View Single Post
Old 07-27-2005, 01:25 PM   #30 (permalink)
Gilda
32 flavors and then some
 
Gilda's Avatar
 
Location: Out on a wire.
Quote:
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?
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.

Quote:
Ditto. Or taped sessions that could be put on public broadcast, like those learning annex shows on KTEH?
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.
__________________
I'm against ending blackness. I believe that everyone has a right to be black, it's a choice, and I support that.

~Steven Colbert
Gilda is offline  
 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231 232 233 234 235 236 237 238 239 240 241 242 243 244 245 246 247 248 249 250 251 252 253 254 255 256 257 258 259 260 261 262 263 264 265 266 267 268 269 270 271 272 273 274 275 276 277 278 279 280 281 282 283 284 285 286 287 288 289 290 291 292 293 294 295 296 297 298 299 300 301 302 303 304 305 306 307 308 309 310 311 312 313 314 315 316 317 318 319 320 321 322 323 324 325 326 327 328 329 330 331 332 333 334 335 336 337 338 339 340 341 342 343 344 345 346 347 348 349 350 351 352 353 354 355 356 357 358 359 360