blog 8: Nancy McCoy

1. Talk about the overall claims of these two scholars (Versaci and McCloud). What arguments are they making about comics and their uses? Use examples from their texts to support your summary.

Versaci believes that comics are literature  and should be treated as literature. He sees that comics can provide a reader with the same thought provoking questions that widely accepted great literature can. For example, Versaci used a comic called Daddy’s Girl in a class to help students dig into the literature, past the obvious and form their own thoughts about what they were seeing and reading. Students were “forced to look at a relatively confined space with such intensity, students noticed that the panels gradually become darker as Lily’s initial enthusiasm at having a diary is undercut by the fact that her privacy has been violated. They also noticed how the direction of Lily’s gaze varies throughout the four panels and that in the crucial, third panel, where she is responding to this violation, she seems to be looking directly at the reader.”

McCloud believes that comics are evolving with the media and that it is a way to escape reality as well as a way to see reality as a different way. “But media provides us with a window back into the world that we live in. And when media evolve so that the identity of the media becomes increasingly unique. Because what you’re looking at is, you’re looking at comics cubed: you’re looking at comics that are more comics-like than they’ve ever been before. When that happens, you provide people with multiple ways of re-entering the world through different windows, and when you do that, it allows them to triangulate the world that they live in and see its shape.”

2. How did reading your text from the genre series compare to other reading we’ve done to date? How did it change how you read? How can you imagine using drama, comics or graphic novels in the classroom?

I had a really great experience in another class were we read a comic book series called Maus. It is a comic book about the author retelling his father’s experience about surviving WWII. It was a great eye opener because there was obvious symbolism with the characters in the story being different animals, depending on their ethnicity, it put pictures with facts, and it helped you connect with the history because you were seeing it through the father who actually experienced it as well as his son, the author, dealing with the knowledge of what he was learning about his father’s past. I would love to use more books like this in my classroom. You can do so much with this genre. Students could reenact some scenes and they could discuss in small groups the symbolism of the story and it would help them to understand world history, grasp a deeper concept of it. I would love to learn more about this genre to use it in multiple grades as a future teacher.