Amidst the Jivas

It's midterm week! Time to make sure all the grades are in the computer. Some of my students will be happy with their midterm report cards, and some will be significantly less happy. But the grades are fair, so don't feel too sorry for those unhappy folks. And it's just midterms; it's not like it's a real quarter grade.

Yesterday the students read "Frank and the Truth About Plenitude" and wrote about it.

The floaty things are called jivas.

Loving Wife was right; most high school students are not crazy about Jim Woodring's surreal wordless stories. As I always say, though, you don't have to like it to write about it.

I'm hoping they like Batman: Year One more.

The Truth About Plenitude

I got four more copies of Understanding Comics in the mail today. Thanks, friends! You are unbelievably swell. I almost have enough for a complete class set.

Tomorrow I'm giving a quiz on the first chapter of Understanding Comics and our vocabulary words.  Today we reviewed for the quiz, and they read a three page Frank comic by Jim Woodring. I already shared the last page of it here. I chose this because it's short and it's wordless. I want them to practice reading the pictures. To make sure they looked at each panel, I had them number their papers 1 - 22 and write a one sentence summary of what happened in each panel.

Jim Woodring is basically a genius, but I'm afraid you don't really get that from reading just three pages. If you ever get the chance, read the slightly-longer "Frank and the Truth About Plenitude." It's one of my all-time favorite comics, a surreal vision of an imaginary but internally consistent world, and oh my god man it will totally BLOW YOUR MIND.


I once met Jim Woodring. Are you impressed? Yeah, the kids weren't, either.

In other news, I'm going to write about Grant Morrison's Supergods one of these days. In the meantime, here's Morrison being interviewed by Rolling Stone. It seems like he tries to avoid expressing his rage at Mark Millar, so I was surprised by the part where he basically said he'd like to hit Millar with his car.

Return to Riverdale

You know, I haven't told my colleagues about this blog yet, and I don't know if they would want me to refer to the school by name, so I should probably come up with an alias. Since this is comic book class, I should use something comics-related. I'll go with the most famous school in American comics, Riverdale High.

So I went to Riverdale today and set up my classroom. It took about three hours. I'm happy with how it looks, particularly the bulletin board collage (I always cover one small bulleting board with random pictures I've accumulated over the years.) Loving Wife tells me that, since I'm teaching a comic book class, I should put my giant Crisis on Infinite Earths poster up in the classroom. I've got pictures of Superman and Captain America up but, I dunno, that Crisis poster is 65" x 28". That is a lot of space for one poster, particularly one that really undercuts that whole "there's more to comics than super-heroes" argument I'm going to be making.

I've still got to figure out the details of the first week's lesson plans, and some stuff like that, but I'm much farther along than I was this time last year. The last days of summer are usually a desperate scramble as I struggle to make the transition back into teaching. Creating this blog, and thinking through the details of this class, made the transition much smoother this year.

After writing about this class for the last few weeks, I'm feeling excited and optimistic about actually teaching it. Will my optimism survive contact with the students? Only time will tell. They say that students can sense when a teacher is genuinely enthusiastic about the material, and there is not much I am more enthusiastic about than comics.

Here's something students have to look forward to in the first week:

(from The Portable Frank, by Jim Woodring)