Comic Genius

Tonight I’ve been spending some time getting started on planning for the English classes I’ll be teaching starting in August. And because I’ve already had the opportunity to teach a comic in a novels class, it got me thinking about ways I can bring comic books into the classroom.

Some of the most obvious ways to bring comics into the classroom are those books that are historical retellings of epic stories. The Infinite Horizon, for example, is a modern-day retelling of The Odyssey. It is set in the Middle East and is centered around a character trying to return from the Iraq War, but the essentials are still the same. I’m also pretty sure that there is a Beowulf graphic novel out there, which is an epic story that is read in many high school English classes around the country.

But if I’m going for familiarity, it would be much more beneficial for me to use characters and books that my students would be familiar with. These are the characters who have high visibility when it comes to comic books–the Supermans, Batmans, and Spider-Mans of the world. One of the things I actually have a great deal of fun with though, is going through various books and finding different ways that I could teach story elements such as conflict and characterization.

I also found in our Freshman English book an excerpt from Understanding Comics. I haven’t had a chance to look this over yet, but I definitely want to look at it and find a way to work it into the class. The students at my last school loved that I had a geeky sort of personality because it made them feel like we had something in common, so I would love to be able to have the same kind of connection with my new students at my new school.