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Comics in the English Classroom

A Guide for Teachers

Created for NCTE
by Jessica Abel and Matt Madden
Authors of Drawing Words & Writing Pictures
Instructors at the School of Visual Arts
Bibliography
Abel, Jessica & Matt Madden. Drawing Words & Writing Pictures: Making
Comics: Manga, Graphic Novels, and Beyond. New York, NY: First Second
Books, 2008.
ISBN: 1596431318
Brunetti, Ivan. Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice. (A Supplement to Comic
Art, Number 9.) Oakland, CA: Buenavetura Press, 2007.
ISBN: 0976684861
Groensteen, Thierry. The System of Comics. Jackson, MS: University of
Mississippi Press, 2007.
ISBN: 1578069254
Karasik, Paul and Mark Newgarden, How To Read Nancy. http://
www.laffpix.com/howtoreadnancy.pdf.
Madden, Matt. 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style. New York, NY:
Chamberlain Bros., 2005.
ISBN: 1596090782
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York, NY:
HarperCollins Inc., 1993.
ISBN: 006097625X
. Making Comics: Storytelling Secrets of Comics, Manga, and Graphic
Novels. New York, NY: HarperCollins Inc., 2006.
ISBN: 006078940
National Association of Comics Art Educators. www.teachingcomics.
org
Wolk, Douglas, Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They
Mean. Cambridge MA: Da Capo Press, 2008.
ISBN: 0306816164
Note: Find more teaching materials, lesson plans, and syllabi on the
Drawing Words & Writing Pictures website: www.dw-wp.com. Contact us at:
dwwp@rstsecondbooks.com

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There are any number of different ways comics can t comfortably in an
English classroom, ranging from teaching them as literature, as you would a
prose novel, to having your students write, draw, and self-publish their own
work. Its impossible to address all the different contexts and levels at the
same time, so consider this handout a starting point to help orient you in
your own exploration of teaching comics and teaching with comics. Lets
look at a few distinct ways you can use comics in your classroom.
Various Classroom Contexts
Reading Comics
If you are teaching a reading-based literature class you will nd that you
need a slightly different set of critical tools for talking and thinking about
comics than about prose writing. If that is your situation, you may want to
readand have your students readScott McClouds Understanding Comics.
UC is the most important (and accessible) book explaining how comics
work and how they create meaning for readers. Understanding Comics is in
the form of a comic so McCloud is able to demonstrate the principles he is
discussing as he introduces them.
Matt Maddens 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style is a playful,
experimental work which tells the same one-page story 99 times, from
different points of view, in formal variations, homages and pastiches. This
work is a useful resource for discussing comics many formal and narrative
possibilities.
A Comic With No Pictures
Materials
paper
pencil and eraser
ruler
pens
black ink
graphite white or white acrylic for corrections
brushes for applying blacks and whites
Instructions
Now youre going to draw a comic with a twist: you cant
draw any pictures! This activity will help you gure out how to
lay out a page with panels (with white space between them) and
challenge you to see what kind of story you can tell using only
panels and text.
Come up with a story that can be told using no images let
the very idea of no images be a starting point. What is a situ-
ation in which something might happen in a eld of white or
black? Classic examples would be a scene with two characters
caught in a snowstorm or having a conversation in total dark-
ness.
Lay out your comic. Think about how you can tell a story
entirely through the placement, size, and rhythm of panels, and
use of text (dialogue, sound effects, and narration).
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Making comics as creative writing
Perhaps youre simply interested in comics as an expressive tool. Comics
is, of course, a rich and complex narrative art form, and many students
are clamoring to use comics to tell their stories. The most straightforward
approach, of course, is to offer a complete class on comics, where writing
and art are both part of the curriculum. If youre planning such a comics
class, we can give you no better advice than to simply follow the Drawing
Words & Writing Pictures curriculum from beginning to end. Students will
nish the class with several comics under their belts, and the skills to carry
on independently. On our website, DW-WP.com, we also are developing
numerous resources for teachers, including chapter-by-chapter teaching
guides and sample syllabi for teaching the book on a more condensed
schedule.
In addition, you may want to assign short story assignments in
thumbnail* form. Autobiography and true stories engage students as well
as being popular subject matter of graphic novels (or graphic memoirs,
to be more precise). Have students write a three-page thumbnail about
an accident, or have them draw a four-panel diary comic every day for a
week, or longer (see James Kochalka's diary comics at americanelf.com for
examples of these).
*Thumbnails are the writing part of comics. Also called layouts, they con-
sist of roughly-sketched versions of comics pages. Students should do thumbs at a rate
of one per sheet of copy paper, one side only, and keep the drawing rough to encourage
revision. This is where the real creative writing happens in comics. Using thumbs as
opposed to scripts is a way to get students to think in terms of panels and pages, and
to think about how visual material will affect the words they need to, and want to,
write. While drawing skill is a help, great thumbs can be made with stick-gure-level
skill as well, by students who have no intention of creating completed comics, but
hope to collaborate with an artist.
Exercises with minimal or no drawing
To take things a little bit further, you may have your students read some
or all of Understanding Comics and/or DWWP chapters 1-4, but then ask
them to do a few hands-on assignments. At the same time, you may not
want your students to draw entire comics from scratch. There are lots of
activities you can do that dont involve much or any drawing but which are
invaluable tools for understanding comics and other visual media.
You can study word-image juxtaposition by showing the class a single
image and inviting them to come up with three words that, when placed
one by one under the image as a kind of caption, create very different
connotations.
You could also make copies of comics with the words in the balloons
whited out, and ask students to make up dialogue to create various kinds of
stories.
Drawing Words and Writing Pictures has a fun and enlightening activity
called a comics jumble.
Drawing Words and Writing Pictures, p. 23
Drawing Words and Writing Pictures, p. 46
Image from La Perdida, by Jessica Abel
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Making comics to critique comics and other media
If you have a class of art students (or general students who are game
and adventurous), you can have students draw comics or create other kinds
of visual works as a way of critiquing work you are studying in class,
whether comics, prose, or other media. For example, have students copy a
panel or two, as faithfully as possible, from a comic they are reading. Ask
them to put themselves in the mind and hand of the original artist and to try
to understand their process of choosing, framing, and inking a given panel.
Or have them draw a one page comic where they try to emulate a given artist
as closely as possible in order to learn about the narrative uses of framing,
drawing style, pacing, and so on.
If youd like students to use comics to engage with a novel, ask them to
draw a one-page comic based on a favorite scene. Or have them do a stand-
alone illustration for the book, a cover design, or pin up sketches of the
main characters.
There are also productive and fun exercises you can try using photo-
copied or scanned images from a comic and performing various transfor-
mations on them. For example, have students condense a 300-page graphic
novel into one page of essential panels, then ask them to explain and jus-
tify their criteria (some examples of criteria might be: the rst panel of each
chapter, every panel where the main character shouts one word, all panels
that depict only hands). Students could also replace the text of a comic with
text from another sourcea novel or even a newspaper articlein order to
see how visual storytelling is affected by a new context; or they might shufe
or reorder panels in order to nd new juxtapositions that can give you a dif-
ferent view of a work.
These kinds of activities are highly engaging, inviting students to inter-
act quite literally with the work.

6: Drawing Words and Writing Pictures, p.122
Making comics to read/critique other works
We encourage you to try making comics with your students as a way of
exploring comics and other works you are reading. These activities can take
two forms:
Making comics to understand comics
We have all written prose stories and essays, maybe even a few poems,
by the time we reach middle school. However, beyond childhood doodling,
not many of us have actually drawn a comic before. The act of making a
comic yourself, even very informally, not worrying about whether it turns
out to be good or not, offers you invaluable insight into the numerous cre-
ative decisions a cartoonist makes as she creates a comic, from creating the
illusion of movement in a drawing to pacing a narrative from panel to panel
and over hundreds of pages.

For example, chapter one of Drawing Words and Writing Pictures features
an activity
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where students are asked to draw off the top of their heads a
series of simple, discrete actions: a newspaper blowing in the wind, a speed-
ing car. Then they are asked to combine a series of actions in a single panel
to create a cause-and-effect sequence; for example, a person tripping another
person. By going through this creative problem-solving process they begin
to understand the variety of choices cartoonists are making in each panel of
their work.
4: Drawing Words and Writing Pictures, p. 11
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Abstract
To address the growing interest in graphica in the literature, creative
writing, and language arts classroom, the authors present a series of hands-
on and classroom-tested strategies to begin reading and making comics, as
well as references to some theoretical and conceptual works on comics.
Introduction
We are extremely interested in the idea of incorporating comics* into
mainstream English and language arts classrooms. Our own backgrounds
are in literatureMatt graduated with a degree in comparative literature,
and Jessica in English. Both of us were also fortunate enough to have
teachers who indulged our desire to do some assignments in comics form.
In our teaching and thinking about comics, weve come to conceive of
it as a language, with a whole set of conventions and its own syntax. As we
began work on our textbook, Drawing Words & Writing Pictures, a few years
ago, that became our focus. As the title suggests, we see the image and the
text as inextricably linked. Even in an English class, its important to read
the images along with the text and not give into the temptation to scan the
dialogue and narration alone. The images are not just illustrations of the text
but an integral ingredient of the art form. An important goal of this handout
is to give you some ideas about how to grapple with the visual storytelling
aspect of comics.

*A note on the word comics: We believe its important to use clear terminology.
At the most basic level, just be aware that graphic novel is the name of a publica-
tion format, and comics is the name of the art form. If you need a less-fraught term
to use, graphic narrative is the best of a not-great bunch.
See Drawing Words and Writing Pictures, p. 4, and sidebar Whats in a
name? p.6, for more on this topic.
Concluding Remarks
There is a multitude of contexts for using comics in your classroom. We
hope this primer gives you a few approaches with which to start out integrat-
ing this complex and engaging medium into your classes. We think youll
nd that the rewards, in students engagement and enjoyment are worth the
effort.
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Teachers of advanced or upper-level classes will want to take a look at
the growing body of serious critical works being published about comics,
many of which are from the University of Mississippi Press. The most im-
portant work they have published to date may be their translation of Thierry
Groensteens seminal The System of Comics.
If youre using Drawing Words and Writing Pictures in this or other con-
texts, you could have your class read chapters one (denitions and basics),
two (a discussion of single-panel cartoons and word-image juxtaposition),
three (building narrative by using multiple panels), and four (transitions and
closure). There are a number of non- or minimal-drawing exercises in those
chapters you might have students complete as a way of solidifying their
understanding (see the next section for more on that).

Comics close reading is a project you could assign to round out this type
of unit. For this project, you would have your students pick a panel, page, or
sequence of a comic youve read, and make observations about the way the
drawing affects the writing (and vice-versa), the way time passes within and
between panels, the effect of various panel transitions, the effectiveness of
panel and page compositions, and whatever else you and your students can
glean from it. The students can then create a chart, using a photocopy of the
page and arrows pointing out his or her observations.
This project was inspired by the work of the students of Maida Stupski
in San Francisco.
Image from American Born Chinese, by Gene Luen Yang
If youre not able to offer a full class in comics, one option is to create a
unit of several days to a few weeks in the context of a creative writing class.
At the most basic level, youll want to help students to understand the
syntax of comics and then to use those tools to make a short comic of their
own. That might mean a class or two where you read Understanding Comics
and/or chapters one and four of Drawing Words and Writing Pictures, and you
do Drawing Time from DWWP chapter 1, the pictureless comic exercise
as a thumbnail, and perhaps Comics Jumble, as described above.

At that point, theres a decision to be made. If your class is oriented
towards writing, and you dont expect students to have drawing skills to
speak of, youll want to concentrate on thumbnails. You can also have your
students write scripts using a similar format to lm and television writing,
but we encourage you to incorporate thumbnails into your curricula to
induce your students to grapple directly with the visual aspect of comics
storytelling.
If youre interested in helping your students make nished, fully-inked
work, you may want to add some instruction on materials and tools. It may
be too much to get into traditional comics inking, but even if you decide you
want students to ink with whatever tools come to hand, youll still want to
cover some basic layout skills and problem-solving penciling ideas. These are
points at which students often get stuck and need encouragement to solve
technical problems. Students can learn all the basic layout and lettering skills
theyll need by completing the full version of the pictureless comic.
Sample thumbnail panels from La Perdida, by Jessica Abel
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Comic Jumble
This exercise helps students understand panel transitions
and how they can be used to create meaning.
Materials
a copy of the daily papers comics
scissors
scrap paper
tape
Instructions
Using only one days comic page, cut out the comics panels
from various different strips and rearrange them on a sheet
of scrap paper to make up a new story. Try to make stories
that involve different kinds of panel transitions moment to
moment, action to action, subject to subject, or scene to scene.
When you have decided on your story, tape the panels in
place.
Talking Points
When youre done, post your comics on a wall and com-
pare them. Point out the transitions and discuss the differences
in feel produced by strips that are heavy on certain types of
transitions, for instance action-to-action, or scene-to-scene.
Also note if there is overlap between the various strips. Did one
panel or strip from the newspaper get used frequently? If so,
why? Talk about the stories as well. Make suggestions for cuts,
replacements, and rearrangements. Make these the best comics
they can be!
Line for Line
Materials
reproduction of a pen and ink drawing
photocopier or scanner
bristol board/drawing paper
pencil
pen
Instructions
Enlarge your reproduction of a drawing to 150% of the
current size. This is probably close to the original size of the
drawing. Cartoonists usually draw larger than printed size.
Trace the drawing in pencil onto bristol board using a
light table or other transfer method. You can even tape your
drawing up on a glass door or window and use the sun as a
light source to trace through the paper.
Study the drawing and think about how the artist might
have approached inking it. You may be tempted to simply start
at the top and copy all the lines you see, but that is certainly not
how the artist did it. Start inking in the pencil lines, and try to
learn something about the artists process and visual thinking.
Most artists start by drawing the outlines of the gures. Then
they might draw the outlines of the backgrounds, followed by
shading. Study the kinds of lines your chosen artist uses.
When youve nished inking your copy, wait for it to dry,
erase the pencils, correct your mistakes, and photocopy your
inked drawing back down to the printed size. Youll be amazed
at what your drawing will look like!
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Another activity you can try is a pictureless comic: that is, a comic
that uses panels, narration, dialogue, and sound effects but which cannot
have any representative imagesthe backgrounds can only be solid white or
black (see page 14 of this booklet).
This exercise makes students think about the many linguistic and design
aspects of comics storytelling that often go unnoticed or underappreciated.
If you do this activity with a group where you dont expect much in the way
of drawing ability, you can ask students to do it in thumbnail form; that is,
simply to sketch the idea, not try to rule it out carefully. You can even do a
short versiona 3-5 panel comic strip instead of a full page.
A jam comic is a great way to involve your students in collaborative
creativity where they learn inductively about the mechanics of comics. Here
Comics Jam 9-Panel Grid
Comics Jam
A great way to dive right into the world of comics is to
make a jam comic with your colleagues or a group of friends.
A jam comic is an improvised collaborative comic wherein one
person draws a single panel and then passes it on to the next
person, whose job it is to draw a new panel that continues the
story. In addition to being a relaxed introduction to creating
comics, jam comics are a great warm-up activity and icebreaker!
Jam comics are often more fun to create than read since
they tend to become a little chaotic. However, one way to cre-
ate more interesting comics is to assign yourselves a rule that
will give all the participants a common guiding principle or
constraint. For example, you could make a jam comic where
every panel has to include a circle, triangle, and square.
Materials
ofce paper, pencils and/or pens