Category: Education

  • Classic Comics: A Reading List

    Comic culture can be daunting. The world is changing, I know, but I remember the days when I, a young (feminine) reader of comics, felt really uncomfortable and unwelcome in a comic book shop. The closest thing I got to representation was Sailor Moon, which I was clearly too much of a proto-Cool Girl to…

  • Raising the Legal Age of Marriage – Alex Reflects

    “But Mum, I love him!” My sister proclaimed. She was older than me, probably just turned sixteen, and was deeply in love with her first boyfriend (who was her own age and, if memory serves, a sweetheart. He gave me my first copy of The Smashing Pumpkins, though, so I’m aware that I might be…

  • So You Want to Make a Comic 2: How we did it 

    A couple of weeks ago, I came across Alan Moore’s Writing for Comics and Alex put together a handy list resources for comic making. I wish I could say I followed any of the advice of The Great comic writers when I wrote ours.   Instead, and as so often in academia, I made it up…

  • So You Want to Make Comics: A Resource List

    When we ran one of our workshops, a student approached us at the end of the session and expressed her interest in becoming a comic artist. She asked if there were any books on making comics that she could read to develop her work. Caught on the back foot, I recommended the trusty Understanding Comics…

  • A Review (or something) of Team Muhafiz and the Child Raiders

    Of course our comic is not the only educational comic on forced marriage out there. Another example is Team Muhafiz and the Child Raiders by Samar Minallah Khan, Imran Azhar, Babrus Khan, and Rabiya Waheed. It is part of a Pakistani comic book series that aims to contribute to social change. In addition to speaking…

  • Batman and Wife: How to Close Read a Comic

    DC Special Series Vol 1 #15 June, 1978 Source: Batman Reddit Before you begin reading this blog, you may want to take a look at Hannah’s excellent post on this Batman narrative, which explores the legality of the situation that Batman has found himself in. It’s fascinating and enjoyable, and it even includes the law of the…

  • Teaching with Comics: A Reading Guide

    In the course of the Drawing on Forced Marriage project, I’ve been doing a fair bit of research on how to teach comics to students, and how to teach students with comics. I’ve really enjoyed the process and have learned such a lot, but I realised that the reading list I’ve been compiling would probably…

  • Comics As Educational Tool

    Film, advertisements, the internet – we live in a visual age where we are constantly presented with a vast array of images. Even within a casual chat group between friends, we express ourselves with iconography, peppering our texts with emojis, reaction gifs and memes. It is clear, then, that our students are increasingly immersed in…