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Originally Posted by doodlebird
that's awesome. i wish i could have sat in on some of those classes.
if you have any sort of class notes or anything already on computer, i'd love to see them. i'd say email them to me, but i bet others would want to see them too. somewhere in tilted academy a thread is waiting to be born.
comics as literature is an intriguing subject. i'd love to know more about it.
(omitting the peerless maus) are you as in interested in the chris ware / jimmy corrigan or craig thompson / blankets type stuff? or strictly super hero stories?
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It's middle school so I generally can't use anything that would be rated R if it were a movie, so Blankets and Maus are no-no's. I'd be happy to post lecture notes, but they're stored on my school computer, which I don't have access to right now, and they're in outline form anyway--it'd be about as interesting as reading a table of contents without the actual book. The class tends to be mostly discussion--I introduce a topic, then run a discussion based on that topic, introducing relevant facts as they come up.
The Comics as Literature class starts with Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, and we spend about three weeks really digging into the nuts and bolts of how comics actually work, how they're processed in the mind, then we spend the last nine weeks (we have three twelve week "quarters" in the regular year and an eight week makeup session called summer quarter) reading comics themselves and applying what we've learned from McCloud's book. Part of that is spent on newspaper comics, about a week, and the rest is split between mainstream superheroes and "other", other being foreign Western comics like Tintin and Asterix, Horror, War, Romance, Teen Humor, and Funny Animal.
Nobody ever sees the genius of Carl Barks' Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge; my students seem to equate it with bland Richie Rich style stuff. Sigh.
Hee hee. I have on order for this coming year's class a class set of Essential Iron First, which will be our "textbook" for the superhero segment. This is such a great job.
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Ditto. Or taped sessions that could be put on public broadcast, like those learning annex shows on KTEH?
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If I ever convince the University to let my try comics as a 298 course again, this might actually be feasible. The last time, two years ago, I got the course approved and didn't get enough students to sign up for it. It seems that if it was going to be taught as an actual class, with homework and research and term papers, and we weren't going to be spending much time on manga, most students weren't interested. Public school classes can't be taped for rebroadcast without the permission of the parents of every child involved.
As it is, I have to do some campaigning in a middle school to get the minimum number of students for the middle school class. Immigration and Annexation fills up faster than my comics classes.
Sigh. Where did our society go wrong? What kind of world do we live in where ten to twelve year olds spend so little time reading comic books. It's a crying shame, I tell you.
By the way, guys, you'd probably enjoy Scott Tipton's collums at Movie Poop Shoot, called comics 101.