Every teacher knows that keeping adolescents interested in learning can be challenging—The Graphic Novel Classroom overcomes that challenge. In these pages, you will learn how to create your own graphic novel in order to inspire students and make them love reading. Create your own superhero to teach reading, writing, critical thinking, and problem solving! Secondary language arts teacher Maureen Bakis discovered this powerful pedagogy in her own search to engage her students. Amazingly successful results encouraged Bakis to provide this learning tool to other middle and high school teachers so that they might also use this foolproof method to inspire their students. Readers will learn how to incorporate graphic novels into their classrooms in order to: Teach twenty-first-century skills such as interpretation of content and form Improve students’ writing and visual comprehension Captivate both struggling and proficient students in reading Promote authentic literacy learning Develop students’ ability to create in multiple formats This all-encompassing resource includes teaching and learning models, text-specific detailed lesson units, and examples of student work. An effective, contemporary way to improve learning and inspire students to love reading, The Graphic Novel Classroom is the perfect superpower for every teacher of adolescent students!

The most comprehensive reference ever compiled about the rich and enduring genre of comic books and graphic novels, from their emergence in the 1930s to their late-century breakout into the mainstream. At a time when graphic novels have expanded beyond their fan cults to become mainstream bestsellers and sources for Hollywood entertainment, Encyclopedia of Comic Books and Graphic Novels serves as an exhaustive exploration of the genre's history, its landmark creators and creations, and its profound influence on American life and culture. Encyclopedia of Comic Books and Graphic Novels focuses on English-language comics—plus a small selection of influential Japanese and European works available in English—with special emphasis on the new graphic novel format that emerged in the 1970s. Entries cover influential comic artists and writers such as Will Eisner, Alan Moore, and Grant Morrison, major genres and themes, and specific characters, comic book imprints, and landmark titles, including the pulp noir 100 Bullets, the post-apocalyptic Y: The Last Man, the revisionist superhero drama, Identity Crisis, and more. Key franchises such as Superman and Batman are the center of a constellation of related entries that include graphic novels and other imprints featuring the same characters or material.

A labyrinth of secrets, revenge, sex, and manipulation come to life in this graphic novel adaptation of a “surprising and complex story of evil” (People) by #1 New York Times bestselling author Jonathan Kellerman. Two separate murders, strikingly similar in their grisly particulars, bring psychologist Alex Delaware and LAPD detective Milo Sturgis together once again to pool their crime-solving skills in the hunt for a homicidal maniac. But they’re shocked to discover that another deranged murderer may be their best chance of cracking the case. Ardis Peake has been locked away in an asylum for the criminally insane for the last sixteen years, ever since he committed the horrifying massacre as a teenager that made him infamous—and earned him the nickname “Monster.” A pariah even among his fellow inmates, Peake is a lost cause to most of his doctors, and only staff psychologist Claire Argent took a keen interest in treating the caged killer—until she turned up brutally slain in the trunk of her car. It is a death made all the more disturbing by the fact that it was seemingly predicted by Monster. While Milo searches for a connection between the killing of a struggling actor and Dr. Argent’s nearly identical murder, Alex wonders what spurred the reportedly shy psychologist’s intense fascination with the dangerously insane. But Claire Argent’s personal life proves as barren as the empty home she left behind, and neither her ex-husband nor her colleagues can fill in the cryptic blanks. Only Ardis Peake, whose barely functioning mind lies buried deep in psychosis, seems somehow inexplicably linked to the world from which he’s sealed off. And when he foresees another violent double slaying, Alex and Milo fear that their only hope of finding the truth—and stopping the bloodshed—may be to follow a strange and menacing path into the dark heart and twisted psyche of a madman.

This work provides an extensive guide for students, fans, and collectors of Marvel Comics. Focusing on Marvel's mainstream comics, the author provides a detailed description of each comic along with a bibliographic citation listing the publication's title, writers/artists, publisher, ISBN (if available), and a plot synopsis. One appendix provides a comprehensive alphabetical index of Marvel and Marvel-related publications to 2005, while two other appendices provide selected lists of Marvel-related game books and unpublished Marvel titles.

The graphic novel is a vital and emerging genre, and this is the only book that focuses on its relation to Jewish culture, literature, and history. A highly readable and informative collection that will be of great interest to readers across a wide range of disciplines.--Deborah R. Geis, editor of "Considering MAUS: Approaches to Art Spiegelman's "Survivor's Tale" of the Holocaust."

A noted comics artist himself, Santiago García follows the history of the graphic novel from early nineteenth-century European sequential art, through the development of newspaper strips in the United States, to the development of the twentieth-century comic book and its subsequent crisis. He considers the aesthetic and entrepreneurial innovations that established the conditions for the rise of the graphic novel all over the world. García not only treats the formal components of the art, but also examines the cultural position of comics in various formats as a popular medium. Typically associated with children, often viewed as unedifying and even at times as a threat to moral character, comics art has come a long way. With such examples from around the world as Spain, France, Germany, and Japan, García illustrates how the graphic novel, with its increasingly global and aesthetically sophisticated profile, represents a new model for graphic narrative production that empowers authors and challenges longstanding social prejudices against comics and what they can achieve.

This book mobilises the concept of kitsch to investigate the tensions around the representation of genocide in international graphic novels that focus on the Holocaust and the genocides in Armenia, Rwanda, and Bosnia. In response to the predominantly negative readings of kitsch as meaningless or inappropriate, this book offers a fresh approach that considers how some of the kitsch strategies employed in these works facilitate an affective interaction with the genocide narrative. These productive strategies include the use of the visual metaphors of the animal and the doll figure and the explicit and excessive depictions of mass violence. The book also analyses where kitsch still produces problems as it critically examines depictions of perpetrators and the visual and verbal representations of sexual violence. Furthermore, it explores how graphic novels employ anti-kitsch strategies to avoid the dangers of excess in dealing with genocide. The Representation of Genocide in Graphic Novels will appeal to those working in comics-graphic novel studies, popular culture studies, and Holocaust and genocide studies.