New Article: “There are no rules. And here they are”: Scott McCloud’s Making Comics as a Multimodal Rhetoric

The new issue of the Journal of Teaching Writing is just out and includes my article on Scott McCloud's Making Comics as a multimodal rhetoric. Here's an abstract:

The ways we read and compose and, more importantly, the ways our students read and compose, have become multimodal, involving not only words, but also images, sounds, video, spatial relationships, gestures, and other systems of signs through which meaning can be created. As English teachers we must broaden our views of what constitutes writing. We must address issues of not only alphabetic literacy, but also multimodal literacy—the means by which we compose and read meaning from and through multiple modes or sign systems. Since they are multimodal texts, comics can, in general, have an important place in such a shift in thinking and a text such as Scott McCloud’s Making Comics can, specifically, act as a flexible rhetorical framework for multimodal literacy.