Blog Archives
Comics in Education: Teaching Figurative Language with Comics and Graphic Novels
Columnist Anastasia Betts of Graphic Novels 101 looks at the use of comics in the classroom, and shares her experience as an educator helping teachers embrace sequential art as a teaching tool.
Anastasia Betts by Anastasia Betts
I still remember my first year teaching in the classroom. What a fun, challenging, and eye-opening experience that was. I eagerly anticipated the students I would get to know, and how (with all the naive enthusiasm of a newbie), I would light the fire of inspiration under each and every one of them. I dutifully reported to campus, accepted the key to my classroom, and received from my principal a very tall stack of teacher’s manuals.
I started the year with gusto, following the pacing plans given to me by the district and the sequence of lesson plans laid out in the manuals. Before I knew it the end of the first trimester arrived and it was time to complete the report cards for my lovely young 4th graders. It was my first time ever filling out a report card, and I was excited to engage in this next new step of my teaching career.
The report cards were the newly designed, standards-based kind. As a result, I did not see one until it was time to fill it out. Had I gotten my hot little hands on one at the beginning of the year, my teaching might have been entirely different – for the “key” standards listed on the report card had very little to do with what I had been teaching from the teaching manuals and district assignments.
Understanding figurative language (similes, metaphors, personification, onomatopoeia, etc) was one of the important skills that I was to report on. How well had they mastered this knowledge? Were they able to demonstrate and apply their understanding? I experienced a moment of panic as I realized that my current prescribed curriculum did not even cover figurative language – yet here it was on the report card. And I was responsible for holding my students accountable for this knowledge.
I realize this is a lengthy introduction, but here I arrive at my point. With absolutely no tools in my classroom to teach figurative language (and I was determined to do so before I completed those report cards), I raided my comics and graphic novels collection for teaching ideas.
Green Arrow #13 by Kevin Smith and Phil Hester
The first experience with using comics in my classroom was a little rough. I barely knew what I was doing – but I knew that the kids were engaged, and excited to learn. And because they were engaged and interested, their retention of the concepts I was teaching was even stronger.
The next year, I was determined to be much more prepared. My collection of superhero comics was not large at this time (and, I wasn’t sure how manhandled I wanted my issues to get). So to limit some wear and tear, I saved up all the Sunday comics for months, and added them to my lessons on onomatopoeia. Handing out stacks of colored newspaper comics with my DC and Marvel issues elicited tons of “oohs” and “aahs” from my class. With highlighters and post-its they eagerly dug into the comics determined to find every last pop, bang, and pow.
In the coming years I continued to add to my comics collection. My lessons on personification moved to include the amazing comics series Babymouse by Jennifer and Matthew Holm, and also Owly by Andy Runton.
Similes and metaphors are found everywhere in comics. But as teachers, we want our students to move beyond simply identifying to creating their own. Comics provided the perfect stepping stone for such skills. Batman, Superman, and Spider-Man were all larger than life characters that made it easy for my students to develop figurative comparisons: he was fast as a speeding train, or he fought like an enraged lion, etc.
Babymouse: Queen of the World by Jennifer L. Holm and Matthew Holm
We moved from writing figuratively about established characters, to having students develop their own characters. I invited my students to create their own comics; tell their own stories – and include all of the examples of figurative that they had learned about. Together we created rubrics and criteria lists, through which the students assessed the work of their peers as well as their own. We had a “wall of fame” where students put up the best examples of similes, metaphors, and inventive onomatopoeia that they had found – in the commercial comics as well as the work generated by the class.
It was many years ago, but I realize looking back that these experiences with teaching figurative language launched what would become a very long love affair with using comics in the classroom. Not only did my students learn everything I wanted them to, they learned so much more. We continued to use the comics throughout the year – to teach elements of narrative, fiction, the hero’s journey and more. And because my students had learned all of these skills using a medium they loved and found engaging, they were more willing and ready to apply that learning to the text-only literature we read.
Using comics in the classroom can be as simple as bringing in the Sunday “Funnies” or the latest issue of Spider-Man or Teen Titans. Don’t be afraid to try – it opens a world of awesome opportunities.
Homework (for you to do on your own, with your kids, or with your students): Pick up any handy Marvel or DC comic and count the instances of onomatopoeia you find. Do the same with the Sunday Comics. Which has more? Which has more “rare” onomatopoeia? What purpose does the onomatopoeia server? How would the experience of the comic change if it wasn’t there? When is it effective? When is it not effective? How can you effectively use onomatopoeia in your own writing?
HAPPY READING!
Anastasia Betts is a former teacher, administrator, and UCLA literacy coach from California. She has delivered professional development courses, workshops, and seminars on using comics in the classroom, including participating on Comics in Education panels at Comic Con International: San Diego. Anastasia currently runs an independent curriculum development company called Curriculum Essentials, Inc as well as the website Graphic Novels 101. You can follow her on Facebook at Graphic Novels 101: Using Visual Texts in the 21st Century.
Intro to Comics: Why?
Maus: A Survivor's Tale by art spiegelman
Why read comics?
There’s the Internet, there are video games, apps, TV shows, movies, music, books, theater, radio plays, museums, art galleries… There are bills to pay, jobs to get to and/or find, homework and chores to do, people to be with (or avoid)…
Finding a reason to do something else is real easy.
But once you stumble upon that first comic book or graphic novel or manga or web-comic that connects with you in a way like nothing else, it’s even easier to realize that comics can’t be ignored. They can be an exceptionally engrossing form of entertainment and a transcendent form of artistic expression.
The short version is – THEY’RE AWESOME!
Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson
Sure, it’s a great way to spend some spare time. It’s a fun way to be entertained. Some light escapism is great. And if you’re looking for more, there’s plenty of that too. They have unbridled freedom for creativity and expression. They can be crazy, bizarre, unpredictable, adventurous, sublime, hilarious, romantic, informative, brazen, crass, gentle, healing, and so much more.
The longer version gets a little deep, so hold on.
Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz
We may think of comics as old newspaper strips, superheroes and funny animals, but the art form and language have pervaded our entire culture.
Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli
Some in literary circles see the graphic novel as the young upstart to the established prose novel. But comics actually predate print and the written word. Pre-historic cave drawings used symbols, imagery and sequential storytelling like a primitive comic strip mural. The written language could even be said to be the evolution of these kind of devices. Just as our brains have been trained to understand that a big, lazy orange cat that eats lasagna and hates Mondays is Garfield, so too do we understand that a circle with the right side missing is the letter ‘C’ and that it makes certain sounds in our language. Taken further, we also understand that a red octagon means we should STOP. We understand that words over someone’s head means they are speaking those words. All of this representative symbology could be said to be related to the development of comics. They are a deeply engrained aspect of our basic visual communication.
Because of these fundamental building blocks, comics are arguably the most powerful, pervasive and instant form of communication. And whether you agree or not (it’s not really a contest, after all), comics have proved themselves to be just as capable forms of entertainment worthy of some time as any other. I hope you’ll give them a chance.
Garfield by Jim Davis
Keep checking back here at The Comics Observers for more Intro to Comics articles, where we’ll explore basic aspects of the big world of comics so it doesn’t seem so daunting and overwhelming to check something out. (And me we might touch more on theory from time to time.) If you’d like to see if you can find something you might like, check out What to Read. If you have a question or want to see something explained, post a comment below, or write through Facebook, Twitter or email.
Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud
Welcome to The Comics Observer
And here we are!
If you got here from my comics coverage at CoreyBlake.com or from DigComics.com, thank you for your continued interest. You’ll find that all of my comics-related articles from CoreyBlake.com have magically teleported over here, along with some even older articles from here and there.
If this is your first time, thank you for taking the time to stop by! You’ll see some new articles from the last month and tons more to come!
So what can you expect? The world doesn’t need yet another comics news site, so while I will be providing my own commentary and unique coverage of current events in comics, the site will look to provide a gateway to people just getting into this massive form of entertainment and also give occasional recommended reads. As visitors get more comfortable, they can dig deeper by looking at spotlights on unique experiments in comics and fun facts of the past. And as a special bonus for local readers here in Los Angeles, I’ll feature events like signings and conventions in and around the LA comics scene. To learn more, see the About page.
It’s very likely you’re here for only a few of these things and that’s OK! Just use the handy navigation menu at the top to see the articles you’re interested in.
We’ll have guest-bloggers, like this Friday’s coverage of an LA play that merges theater and graphic novels. We’ll take a look at a publisher’s digital exclusive comic and see if it succeeds as a promotional tool. What else? If there’s anything you’d like to see, let me know. If you have questions about comics you’ve always wanted to ask but were embarrassed, ask away (anonymity provided upon request). Post in the comments below every article, join The Comics Observer Facebook page, follow @ComicsObserver on Twitter, email comicsobserver@gmail.com.
To start, the site will update Wednesdays (new comics day!) and Fridays to keep the focus on quality over quantity.
Thanks again for stopping by. We’ll see you on Friday!
Sequence to Motion: The First Comic Book Movie and the Comic That Inspired It
Happy Hooligan by Frederick Opper (click for bigger)
We’re getting closer to the beginning of the big summer blockbuster season and once again, comic book adaptations are making up a very visible percentage of the big cinematic spectacles. But before Green Lantern, Thor and Captain America, before Iron Man, Batman, Spider-Man and Superman all had their own superhero movies, there was Happy Hooligan.
Over 100 years ago, newspaper comics were still refining the language of comics but at the same time they were becoming a hugely popular form of entertainment. It was basically TV for the masses before there was television (or even radio, for that matter) in America’s living rooms. In 1899, one of newspaper’s biggest moguls, William Randolph Hearst, hired a respected illustrator of humor magazines to add to his growing roster of newspaper cartoonists at the New York Journal. Hearst quickly found that comics significantly increased readership and was a powerful communication tool, and he was a fan himself. He paid better rates to steal creators from his competition, and would fight for less successful creators he believed in. Hearst’s respected illustrator was named Frederick Burr Opper and one of his big creations was Happy Hooligan, which debuted March 11, 1900.
The comic strip was about a disheveled tramp with the worst luck. Happy would frequently try to do good, only to fall (usually literally) to some accident conveniently witnessed by a passing cop who thought Happy was causing the trouble. Most comics ended with Happy being dragged off by one or more cops to serve some excessive amount of jail time. Someone in the legal system must have taken pity on Happy because the following Sunday he would be getting into trouble all over again.
Above is an example from August 24, 1902, preserved and represented by Barnacle Press, which has a veritable treasure trove of old newspaper comics. The physical comedy is played out seemingly second-by-second in each panel. The main fun is in following each step of the small disaster as it unravels, and how each chess piece moves around the space and interacts with the others. In this instance, the chess pieces are Happy, the woman, her horse, Happy’s brother Gloomy Gus (essentially serving as our point of view), the police officer that runs onto the scene, and the tree. The tree’s broken branches and Happy’s pocket knife also serve as secondary chess pieces. Even the bush in the background seems to respond to the action in each panel. And Happy’s ever-present tin can hat adds to the whole. It might look like it vanishes but it’s still on his head at the end, flattened from the action in panels 6, 7 and 8.) You can re-read the strip following just one of the chess pieces. Speech balloons helped direct attention to certain chess pieces at specific moments. The “camera” holds at one angle throughout, similar to vaudeville theater at the time (Gloomy Gus even breaks the fourth wall and talks to the readers/audience at one point). But this also enhances the effect of following the action. We’re a witness to this unbelievable accident as though we were walking by. It also makes it easier to track the action, allowing each panel to serve as a before and/or after comparison of the panels around it. It seems primitive at first (the panels are numbered to make sure readers understood the reading sequence), but it’s really quite a wonderful bit of choreography, and was probably really eye catching to readers of the time. It still holds a lot of delight. I love the horse’s faces! And there’s something really bewitching about Gloomy Gus’s spotted hankerchief, which seems to know more than it’s letting on.
The comic must have hit a chord with people fairly quickly, because within the year the silent film producer/director J. Stuart Blackton (who also created the first American animated film) began making live action short films based on Happy Hooligan. Blackton himself played Happy, complete with torn clothes and a tin-can as a hat. Six shorts were made between 1900 and 1903. Sadly, nearly all of the shorts have either been misplaced or dissolved from the passage of time. Fortunately, The Library of Congress has been able to retrieve and digitally save about 1 minute of one of the last shorts in 1903. This scene was shot on June 15, 1903, at the New York studio of the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, the production and distribution company for the shorts.
Cute bit, definitely a classic. But from the start, you can see that movies already had a challenge in adapting comics that would dog them for a century. The visual effects just can’t recreate the madcap slapstick and physical choreography of the comic strip. And this was a good 35+ years before superheroes introduced superpowers and flashy costumes into the mix. Movie-making technology has come a long way since then but it’s still a challenge to get the visuals right. Just last week, the reveal of Wonder Woman’s costume for the new TV series caused much outrage and ridicule online. We’ll see how this summer’s movies tackle it.
Meanwhile, Happy Hooligan went on to influence Charlie Chaplin’s tramp and other lovable homeless characters with bad luck. Happy had three brothers, one of which was named Gloomy Gus (seen in the comic above), a term that’s still sometimes used today to describe an excessively depressed person. Happy also had three nephews that looked nearly identical and spoke in unison, likely influences for Donald Duck’s nephews Huey, Dewy and Louie. The strip has also been cited as the comic to establish the consistent use of speech balloons as the regular comics form of depicting dialogue. Before that, comics typically had dialogue below the panel as a caption. While the comic might take work for some readers to adjust to its aging style of storytelling, it will always hold a significant place in history.
More info about Happy Hooligan and Frederick Opper: Toonopedia, Wikipedia, Comiclopedia
To read more Happy Hooligan comics, visit the previously linked Barnacle Press, and NBM Publishing for their published compilation.
Someone make this: Searchable database of comic strips in major newspapers throughout history
I was hoping to find something like this but for the Boston Globe instead of The Oregonian (scan from Jonathan Shipley's Writer's Desk blog)
I was trying to figure out what comic strips were running in The Boston Globe when I started reading the comics section as a young lad. I know there was Garfield, probably the Amazing Spider-Man strip, Peanuts most likely, For Better or For Worse probably, but I can’t really remember what else. I think I started regularly reading the comics pages just before Calvin and Hobbes started, as I remember that being “the new strip”. So probably around 1984? I would love to have that information.
I was hoping I could find a scan of a random page from the ’80s to help refresh my memory. You can find everything online, so I figured this might take some clever Googling but should be doable. Well, apparently not. (Or I’m just not a very good Googler.) I did an image search at “the Google” for said random scan but no such luck. Then I did a search of all the internets, every single one of them, hoping for some ugly GeoCities fan site created by an obsessive-compulsive Globe reader who had cataloged every comics page, preferably using HTML tables and yellow font on a gaudy background. Maybe a dancing Calvin & Hobbes gif to really seal the deal? Well, GeoCities is gone, so maybe it took this hypothetical site with it. Once again, no such luck.
So this got me thinking. This is something that should be out there. All of the major newspapers with comics sections: The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune – it would be a great historical resource to know which strips ran in which papers when and for how long. (Last night on Twitter, I mistakenly included the New York Times in my initial wish list, but they don’t have a comics section.) Getting smaller papers would be great too but at least the major papers initially. And this information undoubtedly exists. The syndicates surely have extensive records of this information and more, although they probably have little motivation to provide it. So it will likely fall to the people to collect this information. So come on, everyone, let’s head to our local library‘s microfiche and get this going!
