Friday, March 26, 2010

Comic books as literature?

Wow it's been AGES since I've last been on here! Unfortunately, there's nothing too new to catch up on...things have been super-busy with classes (try getting three hours of sleep every night for a week!), but what else is new, right? I feel like every time I blog, I say that. And it must be pretty boring for readers, because I have like a month in between each post and all they ever say is "well, my life has been pretty busy..." Great.

On an up note, I've recently embarked upon a new course of study for some of my final projects in my classes...comic books. This, of course, has Kyle pretty excited, because he ADORES comic books and graphic novels. Mostly I'm studying how they can be useful to use in a classroom setting to teach things like plot, character development, morals, etc. Mostly I'm focusing on comic book superheroes like Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman (along with other DC and Marvel superheroes), but I've also become intrigued with the idea of turning novels into graphic novels. For instance, last night at Maring-Hunt library I checked out a graphic novel of Pride and Prejudice. After reading the first few frames, I've decided it was amazing.

I'm intending to create a unit plan for one of my classes around using comic books to study English and I'm actually very excited about it. For my Young Adult literature class, I want to address the issue of using graphic novels in class and give some examples of my experiences in reading graphic novels of novels (not only did I check out Pride and Prejudice, but I also have Jane Eyre and King Arthur, and I'm looking forward to checking out Beowulf as well as Walden at Thoreau). For my digital literacy class, I'd like to take the information I found and publish it to a website and include a database of some lessons I've created around teaching comics and graphic novels and perhaps add a blog of my research (I'd update it more than this, I think).

So, there are only five weeks of classes left (eeeek). I need to work hard to get this together. But I'm actually quite excited about it :) For once, I'm into my final projects as opposed to being opposed. It feels pretty good.