Full Description
With the recent explosion of activity and discussion surrounding comics, it seems timely to examine how we might think about the multiple ways in which comics are read and consumed.
Graphic Encounters moves beyond seeing the reading of comics as a debased or simplified word-based literacy. Dale Jacobs argues compellingly that we should consider comics as multimodal texts in which meaning is created through linguistic, visual, audio, gestural, and spatial realms in order to achieve effects and meanings that would not be possible in either a strictly print or strictly visual text. Jacobs advances two key ideas: one, that reading comics involves a complex, multimodal literacy and, two, that by studying how comics are used to sponsor multimodal literacy, we can engage more deeply with the ways students encounter and use these and other multimodal texts. Looking at the history of how comics have been used (by churches, schools, and libraries among others) will help us, as literacy teachers, best use that knowledge within our curricula, even as we act as sponsors ourselves.
Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: Secret Origins of Literacy Sponsorship
Chapter 3: To Blend In or Stand Out: Publishers' Responses to "A National Disgrace" and the Comics Panic of the Early 1940s
Chapter 4: More at Stake: EC, Vampires, and the Sponsorship of Critical Literacy
Chapter 5: Oral Roberts Discovers Comics and Archie Goes to Church: Sponsoring Multimodal Literacy through Religious Comics
Chapter 6: Teaming Up for Literacy: Spider-Man, The Electric Company, and Cross-Media Literacy Sponsorship
Chapter 7: Libraries and the Sponsorship of Literacy through Comics
Acknowledgements
Works Cited
Index
