Graphic Encouters Nominated for the 2015 Teaching Literature Book Award

Graphic Encounters has been nominated for the 2015 Teaching Literature Book Award, a prize for outstanding scholarship on teaching literature at the college level. The nationally juried award is conferred every other year by the faculty in the Ph.D. program in English and the Teaching of English at Idaho State University. The jurors for this year’s award are the following individuals:

 Tanya Agathocleous (Hunter College, CUNY), editor of Teaching Literature: A Companion;
 Jennifer Holberg (Calvin College), founding editor of the journal Pedagogy; and
 Steven Lynn (University of South Carolina), author of Literature: Reading and Writing with Critical Strategies and Texts and Contexts.

The winning book will be announced in September.

Introducing The Comics Machine

Gene Kannenberg, Jr. is going to produce one abstract comic per day for all of 2015. You can see the results at his tumblr: http://comicsmachine.tumblr.com

It's fascinating stuff and I encourage you to check it out.

Aspects of the Book: Graphic Arts. Bookfest Windsor Panel, October 25, 7-8 pm.

Special Issue of ImageText on Comics and Post-Secondary Education

I'm pleased to be a part of the new issue of ImageText, guest edited by James Bucky Carter and Najwa Al-Tabaa. Included in the issue is my article, "Webcomics, Multimodality, and Information Literacy."

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.

UW Comics Theory Course Blog

If you follow this blog, you might be interested in the blog I've set up for the Comics Theory course I'm teaching this fall. It will feature some course content, but the main emphasis will be on student posts on comics theory and practice. As of now the syllabus is up and soon there will be content from the students. Check it out here: http://uwcomicstheory.blogspot.ca

I will be speaking about Graphic Encounters at The Incredible Comic Show, a comic book art opening, on Saturday, September 28 at Glass Monkey Studios in Windsor. It should be an excellent night.