the narrative from these documents. Other graphic novels vary, sometimes giving sources, other times not. The graphic novel Mike’s Place: A True Story of Love, Blues, and Terror in Tel Aviv (Baxter & Faudem, 2015) says on the cover that it is based on a true story, and in the context of the graphic novel, describes how the authors came to write the story. The authors had traveled to Israel to make a documentary and became interested in a restaurant that served Jewish people and Palestinians alike in an environment free of conflict. During this time, the restaurant would also be bombed and rebuilt. But the story is primarily a first-person account built from the interviews that the main characters did for the documentary. Students might contrast Abina and Mike’s Place to see what differences there are in trustworthiness and whether/why that matters. Structure in narratives of events varies greatly and can be a useful topic of discussion or analysis with students. For example, the graphic novel Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow (Sturm & Tommaso, 2007) begins with a

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first-person narrative from the perspective of an older African American man who played in the American Negro Leagues against Satchel Paige, got a hit on one of his pitches, but was injured so badly in his slide into home plate that his career was done. This character, who is clearly important to the story, may be based on a composite of Negro League players, but is a fictional character. This allows the creators of the comic book to not only use more conventions of a historical fiction novel but also get in some important content of what it was like for Black people living under the Jim Crow laws which instituted a system of separate (and unequal) schools, bathroom facilities, restaurants, theaters, and other goods and services in the American South. This context is vital for students hoping to understand the historical significance of Paige’s career in baseball. Students can consider some of the affordances and constraints of this particular structure which allows the reader to become more absorbed in the book earlier and more deeply, but may make it difficult to distinguish fact from fiction. In contrast, Joe Sacco has had several important graphic novels including both Safe Area Gorazde (2018) and Palestine (1994), which perhaps align best with the structure of new journalism. Sacco embeds himself in a location and interviews many witnesses in that location about the events he is trying to describe. In his graphic novels he gets a lot across with his drawings of places. The images of Palestine get across the depth of daily poverty in that place, while the images of Gorazde convey the fear and devastation in a town caught in the cross fire of the Bosnian War. Sacco also tells the story by giving us the direct words of the people he has interviewed, sometimes even layering two or three people’s accounts together and indicating when there is a transition in who is speaking by giving us a close up of their face in a panel, then returning to the images being described. This structure resembles a short story or essay collection as Sacco keeps looking at different aspects of life in Palestine or Gorazde but returning again and again to themes of injustice, helplessness, loss, and hope.

Memoir As we discussed in Chapter 3, a memoir is usually focused on a particular time period in the person’s life and is sometimes more valuable for the insights it produces about events than for its description of the events themselves. A memoir is a way for a person to make sense of the events of their life in terms of their own growth rather than for the historical value of the information. For example, although the book Alan’s War: The Memories of G.I. Alan Cope (Guibert, 2008) provides an enlightening view of what life was like for an everyday American soldier in the Second World War, the focus of the memoir, Alan Cope, did not fight in any significant battles. In fact, he usually seems to have little idea of what was going on in the rest of

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the European theater of war. He traveled around with his unit, made friends, did his best to cope with difficulties, and, in the end, he had more to say about what it means to be human than he had any insight into the war itself. Often memoirs are built around an everyday event that does not seem to be anywhere near as significant as the Second World War. Lucy Knisley’s Something New: Tales from a Makeshift Bride (2016) uses the memoir form not only to explore Knisley’s life, family, relationships, and wedding but also to give insight into themes that apply to the way romance and marriage work in our world. Themes of compromise, of identity, of community, and of trying to escape the frenetic pace of modern life run throughout the book. Other memoirs cover a remarkable array of subjects, contexts, and times of life: everything from teenage pregnancy (Arnoldi, 2016) to growing up with parents who struggle with addiction (Krosoczka, 2018), to personal struggles with cancer (Marchetto, 2009), epilepsy (B., 2006), Lou Gehrig’s disease (Moss, 2017) and countless other topics. Each of these can be a great way to get students to explore both the structure of the narrative and the themes. Student-readers can look for themes (both in the words and pictures) and trace those themes through the work as a way of seeing how those themes develop.

Process Narrative A process narrative describes how to do something or how something happens. We encounter process narratives regularly in our daily lives in the form of recipes, instruction books for assembling products, and explanations of how vaccines work, how bills become laws, how the greenhouse effect induces global climate change, and how to change the oil in your car. There are some graphic novels that are, in their entirety, a single process. However, it is more common to find a process narrative comprising a part of a graphic novel. Excerpting these as examples for a process-writing assignment can be a good way of including the graphic novel format to broaden the possibilities for writing. Why include graphic novels? Because, when it comes to process writing, graphic novels are able to make things clearer in several ways. Andy Hirsch’s Science Comics: Trees: Kings of the Forest (2018) provides an interesting example of this. In six panels, a seed splits open, with roots growing down and a sprout coming up, then leaves opening up to the sky. Each panel is a cross section showing both what is happening below the dirt and above it. This allows Hirsch to show a clear progression of time, which allows the reader to see how things unfold. It seems to be stepby-step, but readers of graphic novels are used to using their imaginations to fill in what happens between the panels. We not only see the process as a series of steps but also understand that, for the seedling, it isn’t really moving through stages, but it is one continuous process. This allows the

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graphic novel to present both step-by-step and continuous perceptions simultaneously. We might also notice that the illustrations are done in cutaway, as if we could see through the dirt. To be fair, a photographer or filmmaker could achieve the same effect by planting the acorn in dirt sandwiched between two pieces of glass, but no matter how many times they set this up, the seedling will likely develop in a way that isn’t exactly typical—plants have individual differences after all. Hirsch can select colors and do the drawings in such a way that they highlight the important parts of the growth and cut out anything distracting or extraneous. Finally, unlike illustrations in a science book which might have an accompanying explanation in the text or perhaps as a caption to the photo, the graphic novel can embed the text box in the illustration itself. It can even extend over multiple panels to offer an explanation that is inextricably linked to the visual narrative. Rather than requiring the reader to follow a visual narrative and then read a text narrative, a graphic novel can try to bring the two together into one imagined understanding.

Explanation of a Particular Subject Some nonfiction graphic novels are not biographies, memoirs, reportage, or even narratives. Many graphic novels are explanations of a particular subject. One strong example is Hennessey and McConnell’s The United States Constitution: A Graphic Adaptation (2008). Using a variety of visual analogies, personifications of concepts, and concrete representations of abstract ideas, this graphic novel explains concepts like the three branches of the US government, checks and balances, individual rights and what happens when they come into conflict, the separation of church and state, and other important concepts. For example, the legislative branch is represented as a giant wearing a three-piece suit with the Capitol Building as its head and holding a quill to signify its power to write laws. This kind of image, which would not be of much use in a text-only description of the Constitution, helps readers to understand and remember the role of the legislative branch (although students might also consider the bias inherent in an image appearing to put the Capitol Building on a male body as a way to represent a legislative body with a significant number of female congressional members serving). Another example of a graphic novel that describes concepts is Brooke Gladstone and Josh Neufield’s The Influencing Machine (2012). This book looks at the way reporting and the media works: both in ways that strengthen democratic nations and get at the truth and in ways that cause misinformation to actually become stronger. While it contains narrative stories, it primarily explains difficult concepts through concrete examples, comparisons, and charts, and through an easy-to-relate-to narrator.

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There are graphic novels that explain genetics, car repair, global climate change, aeronautics, terrorism, physics, and even teaching. Explaining concepts is a sort of reading and writing that we spend relatively little time on in English and language arts classes, but interestingly nearly every serious literary work includes explanations within it. Being able to read and write explanations can certainly strengthen student understanding. Combining graphic novels with regular text books that contain explanations can lead to an excellent discussion of ways to convey complicated information with words and pictures. Follow-up assignments can involve using a range of multimodal expressions for students to explain concepts connected to their own experience. While nonfiction and informational writing is not perhaps the first thing we associate with English class, this type of reading and writing is important and valuable and graphic novels can offer student-readers the opportunity to consider the affordances and constraints that different multimodal forms offer different expressions. It is also a good opportunity to learn more about fiction narrative by contrasting it with nonfiction narratives—and graphic novels can help.

Works Cited Anderson, H. C. (2005). King: A Comics Biography of Martin Luther King Jr. Seattle: Fantagraphics. Arnoldi, K. (2016). Amazing True Story of a Teenage Single Mom. Greymalkin. B., D. (2006). Epileptic. New York: Pantheon. Baxter, J., Faudem, J., & Shadmi, K. (2015). Mike’ Place: A True Story of Love Blues, and Terror in Tel Aviv. New York: First Second. Bertozzi, N. (2014). Shackleton: Antarctic Odyssey . New York: First Second. Boerman-Cornell, W., Kim, J., & Manderino, M. (2017). Graphic Novels in High School and Middle School Classrooms: A Disciplinary Literacies Approach. Lanham, MA: Rowman and Littlefield. Brown, B. (2014). Andre the Giant: Life and Legend. New York: First Second. Brown, C. (2006). Louis Riel: A Comic Strip Biography. Drawn and Quarterly. Doxadis, A. (2008). Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth. New York: Bloomsbury. Getz, T. R., & Clarke, L. (2012). Abina and the Important Men. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Gladstone, B. (2012). The Influencing Machine. New York: W.W. Norton. Guibert, E. (2008). Alan’s War: The Memories of G.I. Alan Cope. New York: First Second. Hatke, B. (2011). Zita the Spacegirl. New York: First Second. Helfer, A., & DuBurke, R. (2006). Malcolm X: A Graphic Biography. New York: Hill and Wang. Hennessey, J., & McConnell, A. (2008). The United States Constitution: A Graphic Adaptation. New York: Hill and Wang. Hirsch, A. (2018). Science Comics: Trees: Kings of the Forest. New York: First Second.

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Hosler, J. (forthcoming in 2021). The Way of the Hive. New York: HarperCollins. Knisley, L. (2013). Relish: My Life in the Kitchen. New York: First Second. Knisley, L. (2016). Something New: Tales from a Makeshift Bride. New York: First Second. Krosoczka, J. (2018). Hey Kiddo. New York: Graphix. Laird, R. O., Laird, T. N., & Bey, E. (2009). Still I Rise: A Cartoon History of African Americans. New York: Sterling. Lewis, J., & Aydin, A. (2013). March I. Marietta, GA: Top Shelf. Marchetto, M. A. (2009). Cancer Vixen. New York: Pantheon. Moss, M. (2017). Last Things: A Graphic Memoir on Loss and Love. San Francisco: Conari Press. Ottaviani, J., & Myrick, L. (2011). Feynman. New York: First Second. Ottaviani, J., & Purvis, L. L. (2009). Suspended in Language: Neils Bohr’s Life, Discoveries, and the Century He Shaped. G.T. Labs. Ottaviani, J., & Wicks, M. (2013). Primates: The Fearless Science of Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Birute Galdikos. New York: First Second. Ottaviani, J., Johnston, J., & Jones, J. (2015). Fallout: J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Political Science of the Atomic Bomb. Ann Arbor, MI: G. T. Labs. Sacco, J. (1994). Palestine. Seattle: Fantagraphics. Sacco, J. (2018). Safe Area Gorazde. Seattle: Fantagraphics . Schultz, M., Cannon, K., & Cannon, X. (2008). The Stuff of Life: A Graphic Guide to Genetics and DNA. New York: Hill and Wang. Sturm, J., & Tommaso, R. (2007). Satchel Paige: Striking out Jim Crow. New York: Jump at the Sun. Yang, G. (2006). American Born Chinese. New York: First Second.

C CHAPTER TEN

Creating Writing and Multimodal Composition

Often, when teachers plan a graphic novel unit, they want to end it with the chance for students to design their own graphic novel, perhaps one that tells a biographical story. Unfortunately, few students possess the drawing, layout, and writing skills to be able to produce a piece they find satisfying and the time involved to teach such skills would be prohibitive. Further, many teachers feel ill-equipped to teach students the requisite skills. However, in advocating for teachers to teach comics production with students, Michael Bitz (2010) differentiates between creative (required) and artistic skills (nice to have, but not necessary). He describes creative skill as an ability rooted in imaginative, original, and independent thinking while he defines artistic skill as rooted in technique. However, for those still wary of tackling such an endeavor, we would suggest teachers consider expanding this concept to student production of a multimodal composition, which would draw upon the multimodal elements of a graphic novel without having to actually produce a full graphic novel. This chapter will provide ideas for considering either a graphic novel writing project or using graphic novels to teach multimodal composition.

What Is Multimodal Composition? Both composing a graphic novel and learning about multimodal composition will require a close examination of how words, pictures, and space are used to communicate ideas in multimodal text. What do we mean by the term “mode”? What modes are involved in a multimodal text? Do graphic novels

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include all the modes? Are we leaving out some modes? Does this have any connection to pie à la mode? Alas, no pie is involved. Multimodal composition refers to texts that include different modes, or modalities of communication. So a traditional picture book would include both printed text and pictures as their modes. However, some interactive picture books also include participatory elements that require gestures or even have embedded sound within them and utilize more modes. Think of a television advertisement that draws upon movement or gestures, speech, and music to communicate ideas. Each of these are additional modes. Multimodal communication is becoming increasingly more prevalent as we see more text on television (think of the news ticker on the bottom of cable news channels) and more images included in print (think of the emergence of infographics). To ask students, then, to ignore these trends in communication and include only one mode—text-based print—in their compositions seems shortsighted. The chapter will give you a basic overview of how to approach a graphic novel writing project or a multimodal composition. However, because of the amount of overlapping information between the two, we would suggest you read through the whole chapter.

How Do I Help Students Create Comics? Let’s be honest. Most of us are not going to have the time, space, and wherewithal to have our students write a full-fledged graphic novel. This rough framework can help you plan out what a limited comics composition unit can look like in your specific context. Whether an abbreviated comics essay or short story or a full-fledged graphic novel, the comics format is one of the most accessible forms of multimodal text. At the minimum, it only requires a writing utensil and paper. While individuals might want to include technology (and there is a fair bit out there), it is not necessary. The humble zine is a perfect example of what some creativity, markers, glue, and scissors can accomplish.

Know Graphic Novel/Comics Formats You and your students will have spent some time reading and studying graphic novels before you teach students to create their own. It may be helpful to review the different aspects of the graphic novel format that you and your students have noticed. Students should identify the different visual and textual features of the graphic format such as examining the various types of panels, the different ways to use space within and between panels, how word or thought balloons are implemented, the use of captions, and the use of perspective. Depending on the genre or purpose your students

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are writing for, you may want to focus your graphic novel study on specific genres, such as memoir, historical fiction, or biography. It may be interesting to have students review other student-created texts, whether from a previous class or those found online. Michael Bitz’s Comic Book Project has several examples that can be found online through his website.1 One amazing resource for exploring how illustrations work with words to convey different feelings is Matt Madden’s 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style (2005). Madden takes a simple story—a guy in the middle of doing work at his desk goes downstairs to the fridge—and draws it in ninety-nine different styles. Without changing the content or (for the most part) the words, Madden recreates extremely varied meanings and experiences through choice of characters, drawing styles, and formats. Some are imitations of famous comics artists, like Jack Kirby, and others are more thematic, like one featuring the man and his wife as a happy couple. Whether reviewing the previously studied graphic novels or examining Madden’s book, it might be helpful to have students conduct a scavenger hunt of how graphic novels work. This allows for a more inquiry-based understanding. By collecting insights onto a real or virtual bulletin board and discussing how to organize the class understandings of the various techniques used, students can track and discuss their understandings. Posting this bulletin board somewhere in the classroom will make it easy for students to return to it when they are working on their own texts. Other great books for better understanding and analyzing comics formats are Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics (1993) and Will Eisner’s Comics and Sequential Art (2008). Both books provide more technical and detailed information on creating comics. Since both McCloud and Eisner are cartoonists, their books are filled with excellent examples of the graphic novel creating process.

Getting Started Once students are relatively clear on the elements of the graphic novel format, teachers should explain the genre, purpose, and audience for the assignment. This project will work best if students have the option of working collaboratively. Writing a graphic novel alone is daunting and perhaps overwhelming for most students. Many professional comics and graphic novels are collaborative projects as well, something that may be worthwhile to point out to students. In creating collaborative groups, it may be helpful to first assess whether students feel they are better writers or artists to help create relatively balanced groups. It is also important to keep personalities and group dynamics in mind.

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Student partners or groups will then need to decide their focus or topic for their project. Before sending students out to collect research, provide a timeline of suggested deadlines and dates for the unit. Teachers might include a hard deadline for full drafts of the project. Deadlines help students avoid getting too bogged down on any one specific element of the project— particularly the illustrations. In the real world, writers and artists must meet deadlines to reach production schedules. They cannot always create the perfect products they want to. In fact, inviting guest writers and artists into the classroom to talk about their processes and schedules would be a great way to address this. Even without guests, there are a multitude of online interviews and podcasts that address this topic and underscore the importance of drafts, revision, and deadlines.

Making Choices Scott McCloud, in Making Comics: Storytelling Secrets of Comics, Manga, and Graphic Novels, describes “writing with pictures” as a series of choices of the following: ●●

Moment (McCloud breaks this idea down further into moment to moment, action to action, subject to subject, scene to scene, aspect to aspect, and non sequitur): Students choose which moments to include in the story and which to leave out.

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Frame: Students must consider the right distance and angle to view those moments.

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Image: Students should render characters, objects, and environments clearly.

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Word: Students should pick words that add valuable information and work well with the images around them.

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Flow: Students must guide readers through each panel, page, or screen.

It is important to understand that his list is not a sequence. These choices overlap and occur at the same time. If students plan only the images first, then add the words, those words are likely to be superlative add-ons rather than working with the images on an equal level. Likewise, moments, frames, and flow should be considered together. It is helpful to suggest to students to sketch out a draft of a page and play around with some options before deciding on a final layout. McCloud’s overview provides an entry point for understanding the variety of choices and decisions graphic novel writers and artists will have to navigate in creating their texts. It is not so much a road map as it is a big

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picture overview, and understanding each choice helps students navigate the various ways texts can be approached.

Characters While Bitz’s framework is not meant exclusively for narrative writing, it begins with character design or development and seems to lead more toward that type of writing. He also suggests students consider setting a theme for their comics. Bitz’s Framework ●●

Character design/development

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Plot/story development

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Planning panels (and creative layout)

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Dialogue crafting

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Caption building

Publishing for an audience ●●

Revising

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Inking

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Coloring

Bitz not only asks writers to think about the characters and their motivations but also pushes students to consider how to portray these characters. Students should know characters’ names, ages, and general background information and also be able to create written (or sketched out) descriptions of these characters. This creates a jumping-off point for illustrating characters. Bitz challenges students to develop a multitude of expressions for their character—angry, sad, happy, and so on—using only six lines for each drawing. This forces students to consider the basics of communicating a mood or expression for their character without getting caught up in doubts about their artistic skills. If time permits, students can create collages or use technology-based applications to create character profiles.

A Suggested Hybrid for When Writing Comics Isn’t Quite Perfect An interesting hybrid approach we might suggest to getting started is based on an activity Bill does with his essay-writing class. It is a modified form of

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what John Schultz (1990) calls instance writing. Students focus on a topic that they have personal experience with (say identity formation, or treatment of immigrants or experiences at work), then they write a series of short “instances” (half- to one-page-long descriptions of particular experiences they have had). Bill usually requires five to ten when he teaches it. What is crucial here is that while instances are often biographical, when the students are writing them, they do not need to be in chronological order. The idea is just to get them down. The students should select an instance topic that narrows their subject enough to give them focus. So while “The story of my life” is probably too big of a topic, “Working at McDonald’s” could be a good one. Here are some examples of instance topics: Work stories Stories about relatives Things that scare you Moments when your identity became clear to you Mentors Family (or parental) conflict Struggles Getting in trouble Pretty much anything else Once they have written these instances, they take another look at them and see if they notice any themes or motifs running through them. Let’s say, for example, that students write a series of instances about moments when they were made aware of their identity. As they read them over and look for patterns, they may notice some emerging themes. For example, they may notice that about half of the instances are about times when they learned something about who they were because of something they came to realize about themselves, and the other half of the instances describe moments when other people defined their identity in a way that they disagreed with. Students can then return to their instances and see if there is a way, as they plan their multimodal narrative, that they can bring out that theme in the images, text, and the interaction of the two. In addition to personal instances, students can also do researched instances, collecting short narratives, facts, and information about a particular topic. Here too the possibilities are legion. Students could write about elephants, lunch counter sit-ins, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Trail of Tears, the early history of their hometown, the athletic shoe industry—essentially any topic they have an interest in, can research, and which has some kind of stories associated with it.

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This gives students a lot of material to work with. They can pick the instance that most connects with the theme they have chosen. This would also mean that if students work in groups, they can pick the instance topic together, write separate instances, and then choose the ones that seem to address a common theme. If they write their instances separately, then decide to include several instances written by different people about the same topic, that would allow the individual stories and voices to come through and help ensure that there aren’t any groups writing by committee—which tends to produce less than stellar results.

Storyboarding Once students have their general information collected and organized (or characters and plot sketched out), they can think about how they will lay out their project. In developing the page layouts, students should determine how many scenes will be required to convey their information, how many panels per scene, and how these panels will be distributed over the pages. It may be helpful for them to first roughly storyboard their narrative to work out general content and organization before beginning the writing and drawing phase. By searching the phrase “Dark Horse script format” online, students can find a general template for formatting a graphic novel script (our thanks to Gene Yang who mentioned that tip in a talk Jung saw). Searching “comic book storyboard template,” will yield literally a million other options you can use if the Dark Horse template is not to your liking. Whether using a more formatted template or none at all, students will need to decide, at minimum, what general action or scene to represent and what information or text to convey. They will have to determine flow and pacing, as well as how broad or detailed that information should be. Storyboarding is not where refined details of each specific panel are hashed out. Rather, storyboards lay out the general number of panels needed, what goes in each panel, and the general format and structure of the narrative.

Panels Once students have determined the content of the work, they can then tackle the more nuanced aesthetics of their panels. This finer detailed work may involve decisions like how many panels to put on a page, the shape of various panels (remember the honeycomb-shaped one Hosler used in The Way of the Hive we pointed out in Chapter 7?), and what kind of borders to use. The shape and size of panels can help control elements like pacing, tone, and emotion. There are some graphic novels that will use different colored panel borders to indicate change in narration, voice, or time. Some borders

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might be fuzzier to indicate a fluidity of memory. Locations of the panels on the page can also change the narrative flow—whether straight across from left to right and top to bottom, or flowing across the page more organically, or placing borderless panels nested and intersecting one another. All will provide a different emotional tone to the writing. Students can also control illustration details within the foreground or background of a panel to give readers clues without explicitly stating details in writing. This balance of what information is conveyed through text and image is a tricky one to master. Poorly done graphic novels are often too text-dependent. Well-done graphic novels should have a synergistic relationship between words and pictures. The pictures are not just illustrating the words. Rather, words and images work together to provide context and information. Similarly, some poorly done graphic novels don’t have enough words. Words help convey complex ideas or information that is harder or unwieldy to relay without extensive illustration (Ikea manuals come to mind). Welldone graphic novels use precision and conciseness of language, which partly explains why such texts use higher-level vocabulary. When there are space constraints, a word like “impeccable” serves the reader better than “practically perfect.”

Text Beyond balancing information between images and text, students must also determine which lines they will put in speech and thought balloons and which will go in narration boxes. Which approach is most effective for what aspects of the plot, character development, and themes. Studentcreated graphic narratives that are more story or character-driven may choose to forego captions completely, while those that are more informational will probably rely on them more heavily. Again, students will need to be purposeful about the balance of text—and types of text— to illustration. Another element of text is how to craft dialogue. This requires students (in conversation with teachers) to determine what kind of language to use. This includes actual languages for students, who are multilingual, or different dialects or slang or other types of vernacular which may make up that student’s voice. It may also include aspects of translanguaging, where there is a fluid back and forth of multiple languages used by the same speaker or speakers. Such diversity may reflect a more natural depiction of student speech and language use. Students and teachers may also differentiate use of more standard English for use within captions and the more natural use of language within speech or thought, which are again dependent on the context and purposes of the comic assignment.

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Illustration Collaboration Possibilities If having a class full of students write and illustrate their own graphic novels independently seems too large of an undertaking, there are some other options to make it a cross-classroom collaborative project. For example, the English class could pair up individually or in groups with an art class. The English students present their ideas and connect with the art students most excited about their ideas to develop the script, rough panel plan, and final product. A final approach is to work as a whole class to select one to three instances from everything the class has done, then bring in a professional artist to work with the students to develop their work into a solid graphic novel. Each of these approaches to collaboration could produce something more artistically satisfying than hastily drawn stick figures and would more closely mimic more professional collaborations. An interesting real-life example of a small group of writers and one artist creating a cohesive product is the graphic novel Cardboard Kingdom (Sell, 2018). Using social media, Chad Sell called for writers to work with him on a collection of short stories revolving around kids in a neighborhood. Most of the writers had never met and lived all over, yet managed to write a cohesive narrative which Chicago-based artist Sell turned into a graphic novel. The final product is a beautiful, imaginative, and sometimes touching collection of stories and experiences. There are a couple of articles linked on Sell’s personal website discussing the process that might be helpful to share with students.

Inking/Coloring Finally, depending on the time or resources available, students will need to make choices around inking and coloring their illustrations. This is the final step of a process that assumes multiple drafts have been completed. Inking and coloring are definitely not required steps, but it may be interesting to students to understand the whole process of creating a graphic novel which includes these elements. Graphic novels are not a quick, first-go, dash off project but a thoughtful, purposeful process that is a collaboration among multiple artists. Many comics and graphic novels include end pages that show the artist’s sketches in the process of developing different characters. Assuming illustrations are hand-drawn in pencil, inking involves outlining and finalizing the penciled drawings to produce a more finished, more detailed, and cleaner product. Graphic novel artists usually pencil in the drawings first, then ink in the pencil lines, making them more detailed, and thickening lines which need to be stronger. This creates the look of the images. By paying attention as they move through the book, readers can see how the style of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods developed over time.

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Students also need to decide about color—whether to use color at all or only one or two specific colors, or the full spectrum. Even when only using black and white, artists can make interesting choices about how heavy or saturated the black is. Jeff Smith uses simple thicker lines to draw the main characters in Bone (2004), while Craig Thompson uses saturated, detailed ink drawings in his graphic novel Habibi (2011). How does Jarrett Krokosczka’s use of only red tones in Hey, Kiddo (2018) make an impact in his work? How does color change the mood of a panel? How can it enhance or detract from understanding? Teachers might show students pictures of the Sistine chapel before and after renovation. Many people found the bright colors that were restored in the chapel very different in mood and tone from the previously understood more somber colors. This example provides an interesting entrée into discussing how colors convey emotion and how differences in shading and tones can change a viewer’s interpretation of a text.

Publication As with all good writing endeavors, having an audience and venue for publication is always a great end goal. Because of the reduced quality of black-and-white copies and the cost of color copies, producing multiple hard copy sets of students’ graphic novels may not always be the best option. Scanning and uploading the work to a website or online storage drive might make it easier and less expensive to share work. The biggest hindrance may be the amount of memory or storage available. However, this is a great way to share the work among students in the class and also between different class periods and even family or community members.

A Note about Technology There are multiple comics-creating platforms online. Don’t just take our word for it but do an online search of that phrase. We are loathe to recommend any specific one for a few reasons: 1. Everyone’s context and purposes will be different, so it is hard to

say which is best for whom. Some districts may have money to buy more premium services instead of being relegated to free ones. Others may have less access to technology on an individual basis. 2. Technology is constantly changing. Apps live and die overnight, in both free and paid versions. We have seen several articles recommending apps that no longer exist. 3. We are graphic novel nerds. We love the detail, care, and thought that go into these texts. Prefabricated characters and scenes seem

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to take away the personalized and nuanced nature of these texts, and also the deeper and richer meaning that can be extrapolated. One way to evaluate such a program is the degree of freedom it allows the creator. Programs with a set of twenty possible pre-drawn characters and fifteen pre-drawn backgrounds and ten panel layouts and three word balloon styles may sound like they offer a lot of combinations, but student work will come out largely looking like it is all the same. We would prefer to see the lovingly uneven but thoughtful creation of texts students have created themselves than a “plug and chug” model of graphic narrative creation. Having said that, if your goal for your students is that they learn the structure and properties of the graphic narrative rather than the aesthetic aspects, or if using apps or online platforms allows you to feel more comfortable delving into a graphic novel unit, we would encourage you to go with it. However, we would also encourage you to give students the option and encouragement to try completely student-generated comics as well.

Multimodal Composition If you don’t have the knowledge or time to develop a full graphic novel writing unit, you can still capitalize upon the affordances of the graphic novel format by having students create a multimodal composition. Multimodal compositions open the door for online creativity that combines image and music—for a graphic novel approach that uses photos or other images instead of drawings; and for many other possibilities as well. We are awash in multimodal texts, from websites and print or television advertisements to billboards and newspaper articles. The emergence and proliferation of the infographic indicates just how enmeshed words and pictures have become in our society these days. By having students collect examples from their daily lives and analyzing and understanding them, teachers can facilitate discussions around what makes a multimodal composition effective.

Examining Multimodal Understandings One activity Jung likes to do to show how multimodal texts can be tricky is to show Kanye West’s video “Sierra Leone.” It’s a little old school but very effective for showing how pictures, words, and sounds can create illusory understandings. Jung shows the video three times: once without sound, once with sound, and once with the printed lyrics. Kanye West is a hip-hop superstar who started out making beats before he started rapping.

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He still has great beats. The video of “Sierra Leone,” includes images of children working in dangerous conditions in the diamond mines flowing into images of a happy white couple getting engaged. Happy, that is, until blood comes pouring out of the ring to consume the woman’s arm. Based on the title and the images, one would surmise that the song is a critique of the blood diamond trade of Sierra Leone, which forces people to work in backbreaking and unsafe conditions to fuel the civil war. However, closer inspection of the lyrics reveals no such political messaging. Rather, the song is mostly name-dropping expensive brands and talking about picking up women. The great beats and moving imagery cover up the lack of deeper messaging in the actual lyrics. Another Chicago rapper, Lupe Fiasco, took issue with Kanye’s lack of actual political messaging around the blood diamond trade and took Kanye to task by rewriting his own lyrics to the same beats and music. His song, “Conflict Diamonds,” explicitly discusses the blood diamond trade and critiques the “bling” culture of hip-hop in supporting this trade. This exercise provides one example of how the images and music can work together—or against each other, depending on your perspective—to highlight or obscure the real meanings of texts. The various types and forms of multimodal texts out there are immense. There are hybrid books that are neither just words nor fully comics but some graphic novel panels, some full-page pictures, and some traditional text narratives, like many of Brian Selznick’s books or even the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series (Kinney, 2016). The more examples and types students bring in, the more discussion can happen about how writers use visuals and words together to create meaning. Even using less effective examples can be a great opportunity for students to understand how words and pictures can work together to enhance or detract from comprehension. Some questions to consider are: What makes this text effective or ineffective? Is there something that would make it more effective? How would this text be without words? How would it be without pictures? How much space is in the text and how is it used? What kind of text features do we see and how do they support or detract from the understanding of the text? How do the words and pictures interact? How does the author use color (or not) to enhance their text? How many modes are involved? Do all the modes work well together? How would more/less modes make this text more/less effective?

How about Some Other Multimodal Formats? Depending on the context, teachers will also want to determine what this multimodal composition will look like. Will it be collaborative or individual? Is it a research assignment or narrative in structure? Will it be

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a single page like a digital poster board or multiple pages like a digital story? Or will the format be more open as long as the content meets the requirements? Decisions around formats and requirements may depend upon factors such as the amount of time for the unit, access to technology (if using technology at all), how much guidance or instruction students will need to get started, and content requirements. Here is a quick list of possible formats or structures: 1. Digital poster (e.g., Glogster) 2. Digital essay/presentation (e.g., Prezi) 3. Digital poem/storytelling (e.g., iMovie) 4. Multi-genre paper (as Jim Burke describes in several of his books) 5. Infographic 6. Podcast 7. Hybrid text (e.g., Dork Diaries) 8. Zine (e.g., East Village Inky)

This is by no means a comprehensive list and some assignments may not even fall neatly within a specific category, but it is a good place to start. Give the students this list and see what other multimodal options they suggest. Remember, at the most basic level, a multimodal text will include at least two modes, such as words and pictures. We would suggest providing reallife, amateur (meaning not professional) examples to show students. Many youth-created examples can be found online through a search. Teachers can then review these examples to discuss their relative merits and effectiveness. Some examples of student multimodal compositions we’ve come across are: a collaborative podcast venture between two different high schools responding to the same text, a literacy autobiography charting experiences with literacy from birth into adolescence using audiovisual tools, and a digital poster representing a character from a novel using embedded audio and visual links along with alphabetic text. There has been some particularly interesting work coming out of college composition and rhetoric scholars around multimodal composition. While geared more toward first-year college writing courses and beyond, the book Multimodal Composition: Resources for Teachers (Selfe, 2007) has a multitude of resources that are thoughtful and practical. One suggestion offered by Selfe is to scaffold students into the various modes by sequencing assignments, and effectively building students into using a number of modes. For example, one could begin by assigning a conventional alphabetic essay then moving into an audio essay and finally a video essay. This allows students to consider how the various modes work separately and in conjunction with one another (similar to how Jung approaches her Kanye/Lupe activity). This will be particularly helpful if you are considering letting students choose the modalities with which they will work rather than specifying them.

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Pedersen and Skinner (2007, p. 33) suggest that when designing multimodal assignments, teachers should consider allowing students to choose the modalities they wish to compose in, allowing different options for group work, allowing students to explore and question as they work on the assignment, providing structure and strategies for them, and including written reflection as part of your assignment. Since the timing of college courses, and the availability of larger blocks of unscheduled time for students to devote to class projects, is different from those of high school, some high school teachers may put greater constraints on the assignment than others, particularly if it is their first time trying out multimodal compositions. There are other aspects to consider incorporating into the unit that will allow for greater success. Exploring with students what composing means and how literacy has expanded in meaning beyond just alphabetic text is an important one. Along with negotiating these understandings, teachers should collaborate with students to create formative and summative assessments and a timeline of deadlines that seem reasonable to both teacher and students. Depending on the length of the unit, teachers may require student groups to keep progress or research logs. This allows the teacher to see how much time students spend, what they work on, and what they consider their success, struggles, and progress. These kinds of notes are useful not only in maintaining some fairness and accountability in work distribution but also in allowing the teacher to have a clearer idea of how each student is faring with the project. Similar to the graphic novel writing unit described earlier, if the text requires outside research or the development of characters, students will need time to develop this content. From there, they can also use a script or storyboard format to sketch out (literally or figuratively) the rest of the timeline of their project. This is particularly important if students need to use various forms of technology in collaboration. Creating and editing sound or visual texts can take a long time and planning is necessary to get it all done. Embedding multimedia or hyperlinks in webpages can also take more time than students anticipate. Even without multimedia tools there will still need to be negotiations in use of images and text, including other related features like color and typeface. One reason some teachers may be leery of multimodal composition projects is fear of not being competent enough to teach or support the technological aspects. By inviting visiting experts into your class or giving students time to work with digital tools until they master them (and can teach each other), this concern can be easily lessened. Bringing in community experts can be a great way to help build school-community/home partnerships (and gets you off the hook for being an expert). Finally, sometimes students are okay with just being given resources and figuring things out themselves. Jung knows of two teachers, one high school teacher and one college professor, who had students create podcasts for an assignment. They provided some

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resources and links, but the students really didn’t receive much instruction nor were the instructors particularly adept at the technology. The students were comfortable with learning mostly on their own and created amazing, quality projects. In some episodes of the podcast Radiolab, the hosts will revisit an earlier podcast to update the information or follow up on the same theme. Their meta-comments about their earlier selves and their production provides a real-life example of how even professionals learn and develop in their craft. It may be of interest to students to see that revision and reflection are not just classroom-based activities. The final point of consideration for the multimodal composition is to make sure students write a reflection piece to accompany their assignment. This allows the opportunity for teachers to see how students processed the creation of their assignments. Students can also provide a deeper context that may not be immediately relevant in the multimodal composition alone. For those more bound to alphabetic text assignments, this can also fulfill some more traditional elements of a writing assignment.

Works Cited Bitz, M. (2010). When Commas Meet Kryptonite: Classroom Lessons from the Comic Book Project. New York: Teachers College Press. Eisner, W. (2008). Comics and Sequential Art: Principles and Practices from the Legendary Cartoonist. New York: W.W. Norton. Kinney, J. (2016). Diary of a Wimpy Kid Series. New York: Harry N. Abrams. Krosoczka, J. (2018). Hey Kiddo. New York: Graphix. Madden, M. (2005). 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style. New York: Chamberlain Bros. McCloud, S. (1993). Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: Harper Perennial. McCloud, S. (2006). Making Comics: Storytelling Secrets of Comics, Manga, and Graphic Novels. New York: William Morrow. Pederson, A., & Skinner, C. (2007). “Collaborating on Multi-Modal Projects.” In Cynthia Selfe (ed.), Multimodal Composition: Resources for Teachers (pp. 39–47). Cresskill, NJ: Hampton. Schultz, J. (1990). Writing from Start to Finish. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Sell, C. (ed.) (2018). Cardboard Kingdom. New York: Knopf. Selfe, C. L. (2007). Multimodal Composition: Resources for Teachers (New Directions in Computers and Composition). Newburyport, MA: Hampton Roads . Smith, J. (2004). Bone: The Complete Cartoon Epic in One Volume. New York: Cartoon Books. Thompson, C. (2011). Habibi. New York: Pantheon.

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C CHAPTER ELEVEN

Finding Excellent Graphic Novels

By this point in the book, you have probably come to realize the potential that graphic novels hold for helping English Language Arts teachers reach curricular and pedagogical goals. You have also read suggestions of how specific graphic novels could impact teaching literary themes and interpretation, story structure and literary terms, nonfiction, and other aspects of teaching. But in spite of the many graphic novels we have recommended, we are only scratching the surface of what is out there, and with the strong showing in sales that graphic novels continue to make in the marketplace year after year, we can expect even more graphic novels in the years that follow the publication of this book. Also, although we have mentioned some possible goals and themes, we are sure that many teachers reading this book will come up with creative ideas that we have not imagined. How can those teachers find graphic novels to support their new ideas? The first suggestions we have for keeping up on graphic novels are both obvious and fun. Bookstores, libraries, and online retailers can be your best allies.

Bookstores It usually isn’t hard to convince an English/language arts teacher to visit a bookstore. Good bookstores can be excellent resources for finding books, and if the people who work in the store like graphic novels, they can help

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keep you aware of what is out there. Here are a few suggestions to get the most out of bookstores. 1. Look for well-curated independent bookstores that sell a selection

of recently released books if you are trying to keep up with what is new. Mention to the workers there that you are an English teacher and are looking for graphic novels that would be of interest to your students for your classroom library, and also that you are looking for books that connect with important issues or have significant themes that might make them good choices to study as part of your curriculum. 2. Used bookstores can be helpful for picking up additional copies of a graphic novel you are considering for use in groups or with your whole class. But not every used bookstore has a good sense of their inventory, so be prepared to hunt through shelves. Thrift stores are usually even more unorganized but can be a way to get inexpensive copies. 3. Some bargain bookstores offer mainly remaindered books. These are books in which the publisher estimated greater sales than actually happened. There are a variety of reasons for this, but a remainder bookstore is inevitably a collection of books that are not the best of what is out there. 4. Comic bookstores often carry graphic novels as well. The biggest part of their selection, though, is usually superhero books. If that is what you are looking for, they are a good destination.

Online Booksellers and Other Resources Amazon has become the online retailer that most people looking for a book turn to initially. If you have a particular title in mind, this is an easy way to get hold of it. Amazon and similar retailers also use their algorithms to suggest other graphic novels you might like. Be aware that there is a pretty sharp divide between graphic novels written for students and young adults, and those written for regular adults. Because many graphic novel fans read both, the recommendations may not always be in keeping with what you are interested in. Reading the online reviews can help. Another online alternative to Amazon is AbeBooks. AbeBooks (the first three letters stand for Advanced Book Exchange) links up independent bookstores in Canada, United Kingdom, United States, and several other countries. Though it doesn’t work as well for brand-new books or for browsing, it is an excellent resource if you are seeking cheap copies of a particular graphic novel to build a class set.

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There are also a variety of online options for narrowing down your reading list to the best graphic novels. There are many blogs that review graphic novels, though many of them devote a great amount of space to superhero comic books (which many of your students might be interested in, but usually do not connect to class content quite as well or in as useful a way as other graphic novels do). We can recommend two websites in particular. No Flying No Tights1 offers insightful reviews of new graphic novels and an interesting comment board. It is a general review site, though, and so the reviews are not necessarily pitched with an eye toward whether a given graphic novel would be useful in the classroom. Similarly, Slings & Arrows2 and Grovel3 have many graphic novel reviews but are not explicitly pitched toward youth or classrooms. Another option is Bookcommercials.4 (In the interest of full disclosure, this blog is administered by Bill, one of the authors of this book.) This blog offers concise reviews of new graphic novels and includes the opening lines of the book, a short summary, a description of why it might be useful in the classroom, a guess as to what grade levels it would be most appropriate for, and a heads up about any content that might be likely to provoke parental objections. The reviews, however, are only about 50 percent graphic novels, while the other half are conventional YA books. Also, because Bookcommercials has fewer contributors, it usually does not cover as many graphic novels as some of the other websites do. There are also several online resources that are geared toward teachers and educators, such as the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, Reading with Pictures (although this is not exclusive to graphic novels and also includes comics), and the American Library Association (ALA). The ALA has both graphic novel reading lists and an active Facebook group for graphic novel lovers. The School Library Journal also follows graphic novels trends and creates “best of” guides each year. Finally, Diamond Bookshelf is a comics distributor that has a great website full of reviews, lesson plans, and book lists. Yet another resource you might consider is going to the website of your favorite graphic novel publishers and asking to be put on their mailing list. This will give you advance notice of what is coming out, though it is hard to get any real sense of how good a given book is likely to be since publishers tend to love the books they are going to publish, so any email coming from them will be far from objective. Similarly, there are some great graphic novel authors and educators on social media. Twitter is a great place to follow your favorite artists, authors, ​ oflyingnotights​.​com N ​theslingsandarrows​.​com 3 ​grovel​.org​​.uk 4 ​bookcommercials​.wordpress​​.com 1 2

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publishing houses, and so on. By seeing who follows them or who they follow, you can quickly expand your sphere of fellow graphic novel lovers. In the appendix which follows this chapter, there is a list of good graphic novels organized by theme and purpose. This is another great place to start.

Libraries and Librarians Of course, there is no deal at any bookstore that can top the options that libraries have. Good municipal and college libraries often have current graphic novels and will even order specific titles you are interested in. There are, however, some things that will be helpful to know about libraries and librarians. Most librarians will be happy to show you where they keep their graphic novel collection. Because graphic novels are a format rather than a genre, some libraries keep their children’s graphic novels, their adult fiction graphic novels, and their adult nonfiction graphic novels in different parts of the library (including history, self-help, math and science, biography, and other sections). It is not unusual for the children’s graphic novels to be further divided by age. Because high school students are likely to enjoy both YA graphic novels (which are sometimes shelved in the children’s section) and some adult graphic novels, and because it is often difficult for librarians to make those distinctions, figure on looking in multiple places. It is also worth talking to the librarian because they can help direct you to the specific sorts of graphic novels you are interested in. In fact, if you are an avid reader of graphic novels, they would likely be excited about hearing which are your favorites and acquiring them for their library. The best librarians seem to especially like challenges. If there is a graphic novel you haven’t been able to find, they will often go out of their way to find it for you. Depending on your location, your library may belong to a larger interlibrary loan program that allows libraries to order books from other libraries. College and university libraries have similar cross-library lending programs. Often you can search both your local libraries collection and the greater consortium of loaning libraries by accessing a website from home. This can save you the time you don’t have during the busy school year anyway. It is a great way to stay caught up, pre-read work that you are considering for class, and enjoy reading some really good graphic novels.

Connecting with Other Teachers As of this writing, there is no central message board, clearing house, or organization to connect teachers who use graphic novels with each other.

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We surveyed middle school and high school teachers who have experience teaching with graphic novels in order to get many of the ideas and quotes we use in this book. To find them we started by putting the word out that we were interested in connecting with teachers like that. We built up a collection of referrals of teachers that other teachers knew or had heard of fairly quickly. Then, when we presented at conferences (including the Assembly of Literature for Adolescents of NCTE [ALAN], the International Literacy Association [ILA], and the American Educational Research Association [AERA]), we asked those interested in graphic novels and teaching to fill out a sign-up sheet. These two approaches can be a good start. Some conferences have Special Interest Groups for those interested in graphic novels and that can be a resource. Other teachers who teach graphic novels can help you find good titles worth teaching and can also share advice about what has worked for them and what hasn’t. While we have done our best to collect that information in this book, there are always new ideas, new approaches, new book pairings, and new techniques being discovered.

Listening to Your Students While it is unlikely that all of your students will be reading graphic novels outside of class, it is very likely that some of them will be. They might be fans of a particular manga series or might read trade paperback collections of comics about their favorite superhero, or they might follow several particular artists closely. It is not as likely that they will be fans of literarygraphic novels, or even of graphic novels that address themes that you would be using in class. So your students might seem an unlikely source for good graphic novel recommendations. Yet there are some very good reasons why you should let them know you would love to hear whatever suggestions they want to tell you. First, obviously it is important to encourage your students in their out-ofclass reading. If they are willing to talk to you about what they are reading, that means they value your opinion and you have engaged them. So even if you would not normally be interested in the latest run of the Hawkeye comic or a manga series about a group of schoolgirls who follow a boy band around Tokyo, be open to what they are saying and if your student is willing to loan you the book they care so much about, accept it, and check it out. You may like it (which would give them great joy). And if you don’t find it fascinating, they will be honored that you gave it a shot (and might be interested in hearing why you didn’t like it so much). Second, as an English Language Arts teacher, you are interested in more than just graphic novels you can use as part of the curriculum. Student suggestions are excellent ways to build an engaging classroom library (or

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to add to the collection in your school library). It is important to remember that while we want students to engage with thoughtful, meaningful literature that addresses important themes, we also simply want them to read on their own, for fun. Third, you may be surprised by what they suggest. Your students probably know your reading preferences at least as well as you do. They may be able to suggest an engaging new graphic novel about immigration or race or a really excellent memoir that connects to something you have been reading in class.

Joining the Community of Teachers Who Use Graphic Novels As we mentioned before, there is no central clearing house for teachers to connect about graphic novels. So far, most groups of teachers who use graphic novels grow locally or via social media. Often it begins with two or three teachers who meet at a district in-service or connect at a conference. One way to make such a connection might be to check to see if your local college or university has a course on teaching with graphic novels. The professor who teaches that course may be able to help you make the connection to other teachers with similar interests.

Wrapping It All Up Way back in the introduction, we explained that the academic study of graphic novels is a relatively new development. There are perhaps over a hundred new graphic novels coming out every month. This book contains some useful advice and principles about how to use graphic novels in the classroom. But don’t be afraid to experiment on your own. You know your students and your own teaching style the best and should be able to use the ideas in this book to reach your own particular teaching goals. Graphic novels can make a remarkable difference in your teaching and in the lives of your students. We encourage you to make the most of this amazing format.

APPENDIX List of Graphic Novels

List of Good Graphic Novels We Didn’t Mention in the Book, Arranged by Theme or Purpose for Teaching This list was compiled and edited from Bill’s blog, bookcommercials​ . wordpress​.​com with some important additions from Jung. Obviously your tastes may vary, and because we have tried to keep the reviews as brief as possible, think of them more as previews to help you decide what you want to check out. There are more graphic novels, so if you are interested in a particular theme, checking online for more recent options is never a bad idea. The list is organized by categories that we hope will be useful to teachers, but the most useful way to use this list might be to browse and see what catches your attention. We have tried to give some indication when graphic novels might contain content that could cause them to be challenged by parents, but communities vary on this and you know your students and their parents best. Images can sometimes be more incendiary than text, so we encourage you to read each graphic novel before putting it in your classroom or teaching with it. Finally, the opinions expressed here are our own (and sometimes we don’t even agree with each other). Your evaluation of the value of a graphic novel will certainly differ from ours. It is our hope that this list will give you a place to start.

Adaptations of Literature Bingham, Jerry (1984) Beowulf. Chicago: First. Beowulf has always been a comic book story. A cannibalistic, serialkilling monster with unnatural power faces a stranger from far away who

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has strength and cunning beyond human understanding. Beowulf defeats Grendel and his evil mother, saves the world, and retires, then comes out of retirement to battle a dragon. Bingham embraces the comic book aspect with drawings of hyper-muscled heroes, twisted monsters, and bikini-clad women. Good to contrast with Hind’s adaptation. Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur; Culbard, I.N. J.; Edginton, Ian (2010) A Study in Scarlet: A Sherlock Holmes Graphic Novel. New York: Sterling. The majority of the book stays true to Conan Doyle’s original language and opens up the story so students can appreciate it fully. Dr. John Watson is brought into a case that Holmes is working on—a case involving a dead man, no witnesses, and the word “Rache” written on the wall in blood. Watson tags along as Holmes uses his remarkable analytic powers to discover the story of this murder. Students who are fans of the BBC/PBS show Sherlock may particularly enjoy this. Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan; Culbard, I.N.J.; Edginton, Ian (2009) The Hound of the Baskervilles London: Self Made Hero Publishing. Very nice adaptation of the original story. Very faithful to the original text. Deas, Robert (2008) Manga Shakespeare Macbeth. New York: Amulet Deas’s illustrations are exciting and interesting and this isn’t the Macbeth of twelfth-century Scotland exactly. Shakespeare’s words are intact, but Deas moves the story to postapocalyptic Japan. And, although some readers might find it a bit weird, it works. Shakespeare’s plots and writing can stand up to a lot and still carry profound ideas. Like a good production, Deas’s art helps students figure out the tricky stuff by combining the sense of the words with the expressions of those hearing them. Homer; Thomas, Roy; Sepulveda, Miguel Angel (2008) The Iliad. New York: Marvel. Excellent rendition of the epic poem. Emphasizes the theme of manipulation by the gods over the theme of petty jealousy among the Greeks. Very nicely done! Keller, Michael; Fuller, Nicole Rager (2009) Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species: A Graphic Adaptation. New York: Rodale. I don’t know if this graphic novel contains the whole text of Origin of the Species, but I can tell you it contains a lot of it. Normally, this would be a daunting book for a high school student to take on—with difficult vocabulary and lengthy, complicated sentences. However, the graphic novel version supports understanding through the images. Although Keller and Fuller don’t take full advantage of what the graphic novel format can do and although the art is not spectacular, it is an engaging book. Kick, Russ, Ed. (2012) The Graphic Canon. New York: Seven Stories Press. Multiple artists tackle different classics in this large volume which includes The Iliad, The Odyssey, Lysistrata, The book of Esther, Beowulf, Dante’s

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Divine Comedy, Malory’s Morte’ D’Arthur, Midsummer Night’s Dream, King Lear, Donne’s The Flea, Paradise Lost, Gulliver’s Travels, Candide, A Modest Proposal, and more. Unfortunately, some stories are so abridged that they only work for readers familiar with the original. Some stories get lost in showy art or do not use the graphic novel format well. Lee, Tony; Hart, Sam (2011) Excalibur: The Legend of King Arthur. Somerville, MA: Candlewick. Arthur transforms from a skinny straw-haired boy to the king who unites all of Britain. There is romance here (and not just the Arthur and Guinevere— but the more complicated web beyond it), and there are battles, magic, enchanted swords, portals into the realms of faerie, noble knights, evil villains, sorceresses, and everything the story of King Arthur is supposed to be. The art captures all of it: the heroic stances, the tragic injuries, the rise and fall of an entire kingdom. Lee, Tony; Hart, Sam; Fujita, Artur (2009) Outlaw: The Legend of Robin Hood. Somerville, MA: Candlewick. Excellent retelling of the Robin Hood story. Melville, Herman; Sienkiewicz, Bill (1990) Moby Dick. New York: Berkley. Excellent adaptation (though greatly abridged). The art is fabulous. Reed, G., F. Irving, et al. (2005). Frankenstein, the Graphic Novel. New York, Puffin. A good take on Shelly’s original novel. Shakespeare, W. and McDonald, John (2009) Romeo and Juliet: The Graphic Novel. Lichborough: Classical Comics. Not a bad adaptation generally, and completely unabridged. Traditional costumes and sets. The word does not always suit the action. This company also publishes a plain text version and an abridged version using the same art. Shakespeare, W. & Vieceli (2007) Manga Shakespeare Hamlet. London: Self Made Hero Press. Sparse drawings that still artfully convey the feelings behind each word a character speaks. Worth checking out. Shakespeare, William; Yong, Faye. Manga Shakespeare Merchant of Venice. London: Self Made Hero. This is a nicely done version of the play though it leaves out the rhyming hints for the casket puzzle. It is also unclear why everyone in the book has pointy elf-ears. Apart from that, easy to follow and generally well-illustrated. Spender, Nick; Haynes, Stephen (2008) Macbeth. Brighton, UK: Book House. Spender favors light from fireplaces and dark shadows to give the whole play an authentic and creepy quality. Unfortunately, the creators chose to typeset the words rather than hand-lettering in classic comic book tradition.

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Hand-lettering allows the graphic novel text to carry more emotion and emphasis (even though we often don’t consciously notice it when we are reading). Typeset lettering can make this version seem cold and sterile. This version has also cut some key scenes.

The Arts Bellstorf, Arne (2012) Baby’s in Black: Astird Kirschherr, Stuart Sutcliffe, and the Beatles. New York: First Second. Set in the early days of the Beatles, this biographical novel concerns the romance between bassist Stuart Sutcliffe and photographer Astrid Kirchherr. Kindt, Matt (2013) Red Handed: The Fine Art of Strange Crimes. New York: First Second. It starts off disjointed: a woman steals chairs and stores them all in her house; a man steals famous paintings, cuts them up, and sells framed pieces of them; a different woman plans the perfect crime; and a detective solves crimes by relying on cameras. Some long digressions about the meaning of art might not connect with all readers, but in the end, it all comes together and wraps up nicely, though I would not call the ending satisfying. Strong art and excellent use of panel layouts. Russell, P. C., L. Kindzierski, et al. (2002). The Ring of the Nibelung. Milwaukie, OR, Dark Horse Comics. This is a strong portrayal of the first part of the Ring cycle and is notable for the way the art and text complement each other. Van Meter, Jen (2010) Hopeless Savages Greatest Hits: 2000-2010. Portland: Oni Press. When Zero’s parents get kidnapped in the middle of the night, she has to round up her siblings, her sister Arsenal and her brother Twitch, and abduct her brother Rat from his corporate job and deprogram him so they can save their parents. The story is entertaining, the art and panel design is strong, and the characters are interesting. Themes of loyalty, acceptance, concern, and caring. Particularly good for students interested in punk music and humor.

Biography Buhle, Paul; Pekar, H.; Piskor, Ed. (2009) The Beats: A Graphic History. London: Souvenir Press. This book is a nice set of parallel biographies about the American beat poets of the 1950s and 1960s. There are some language, drug, and situational

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issues. It includes a wide variety of perspectives, writing styles, and types of art. Colbert, C. C.; Tanitoc (2010) Booth. New York: First Second. Interesting biography of John Wilkes Booth, the assassin who killed US president Abraham Lincoln. There is some brief nudity. Some adult situations. Geary, Rick (2008) J Edgar Hoover: a Graphic Biography. New York: Hill and Wang. J. Edgar Hoover’s career in the American FBI spanned five decades. During that time he was seen as a bureaucrat, a leader, a hero, a moral crusader, a commie-buster, and a paranoid and vindictive man. Geary’s balanced narrative shows Hoover’s beginnings as an erstwhile and dedicated young lawyer working for the attorney general during the Second World War, his rise through eight presidential administrations, and his final descent into paranoia. Lutes, J. and N. Bertozzi (2007). Houdini: The Handcuff King. New York, Hyperion. This somewhat fictionalized biography does an excellent job of showing readers a single day of Houdini’s life, managing in the process to get across as much as a biography. This is not an in-depth biography but may be a good introduction to lead readers into reading more about him.

Books for Your Classroom Library These graphic novels might not have the thematic depth to stand up to the discussion and analysis of classwork, but they are excellent stories that our students would enjoy reading and thinking about. Barr, Mike W.; Davis, Alan. (2005) The Maze Agency. San Diego: IDW Publishing. Jennifer runs her own detective agency. Gabe is a mystery writer. When the two team up, they can solve even the most baffling crimes. This is a series of one-shots. Over the course of the book, Jennifer and Gabe’s relationship develops at a glacial pace and ultimately, the collection ends with their relationship unresolved. Black, Holly and Naifeh, Ted (2008) The Good Neighbors: Book 1, Kin. New York: Graphix. Very intriguing story about a girl who finds out her mother is one of the faery folk and she is in the midst of a war. Brosgol, Vera. (2011) Anya’s Ghost. New York: First Second. Anya is a fairly recent immigrant from Russia who stumbles into a well in a field and meets a ghost. At first the ghost seems like a perfect best friend.

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Then Anya begins to suspect the ghost is not telling her the truth about its origins. Busiek, K. and C. Pacheco (2004). Arrowsmith: So Smart in Their Fine Uniforms. La Jolla, Wildstorm. This story happens in an alternate reality of the First World War in which magic works, mythical beasts exist, and Fletcher Arrowsmith, who has grown up in the new world, joins the overseas air corps. With his little dragon, he fights for the allies. Excellent story. Cliff, Tony (2013) Delilah Dirk and the Turkish Lieutenant. New York: First Second. Selim is sent to interrogate a recently caught female thief. She loves the tea he brews for her and tells him her whole story. When Delilah Dirk escapes, Selim finds himself branded a traitor and, along with Delilah, on the run from his own fellow troops. And there begins a wild romp with nonstop action and wisecracks that would make Indiana Jones proud. The illustrations move the action along and make the story magically bombastic. Cliff, Tony (2016) Delilah Dirk and the King’s Shilling. New York: First Second. Delilah (adventurer, skilled swordswoman, righter-of-wrongs) discovers a British officer spying for the French and must go to London to expose him. While there she returns to her childhood home and, as Alexandra Nichols, must deal with her mother who wants her to resume her identity as an English gentlewoman. Themes of identity and expectation and wrapped up in a rollicking adventure storyline. Tony Cliff shows fight sequences and depicts intrigue with clarity and excitement. D’Errico, Camilla (2008) Burn. New York: Simon and Shuster. The drawings are sketchy and this is one in a series, so it isn’t perfect, but it is a pretty compelling story about a kid who gets connected to an evil war robot and has to work out one body with two minds, two sets of objectives, and two moral codes. Friedman, A. and C. Norrie (2007) Breaking Up. New York: Graphix. Chloe, a member of a popular clique of girls, falls for Adam, a nerd. This causes tension with her friends and his friends. The romance is dealt with realistically. The ending is satisfying. Hartman, Rachel (2002) Amy Unbounded: Belondweg Blossoming. Wynnewood, PA: Pug House Press. Amy lives in a medieval village amid political intrigue between the queen and the guilds and Amy’s father and other members of the community. There is a love story involving a dragon who takes the form of a monk and is forbidden from caring for humans. Most of all, though, the story is about Amy as she goes through puppy love and awkwardness and finally falls in

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love with the annoying boy next door (who turns out to be a much funnier and more caring person than she thought). Ben Hatke (2016) Mighty Jack. New York: First Second. Summer is beginning, but since Jack’s single mother has to work, it is his job to watch over his little sister, Maddy, who is autistic. At the farmer’s market, Jack trades the keys to his mom’s car for a set of magic seeds. Eventually Jack and his sister plant the seeds and this crazy garden grows and soon they (and Lilly, a neighbor girl who likes swordfighting) are battling alien plants, and something far harder to get rid of. It might be pitched a little young, but some high school students will like it. Hatke, Ben (2017) Mighty Jack and the Goblin King. New York: First Second. Jack and his friend Lily journey into another world to rescue Jack’s sister Maddy. Jack fights, and barely defeats a giant knight, then Lily falls off a bridge into a chasm. Jack has no choice but to continue after Maddy. Lily gets rescued and nursed back to health by a squad of goblins, then leads a rebellion against the evil goblin king. The themes of self-sacrifice, being torn between important responsibilities, loyalty, and not knowing one’s own capabilities are all there. The art is beautiful. Hatke, Ben (2010) Zita the SpaceGirl. New York: First Second. When Zita’s friend Joseph falls through a space portal, it is up to her to rescue him. With the help of some new friends, and in spite of betrayal, she tries to find him and save the galaxy. While this is written for younger readers (fourth grade and up), it is absolutely excellent graphic novel writing and high school students might find it an enjoyable break from heavier fare. This makes a great example when teaching about graphic novels. Themes include friendship, loyalty, courage, and responsibility. Hatke, Ben (2012) The Legends of Zita the Spacegirl. New York: First Second. This strong follow-up to the first Zita book plays around with themes of identity and fame a bit. Doesn’t quite have the freshness of the first book, and Zita doesn’t quite have the vulnerability, but it is still a very good book. Hatke, Ben (2014) The Return of Zita the Spacegirl. New York: First Second. In this book, Zita has been apprehended and is being tried and held on trumped up charges on a prison world. Her old friends, Mouse, Piper, One, Strong-Strong, and the rest, are far away (though they have heard her distress call) and so she must rely on help from her cellmates Ragpile and Femur and from the mysterious ghost. Escaping her cell is easy but escaping the planet and freeing all those trapped with her is more daunting. The story is funny and exuberant. Hickman, Jonathan; Pitarra, Nick (2012) The Manhattan Projects: One. Berkeley: Image. The good guys are Albert Einstein and Richard Feynman and the bad guys are an insane American general, and Robert Oppenheimer’s and Einstein’s

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evil twins. It has lines like, “We’re checking every ream of paper in critical government offices after last month’s sentient origami incident.” This graphic novel blurs the line between violence and mysticism and substitutes sarcasm and jaw-clenched determination for hope, but some high school readers will likely love this series. Hicks, Faith Erin. (2012) Friends with Boys. New York: First Second. Maggie’s been homeschooled her whole life and now is starting high school. She worries about finding friends. Fortunately, three of her brothers attend the school and soon introduce her to hyper-but-likable Lucy and her moody punk brother Alistaire and things seem to be going okay. Maggie’s only other problem is that she is haunted by a ghost. Themes include developing your own identity, defining friendship, and developing courage by standing up to what you fear. Hicks, Faith Erin (2016) The Nameless City. New York: First Second. Kaidu is the son of Adren, the general of the conquering armies that have taken control of the Nameless City. In the city he meets Rat, a street urchin who shows him how to run across the rooftops. Kaidu and Rat develop an unlikely friendship and together help to convince the various leaders of the city to meet for peace talks. Hick’s illustrations invite us into the amazing world she has built. The details are magnificent, the characters interesting, and the story believable. Hicks, Faith Erin (2017) The Nameless City: The Stone Heart. New York: First Second. In this second volume we learn that Rat’s parents were killed by Kaidu’s people and that Kaidu’s dad, the general, is working on a peace plan to break the cycle of invasion and subjugation. As the peace plan gets closer though, it becomes clear that the enemies of are willing to go to great lengths to ensure that the peace plan is never realized. This is a wonderful story of sudden twists and turns punctuated by moments of great beauty. Kesel, B., S. McNiven, et al. (2002). Meridian: Going to Ground. Oldsmar, Florida, CrossGen. Kesel, B. and J. Middleton (2003). Meridian: Flying Solo. Oldsmar, Florida, CrossGeneration Comics. This excellent series features a strong female protagonist caught up in a revolution on a fantasy world. The images are amazing and the series deals with some important questions of ethics. Kim, Derek Kirk (2012) Tune: Book 1: Vanishing Point. New York: First Second. Andy Go drops out of art school, and after weeks of searching, ends up broke and in imminent danger of being kicked out of his parents’ home for not having a job. Desperate to impress a girl, he answers a classified ad. Turns out the job involves working for aliens as an exhibit in an extra-

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dimensional zoo. Kirk’s command of the graphic novel format is impressive. His excellent panel transitions allow you to get lost in the story. There is some vulgarity. Kim, Derek Kirk (2013) Tune, Book 2: Still Life. First Second: New York. Andy Go finds out that under the contract he signed to become an exhibit in an intergalactic zoo, he is in the zoo for life, gets no communication with home, and never gets to leave. He barters some art (his alien captors don’t have art in their world) in exchange for being allowed to pick the mate they will get for him. Unfortunately, they abduct his girlfriend from a dimension where he is a womanizing jerk and she hates his guts. Kindt, Matt (2008) Super Spy. Marietta, GA: Top Shelf. This story is told in a nonlinear, nonchronological manner with interwoven stories, in this case involving spies and double agents on both sides of the Second World War: A female agent requests that she and her baby be pulled from the mission. An older man hides messages for the allies in the children’s books he is writing. And an agent uses the comic strip he writes for a regimental newspaper to propose to his beloved in code. Kneece, Mark; Ellis, Rich; Serling, Rod (2009) Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone: Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up? New York: Walker and Company. When two state troopers find evidence of a UFO crash-landing in a pond and footprints leading to a diner, they go in to investigate. A snowstorm traps everyone in the diner and soon the customers begin to suspect each other of being the alien and suspicion reigns supreme. Of course, like any twilight zone story, there are lots of twists and turns before we get to the end. The art is pedestrian but it works. Larson, Hope. (2008) Chiggers. New York: Atheneum. Middle-schooler Abby returns to summer camp but is torn between her old friends and a new girl named Shasta who seems really cool. Things get difficult when both Abby and Shasta fall in love with the same nerdy boy. Larson does a nice job exploring middle school relationships at camp in all their emotional roller-coastering glory. High-schoolers may enjoy the trip down the memory lane. Means, Greg; Red, M.K.; Flood, Joe (2013) Cute Girl Network. New York: First Second. Jack thinks Jane is beautiful and clever. Jane thinks Jack is kind, compassionate, and endearingly forgetful. Then the Cute Girl Network, girls who serve as a warning system about guys who are jerks, idiots, and generally insensitive, warn Jane that Jack is bad news. Will Jane realize Jack is right for her even though he was wrong for other girls? Will Jack realize Jane loves him for who he is, not who his friends think he should be? It is a wonderfully quirky love story. There is some vulgar language.

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Mechner, Jordan; Pham, LeUyen; Puvilland, Alex. Soloman’s Thieves. New York: First Second. A rip-roaring, swashbuckling tale of some disenfranchised Knights Templar in Paris in 1291. Hidden treasure, secret passageways, and good versus evil. Not much going on thematically here, but this is a fun story and it does tie in to some real history. McCreery, Conor; Del Col, Anthony; Belanger, Andy (2010) Kill Shakespeare: A Sea of Troubles. San Diego, IDW. Shakespeare’s characters have figured out that he is the one directing their movements. The evil ones (Richard the Third, Lady Macbeth, and Iago) have hatched a plot to trick Hamlet into murdering the bard. Falstaff helps Hamlet to see Richard for what he is, a despotic tyrant, and eventually are joined by Juliet (now a valiant warrior) and her strong-arm right hand guy, Othello. They raise up an army to fight against Richard’s oppression. Good supplement to any Shakespeare play. Pope, Paul; Petty, JT; Rubin, David (2015) The Fall of the House of West. New York: First Second. Aurora West fights monsters to avenge her father and seek information on the death of her mother. Action, adventure, and mystery and even some lighthearted moments. Good choice for a seasoned graphic novel reader since sometimes the panels are so full of action, it is hard to figure out what is going on. The story is engaging and worth adding to your classroom library. Pope, Paul (2008) Heavy Liquid. New York: Vertigo. S has stolen a batch of heavy liquid from the drug dealers he is a courier for. Now they are hunting him. So when a wealthy art collector hires him to find a missing sculptor, S agrees, even though the missing artist is his ex. Although it is mostly black and white with spot color, the gritty shadowy style typical of Pope complements this noir action story well (though it may be inaccessible for new graphic novel readers). Reed, M. K.; Hill, Jonathan. (2011) Americus. New York: First Second. Two eighth graders, fans of a fantasy series, find their friendship torn asunder when one mother reads part of the series and goes on a fundamentalist crusade to purge the library of it. Arguably stereotypical portrayal of fundamentalist Christians—but this is an exciting fight and it is satisfying that the forces of good (the librarian and the boys) win in the end. Renier, A. (2005). Spiral Bound (Top Secret Summer). Marietta, GA, Top Shelf. Anthropomorphic animal children discover that the monster in the pond is mechanical, restore an exile to the community, and cavort through an underground newspaper/art complex. Their art teacher is a whale in a kind of motorized fishbowl. This one is maybe a little young for high school but would be ideal for middle school.

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Reiner, A. (2010) The Unsinkable Walker Bean. New York: First Second. A young kid goes to sea with his greedy captain-dad in order to save his good-hearted but dying grandpa. His fortitude and ability to invent things stand him in good stead against evil pirates, terrifying sea monsters, and a series of challenges. Well-drawn, but sometimes a little hard to follow. Robinson, J., P. Smith, et al. (2003). Leave it to Chance: Monster Madness and Other Stories. Orange, California, Image Comics. Lucas Falconer is the mystical consultant for the city, keeping the monsters at bay—but it is often his daughter Chance and her friends who tackle the worst of the monsters. In this volume in a longer series, classic movie villains are walking off movie screens and causing havoc and it is up to Chance to defeat them and figure out who is behind this. Excellent comic book style illustrations. Sakai, Stan (1987) Usagi Yojimbo: Book 2 Samurai. Seattle: Fantagraphics. Sakai, Stan (1989) Usagi Yojimbo, Book 5. Seattle: Fantagraphics. Usagi is an anthropomorphic rabbit who trains with a discredited Sensei (a lion) and becomes a masterless samurai (or Ronin) who wanders the countryside writing wrongs and fighting corruption, bullying, and evil. Usagi is an honorable rabbit, avoiding violence whenever possible, but fighting for the poor and against the dishonorable. Sakai has crafted a detailed, often beautiful world. It is nice to spend some time in a world where justice prevails and the little guy comes out on top. Shiga, Jason (2007) Bookhunter. Manitoba: SparkPlug. Bay, head of the Oakland Library Police, he has made an impressive name for himself by investigating a bringing to justice self-appointed censors, book thieves, and library card forgers. Now he faces the case of his life. A rare Caxton Bible has been stolen from a locked vault within a locked office within a locked library building, and replaced with a convincing forgery. Action, plot twists, gadgets, justice, and the joy of spending time in a world where libraries are fully funded. Shiga, Jason (2017) Demon 2. New York: First Second. When a drunk driver hits the car carrying his family, Jimmy Yee finds that he hasn’t died but has possessed the body of the living person nearest to him. Jimmy, a former actuary, evades the government agency chasing him, breaks into prison to complete his mission, and finds his daughter is still alive and using the same abilities that he does. Jimmy uses math and logic to get out of trap after trap. Some books in this series are more prone to being challenged than others. Stevenson, Noelle (2015) Nimona. New York: HarperCollins. Nimona auditions to be the sidekick of Lord Blackheart, who is the best villain ever. She finds out that he has rules—he doesn’t kill people indiscriminately, least of all his arch nemesis, Sir Goldenloin, for example.

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When, with Nimona’s help, Blackheart discovers corruption in the kingdom, he must go to his archenemy Goldenloin for help. Nimona realizes she may have to reveal her secret to protect Blackheart. Stevenson is remarkably good at using the panel divisions to tell a funny, gripping story. Telgemeier, Raina (2012) Drama. New York: Scholastic. In the sequel to Smile, Drama, a bunch of middle school kids put on a musical, break up, get together, flirt, dream, fall into love triangles, and ultimately find far more drama than resolution. The colors and images are not only engaging but engrossing. In the end, the book really is just drama. None of the characters change much. Especially good for light reading. Ten Napel, Doug (2012) Cardboard. New York: Graphix. Mike lost his job and can’t afford a Christmas present for his son, Cam. An odd man sells him a cardboard box cheap. Cam sculpts a boxer from the cardboard and it comes to life. When a creepy neighborhood bully steals the cardboard, it replicates and threatens the neighborhood and maybe the world. This exciting heartwarming tale will remind readers of the sorcerer’s apprentice and similar folktales. The pictures are sometimes too cartoony but still convey the joy and the horror. Vernon, Ursula (2013) Digger: The Complete Omnibus Edition. Saint Paul, MN: Sofawolf Press. The story features an anthropomorphic wombat engineer in a world of intelligent trolls, a slug that can tell the future, a shrew that thinks it is a troll, rats with wings, and a human guide who took the wrong herbal supplement and ended up with the head of a deer. Vernon draws with a minimum of lines, yet creates facial expressions that carry a ton of. Between the text and the image, you begin to really care for many characters. There are some powerful themes and ideas here. Watson, Andi; Howard, Josh (2007) Clubbing. New York: Minx. Charlotte Brock gets caught with a fake ID she made so she could go to a London club, the police drive her home, and her parents decide to send her to Grandma Aggie and Granddad Archie who won a golf course. The only clubbing she will be doing will be with golf clubs. Before long, Charlotte has met a local boy, found some friends, and stumbled into a mystery that may involve a murder. No particular thematic development here, but it is a fun mystery to read. Watson, Andi (2007) Slow News Day. San Jose: SLG Publishing. Katherine is starting a job at a small newspaper in England. She is from the United States and is not sure whether this job will be good for her career. When a pilot script she wrote for a sitcom gets picked up she must decide between a frustrating but more authentic job and a high paying less authentic job (and at the same time, between her LA vapid boyfriend and her English coworker who she finds annoying, but strangely likable). More a romantic comedy than anything else.

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Yang, Gene (2004) Loyola Chin and the San Peligran Order. San Jose, CA: SLG Publishing. Loyola Chin, a high school sophomore, eats corn bread before bed and dreams of a spiritual guide named Saint Danger. He tells Loyola to plug the TV into her nostril upon waking. She does and a robot takes her to meet Saint Danger for real and they kiss. After that, Loyola suspects that Saint Danger hopes to destroy the world. Underneath all this is the offbeat story of a nerdy guy who loves a girl who doesn’t see him because she loves someone else. Yolen, Jane. (2013) Curses Foiled Again. New York: First Second. Continuing the story begun in Foiled, Aliera Carstairs is a high school student who works hard, likes to read, and is passionate about fencing with swords. A foil her mother bought at a garage sale allows Aliera to see the world of faerie all around her. The second book is a save-the-world-fromutter-destruction story with plenty of close calls, plot twists, narrow escapes, and surprises. Mike Cavallaro uses color to indicate the difference between the mundane world and the faerie one.

The Civil Rights Movement in the United States Brooks, Max; White, Caanan (2014) The Harlem Hellfighters. New York: Broadway Books. This book tells the forgotten story of the 368th regiment, an African American unit that fought in France during the Second World War. They spent more time in combat than any other unit fighting for America and though they fought in front line trenches, they never retreated or lost any ground to the enemy. We see them changed from a collection of teachers, porters, farmers, musicians, workers, and students to a unified fighting force. It seems an honest and moving portrayal. Poe, Marshall; Linder, Ellen (2008) Little Rock Nine. New York: Aladdin. This historical novel tells the story of Thomas, an African American teenager who was hurt in an earlier attempt to integrate the schools, and whose family is opposed to him getting involved again; and Will, a white teenager, whose lawyer/father fights for integration and whose grandpa opposes integration. The story shows how white and black families were torn by different positions on the issue of integration. Some students may find the story a bit simplistic.

Cultural Identity Bruchac, Joseph; Davis, Will (2009) Dawn Land. New York: First Second. Bruchac depicts a Native-American legend set before Europeans arrived in North America. This well-written story and breathtaking art will grab

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student-reader’s attention. The book does contain some vulgar language and implied adult situations. Tolstikova, Dasha (2015) A Year without Mom. Toronto: Groundwood Books. When twelve-year-old Dasha’s mom goes to the United States to study advertising, Dasha must remain with relatives in Russia. She has to survive science class, her first crush, and figure out what it means to be a Russian without her mom. While it is a fascinating book in terms of cultural differences, it also has an odd, inconclusive ending. Might work as supplemental text. El Rassi, Toufic (2007) Arab in America. San Francisco; Last Gasp. This first-person response to 9/11 from an Arab-American shows plainly what he went through in the weeks and months following the 9/11 attacks. The art is more raw than refined which might suit the emotion of this piece. Yang, Gene Luen; Liew, Sonny (2014) The Shadow Hero. New York: First Second. When a superhero rescues Hank’s mother from a carjacking in Chinatown, she exposes Hank to toxic spills, occult herbs, rabid dogs, and martial arts training so he will become a superhero too. Only when a gangster murders Hank’s father, however, does Hank inherit superpowers. Hank works to bring his father’s killer to justice. This great story with beautiful art frequently tips its hat toward the golden age of comics and addresses Yang’s familiar theme of developing cultural identity. Yang, Jeff; Shen, Parry; Chow, Keith; Ma, Jerry (2009) Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology. New York: The New Press. Asian Americans in comic books usually fill one of three roles: the sidekick (Wong, manservant of Dr. Strange), the martial arts master (Shang-Chi, master of kung fu) or the villain (the Silver Samurai). This anthology is a team up of some up-and-coming Asian American graphic novel artists who take a new look at what an Asian superhero could be. These short stories are fun, often address social responses to ethnic identities, and usually sport ironic twists

Education (Professional Development) Ayers, William; Alexander-Tanner, Ryan (2010) To Teach: The Journey, In Comics. New York: Teachers College Press. Excellent graphic adaptation of a thoughtful examination of the philosophy, practice, and context of teaching.

Ethics Halliday, Ayun; Hoppe, Paul (2013) Peanut. New York: Schwartz and Wade. Peanut is fun, then full of cringe moments, but has a satisfying ending. Sadie moves to a new school where no one knows her. She meets a girl with a

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peanut allergy and has the idea of ordering a med-alert bracelet and telling everyone she has a peanut allergy. Soon she has a group of friends and a wonderfully nerdy boyfriend. Then the truth comes out. Hoppe’s drawings are clear and direct and really do a nice job of conveying emotion through facial expressions and body stances. Kneece, M. and J. Collins-Rousseau (2005). Trailers. New York, NBM. Josh Clayton’s drug-addict mother kills her boyfriend/pimp and has Josh bury the corpse. Josh also takes care of his younger step brothers and sisters when his mother is drunk or out. This book contains nudity, profanity, violence, decay, and a surprisingly redemptive ending—but you should read it before teaching with it or considering it for your classroom library. LaBoucane-Benson, Patti; Mellings, Kelly (2015) The Outside Circle. House of Anansi Press. Pete Carver is an indigenous Canadian whose mom is a heroin addict. One night, during a fight, Pete kills his mother’s boyfriend and is sent to jail. Worried about his little brother who is on the streets, Pete agrees to a rehabilitation program that uses traditional tribal worship to deal with his anger. The book includes painful scenes and vulgar language, but the story is worth fighting for.

Global Current Issues Amir; Khalil (2011) Zahra’s Paradise. New York: First Second. Excellent novel about repression and execution of political dissidents in Iran. It is a surprisingly moving piece (especially the pages of names in the back). Unfortunately, some nudity and extreme violence (which are not terribly gratuitous in terms of serving the story) mean that any attempt to use this piece in class may result in challenges. Great book all the same. DeLisle, G. (2003). PyongYang: A Journey in North Korea. Montreal, Drawn and Quarterly. A good introduction to daily life in North Korea which is, of course, not very sympathetic to Kim Il Jung’s government. DeLisle, G. (2008). Burma Chronicles. Montreal, Drawn and Quarterly. Excellent story of the ex-patriot life in Burma. Guy’s wife works for Doctors Without Borders. Story is somewhat episodic without a clear thematic through line—but still fun. El Rassi, Toufic (2007) Arab in America. San Francisco; Last Gasp This graphic novel is a first-person response to 9/11 from an Arab-American and it shows what he went through. Art is unrefined. Landowne, Youme; Horton, Anthony. (2008?) Pitch Black. New York: Cinco Puntos Press. Interesting exploration of the life of the homeless above and below ground in New York City.

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Global History Guibert, E. (2008). Alan’s War: The Memories of G.I. Alan Cope. New York, First Second. This historical novel tracks one man’s life as a US soldier fighting in Europe during the Second World War. He ends up moving to Europe. Themes: The transient nature of friendships forged during wartime. Hee, Han Yong (2006) Chinggis Khaan: Birth of the Hero. Ulaanbaatar: Interpress. This is the only graphic novel history I have ever seen of the person Westerners recognize as Ghengis Khan. This version portrays him as a genius and a hero to his people. Unfortunately, the text is wooden and oddly translated. Heuvel, Eric (2007) A Family Secret and The Search. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. These two volumes depict the fictionalized story of the resistance in Holland during the Second World War. This may be pitched to a slightly younger audience than high school and the narrative is, at times, kind of didactic. Yet it is a compelling and interesting tale. Hunt, Gerry (2009) Blood Upon the Rose: Easter 1916. Dublin: The O’Brien Press. This narrative of a particular moment in Irish history casts the rebels as the heroes and the government forces as the villains. Jablonski, Carla; Puvis, Leland. (2010) Resistance: Book 1. New York: First Second. Excellent fictional account of a French boy and his sister who get drawn into working for the resistance against the Nazis. Jablonski, Carla; Purvis, Leland (2012) Victory: Resistance Book 3. New York: First Second. Pal Tessier and his sisters Sylvia and Marie are involved in the resistance against the Nazis. In this conclusion of a three book series, as the Nazis begin to falter, the Tessier kids act as couriers, intelligence gatherers, and even shelter and hide an allied pilot who has been shot down. The work ignites their idealism but proves far more serious than they had imagined. They learn that friends and enemies are sometimes not as clear-cut as they thought, and that loss comes with any war. Kubert, J. (1996). Fax from Sarajevo. Milwaukie, OR, Dark Horse. Touching story about Ervin’s efforts to get his family out of Sarajevo. Kubert, Joe. (2003) Yossel, April 19, 1943. New York: ibooks. A Jewish boy with an amazing drawing talent tries to survive the Nazi occupation. He experiences life in a ghetto, death camp, and as part of the Jewish resistance.

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Llywelyn, Morgan; Scott, Michael (1995) Ireland: A Graphic History. Shaftesbury, Dorset: Element. This might be an interesting text to practice critical awareness on. About half the stories here are legends. The other half are very subjectively written from the Irish perspective. A good text to examine bias in imagery. Miller, Frank; Varley, Lynn (1998) 300. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse. Gory depiction of the Spartans’ stand at Themopolae. Captures the Spartan war ethic effectively. Accurate illustrations. Mizuki, Shigeru (2013) Showa 1926–1939: A History of Japan. Canada: Drawn and Quarterly. Why did Japan join with Germany and Italy to fight against America and the European Allies in the Second World War? This brilliant and weighty volume alternates between traditional expository history chapters and those of Mizuki’s memories of being a child during that time. This gives the reader both an overview of the bigger picture stuff, and an empathic connection with the everyday people in history. The pen and ink artwork is beautiful and sometimes breathtaking.

Health and Illness Fies, Brian (2006) Mom’s Cancer. New York: Harry Abrams. This book takes the reader from the author’s mother’s small seizure and tumor discovery through brain scans, diagnosis, waiting, learning the depth of the problem, first appointments with doctors, biopsies, chemo, side effects, radiation, stages of grief, miraculous healing, and life after cancer. The book is also about how siblings cope with the illness of a parent. By alternating between gut-wrenching realism and cartoonish comic relief, Fies helps the reader see the difficult stuff. Marchetto, Marisa Acocella (2006) Cancer Vixen. New York, Alfred Knopf. Woman gets cancer, moves from a shallow life into a committed one. There is some vulgar language here. This one might be hard for some teenagers (especially those that consider themselves indestructible) to relate to. Pekar, H. and J. Brabner (1994). Our Cancer Year. New York, Thunder’s Mouth Press. A frank memoir of the pain and indignity of having cancer. Pekar, H. and D. Haspiel (2005). The Quitter. DC, New York. This excellent autobiographical memoir is honest about Pekar’s struggles with what seems to be depression and a low self-image. Robinson, Alex (2008) Too Cool to be Forgotten. Marietta, GA: Top Shelf. Middle-aged Andy goes to a hypnotist to quit smoking and ends up going back in time to when he was in high school. One strong theme here is

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choices. Language and frankness may be an issue if contemplating using this one in class. Seagle, S. T. and T. Kristiansen (2004). It’s a Bird. New York, DC. This is a memoir about the author’s childhood struggle with his mother’s fatal illness and the effect that has on his later life. Small, David. (2009) Stitches. New York: W.W. Norton. In this memoir, David comes to terms with finding a cancerous lump in his neck, having two operations to have it removed, finding out that his radiologist father may have caused the cancer by treating David’s respiratory problems with X-ray radiation when he was younger, discovering that the second operation has cut away half of his vocal cords, leaving him mostly mute, and discovering his mother has a female lover. Not very hopeful, but an amazing piece all the same. Winick, J. (2000). Pedro and Me: Friendship, Loss, and What I Learned. New York, Henry Holt and Company. Judd Winick develops a friendship with Pedro who has (and eventually dies of) AIDS while they are living in a communal house as part of MTV’s Real World. This book dispels some myths of AIDS.

History of the United States Butzer, C.M, (2009) Gettysburg: The Graphic Novel. New York: HarperCollins. This book opens by giving the historical context of what the soldiers, nearby townsfolk, local officials had been through with the Battle of Gettysburg. When, halfway into the book, President Lincoln begins the speech, the reader is already intensely interested. As we read the speech, the images show not only the audience response but also the devastated battlefields, the faces of the soldiers, the bystanders, and the wounded, which changes our perceptions. Crowley, Michael; Goldman, Dan (2009) 08: A Graphic Diary of the Campaign Trail. New York: Three Rivers Press. Excellent diary of the 2008 historic American presidential race between Barack Obama, who would go on to become the first African American president and John McCain. There are two narrators, each of whom is a reporter following one of the candidates. Geary, Rick (2003) The Beast of Chicago: The Murderous Career of H.H. Holmes. New York: Nantier Beall Minoustchine. H. H. Holmes was arguably America’s first real mass murderer. With the World’s Fair coming to Chicago, Holmes built a rooming house with secret passageways, trap doors, unventilated rooms, and hidden gas lines—all

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to create a factory for murder. Geary’ uses building layouts, maps, and beautifully rendered line drawings to clarify the details of Holmes’s story. Excellent companion piece to The Devil in the White City and could be a great way to bring students to that work. Geary, Rick (1997) The Borden Tragedy. New York: Nantier, Beall, and Minoustchine. In the summer of 1892, in the small town of Fall River, Massachusetts, Andrew and Abby Borden were murdered in their own home apparently by repeated blows from a hatchet. Geary uses his detailed line drawings to provide details about the layout of the house and the relative reported locations of the suspects. Though a double murder of a married couple is itself rather horrific, Geary doesn’t play up the gore. This book will grab the attention of students. Hennessey, Jonathan; McConnell, Aaron (2008) The United States Constitution: A Graphic Adaptation. New York: Hill and Wang. This book alternates between the text of the US Constitution, quotes from the founding fathers, a contemporary explanation of the meaning of the Constitution, and dialogue by people affected by the Constitution today. The artwork combines historical scenes with symbolic representations (the executive branch, for example, is shown as a giant in a suit with the White House as its head). Its lack of a traditional narrative, however, might make it an odd choice for English classes. Jacobson, S. and E Colon (2008) After 9/11: America’s War on Terror. New York: Hill and Wang. Not nearly as good as the 9/11 report. This one consists of disconnected panels summarizing news stories. Mostly talking heads with a bizarre variety of styles from realistic to caricature. Kendall, David (2007) The Mammoth Book of Best War Comics. New York: Carroll and Graf. This anthology covers patriotic and propaganda war comics from the Second World War, protest commix from the Vietnam era, and a manga style Japanese response to the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

How-To Narratives Schweitzer, Chris (2019) Maker Comics: Fix a Car. New York: First Second. Ms. Gritt’s Saturday morning car maintenance club includes Abner (a street racer), Lena (who drives a truck), Rocky and Esther (two middle school kids who are really interested in engineering), and Mason and his old sedan. Over the course of the book, Ms. Gritt teaches them everything from checking the fluid levels to replacing the drive belt. The narrative is interesting and the car advice is fantastic. Excellent for high school kids learning to drive.

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Memoir Knisley, Lucy (2013) Relish: My Life in the Kitchen. New York: First Second. This memoir tells stories of Lucy’s parent’s marriage, her mom’s early work life in the food industry, their eventual breakup, Lucy’s coming-ofage (including first encounters with pornography and drinking), and Lucy’s early childhood through her college and post college days. These scenes are punctuated with recipes, explanations about the right way to cook something, and advice about how to shop for food. For students who are passionate about cooking, this memoir might be perfect. Lat. (1980) Town Boy. New York: First Second. This memoir of a child growing up in Malaysia gives a remarkably insightful look at what friendship really is. Excellent use of image and text to tell the story. Liu, Na; Martinez, Andres Vera (2012) Little White Duck: A Childhood in China. Minneapolis: Graphic Universe. No Liu remembers finding recently hatched chicks behind a neighbor’s house and wanting to save them like the People’s selfless hero Lei Feng. On a hot day she and her sister make sure the chicks have enough water forcing them to drink one by one (inadvertently killing them). This memoir of growing up in China after the communist revolution is detailed and personal but also gives readers an idea of what growing up in China after the communist revolution was like. Pekar, H. and D. Collier (2005). Unsung Hero: The Story of Robert McNeill. Milwaukie OR, Dark Horse. First-person account of an African American soldier in Viet Nam. Proust, M. and S. Heuet (2001). Remembrance of Things Past (Graphic Novel Adaptation). New York, Nantier Beall Minoustchine. Graphic novel adaptation. Good art. More captions than word bubbles. Although it is not exactly action-packed, this might be a good choice for a memoir unit.

Middle East Baxter, Jack; Faudem, Joshua; Shadmi, Koren (2015) Mike’s Place: A True Story of Love, Blues, and Terror in Tel Aviv. New York: First Second. Mike’s Place is a bar in Tel Aviv that is warm, cozy, and hospitable. It features live music, an upbeat atmosphere, and welcomes everyone, local or stranger, Israeli or Palestinian, regardless of politics. US filmmaker Jack’s documentary about this neutral ground in the middle of religious tension also tells of a bombing and the pain, grief, havoc, and eventually rebirth

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that follows. It raises questions about brokenness, grace, romance, betrayal, friendship, music, and violence. Pekar, Harvey (2012) Not the Israel my Parents Promised Me. New York: Hill and Wang. This interesting graphic novel charts Pekar’s change from a Jewish boy raised by Zionist parents to a college student and later an adult who questions the way Israel deals with Palestine and indeed questions Israel’s exclusive right to the land it occupies. The book is, at times, overly didactic, and the framing device of Pekar having a conversation with two guys in a bookstore is contrived, yet somehow it also works. Sacco, J. (2009) Footnotes in Gaza New York: Henry Holt. This is excellent reporting about contemporary Palestine and a bloody incident that occurred in 1956. The language is rough at times, but the piece gives the reader a variety of different voices so that readers can put the story together on their own. Other historical graphic novels by Joe Sacco include 2001’s Palestine (Seattle, Fantagraphics), 2002’s Safe Area Gorazde (Seattle, WA, Fantagraphics), and 2005’s War’s End: Profiles from Bosnia 1995-96 (Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly). Yankin, Boaz; Bertozzi, Nick (2013) Jerusalem. New York: First Second. This is an epic story of two families over several generations caught up in the creation of the Israeli state. We see brothers on opposite sides of the conflict and sons set against fathers. It doesn’t push the Israeli or Palestinian political perspective but does address a lot of the issues of ethics that war and occupation and conflict bring with them. The reader gets to know individual members of the families and comes to like, sympathize, and sometimes hate them.

Original Literature Britt, Fany; Arsenault, Isabelle (2012) Jane, The Fox, and Me. Toronto: Groundwood Books. Helene escapes from the loneliness of the drab grey schoolyard and bullying and abuse of her peers by imagining herself into Jane Eyre. That world is full of bright color, great beauty, tranquility. And characters she connects with. Forced to go to camp with schoolmates who humiliate and insult her, eventually Helene discovers other outcasts and they become friends. Jane is hopeful and splendid. Castellucci, C. and J. Rugg (2007). The Plain Janes. New York, Minx. Several girls, all named Jane, use art to wake up their sleepy town. The book could provoke an interesting discussion of the place of art in society and what happens when fear of terrorism restricts artistic expression.

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Chadwick, Paul. (2005) Concrete: Depths. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse. This book is about a guy who ends up in a body that is composed of rock and then he has to figure out what to do with himself. It sounds simplistic, but it is a remarkably interesting series of stories. I liked this one a lot. There is one scene with nudity that may make this particular volume problematic for use in high school. Eicher, Glenn; Bertozzi, Nick. (2009) Stuffed. New York: First Second. Tim inherits his father’s curio museum, and finds that, among the artifacts is a stuffed African warrior. He, and eventually his brother Free, work to return the statue to its native land. Thematically there is a lot here about brother to brother relationships, father to son relationships, racial relationships, and the question of doing the right thing at the cost of all relationships. Fialkov, Joshua Hale; Tuazon, Noel; Keating, Scott Elk’s Run. New York: Villard. In Appalachia, a band of moralist Christian separatists live a life free from the influence of television, radio, or modern media in a valley accessible only through a single highway tunnel. When a mob-based “justice” killing threatens to bring the attention of the outside world on the community, young John and his friends try to escape to the outside world. Giardino, V. (1994). A Jew in Communist Prague: Loss of Innocence. Nantier Beall Minoustchine, New York. This graphic novel portrays the life of a marginalized family under totalitarian rule. There is a coming-of-age/sex scene that might make it difficult to use in some classrooms. Gaiman, Neil; Zulli, Michael (2005) The Last Temptation. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse. Steven goes into a mysterious theater and meets the Showman. Steven soon finds himself not only watching the show but also being part of it. The boundaries between the stage and real life start to drop, and the Showman tempts Steven with all manner of Faustian bargains. Steven must decide whether to be true to his convictions or succumb to temptation. The art is beautifully creepy. Good book to pair with Scott McCloud’s graphic novel, The Sculptor or with Marlow’s Faustus. Gaiman, Neil (1991) Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes. New York: DC. Humans imprison the personification Dream through sorcery. Chaos ensues. Dream eventually escapes and must reclaim three talismans of power. Along the way, some interesting portrayals of the best and worst of humanity. Kim, Derek Kirk (2011) Same Difference. New York: First Second. The main character has always regretted his decision not to go to the prom with a blind girl. In this heartwarming story he tries to set things right. The quirky story does a great job of developing themes of prejudice and preconceptions for both Asian people and those who are blind. The book

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contains a fair amount of vulgar language, some sexual references, and some sexual imagery. Still, it is a good book. Read it for yourself and decide. Kondo, Robert; Tsustumi, Dice (2017) The Dam Keeper. New York: First Second. Ever since he lost his parents, Pig has maintained the dam and windmills that blow back the dark fog. One day the fog destroys the dam and carries Fox and Hippo and Pig far away. They must figure out how to get back and what to do with the knowledge they have learned, that the fog may not be as deadly as they have always been told. The art is gorgeous, breathtaking, and amazing; the story is engaging and surprising; and this book is not like any other you have read before. Larsen, Hope (2010) Mercury. New York: Atheneum. Tara’s mother’s house burned down, Tara is living with her aunt and uncle while her mother works in Western Canada. Josey is living on the Canadian frontier with her mother, father, and sister when a stranger arrives and persuades her father to join him in developing a gold mine. The way these two stories stitch together is delightful. Lemire, J. (2007). Tales From the Farm. Atlanta, Top Shelf. The main character is a kid who mourns his late mother, doesn’t understand his dad, and eventually bonds with a brain-damaged former hockey player who may be his real dad. When the kid imagines an alien invasion, the hockey player plays along. Lemire, J. (2007) Ghost Stories. Atlanta, Top Shelf. Two brothers, both hockey players are torn apart by an affair between the unmarried one and the married one’s wife. Told by the unmarried one as a senile old man looking back on a fruitless life. Novgordodoff, Danica (2014) The Undertaking of Lily Chen. New York: First Second. Deshi Li’s older brother has died unmarried. According to custom, it is Deshi Li’s responsibility to find a wife to be buried next to his brother. With his family’s savings, he goes to hire a grave robber to find him a recently buried corpse. When that fails, he seeks a live girl he can murder and bury with his brother. Deshi helps a girl flee from her family and, though he wants to use her to fulfill the custom, he falls in love with her. This dark story can lead to thoughtful discussions. Phelan, Matt (2013) Bluffton: My Summers with Buster. Somerville, MA: Candlewick. When a group of vaudeville performers begin summering near where Henry lives, his life becomes much more interesting. He meets Buster, a young gifted performer who can juggle and do magic tricks, but is best at pratfalls. When both of them take a liking to Sally, things get particularly interesting. The final twist is the best, though. The illustrations are wonderful watercolors.

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Pyle, Kevin C. (2007) Blindspot. New York: Henry Holt. Interesting piece about a kid whose war games with his friends are, to him, more real than the rest of his life. Rabagliati, Michel (2003) Paul has a Summer Job. Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly. Paul takes a job working as a replacement camp counselor at a camp in the Canadian wilds. Language and adult situations might make it inappropriate for some high schools. Rapp Adam; Cavallaro, Mike (2017) Decelerate Blue. New York: First Second. Financial transaction chips embedded in everyone’s arm, BreifLit and Rapid Jo, and Frenzy Tea all make sure society stays efficient and overcommitted. When teenager Angela stumbles across a book called Kick the Boot, a recipe for escaping into the (literal) underground and finding out what it is like to live life slowly and thoughtfully, she must decide whether to leave behind her parents and her world to pursue a dream (or a trap). This is a good book to pair with Huxley’s Brave New World. Shiga, Jason (2011) Empire State: A Love Story (Or Not). New York: Abrams ComicArts. When his friend Sara decides to move to New York, Jimmy (an Asian American twenty-something who works in a library and lives with his mom) decides to follow her. Unfortunately, his plans go awry and he is unable to tell her how he feels. This graphic novel will appeal to students who want a realistic story in which things don’t always work out. The art mirrors these themes. Shiga’s main characters seem permanently slouched and pudgy. This is a world of the utterly ordinary. Pham, Thien (2012) Sumo. New York: First Second. Scott breaks up with Gwen then does the only logical thing after breaking up—he moves to Japan to become a sumo wrestler. It reads kind of like a graphic novel haiku. The art is simple, but beautiful and the story is told in flashbacks in which different time periods are delineated by the color of the wash over each panel. The running theme is that, if you break up with someone you love, it will hurt, but you will be okay. This one made me feel happy in a melancholy way. Thompson, C. (2004). Blankets. Marietta, GA Top Shelf Productions. This fictionalized memoir is a coming-of-age story that deals with themes deals with conflict between fundamentalist religion and artistic expression. There is some nudity. Yang, G. L. (2010) Animal Crackers. San Jose, California: SLG Publishing. This is one of Yang’s earlier and shorter works. It is excellent and funny and it deals with bullying, religious identity, and romance to boot. Good stuff.

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Yang, Gene; Pham, Thien (2011) Level Up. New York: First Second. Dennis tries to figure out his destiny as a gastroenterologist or a computer game tester. Angels/Pac Man ghosts accompany him. The ending is satisfying ending. Themes deal with identity in terms of work and calling. Yang, Gene (2008) Prime Baby. New York: First Second. Thaddeus becomes convinced that his sister is an alien being. Turns out, he’s wrong, she’s a gateway for alien beings to come to Earth (she pukes up space slugs). It isn’t an invasion, though, the aliens are missionaries bringing smiles and happy feelings. Thaddeus tries to trick them into invading so that he can become president of the world. He gets the government to jail his sister—then he starts to miss her. Excellent story.

Religion Crumb, R. (2009) The Book of Genesis Illustrated. New York: W. W. Norton. Quite a remarkable book. Very faithful to the original manuscript. Reading the whole thing gave me a clear picture of the whole book of Genesis. Having said that, Crumb’s straightforward depiction of the violence and sexual scenes in Genesis may make this a hard book to use in its entirety with many high school classes. Excerpts might be useful for an early world literature unit though. Deutsch, Barry (2010) Hereville: How Mirka got her Sword. New York: Amulet. This book shows the day-to-day life of a Jewish Orthodox family and at the same time tells the story of a girl who manages to outwit bullies, a witch, and a troll. We get to meet her good stepmother, her brother, an evil talking pig, and the troll that challenges her to a knitting duel. The panel layout is inspired and the drawings are clear and well done. Deutsch, Barry (2012) Hereville: How Mirka Met a Meteroite. New York: Amulet. When Mirka claims her sword from the troll, he tricks her into summoning a meteorite that threatens to flatten her town. A witch stops the disaster by transforming the meteor into a duplicate of Mirka. Mirka enjoys having someone who can do her homework while she plays, but before long, the meteorite duplicate proves to be better than Mirka in almost everything. How Mirka resolves the problem is at times nail-biting, but also quite delightful (and involves fighting monsters). Kashyap, Keshni; Araki, Mari (2012) Tina’s Mouth: An Existential Comic Diary. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Tina is a sophomore trying to make sense of religion, belief, and the meaning of life by keeping a diary of her existentialism. She tries to make sense of all this while losing friends, having crushes, losing crushes, and trying to figure out how life works. The book is barely a graphic novel. Some pages

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separate images and text, the lettering is typeset instead of drawn, and the illustrations have a limited range of movement. There is no resolution of Tina’s search, except that it will continue. Ross, S. (2005). Marked. New York, Seabury Books. This black-and-white graphic is about the life of Jesus. It is set in a kind of an alternate universe where Simon and Peter run a Sons of Zebedee fish vending machine company and Jesus shaves his head. This approach comes across more alternative and thought-provoking than preachy. Sheinkin, Steve (2010) Rabbi Harvey vs. the Wisdom Kid. Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing. Rabbi Harvey, the wisest rabbi in the wild west, finds himself in conflict with a selfish, money-grubbing rabbi named Rabbi Ruben (who calls himself The Wisdom Kid). Soon they are having a duel, relying on logic, wisdom, and folktales to outsmart the other. Every single page of this book has several amazingly clever moments. The art is pretty rudimentary (the heads of every person in this graphic novel are disproportionately big). But it is enough to get the story.

Science Fiction and Fantasy De Crecy, Nicholas (2006) Glacial Period. New York: NBM Publishing. Hulk is an intelligent pig who wears glasses who is part of an expedition of humans searching for artifacts from a lost civilization (ours) covered up by an ice age. The members of the expedition are rivals for the affection of Juliette, daughter of the wealthy but handicapped man who is bankrolling the expedition. Hulk gets left behind and discovers the entrance to an ancient art museum. The ink drawings with watercolor washes are perfect for the desolation of this glacial world Vance, Jack; Ibrahim, Humayoun (text 1961, adaptation 2012) The Moon Moth. New York: First Second. Excellent adaptation of a difficult but fascinating science fiction story. It is a kind of detective story set on a planet of self-interested beings who communicate only through music. Westerfeld, Scott; Puvilland, Alex (2017) Spill Zone. New York: First Second. Addison lives with her little sister, Lexi ever since the Spill that claimed her parents’ lives. No one knows what the Spill was—nanotech gone bad, aliens, extra-dimensional invaders? Addie sneaks into the zone and photographs the frightening creatures there. When a customer offers enough for Addie to retire far away from the zone, she agrees to retrieve an artifact. But to get in and out one more time will not be easy. This would be a good addition to a high school classroom library.

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Wooding, Chris; Diaz, Cassandra (2012) Pandemonium. New York: Scholastic. Siefer, son of the chief of a little town in the middle of nowhere, is kidnapped and taken to the great city. It turns out he looks identical to the prince of the realm, who is missing. Siefer’s job is to act as a decoy and rule in his stead until the prince is found and the culprits captured. But Siefer knows nothing of how to govern, nothing of magic, and the prince is engaged to be married and his fiancée is coming for a visit soon. Students will enjoy the humor, action, and romantic intrigues.

Science Writing Cunningham, Darryl (2017) Graphic Science: Seven Journeys of Discovery. Oxford: Myriad. Graphic science presents biographies of Antoine Lavoisier, Mary Anning, George Washington Carver, Nikola Tesla, Alfred Wegener, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, and Fred Hoye. The idea here is to show how science developed over 200 years by focusing on these seven lives. The books shows them in their social, cultural, and political contexts to highlight the way science contends with societal response to theories and discoveries. A fascinating book and well worth a read. Scott, Mairghread; Chabot, Jacob (2018) Robots and Drones: Past, Present, and Future. New York: First Second. With a robot bird as a guide, this book explores the history of the develop­ ment of robots by trying to define what a robot is. Maybe that doesn’t sound so exciting, but it is the amazing details about what robots can do, how they are made, and how they accomplish what they accomplish that makes this a fascinating book (if sometimes a little hokey). Seagle, Steven T.; Kristiansen, Teddy (2013) Genius. New York: First Second. Ted is a physicist whose job is in jeopardy unless he has a breakthrough in his research soon. When he finds out that when his senile father-in-law was in the army, Albert Einstein confided in him about some ideas he was working on, Ted sees a solution. Somewhere along the way, though, Ted begins to ask himself what it is he wants out of life. Ted comes to realize he is on the verge of losing his wife and children in order to make his breakthrough, and it may not be worth it.

Short Stories Geary, Rick; Shaw, Stanley W.; Ryan, Johnny; Weber, Lisa K. (2005) Graphic Classics: O. Henry Mount Horeb, Wisconsin: Eureka Productions.

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This book includes adaptations of O. Henry short stories including “The Ransom of Red Chief”, “Gift of the Magi”, “The Cisco Kid”, and others. Many different adapters, so the styles and the quality of different adaptations vary a lot—but bottom line, it’s a good book. Hagio, Moto (2010) A Drunken Dream and other Stories. Seattle: Fantagraphics. Moto’s work is beautiful, weird, lyrical, gripping, and magical. In Iguana Girl, for example, when a woman is first shown her newborn baby, she sees her as an overgrown iguana. Everyone else see a normal human baby, but the mother is horrified. When a second baby is born normal, the iguana girl begins to suffer neglect and hatred from her mother. The ending is satisfying and somewhat redemptive. Huizenga, Kevin, (2006) Curses. Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly. These amazing short stories deal with hope, despair, religion, morality, and how to live. All the stories share a main character named Glenn Ganges. The story “28th Street” is a kind of modern fable quest story. Well worth reading. London, Jack: Kuper, Peter; Howarth, Matt; Geary, Rick; Emerson, Hunt. (2003) Graphic Classics; Jack London. Mount Horeb, WI: Eureka Productions. Not the strongest art or storytelling in the world, but some of these might be good examples of how to translate classic literature to GNs. Some stories have adultish material. Modan, Rutu (2008) Jamilti and Other Stories. Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly. Excellent and interesting short stories, mostly they take place in modern-day Israel. Very occasional nudity, but the figures are so small, it may not be a problem Yang, G. and D. Kim (2009). The Eternal Smile. New York, First Second. A series of short stories with recurring themes of redemption, trust, fantasy, and the role of women. The final story, about the woman who dreams of answering the email she got from an African prince is a particularly wonderful story.

Sports Jamieson, Victoria (2015) Roller Girl. New York: Penguin. This graphic novel, while admittedly young for high school readers, will grab readers with a wonderful tale about Astrid’s growing interest in roller derby, participation in a Saturday skating camp, and eventual growth and mastery of the sport. Along the way she gains and loses friends, struggles

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with the skills not coming to her as smoothly as she thinks they should, deals with being jealous of her friend’s success, and grows with the support of an older mentor. Sturm, James (2001) The Golem’s Mighty Swing. Montreal, Drawn and Quarterly. This fictional graphic novel is about a Jewish team during the early days of baseball. Santiago, Wilfred (2011) 21, The Story of Roberto Clemente. Seattle: Fantagraphics. This fascinating and multifaceted story of Clemente’s journey from a relatively poor beginning in Puerto Rico to becoming a legendary baseball player contains themes of struggling against a language barrier and prejudice. Clemente comes across as optimistic and unstoppable in the face of discouragement. Panel images and movement are pretty sophisticated, so this is not the graphic novel to start out a student on. Yankin, Boaz; Infurnari, Joe (2012) Marathon. New York: First Second. Most of us know the legend of Marathon—how a runner had to cover the distance from Sparta to Athens to turn the tide of battle. Yakin and Infurnari present the rest of the story, how the 27 miles was only the final leg of the 300 miles Eucles had to run over the course of that battle. This graphic novel moves back and forth from the run to Marathon and the history of the runner at breakneck speed. The images capture both Eucles’s desperate speed and exhaustion.

Women and the World Abouet, M. (2007) Aya. Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly. Set in Ivory Coast, this is the story of several teenage and young adult girls as they flirt with boys, look for love, and hope for marriage. Set in the 1970s postcolonial world, one of the striking themes of this work is that life and love goes on in the midst of country struggling with postcolonial aftermath and economic struggles. Arnoldi, Katherine (1998) The Amazing True Story of a Teenage Single Mom. New York: Hyperion. This black-and-white autobiography follows the main character who has become pregnant, the father of her child has left her and her parents have scorned her. She strikes out on her own facing some difficult and sometimes dangerous and scary challenges but ends on a high note when she gets help and is able to attend college. The art is pretty basic, though. Knisley, Lucy (2016) Something New: Tales from a Makeshift Bride. New York: First Second.

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This book looks at the conflict between societal and family expectations and making your wedding your own. Lucy manages to gets her wedding dress with pockets and her simple wedding, and all without permanently alienating anyone. There are interesting themes here including thinking about traditions before buying into them, basing marriage on more than appearance, and how humor can diffuse tension among others. Knisley references some same-sex dating before meeting her husband. Tamiki, Mariko; Tamiki Jillian (2008) Skim. Toronto: Groundwood Press. Skim attends her first Wiccan circle but finds it is a group of hippies talking about the power of nature. The next day, while sneaking away from school to smoke, she meets her favorite teacher, Ms. Archer. Skim begins to be attracted to Ms. Archer. Eventually they share a kiss. Skim highlights the confusion of negotiating identity and relationships in high school. The art is beautiful and ugly, sometimes blindingly full of white space, sometimes shrouded in shadow.

INDEX Abadzis, Nick, Laika  73, 101 Abernathy, Ralph  134 adaptations, classics  118–25 adaptations, popular modern works  125–6 adaptations, regular-text books  7–9, 115–27, 165–8 Adeyemi, Tomi  26 advocacy criticism  79–83 affordances of graphic novels  6–9 Alcott, Louisa May  116, 122 Alexie, Sherman, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian  124 allusions  54–6 alternate terms for graphic novels  2–4 Anderson, Ho Che, King  134, 136 Anderson, Laurie and Emily Carroll, Speak  8, 26, 29–32, 39, 43, 70–1, 81, 106–7 Anderson, M.T. and Offerman, Andrea, The Knight of the Lion  16–18, 87 Andre the Giant  1 Appleman, Deborah, Critical Encounters in Secondary English  68–9 archetypal criticism  84–5 Arnoldi, Katherine, The True Story of a Teenage Single Mom  107, 139 the arts, graphic novels about  168 arts instruction  104–5 authorial choices  61 authorial intent  57–60 B., David, Epileptic  107, 139 Backderf, Derf, My Friend Dahmer  85 Bagieu, Penelope and Nanette McGuinness, Cass Elliot Before the Mamas and the Papas  104

Baker, Kyle, Nat Turner  4, 36, 62 Ballstorf, Arne, Baby’s in Black: Astrid Kirchherr, Stuart Sutcliff, and the Beatles  105 Baxter, Jack; Joshua Faudem; and Koren Shadmi, Mike’s Place: A True Story of Love, Blues, and Terror in Tel Aviv  137 Bechdel, Alison, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic  62, 72, 82, 85 Bell, Cece, El Deafo  4, 32, 107 biography  136–7, 168–9 Bishop, Rudine Sims  6, 25–6, 108 Bitz, Michael  143, 145, 147 blogs about graphic novels  161 Boerman-Cornell, William; Jung Kim, and Michael Manderino, Graphic Novels in High School and Middle School: A Disciplinary Literacies Approach  93–5, 129 bookstores  159–60 Bortozzi, Nick, Shackleton: Antarctic Odyssey  133–4 Boyle, James and Jennifer Jenkins, Theft: A History of Music  105–6 Bronte, Charlotte, Jane Eyre  124 Brosgol, Vera Anya’s Ghost  46 Be Prepared  46 Brown, Box, Andre the Giant: Life and Legend  1, 134 Brown, Chester, Lois Riel: A Comic Strip Biography  134 Brown, Don Drowned City: Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans  63, 99–100, 103 The Unwanted: Stories of the Syrian Refugees  46, 62–3, 99–100

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Bui, Thi The Best We Could Do  40–2, 62–3, 100, 108–11 A Different Pond  40 Butler, Octavia, Kindred  32–6, 125 Butzer, C. M., Gettysburg: The Graphic Novel  99 Campbell, Joseph  84 Carlin, John and Oriol Malet, Mandela and the General  35, 97–9 Castellucci, Cecil. and Jim Rugg, Plain Janes  106 Chanani, Nidhi, Pashmina  47 characterization  20–2, 51–3, 147 Chikwanine, Michael; Humphries, Jessica; and Davila, Claudia, Child Soldier: When Boys and Girls are Used for War  43 Chute, Hillary, Why Comics, From Underground to Everywhere  2 civil rights movement in the United States  177 classroom library, recommendations  169–77 Coates, Ta-Nehisi  1 Colfer, Eoin; Andrew Donkin, and Giovanni Rigano, Illegal  46, 75, 100 collaboration  151 Collins, Suzanne, The Hunger Games series  124 connecting with other teachers who use graphic novels  162–4 constraints, graphic novels  9–10 content. Graphic novels  4–5 Craft, Jerry, New Kid  26–9 cultural differences  46–7 cultural identity  177–8 current issues, global  179 definition, graphic novel  1–4 Dembecki, Matt, Trickster: Native American Tales  4–5, 62 Deutch, Barry, How Mirka Got Her Sword  85–6 diversity, children’s books  7

Doxiadis, Apostolos and Christos Papadimitrious, Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth  104, 134 Duffy, Damien and John Jennings, Kindred  33–6, 118, 125 Dupont, J. M. and Mezzo, Love in Vain: Robert Johnson 1911– 1938  104 Durr, Morton, and Lars Hornemann, Zenobia  46, 100 Eisner, Will Comics and Sequential Art  145 A Contract with God  2 ethics, theme in graphic novels  178 explanation of a subject  140 facial expressions  10, 20–2 Feynman, Richard  1 Fiasco, Lupe  154–5 Fies, Brian., Mom’s Cancer  107 figurative language  51–64 Fitch, Matt; Chris Baker; and Mike Collins, Apollo  101 foils  51–3 foreshadowing  9, 54–6, 61 format, graphic novels  5, 144–5 Freud, Sigmund  85 Gaiman, Neil American Gods  151 The Graveyard Book  64, 123 Sandman series  3 Gay, Roxanne  1 gender  36, 47–8 gender criticism  79–83, 90 genre  5 genre criticism  72–4, 89 Getz and Clarke, Abina and the Important Men  1, 82, 137 Gillespie, Tim, Doing Literary Criticism: Helping Students Engage with Challenging Texts  69, 74–5, 80 Gladstone, Brooke and Josh Neufeld, The Influencing Machine  140 Gloechner, Phoebe, A Child’s Life and Other Stories  82 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von  124

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Gould, Stephen Jay  101 Gratz, Alan, Refugee  109–10 Guibert, Emmanuel, Alan’s War: The Memories of G.I. Alan Cope  138

informational texts  129–41 inking, coloring  151 interdisciplinary teaching  93–111 intergenerational trauma  43 interpretation  67–76, 79–92

Haddon, Mark, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime  124 Hale, Nathan, One Trick Pony  74, 82 Hale, Shannon, Rapunzel’s Revenge  81 Halliday, Ayun and Paul Hoppe East Village Inky  155 Peanut  32, 81 Hatke, Ben, Zita the Space Girl  81, 129 health and illness  107–8, 181–2 Hegel, George  75 Helfer, Andy and Randy DuBurke, Malcom X  4, 136 Hennessey, Jonathan and Aaron McConnell, The United States Constitution: A Graphic Adaptation  140 Hinds, Gareth Beowulf  8, 62, 118 King Lear  7–8, 118 The Odyssey  8, 62, 118, 122 Hirsch, Andy, Science Comics: Trees: Kings of the Forest  139–40 historical criticism  74–7, 90 history, global  180–1 history, United States  182–3 history instruction  95–100 Homer  116 Hosler, Jay Clan Apis or The Way of the Hive  101, 131–3, 135, 149 The Last of the Sandwalkers  101–2 The Sandwalk Adventures  101 how-to narrative  183 Hyman, Miles, Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”; The Authorized Graphic Novel  124

Jackson, Shirley, “The Lottery”  124 Jacobson and Colon, The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation  4 Jamieson, Victoria All’s Faire in Middle School  82 Roller Girl  32 Johnson, C.J., The Breakaways  107 Johnson, Mat and Warren Pleece, Incognegro  36, 72

identity  25–32 imagination  10 inferences  9

Kafka, Franz  118 King, Martin Luther Jr., 27, 134 Kinney, Jeff, Diary of a Wimpy Kid  2, 4, 154 Kipling, Rudyard, The Jungle Book  123 Knisley, Lucy Relish: My Life in the Kitchen  135 Something New: Tales from a Makeshift Bride  135, 139 Krosoczka, Jarett Hey, Kiddo  57–62, 106–7, 139, 152 Jedi Academy series  57 Lunch Lady series  57 Kuper, Peter  118 Laird, Roland; Tanesha Laird; and Elihu Bey, Still I Rise: A Cartoon History of AfricanAmericans  135 Larsen, Hope, A Wrinkle in Time  8, 116 Le, Minh, Green Lantern: Legacy  43 Lendler, Ian and Zack Giallongo, The Stratford Zoo Midnight Revue Presents Macbeth  119 L’Engle, Madeleine, A Wrinkle in Time  8, 116 Lewis, John and Andrew Aidin, March trilogy  62–3, 74, 82, 88, 90–1, 107, 134, 136–7

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libraries and graphic novels  162 Lifeline Theater  116–17 literary criticism  67–76, 79–92 literary nonfiction  129–41 literary terms  51–64 literary theory  67–76, 79–92 literature, graphic novels as  15–22, 185–9 Long, Mark; Demonakos, Jim; and Powell, Nate, The Silence of Our Friends  62, 99, 107 McCloud, Scott Making Comics: Storytelling Secrets of Comics, Manga, and Graphic Novels  146–7 The Sculptor  124 Understanding Comics  18, 120, 145 McKenna, Aline and Perez, Ramon, Jane  20–2 Madden, Matt, 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style   145 manga  3, 9, 104, 119 Marchetto, Marisa A., Cancer Vixen  139 Marlow, Christopher  124 Marsden, Mariah and Brenna Thumler, Anne of Green Gables  118, 120–2 math instruction  104 mechanics of reading a graphic novel  16–18 Medina, Tony, I am Alfonso Jones  36 memoir  138–9, 184 Meyer, Marissa Lunar Chronicles series  126 Wires and Nerve Series  126 Meyer and Jimenez  19 Meyers, Walter Dean, Monster  125 Middle East in graphic novels  184–5 Miller, Saiya and Liza Bley, Not Your Mother’s Meatloaf: A Sex Education Comic  107 Moen, Erika and Matthew Nolan, Drawn to Sex: The Basics  107 mood  54 Moore, Alan; Gibbons, Dave, Watchmen  3, 85

moral criticism  86–7, 90 Moss, Marissa, Last Things  107, 139 multimodal composition  143–57 multimodality  5–6 Neri, Gregory and Randy Duburke, Yummy: Tales of a Southside Shorty  36 new historicism  76 New London Group  5 Nguyen, Viet Thanh  62 Nicholson, Hope, Moonshot  62 Nuefeld, Josh, A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge  63, 100 O’Connor, George  viii–ix Journey into Mohawk Country  4 Olympians series  62, 99 online booksellers  160–1 Ostertag, Molly Knox, The Witch Boy Series  48 Ottaviani, James, T-Minus: The Race to the Moon  4, 101 Ottaviani, James and Leland Purvis The Imitation Game: Alan Turing Decoded  102, 104, 136 Suspended in Language  102, 104 Ottaviani, James and L. Myrick, Feynman  102, 134, 136–7 Ottaviani, James and Maris Wicks, Primates: The Fearless Science of Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Birute Galdikas  102, 134 Ottaviani, James; D. Barr; and S. Gladden, Dignifying Science: Stories about Women Scientists  102–3 Ottaviani, James; J. Johnston; and J. Jones, J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Political Science of the Atomic Bomb  136 panels  149 parallel structure  57–60 Parisi, Paolo, Coltrane  104 Pederson, A. and C. Skinner  156 Perkins, David  75 perspective  57–60 physical education instruction  107

INDEX

platforms for creating graphic novels on-line  152–3 plot  56–7 popularity of graphic novels  5 Powell, Nate, Swallow Me Whole  63, 107 Prince, Liz, Tomboy: A Graphic Memoir  47–8 process narrative  139–40 professional development education graphic novel  178 psychological criticism  83–6, 90 publication of student graphic novels  152 Pullman, Phillip, The Golden Compass series  125 race and class  26–9 racial justice  36 reader-response theory  69–72, 89 reading aloud from graphic novels  10 refugees  43–6 religion in graphic novels  189–90 Revel, Sandrine, Glenn Gould: A Life Off Tempo  104 Riordan, Rick, The Percy Jackson series  115, 126 Rosenblatt, Louise  69 Rowling, J.K., The Harry Potter series  115–16, 123 rules for using graphic novels in the classroom  10 Sacco, Joe Palestine  62, 138 Safe Area Gorazde  39, 138 Sakai, Stan, Usagi Yojimbo series  75 Salinger, J.D., The Catcher in the Rye  124 Satrapi, Marjane, Persepolis  4, 25, 63, 124 Schaffer, Peter  86 Schultz, John  148 Schultz, Mark; Kevin Cannon; and Xander Cannon, The Stuff of Life: A Graphic Guide to Genetics and DNA  103, 135

199

science fiction and fantasy graphic novels  190–1 science graphic novels  191 science instruction  101–4 script formats for graphic novels  144–5, 149 Selfe, Cynthia.L., Multimodal Composition: Resources for Teachers  155 Sell, Chad, Cardboard Kingdom  63, 151 Selznick, Brian  154, The Invention of Hugo Cabret  4 Shakespeare, William  116, 119, 124 Hamlet  86 King Lear  119 Macbeth  119 The Merchant of Venice  76 Romeo and Juliet  76, 119 The Tempest  123 Shelley, Mary  116 short stories in graphic novels  191–2 Siegel, Siena Cherson and Mark Siegel, To Dance: A Ballerina’s Graphic Novel  105 Sims, Guy A. and Dawud Anyabwile, Monster: A Graphic Novel  125 Sinclair, Upton, The Jungle  118 slavery and race  34–6 Smith, Jeff, Bone series  82, 152 social justice  32–6 Spiegelman, Maus  1, 2, 4, 39, 43, 62, 64, 72, 74, 77, 85 sports graphic novels  192–3 Stassen, Jean-Phillippe, Deogratias  63, 73, 75, 82 Stevenson, Noelle Lumberjanes Series  48, 75 Nimona  32 storyboarding  149 story structure  51–64 Sturm, James and Tommaso, R., Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow  62, 137–8 Sybile, Titeux. and A. Ameziane, Muhammad Ali  107 symbolism  54, 61–2

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INDEX

Talbot, Bryan, A Tale of One Bad Rat  73, 83–5, 108 Tamiki, M. and Tamiki J., This One Summer  64, 73, 75 Tan, Shaun, The Arrival  4 Tatum, Beverly Daniel, Why are all the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria and Other Conversations about Race  29 Telgemeier, Raina, Smile  107 Tercico, Ray and Bre Indigo, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy  122 themes  25–48 Thomas, Angie  26 Thompson, Craig Blankets  73 Habibi  152 Tiwary, Vivek; Kyle Baker; and Andrew Robinson, The Fifth Beatle  105 Tolkien, J.R.R., The Lord of the Rings trilogy  115 tone  54

Walden, Tillie On a Sunbeam  48, 73, 75, 81–2 Spinning  48, 72, 85 Wallis, Pete; Joseph Wilkins; and Thalia Wallis, What Does Consent Really Mean?  107 Walz, Jason, Last Pick  81, 107 Wang, Jen, The Princess and the Dressmaker  48 Watts, Irene N., Seeking Refuge: A Graphic Novel  44–5, 63 Weisel, Eli, Night  77 Wertham, Fredric  1 West, Kanye  153–5 Westerfeld, Scott, Uglies series  8 Wiesner, David  3 Winick, Judd, Pedro and Me  107 women, graphic novels about  193–4 Woodson, Jaqueline, The Day You Begin  26 word and picture interaction  18–20, 22

Ukazu, Ngozi, Check, Please  107 Vaughan, Brian K. and Niko Henrichon, Pride of Baghdad  51–7, 63 Venditti, R.; A. Futaki; and Rick Riordan The Lightning Thief  126 The Sea of Monsters  126 vocabulary  9 voice  29–32, 57–60

Yang, Gene Luen American Born Chinese  25, 47, 62–3, 73, 85, 129 Boxers and Saints  4, 43, 63, 72–3, 76–7, 97 Yang, Gene Luen and Mike Holmes, Secret Coders series  104 Young, Frank M. and David Laskey, The Carter Family: Don’t Forget This Song  104–5

201

202

203

204