Studies in Comics - Volume 11, Issue 1, 2020

The aim of this article is to increase knowledge on the use of comics as materials in K-9 education (ages 6–15). This is achieved through an integrative research review. Reference lists and websites have been searched, both by database searches and manually, and the results analysed and cross-referenced to identify common areas of research and possible gaps in knowledge. 55 texts (research articles and doctoral theses) were found, with 40 first authors from fourteen countries. The results revealed several gaps in knowledge. Most of the analysed studies had been carried out in North America, which suggests that more studies in other educational contexts, published in English, are needed, and that cross-national studies of comics in education will be productive. Furthermore, only three of the analysed texts describe studies that have high ecological validity, while all of the remaining 52 studies were ‘staged’ studies, in which the researcher had introduced material and observed the results. This suggests that further studies that utilize non-experimental research methods are needed. Finally, most studies focus on students’ reading preferences in regard to comics, rather than, for example, on how students compose comics or what they learn through comics. Thus, further studies that explore student work with comics, and examine the kinds of knowledge that reading comics enables, are desirable.

This article examines how an after-school comics club made a space for children’s literacy practices. 21 8- to 10-year-olds took part in the ten-week project. During that time the children made their own comic strips, and worked in groups to create their own self-initiated publications. These comics were sold at two comics fairs, which were collaboratively planned and organized. In this article the multimodal medium of comics will be explored. The concept of children’s literacy worlds will be discussed in relation to identity. Text World Theory will be examined as a framework for analysing children’s literacy worlds, with a particular focus on the bidirectional relationship between the discourse world and the text world. Action Research as a methodology is considered. Text World Theory is then used to interrogate the literacy worlds of two groups of children, examining the interplay of the discourse world and the text world of the two comics created. The article argues that the space for children to create their own, self-initiated narratives plays an important role in children’s meaning making and exploration of identity, through a bidirectional relationship between their discourse and text worlds. Finally, the article offers suggestions for future practice.

This article discusses how the comics form is peculiarly suited to deliver affecting, inclusive sex education. Through analysing the comics anthologies Not Your Mother’s Meatloaf, compiled by Saiya Miller and Liza Bley, and Graphic Reproduction, edited by Jenell Johnson as part of the Graphic Medicine series, this article addresses several specific ways in which these anthologies – and the autobiographical comics they include – demonstrate unconventional and effecting methods of conducting sex education. Comparing these collections to sex education film shows how comics are particularly suited to this goal. These comics anthologies demonstrate the importance of inclusive community-building as a central project of sex education, as well as the need to challenge the teacher–student methodology. Specific comics within these anthologies by Eli Brown and Paula Knight demonstrate how comics allow for radical expressions of how bodies relate to sex and sexuality. Other comics, including those by Alison Bechdel and Alex Barrett, reveal how the pauses and ambiguities fostered by comics heighten their emotional impact and educational value. The overarching power of these narrative comics comes from the self-awareness of the form itself, especially the vulnerability of drawing oneself in relation to sexual experiences. This article concludes that these distinct characteristics of comics allow both a healthy way for creators to look back on their own experiences with sex and, in turn, encourage readers to effectively learn from these depicted experiences.

Recent trends in history education have emphasized the study of primary sources as an important conduit for fostering critical and historical thinking skills and for allowing students to assume the role of historians. In the following article, I examine the ways that Nora Krug’s Belonging, Ari Folman and David Polonsky’s Anne Frank’s Diary and Will Eisner’s The Plot, all meaningfully engage with primary sources as a central feature of the graphic novel. Each of the texts addresses a different aspect of historical anti-Semitism but through the use of visual and textual devices that are woven into the primary sources, connections to contemporary society abound. Furthermore, what also emerges with these three texts is an active engagement with the reader wherein the primary sources are used to demand that the reader thinks about historical and contemporary anti-Semitism. Therefore, these three texts do not simply include primary sources but, like effective history educators, they model and foster critical and historical thinking through the visual and textual prompts. Their inclusion turns the reader into an active historian who participates in the process of discovery and arrives at their own understanding of the perniciousness of anti-Semitism throughout history and its continued presence in their own communities.

Autobiographical accounts of historical violence and trauma in comics form have gained widespread recognition as valuable pedagogical tools, particularly in the wake of Art Spiegelman’s groundbreaking Maus (1980–91). These comics often draw from the conventions of text-based autobiographies to provide first-person, non-fiction narratives of historical events, contributing to their perceived legitimacy as ‘serious’ texts worthy of inclusion in the classroom. However, this narrow focus on autobiographical comics as authentic windows to history has led educators to largely overlook the unique pedagogical possibilities offered by historical fiction comics, which can use both their fictionality and the comics medium to teach young readers to critically engage with history in different and deeper ways than traditional history textbooks and single-narrator autobiographical comics. This article remedies this gap by analysing how Nathan Hale’s middle-grade historical fiction comic One Dead Spy enacts a critical pedagogy approach to teach children to challenge hegemonic historical discourses and ways of thinking. The comic centres on the Revolutionary spy Nathan Hale (no relation to the comics creator) as he attempts to delay his hanging by narrating the American Revolution to his executioners. Nathan’s purportedly true account hinders children’s critical engagement with history by perpetuating dominant historical discourses, providing readers with a whitewashed, male-centric narrative of the Revolution. By contrast, the backmatter complicates Nathan’s one-sided representation of history by featuring a mini-comic narrated by the former slave Crispus Attucks and by attributing the comic’s non-fiction bibliography to fictional Research Babies. This blending of academic citational practices with absurd metafiction, as well as the introduction of marginalized counter-narrators, teaches middle-grade readers to question the authority of history writers and destabilizes all historical narratives as artificial constructs. However, the paratext also reinforces racist and sexist paradigms by displacing black and female voices to the comic’s supplemental endpapers, underwriting the comic’s well-intentioned attempts to educate readers about important voices excluded from white-centric narratives. Thus, while One Dead Spy demonstrates how historical fiction comics can provoke much-needed discussions about the inherent biases and erasures of dominant historical discourses, it also reveals the dangers of relegating opportunities for children to learn about marginalized perspectives in history to the literal margins.

Friendship was a central motif of ‘Lord Snooty and His Pals’, a comic strip created by Dudley Dexter Watkins for the launch of DC Thomson’s new children’s weekly, Beano, in July 1938. The Lord and his working-class friends were motivated by their relationship to overcome boundaries in order to play and learn together. This close analysis of strips from the first year of the comic explores the ways in which friendship is depicted, illuminating the extent to which social learning is pivotal to the child reader’s pleasure. This examination is framed within educational thinking from the time. It specifically draws from Scottish philosopher John Macmurray’s notion of ‘valuational knowledge’, which contends that interrelational social compassion, developed through friendships, promotes our capacity for wisdom and rationalization. As one of the many humanist progressives of education at the time, he argued that it is through our companionships that we learn what we need to know in order to live socially. Through appreciation of the ways in which learning and compassion are portrayed in these comics, this article wishes to align these strips with both educational concerns from the 1930s, such as Macmurray’s, and further to draw attention to the relevance of this discussion in the light of renewed interest raised, for example, by Richard Gerver’s Education: A Manifesto for Change (2019) and as enacted by policies such as Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence (2010). Through a study of comics for children, this article compares pedagogic ideas from the 1930s with contemporary discourse related to childhood, learning and compassion.

Educational and public information messages can be enlivened through the medium of comics, engaging readers not simply through the content, but through careful application of the attributes of the form. The creative and oftentimes collaborative processes used to create such comics benefit from the blending of different perspectives and expertise in order to ensure that the educational message is precisely calibrated. This article elucidates this argument in light of a suite of educational and public information comics produced by the authors as part of a multidisciplinary team from the Scottish Centre for Comics Studies (SCCS) at the University of Dundee, working with various external partners, and reflects on the methodological and pedagogical approaches embedded in this project. We argue that by using a participatory and iterative process that draws on some of the key elements of Jake Knapp’s concept of the design sprint, a prototype comic can be quickly developed that is informed by relevant scholarship and engages a diverse range of partners as co-designers, which can then be moved quickly to the final version. This process creates a feedback loop between research, practice and the various stakeholders, each of whom is empowered within the co-design methodology to contribute to the comic based on their expertise. This is driven by the operational logic of such projects, which bring together participants from diverse backgrounds and areas of expertise, to collaborate and co-design outputs at the interface between critical and creative investigation. In many cases, the comics that we have produced have been to a tight deadline, where the need for the comic is pressing, so the process partly emerged due to necessity, but became refined over the course of several years, evolving into a practice research approach combined with a sprint co-design methodology that embeds learning outcomes in the process as well as the output. Given the nature of this process, we took to describing this activity as a ‘Comics Jam’, and due to the city’s association with the three J’s of ‘jute’, ‘jam’ and ‘journalism’, the name sort of... stuck.

Review of: Lessons Drawn: Essays on the Pedagogy of Comics and Graphic Novels, David Seelow (2019)

Jefferson, MO: MacFarland, 186 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-47667-158-1, p/bk, £43.50