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Technicolor Spaghetti: Discovering Comic Literature By Vicki Cox

Graphic novels, comic books and sequential strips offer unconventional paths to lure students into reading and writing.

Comic books: what kids sneak into the classroom while the teacher isn't looking. Their single-minded desire to turn the page and find out what happened to X-Man or the Hulk can turn into a valuable tool for classroom learning. But for the newcomer, entering the world of comic literature is like falling in a bowl of Technicolor spaghetti. You want to grab something, but you don’t know where to start. With so many characters, publishers and comic lingo assaulting the senses, most educators need an introduction to the subject.

Reading with comics
The Graphic Classroom Web site was created by MSTA member Chris Wilson. The Springfield resident is so passionate about comic literature that his master’s thesis at Missouri State University centers on it.

"I'm concerned with helping children discover a love for reading," Wilson says. "Comic literature is especially engaging for kids as our world becomes more visually oriented."

Comic literature, according to Wilson, incorporates more than the traditional stapled comic book. It also includes the graphic novel, which tells a single story in 30 to 500 pages, trade books that bind together several comic-book issues, and sequential art, or comic strips.
A burned-out reader himself, Wilson liked the shorter words and sentences in the comic books he discovered while searching for reading material for his daughter.

"Comics restored my enjoyment of reading because the stories were shorter, and I took in details through the art, rather than skimming over the words as I had done with novels," he says.
Wilson, 34, established The Graphic Classroom in 2007. He and his Web site's staff — a middle school teacher, high school teacher and school librarian — sort graphic novels for classroom use by age and grade level. Included in each review is the publishing data, list of characters, story synopsis, story and art review, along with the staff evaluation.

His nearly 150 reviews show that comics' subject matter left behind super heroes' escapades with Zap! and Pow! long ago. Education publishers such as Scholastic, Capstone Press, HarperCollins and Learner, as well as traditional comic book companies such as Marvel, DC Comics, TokyoPop and Dark Horse offer graphic fiction and nonfiction in biography, science and literature.

Adaptations of classic literature also come in comic literature form. Wind in the Willows, Great Expectations, Tales from the Brothers Grimm and The Odyssey are recent offerings.

Classical Comics has published Macbeth, Dracula, Henry V, Jane Eyre, Romeo and Juliet, and Wuthering Heights as graphic novels. The stories come in variations: original text (for 15 and older), plain English (for 12 and older) and quick text (stripped of unnecessary words for ages 10 and up or for struggling readers). The story line and the art are identical in each.
Graphic fiction covers the gamut of traditional literature and student interests.

"It has complicated, interesting stories with literary themes. It has all the same qualities as traditional literature except they have a visual component," Wilson says.

Perhaps most lauded is Maus: A Survivor's Tale, Art Spiegelman's depiction of his father's memories of the Holocaust. Using mice as Jews and cats as the Nazis, the tale won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992.

Graphic novels and comics touch on almost any school subject. In social science, Wilson recommends The 9-11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation, which condenses into 144 pages the complex findings of the 9/11 Commission.

Writing with sequential art: comic strips
Bill Zimmerman, a former editor and Pulitzer Prize nominee at Newsday, sees creating comic strips of three to four panels as a vehicle for young children to learn language and communication skills.

Zimmerman's Web site, Make Beliefs Comix, provides an interactive site for creating simple comic strips with predetermined panels, 15 characters, four emotions, thought and talk balloons, and five background colors for students' use. Minimal computer skills are needed. Since the strips are computer generated, students' work can be printed or e-mailed to others. The site and its links also are rich in story ideas and writing prompts for comic strips.

Writing with comic books
The Comic Book Project provides almost everything except the kids. Beginning with a project-determined subject, students progress through the traditional writing process while writing and drawing a comic book. The Web site describes and shows samples of the projects' end results.
The project was created in 2001 by Michael Bitz, Ed.D., to promote literacy through the arts. Beginning as a single after-school program in Queens, N.Y., the project now serves more than 850 schools nationwide.

The topic for 2008-09 is "If I ruled the world..." It focuses students on problems they would like to fix or changes they would like in their community.

Past subjects have included bullying, environmentalism, teamwork, child abuse, vocabulary, grammar and understanding epilepsy.
Activity booklets, manuscript starters, comic-book canvases, lesson plans and student samples are part of the packet, which costs $6 per student from Dark Horse Comics. Every child's completed comic goes into the Web site’s art gallery, and the best are published and distributed for other student use.

Rehabilitating comics

Comics have been around for more than a century, but it wasn’t until the 1950s that they picked up a bad public image. They were blamed for bad grades, juvenile delinquency, drug use and criminal behavior in particular — as well as the moral degeneration of the nation's youth. They even became the subject of a Senate investigation. Yet, their appeal endured. Today, the short words, crisp dialogue and energetic plotline they present seem to fit a society crowded with videos and video games. With Beowulf, Superman, Macbeth and Captain Marvel adventuring together in the same medium, educators may find comic literature a valuable addition to their teaching techniques.

Web sites

The Graphic Classroom
graphicclassroom.blogspot.com

Comics in the Classroom
www.comicsintheclassroom.net

Make Beliefs Comix
www.makebeliefscomix.com

The Comic Book Project
www.comicbookproject.org

Comic Books for Young Adults: A Guide for Librarians
ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/units/lml/comics/pages/index.html