Quillstress

Tuesday was the beginning of the Graphic Novels Workshop. We were honored to have a graphic novel artist come and speak to us about the genre and all things “comic”. Gene Yang’s book, American-born Chinese, will be released by First Second Books later this year, but the RCWP has copies to sell in advance. I already have one…and NO, you can’t have a peek. Go buy your own. ; ) As a bonus to all of Gene’s expertise as an artist, author, and practicing teacher, we got to read comics and even visit the special collection secreted away in the rarebooks vault of the Michigan State University library. Wow, pop culture and medieval manuscripts all housed together down there with my dad’s old veterinary school texts. lol What fun to have a tour from our venerable librarian/afficionado, Randall Scott.

As part of the second day we had some more fun reading and discussing how to teach from graphic sources and I chose to work up a lesson plan to teach narrative using Lost at Sea by Bryan Lee O’Malley. There are so many elements of personal narrative used in this work in addition to the graphic elements that can be taught that I thought it would be a great way to introduce both genres. I also played with the idea of teaching ecology using Nausicaa of the Valley of the Winds or Deogratias as personal narrative and cultural/historical narrative. There were just so many possibilities the more books you picked up. The world of great graphic literature does not begin and end with Maus and Persepolis.

The last day, Gene had to leave us, sadly, but Seth from the Writing Center picked up the reins and ran with it…first having us discuss and analyze and treasure trove of comics of a shorter variety and then having us put together our own comics using ComicLife. This, of course, required that we use the Macs (shiver) but I actually had a lot of fun with the program and I only had to restart twice. (oh, and I had to back in and out of Seth’s PDF file examples all the time because a third of the graphics wouldn’t appear until I did. lol ) It’s a very nice program to introduce students to comic visual conventions and structure, to let them play at narrative. Unfortunately the PC look-alike looks nothing like. Comic Book Creator was a bust, sadly, so I didn’t mind using the Macs. I ended up with a ten page adaptation of a scene from one of my short stories about an ogress…it was interesting to think of it as a different genre and media. Anyway, this was one of the best workshops of the summer, especially with all that I’ve been noticing students do with the genre already, I’m looking forward to putting what I’ve learned to good use in a classroom. (And I have to go save all my Bloom County and Outland books from storage!)