Reading and Making Comics

Graphic Novels across the curriculum

Introduction

School project using Comics

Graphic novel collections: why every school library should have one

Getting to grips withgraphic novels

Comic Creator

Comics and Picture Books

Thinking about comics, childhood, censorship and gender

Reading Comics: Comics and Literacies

Comics and the web

Practical ideas for use with pupils

Introduction

Comics and graphic novels can play an important part in encouraging reading amongst older students. This is particularly the case with young men and boys, who form 80–95 per cent of the audience for most titles, although this is changing with the increasingly popularity of manga.

The flexibility of the comic medium means that it can be used to tell stories in a simple way, without the reader appearing ‘uncool’. However, this same flexibility means that the comic can also tell phenomenally complex stories or explain difficult ideas. This is a medium, rather than a genre, and can be used to create demanding texts across a range of genres. They are not exclusively tied to fiction, as they can be used to create non-fiction, from ‘howto’ manuals through to biographies and autobiographies. The comic can also be used for any age and so is not just able to create funny short stories for the very youngest children. Furthermore, they can be ‘text heavy’ or ‘text light’ (comics may include a large number of words along with the images, or none at all).

As a consequence it is possible to build comic collections that offer challenges to the good reader and support to the less enthusiastic. In many ways, this is the key strength of the graphic novel, or comic book, in a school or library setting. As such, they offer a huge range of resources to the teacher or librarian. They can simply be added to classroom or school library collections as a way of broadening what is offered for leisure reading, but specific titles can also be used to support specific areas within the curriculum.

Comics have often been dismissed as a medium in Britain, something that reflects their problematic history here. This is why they are usually approached with caution by both libraries and schools, as their content has often been seen as controversial, and the medium as somehow undermining literacy and morality.

When using this medium, you may have come across colleagues who still feel this way about comics, meaning that you need to understand where their perspective comes from, and be able to show that comics are very diverse, offering a huge range of reading experiences and so enhance rather than undermine reading skills, as well as offering a way into exploring the varied forms of visual literacy. The following material is designed to help you do that.

In summary, seeing comics in a negative light starts from the premise that comics are bad for readers, thus making such views part of the debates around ‘media effects’ and ‘moral panics’. In addition, this negative view often, inaccurately but firmly, positions comics as suitable only for children, making material aimed at adults seem more shocking. Such a view surfaces throughout the history of comic in Britain, most influentially, in the work of George Pumphrey, for instance What children think of their comics (1964). His writing was a major part of the campaign against comics in the 1950s and the consequences of that campaign remain with us today.

The first key point about comics, both to counter such a view and to illustrate a very different way of thinking about the comic, is to focus on it as a medium. Thinking of the way that comics work will be a theme in all the material that follows, which works mostly with the ideas that Scott McCloud (1993) developed in his book Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art.

It may be that people who have an enthusiasm for the form and the possibilities it offers surround you. This is great, but sometimes brings its own disadvantages in that fans often have a specific set of titles that they are passionate about, and may fail to see their shortcomings or move into an understanding of the rest of the medium, focusing only on certain kinds of artwork or narrative. Work with any enthusiasm you find, and you may find there is a passionate advocate of the form somewhere in your institution, but beware the ‘fanboy’ tendency.

This can be the case with students as well, leading them to have little perspective on a particular key creator whom they adore. Getting both staff and students to have a critical and passionate eye is an ideal in relation to a medium that arouses so much passion, both for and against it.

There is a third way in which comics are seen across this country: solely as a way of drawing poorer readers into literacy. This is a view that is useful to draw upon, but may also have disadvantages.

Clearly, this is a good thing, but it does reveal a telling set of assumptions about comics. Here the comic is a ‘bad thing’, but a useful tool, a perspective that reflects a limited enthusiasm for the medium, something which students often pick up if it is a view held by the staff they work with. Finding even a single title that you can be enthusiastic about rather than simply feeling that you don’t like the medium or understand it, but can see that it appeals to others, avoids the possibility of alienating the students you wish to engage with even if they do not like the titles that you do.

Another way of approaching the comics is to look at them from an academic pointofview, as objects that reward study in various disciplines. The works created also show a range of underlying assumptions about comics, often in relation to issues around gender, and may reflect the key perspectives held above, or may explore them. Comics: Ideology, Power and the Criticsby Martin Barker (1989), although intended for older readers, might also be useful at Higher level. It offers a series of case studies that take a range of theoretical positions that can and have been used in relation to comics (including feminism) and to interrogate them.

This document demonstratesthe very positive potential of the medium by outlining ways to work with comics and graphic novels. The following materials are aimed at supporting staff in both developing their knowledge of the medium and seeing its potential as part of leisure reading, as well as providing some ideas and materials to use in the classroom.

These case studies are on specific themes or focus on specific books. However, the opening, and central, case study outlines a specific approach that was taken in relation to comics, but is further extended with a range of suggestions about working with comics, in relation to both the classroom and school library, whilst offering possible further activities, hints, tips and titles.

Reading and Making Comics

Key terms: Comics as a medium, literacy, projects making and understanding comics, using comics in relation to specific subjects, developing collections.

The following focuses on a linked set of five-day long visits made a few years ago to schools in North-East England. This section details a number of ideas about how comics can be used, with whom and why.

Book talks

Visits such as this can focus on informing or an advocate enthusing about the range of material available to students.There may be a member of staff who is an enthusiast, or a local comic shop with a member of staff able to do this kind of talk, or you could contact someone known as a comic historian. These events were intended to stimulate further work within the school, although they could easily have worked without this being the aim.

The talks were followed by sessions in which students explored the books that were discussed, reading and sharing them, and started some practical work. Having a collection, whether on loan from a library or part of the school’s own stock, on hand is a necessity. This means that students will be immediately encouraged to read the comics and it will flag up that this material is available in a library of one kind or another near them (thus promoting leisure reading), as well as being a stimulus to students creating their own comics.

Designing your own comics

If time is limited, or as an initial short piece that can lead to longer work around comics, students can design a cover for a comic they would like to see.

This enables them to draw on the material available for inspiration, but also ensures that they are creating something new.
Working on a cover makes the student engage with issues around layout and narrative (as covers usually focus on a key point in a narrative in many genres of comic) and allows some initial steps in character development and illustration.

However, the sessions also acted as a follow-up to a large-scale practical project that the library service had developed involving excluded students aged between 12 and 16.

The pupils, working with an artist,came up with their own one-off comic containing a number of short stories (so the model used was more like the Beano in having a series of unrelated strips, most of them funny, each by a different artist and writer, rather than titles like Ethel & Ernest (1998) by Raymond Briggs, which is a book-length, single-theme work by a single creator who both wrote and drew the work).

This comic was then published and circulated within the authority and further afield to function as both leisure reading and as a stimulus to further practical work. The one-off comic by peers, although it risks limiting student understanding of comics as a medium, may be enough to launch others from reading into writing.

Other schools that have developed projects with comics have included:

A school has as a team worked on its own comic, either containing short stories, or a longer narrative, within English and Art lessons. This can work using students doing individual work and taking responsibility for the whole story (best done in a classroom setting with a short story per student) or with students assigned specific roles as writers, editors, or in making pencil versions of the artwork, doing inked copies of the artwork, adding and positioning speech balloons and doing the lettering, etc (which works with both short story collections and with longer narratives). The final work, when published (copied, distributed and copies placed in the school library or classroom collections) is then used as stimulus for students repeating the project in later years.

In relation to the large-scale practical project, the function was to further stimulate use of this publication in schools, but also to promote other comics and gather data for the library authority on the graphic novels collections in these schools. Some of the schools had developed collections, supported by the library service, over several years, whilst for others it was a new venture. It was the intention to use these sessions to discover how existing collections of comic strip materials were being used and how they might be developed in future. The primary aim, however, was to facilitate discussions around, and raise awareness of, graphic novels and comic strip materials in general with young people, librarians and teachers in high schools.

Who are comics aimed at?In relation to book talking, schools often tend to perceive comics as for their ‘less able’ pupils and so tend to offer comic professionals the opportunity to work with groups who fit that bill. Whilst these sessions can be a revelation to teachers as usually inarticulate students can suddenly blossom when talking about reading material they really enjoy, such an approach does risk compounding student self-perception as ‘less able’, even though they may be reading very complex and dense texts in the medium. In the cases that follow, it was the schools that already had experience of graphic novels who wanted students of all abilities at the sessions, suggesting that their familiarity with the medium had led them to understand that they can provide challenging reads for even the most sophisticated reader.

School project using Comics

The project had a number of aims, both in terms of information gathering and in further promoting material in this format. The days in school were used to promote leisure reading to young people, support librarians and make teachers unfamiliar with the medium aware of possible classroom material.

There were three target groups, comprising of the young people themselves and the two groups of adult professionalsprimarily concerned with reading in a school setting – librarians and teachers. The following details the aims and objectives, setting up the project, responses to the comic that had been created, comments on library collections by students and staff, possible projects in school and feedback on the events themselves.

Aims and objectives of the project

The aims and objectives moved into school and primarily school library settings:

To develop an increased interest in reading across the ability range in support of raising standards in literacy.
To extend reading experience in the widest sense.
To enhance and encourage desire and ability to access books.
To encourage young people to discuss what they have read with their peers.
To improve literacy through the medium of graphic novels.
To develop cross-sectoral working involving schools, literacy development and children’s services.

The project's format

Format and the kind of work varied from school to school, but the majority of sessions were with the English equivalent of S1 and S2 age students, in that these were seen by the schools involved as the most appropriate age group, although one S5 group also participated. The majority of the students were characterised as ‘less academically able’ groups, again in line with schools' initial perceptions of the medium. However, in several schools there were students involved from across the ability range who were linked only by their enthusiasm for comics.

The use of a number of formats enabled a range of potential uses and approaches to be tested out. All were successful in that the aims for the visits varied and thus the approach used by the workshop leader was adapted to suit these demands. Sessions were less successful when the school was unsure of what it wanted to do in relation to comics. This does not mean that the students involved did not enjoy themselves, or that ideas were not generated, but it meant that the work was less likely to be built on.

Although there was a ‘typical’ format, there were significant variations. Two of the schools wanted longer sessions with small groups. In one case this was to allow more intensive course-related work to take place, on this occasion developing a newspaper-style four-panel comic strip (think along the lines of Peanuts, Garfield,Nemi, Calvin and Hobbes or Doonesbury), although the overall aim was eventually to move on to creating longer narratives. In the other it allowed for non-course-related discussion and work. These sessions lasted for up to two and a half hours.

More usually the day was divided into four or five 50-minute to one-hour sessions. In these cases the workshop leader based each session around a talk to promote a collection. There was scope for students to contribute, ask questions, explore the collection and do some reading. Group size also varied from around 14 to 60.

A further aspect of the visits was that several of the schools had been visited by the same workshop leader before, whilst for the others it was a first visit. Thus for some schools the sessions were follow-ups to promote pre-existing library collections, others were to promote new collections, and others again were one-off events.

With the former groups, the visits offered an opportunity to see how and if collections were being used. With the latter,the visits enabled the school to see the potential of the material and plan accordingly. In one case where there was no collection, the librarian intended to use student suggestions as the basis for building one. This is another useful way of using comics, developing a sense of student ownership of the school library, an engagement with stock and an understanding of issues around age and suitability, thus enabling discussions about ‘censorship versus selection’ to be opened up.

However, the impact of the day in the school with no pre-existing collection was limited in that no teachers were able to attend sessions and so see how the students used and responded to the material. In contrast other days saw a number of visiting as well as assigned staff attending sessions. Staff involvement in these eventsis vital in sending positive messages to students and in allowing further development of work around comics. This stock can not only encourage work across teaching departments, but also with the school library staff, making more explicit links between classroom and other aspects of school life.