Category Archives: comics

Graphic Insights into Racism

Since George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis last May, public outcries have re-focused attention on the injustices that a few years ago triggered today’s Black Lives Matter movement.  For readers tween and up, that movement’s emotional center and origins are embodied … Continue reading

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In School or At Home–Go Graphic!

As this new school year begins so uncertainly, with COVID-19 affecting where and how youngsters learn their official lessons, I have a new resource to recommend.  Ivan Brunetti’s Comics: Easy as ABC! The Essential Guide to Comics for Kids (2019) … Continue reading

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And the Winner Is

What a thrill!  Jerry Craft’s graphic novel New Kid (2019) recently won the prestigious 2019 Newbery Medal for the year’s “most distinguished contribution to children’s literature.”  With this award, the American Library Association placed graphic literature fully in the mainstream … Continue reading

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Celebrating a New Year

Ring out the old, ring in the new, Ring, happy bells, across the snow: The year is going, let him go; Ring out the false, ring in the true. These words from a Tennyson poem are one traditional New Year’s … Continue reading

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Hurricane Times

Cartoonists around the globe responded swiftly to Hurricanes Harvey and Irma.  Some artists focused on the political or scientific conflicts that swirled around these storms, while others focused on the disasters’ human dimensions.  Now Maria has entered the fray.  I … Continue reading

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Trending–Heroes and Icons

“Popularity” changes and is rarely “one-size-fits-all.”  We could see such trending last month in back-to-school clothing sales and, more significantly, the toppling of Confederate monuments that lionized slavery’s defenders.  Heroism is time and culture-sensitive.  This is equally true of the … Continue reading

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Vantage Points: Staring into 2017

Two new graphic works have helped me deal with my thoughts and feelings about the recent presidential election.  How could so many people have voted for Donald Trump, when so many more of us are dismayed and frightened at his … Continue reading

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After the Brussels Bombings: Rethinking Heroes and Villains

This is not the blog post I had planned to write on April Fools’ Day.  But reverberations from the recent Brussels bombings (and now the Lahore attacks) shifted my attention, compelling me back to 9/11 and its explosions.  Read on. … Continue reading

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Let’s Be Visually Literate!

“Comics are the gateway drug to literacy.”   This remark by Art Spiegelman, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the graphic memoir Maus, A Survivor’s Tale (1980-1991), is not as controversial nowadays as it would have been in the 1950s.  Back then, some … Continue reading

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Cracking Codes and Making History: Then and Now

What connects award-winning graphic author/illustrator Gene Luen Yang and film luminary Orson Welles?   Both have cracked codes—figuratively, and in Yang’s case literally, too—and made history.  Welles did this back in the 1930s and 40s, when kids sometimes thought that access … Continue reading

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