critical thinking comic

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Using Comics to Teach the 4 Cs

When students read comics or create their own, they have an opportunity to develop their creativity, critical thinking, and communication and collaboration skills.

Students today are digital natives who need to develop the 4 Cs —critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity. Comics are perfectly situated for use in developing these competencies, and they work across grade levels—a single story may have the capacity to speak to both elementary and secondary school students.

Raina Telgemeier’s Guts , for example, might be classified for around fifth grade based on reading level, but this story of a girl struggling with anxiety that manifests itself in stomach ailments can reach any high school student, regardless of gender, who is trying to cope with bullying, test taking, family issues, and more.

Similarly, George Takei’s They Called Us Enemy , a memoir of his childhood experience living in an internment camp for Japanese Americans during World War II, is appropriate for both fifth-grade English language arts and 11th-grade U.S. History.

Teachers working to help students consider the way words and images combine to produce a single panel’s composition may want to check out Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics . And Nick Sousanis’s Spin Weave and Cut offers practical annotation projects for thinking about comics in the classroom.

Comics’ dual languages—verbal and visual—give them the range and depth to foster the 4 Cs across the curriculum, both when students analyze comics and when they create them as products to demonstrate their learning.

Critical Thinking

Critical thinking incorporates an array of higher-order thinking skills, such as analysis, evaluation, interpretation, problem-solving, and systems thinking. Even a simple three-panel comic can elicit many of these skills as students read. They must pay attention to literary details such as narration, setting, characterization, and symbolism, and visual elements including line, shape, color, and contrast.

Students can also develop interpretive skills by thinking about comics’ specific language of word and thought balloons, sound effects, lettering, how the gutter—the space between panels—is used, and panel layouts and sequencing.

An extraordinary quality of comics that is ripe for student interpretation is their ability to collapse time and space in a single panel, i.e., to turn space into time and time into space. For example, students could take a single panel from Richard McGuire’s comic Here and interpret it in terms of how space and time are represented through elements inherent to comics.

McGuire uses a panel to double as a window that, in turn, simulates a computer screen, conveying multiple timelines in a single space. The entire comic takes place in one corner of a room in a house. Panels within panels, combined with sparse text, stretch the building’s history back to the prehistoric period and project it forward into the future. Who occupied this house at different points in time, and what do the occupants’ activities say about family life and history at a different moment? Who might occupy the house in 20 years, and what will they be doing? What will society look like at that future time? These questions cascade from a single panel, and the history of the building becomes a palimpsest for history itself. There’s a lot for a student to unpack.

Communication

In comics, verbal interpretation must always also be visual interpretation, and that interpretation, as Kerry Freedman argues in a collection of essays on comics in the classroom that I edited, is complex: We visualize the totality of an image, a more synchronous perspective than the temporal dynamic of reading words one after another. Consequently, comics allow for a different form of multimedia communication appropriate to today’s visual culture.

Students’ everyday writing typically consists of texts, tweets, Instagram posts, and other truncated forms of communication, and teachers can use comics to demonstrate how brevity conveys key information in such shortened formats. In a comic, dialogue and narration distill a message to its essence.

Have students take a page from their favorite short story and adapt the 250 or so words into 10 words for a three-panel sequence. You can also do this with any piece of prose from a textbook, a lab exercise, or directions on how to do something. Students don’t have to draw the three panels—they can use comics creation tools like Pixton or Storyboard That to generate panels, word balloons, caption boxes, background art, and generic premade characters.

This exercise will foster students’ ability to communicate clearly and concisely with concrete detail.

Collaboration and Creativity

Comics are inherently collaborative. Ordinarily, a comic book requires a writer, an illustrator, a colorist, and a letterer, in addition to a managing editor. In the same way, students from primary school to high school can work together on creating a comic. Divide students into teams and assign a topic that speaks to them or the world they inhabit—e.g., attending school at home during a pandemic. I prefer the term teams instead of groups because team implies a coordinated unit working toward a common goal. Plus all students are familiar with superhero teams—the Avengers, Teen Titans, etc.

The process of making a comic together necessarily involves collaborative, creative problem-solving. How will students represent a virus, if they’re making a comic about the pandemic? And will they reimagine what a superhero is? The staff in an emergency room converging on a new patient could be a super-powered team.

In creating an original work, a student must think critically about how to address their issue or topic, communicate about the words and pictures they’ll use, collaborate on the roles each team member will play, and be creative in actually making the product of their learning. Comics and the 4 Cs go together like Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, paper and pencil, or tablet and touch.

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The Educational Power of Comics in Student Learning

Introduction

Comics , once considered mere entertainment, have emerged as powerful tools in student learning. This article delves into the transformative impact of comics on education, exploring their benefits, integration strategies, and real-world success stories .

Benefits of Comics

Comics go beyond words, enhancing visual literacy skills and significantly improving comprehension and retention. The vivid combination of visuals and text captures students’ attention, making complex concepts more digestible.

Integrating Comics in Curriculum and Cognitive Benefits

Discover innovative ways to incorporate comics into teaching plans, with examples illustrating successful integration. From history to science, comics prove versatile, adding an exciting dimension to traditional subjects. Uncover the cognitive benefits of using comics in education , from influencing cognitive development to fostering critical thinking skills. Educational comics provide a unique platform for students to analyze and interpret information creatively.

The Role of Storytelling

Delve into the narrative power of educational comics and their role in developing language skills. The storytelling aspect engages students, making learning a dynamic and enjoyable experience.

Cultural Representation in Comics

Explore the significance of diverse characters in educational comics, promoting inclusivity and representing a variety of cultures. Comics become a powerful tool for breaking stereotypes and fostering understanding.

Research-backed Insights and Overcoming Stereotypes

Gain insights from research studies supporting the educational benefits of comics. Scholarly opinions affirm the positive impact of comics on student learning, providing a solid foundation for their inclusion in education. Address common misconceptions and concerns about using comics in education. Break the myths surrounding educational comics and emphasize their value in enhancing the learning experience.

Case Studies

Dive into real-world examples of schools effectively utilizing comics. Success stories highlight increased student engagement and improved academic performance through the integration of comics.

Teacher’s Guide to Using Comics

Equip educators with practical strategies for implementing comics in the classroom. Tips on selecting age-appropriate content and maximizing the educational potential of comics are discussed.

Comic Creation as a Learning Tool

Encourage students to become creators by incorporating comic creation as a learning tool. Fostering creativity and self-expression, this approach turns students into active participants in their educational journey.

Interactive Learning with Comics

Discover ways to make learning interactive by incorporating activities and discussions around comics. Engage students in critical discussions, encouraging them to think analytically about the content. Embracing interactive learning involves harnessing the power of various online resources to adeptly process academic material. One standout platform in this realm is mysupergeek, serving as a reliable helper for tasks such as essay writing and crafting comprehensive analyses of fiction and comics. The multifaceted capabilities of this resource have garnered substantial admiration among students who appreciate its efficacy in navigating the complexities of academic assignments. The user-friendly interface and valuable assistance provided by mysupergeek make it a favored companion for those seeking interactive and effective learning experiences.

The Impact on Different Subjects

Explore the application of comics in various subjects, from science to history. Learn how comics can breathe new life into lessons, making them more accessible and enjoyable for students.

Addressing Challenges

Acknowledge potential drawbacks of using comics in education and provide solutions to overcome challenges. Balancing entertainment with education is key to maximizing the benefits of comics.

Comics as a Gateway to Reading

Uncover how comics serve as a gateway to reading, particularly for reluctant readers. By combining visuals with text, comics make literature more approachable, sparking an interest in reading.

Parental Involvement

Guide parents on how to support the use of comics in education. Address concerns and misconceptions, emphasizing the positive impact comics can have on their child’s learning journey.

Future Trends in Educational Comics

Explore the intersection of comics and technology, uncovering emerging trends and technological advancements. The future promises exciting possibilities for comic-based learning.

Success Stories

Read testimonials from educators and students sharing their positive outcomes from incorporating comics in learning. These success stories underscore the transformative power of comics in education.

Q&A Session

Are comics a distraction in the classroom.

Comics, when used strategically, enhance focus and comprehension. Proper integration and selection of content aligning with educational goals mitigate any distraction concerns.

How can educators ensure age-appropriate content?

Educators should carefully vet content and choose comics that align with the curriculum and are age-appropriate. Many educational comics come with age recommendations.

Can comics be used in higher education?

Absolutely. Comics are versatile and can be adapted for higher education to engage students and facilitate better understanding of complex topics.

Do comics work for all learning styles?

While not a one-size-fits-all solution, comics cater to visual learners and offer an alternative perspective, making them beneficial for diverse learning styles.

Are there any proven academic benefits of using comics?

Research supports the positive impact of comics on academic performance, citing improved comprehension, critical thinking, and engagement among students.

How can parents encourage the use of comics at home?

Parents can create a conducive reading environment, discuss comics with their children, and select age-appropriate content. It’s a collaborative effort to foster a love for learning.

In conclusion, the educational power of comics in student learning is undeniable. From enhancing comprehension to fostering creativity, comics offer a dynamic and engaging approach to education. As we embrace the future, advocating for the inclusion of comics in mainstream education is key to nurturing well-rounded, enthusiastic learners.

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• Get Your Mind in the Gutter: Sequential Art as Inference Tool

A slideshow presentation and discussion on non-fiction comics as a teaching tool, featuring cartoonists working in the fields of science, politics, art and more. This event is part of Will Eisner Week, and Eisner’s own educational and instructional comics are the inspiration for this panel. With Malaka Gharib , Scott McCloud , Whit Taylor , and Kriota Willberg , moderated by R. Sikoryak .

The field of Comics Studies is an ever-growing scholarly space involving a wide range of participants.  Susan Kirtley  (Portland State University),  Antero Garcia  (Stanford University), and  Peter Carlson  (Green Dot Public Schools) examine this space while reflecting on their recently published work,  With Great Power Comes Great Pedagogy: Teaching, Learning, and Comics.  As the panelists discuss their approach to gathering comic creators, scholars, and educators from various fields and settings to set out the stakes, definitions, and exemplars of contemporary comics pedagogy into one edited volume, they analyze how sources of personal identity, nostalgia, and history affect our evolving relationships to comics. As they share the discoveries uncovered in their editing process, the panelists will reveal the purposes for cultivating the three key areas of this volume: Foundations of Comics Pedagogy, Comics Pedagogy in Practice, and New Directions for Comics Pedagogy.

Henry Barajas  (author of  La Voz de M.A.Y.O.: Tata Rambo ),  Rodney Barnes  (author of  Killadelphia ),  Darcy Van Poelgeest  (author of  Little Bird: The Fight for Elder's Hope ), and  David F. Walker  (author of  Bitter Root ) discuss comic books that tackle real world issues, be it environmental activism, civic engagement, physical and mental health awareness, and more, (including how their work is being used by librarians and educators). Viewers will leave with programming and acquisition ideas designed to inspire their readers to see the world differently and then change it for the better.

Peter Carlson  (Green Dot Public Schools),  Susan Kirtley  (Portland State University), and  Antero Garcia  (Stanford University) lead this panel that reveals practical activities and theory involved in teaching with comics while discussing teaching and making comics with the incredible creators and educators  Nick Sousanis  ( Unflattening ),  Ebony Flowers  ( Hot Comb ),  David F. Walker  ( Naomi ), and  Brian Michael Bendis  ( Naomi ).  www.comicspedagogy.com

Meryl Jaffe  ( Worth A Thousand Words ) with panelists  Laurence Tan  (educator)  Rachelle Cruz  (educator, author  Experiencing Comics ), and  Talia Hurwich  (educator, author  Worth A Thousand Words ) discuss how graphic novels can inspire and enrich online classroom lessons for students grades 3 and up. We discuss challenges, lesson ideas, and loads of resources.

Join us to learn about the ever-growing mountain of evidence on the educational efficacy of comics that is making comic converts out of even the harshest critics. Learn how research shows that reading comics and graphic novels strengthens literacy and content learning for students of all ages, interests, and levels of achievement and how creating comics can bolster critical thinking and social-emotional skills. Our education and comics experts will share with you all the rationale and research you need to prove that comics belong in the classroom. Panelists: Dr. Theresa Rojas Dr. Stephen Krashen Dr. Susannah Richards Tracy Edmunds Moderator: Alex Simmons

This panel provides an inside look at ground-breaking courses by the professionals and academics who are bringing Geek Culture to campuses nationwide (and beyond)! Join Paul Levitz (Columbia University), Rob Salkowitz (University of Washington), Frank Cammuso (Syracuse University), Darlyne Overbaugh (Ithaca College), Chris Irving (Virginia Commonwealth University), and moderator Ed Catto (Ithaca College).

"Interested in knowing more about comics, putting them to use in your classroom, and trying your hand at making them? I set up this site initially for the class on comics for educators that I taught at Teachers College and have since been growing to serve as a  database of comics-education resources. " Dr.  Nick Sousanis Eisner-winning comics and San Francisco State University professor of Humanities & Liberal Studies.  

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Science comics, blind accessible comics, race, gender in comics, historical resources & digital archives.

While some dismiss comics as less intellectually challenging than “real” books, the reality is that graphic novels offer an opportunity to think abstractly in a way few other storytelling media can. The space between panels – the gutter – requires readers to make connections on their own, while the art portion of the media demands patience and attention that isn’t guided by words lined up on the page. Listen as seasoned educators share their use of comics as a tool for all types of inferring: determining causes, solving problems, predicting likely outcomes, and connecting dots. Panelists: Dr. Isabel Morales (moderator) Jana Tropper Shveta Miller Ronell Whitaker Dr. Rachelle Cruz

Hyperlinked in the titles below are toolkits created by  Dr. Valentino Zullo, Ph.D., in 2020/21. They are modeled after the  Get Graphic! with the Ohio Center for the Book  discussions hosted at Cleveland Public Library (home of the Ohio Center for the Book) since 2014. These guides aim to promote the study of comics with other libraries, classrooms, book clubs, independent readers, and anyone else that wants an education in comics! The toolkits offered here represent only selection of comics titles. The list does not reflect an established pedagogical canon of comics to teach on.

Understanding Comics  by Scott McCloud  (Comics: A Medium) 

• 11 x 17 Sheets  (Can be folded into 8.5 x 11 Booklet) (PDF)
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One Hundred Demons  by Lynda Barry  (Creating Comics)

Are You My Mother?  by Alison Bechdel  (Comics as Medicine)

• 11 x 17 Sheets  (Can be folded into a 8.5 x 11 Booklet) (PDF)

Maus  by Art Spiegelman  (The Holocaust)

Persepolis  by marjane satrapi  (iranian revolution), fun home  by alison bechdel  (lgbtq history in the united states), the best we could do  by thi bui  (vietnam war), march   (book one)  by john lewis  (us civil rights movement), palestine  by joe sacco  (israeli-palestinian conflict), grass  by keum suk gendry-kim (janet hong, translator)  (korean “comfort women”), arab of the future  by riad sattouf  (pan-arab nationalism).

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‘hocus pocus’ brings critical thinking (and magic) to comics.

From the mind of a master of both, Richard Wiseman.

Professor Richard Wiseman has a long history of teaching the public about quirks of psychology (“ Quirkology ” is actually the title of one of his books). A well-known figure in the skeptical community, Wiseman has examined a multitude of subjects that fit into the arena of “weird stuff,” and the first issue of Hocus Pocus: Magic, Mystery, & the Mind , described as an“interactive comic series about the history and science of the paranormal,” is no exception.

Wiseman teamed up with writer Rik Worth and comic artist Jordan Collver to examine the alleged abilities of three mind-reading performers from history — two humans, and one horse. Without giving too much away, I appreciated the little Easter eggs, including one gimmick that relies on a choose-your-own-adventure mechanic to demonstrate the Forer Effect (don’t click if you want to avoid spoilers; read the book and all will be revealed).

Hocus Pocus brings a few disciplines to the drawing table besides solid sequential art storytelling, offering vignettes of historical mind-reading techniques and a bit of insight into those who attempted to understand such powers. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle makes an appearance (Doyle and Harry Houdini are the subjects of Worth and Collver’s 2014 comic, A Certain Symmetry ), and we see the “father of parapsychology,” J. B. Rhine, team up with Dr. Karl Zener (for whom the “Zener cards used in the beginning of Ghostbusters are named).

The magician’s hand is evident, as the first issue of Hocus Pocus actually performs a couple of “tricks” as you read along. Wiseman, it should be noted, is not just a Professor of the Public Understanding of Psychology, he’s also a member of the Inner Magic Circle , an exclusive British organization dedicated to promoting and advancing the art of magic.

“Mind Reading!” is only the first of a five-part series; the first three issues, on mind reading, seances, and ghosts, are available now. These comics, while certainly entertaining, also educate readers on critical thinking and experimental design. As such, the creators offer them as free digital downloads in order to make them widely available (though you can choose to pay something, if you wish). I found the Gumroad app easy to install and use, and the art was pristine when viewed on that platform. Trying to use the “read now” button on my laptop, however, resulted in a lower-res version that was not as readable.

Nevertheless, a spin around the Hocus Pocus website is incredibly rewarding. Extras like a printable PDF of a charming cartoon dragon you can assemble yourself into a 3D illusion are fun, but the short comic introduction to pareidolia is required reading for any comic artist or fan. As a cartoonist and longtime skeptic myself, knowing that Wiseman was behind this comic, I went into the first issue armed with knowledge about the psychological tricks used to tell a story with pictures, all the comic psychology theories of Scott McCloud, and the gag deconstruction of Newgarden and Karasik.

But as I clicked through the pages, I found myself simply carried along by the stories, enjoying the nostalgic, time-travel feeling created by Owen Watts’ limited palette that seems to blend cowboy sepia tones with a touch of the superhero fantastic. When a favorite old-timey comedy duo popped up in supporting roles, the cameo delighted me. I failed to deconstruct; I merely enjoyed.

I’ve heard from magician friends that this is the feeling they get when they watch a true master of the craft. While knowledgeable about the gimmicks, techniques, and means of misdirection, they nevertheless get swept up by the performance and it leaves them as amazed as the average audience member.

Every February, to help celebrate Darwin Day, the Science section of AIPT cranks up the critical thinking for  SKEPTICISM MONTH !   Skepticism  is an approach to evaluating claims that emphasizes evidence and applies the tools of science. Every day this month we’ll be highlighting skepticism  in  pop culture and skepticism  of  pop culture.

AIPT Science  is co-presented by AIPT and the  New York City Skeptics .

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Thinking Critically

Subject: SEL (Social-Emotional Learning)

Lesson Length: 1 - 2 class sessions

Topic: Reasoning

Grade Level: 10, 11, 12, 9

Standards / Framework:

• CASEL: RESPONSIBLE DECISION-MAKING

Brief Description: Students will represent how critical thinking skills can be used in and out of school.

Know Before You Start: Students should be familiar with the term critical thinking .

• “What does it mean to be critical?”
• “When have you used critical thinking skills in our class?” 
• “Which critical thinking skills do you use on a daily basis?”
• Split students into two teams. Each team will be supporting one side of a controversial topic.
• Explain what the hot topic is and the general stance that each team will take, e.g., using ChatGTP in school, banning books, etc.
• Have each team generate a list of reasons to support or oppose the controversial topic as well as find resources to provide evidence. 
• Have students debate using their findings. 
• Have students reflect through a whole group discussion on which critical thinking skills they used to research, debate, and collaborate with their teammates. Record a list of the critical thinking skills captured in the conversation.
• Have students select one of the critical thinking skills discussed and create a comic demonstrating how that skill is used in and out of school.
• Display student comics in the classroom for visual reminders of their critical thinking skills.
• Students will share their comics in partnerships or small groups. 
• Share with the class that thinking critically helps to improve their decision-making skills, and problem-solving ability, stimulates their curiosity, and helps them make sense of the world. Critical thinking helps you reflect and understand your own points of view and biases.

Differentiation:

• Allow students to use the speech-to-text feature.
• Allow students to work in pairs or groups as needed.
• Allow students to use the voiceover to read their comics aloud.
• Provide students with the Main Idea Web or Concept Map graphic organizers to plan for their comic.
• Comic to print or display: Comic . 
• Main Idea Web
• Concept Map
• 5 Top Critical Thinking Skills (and How To Improve Them) - Indeed.com
• 100+ Controversial Debate Topics to Challenge Your Students by WeAreTeahers.com  
• The Benefits of Developing Critical Thinking Skills in The Workplace - LinkedIn.com
• 5 Tips to Improve Your Critical Thinking by Samantha Agoos
• How to Develop Critical Thinking- Empowering Speech by Jordan B Peterson

Suggested Content Packs:

Suggested Story Starters:

• Climate Change Is Caused by Human Activity
• Critique Art: Elizabeth Grant Bankson Beatty (Mrs. James Beatty) and Her Daughter Susan

Related Ideas

Community Well-Being

Students will create a comic to illustrate a task that has a positive impact on a community.

Main Idea and Details

Students will determine the main idea and at least two supporting details of a passage.

Problem-Solving

Students will show three to five steps to solve a problem.

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Adventures in critical thinking: using uofl student-created comic books in your teaching, critical thinking · active learning.

This session will showcase the new critical thinking comic book series called Adventures in Critical Thinking and guide you in thinking through how these digital resources can be used effectively with students to develop and hone their critical thinking skills in situations both inside and outside the classroom. The series of six comic books were written and illustrated by UofL students, under the guidance of faculty member Brian Barnes as part of an i2a SUN Grant, who were trained in using the Paul-Elder critical thinking framework. Each of the comics depicts a beginning critical thinker, Paul Elder, as he makes his way through undergraduate life on Belknap Campus. Paul faces opportunities and situations in his everyday life that can benefit from new ways of thinking and applying the concepts of critical thinking.

As a result of attending this session, you will be able to:

• Explore, with the facilitators, the content and structure of the new critical thinking comic book series and the guidelines for using the books;
• Glean ideas and strategies for accessing and using the comic books in or outside the classroom with students in order to foster critical thinking and/or integrate into course content; and
• Practice using the comic books to read, reflect, analyze and reflect on the content and generate ideas for leveraging the tools with students and applying the concepts to their everyday lives.

Session Date

Register Now

Presenter Bios

Edna Ross, Ph.D. , has been with the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences since 1984. She is associate professor and co-course director for the department’s Introduction to Psychology course and teaches this popular course with enrollments of several hundred students. Dr. Ross has been nominated as a Faculty Favorite and received the A&S; Outstanding Faculty Award. She holds a joint appointment with the Delphi Center and serves as the i2a specialist for critical thinking.

Brian Barnes, Ph.D. , has been a visiting scholar at The Foundation for Critical Thinking, developers of the Paul-Elder Framework, since 2012. Barnes is also a senior lecturer in the Department of Philosophy, where he has taught applied ethics and classes in reasoning skills since 2004. Barnes’s dissertation developed critical thinking methods for teaching Business Ethics, and he has published a textbook that applies the Paul-Elder framework to that discipline, as well as having created a series of comic books for undergraduates that inculcate critical thinking skills. Barnes is Director of UofL’s EcoReps Sustainability Education Program, and he presents widely on critical thinking and sustainability topics.

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All of the services and resources provided by the Delphi Center for Teaching and Learning are welcome to all at the University of Louisville. If you have questions about eligibility, please contact [email protected]

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Wednesday, June 24, 2020

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Lyndsay Campbell

August 22, 2023 / Reading Time: ~ 2 minutes

The Importance of Comics

Comics have grown from the idea of their traditional role as something only for children. Comics are still evolving and are a medium for artistic expression, diverse narratives, and even social commentary. Through the work of Scott McCloud and the enlightening scholarly articles, we are able to take a deep like into the world of comics studies that extends far beyond the surface.

In Scott’s book “Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art,” he takes us on a journey that shows us that comics are a deeply captivating form of storytelling. He shares that comics are more than just “sequential art; they are an intricate blend of imagery and text that seamlessly craft narratives” (McCloud).

McCloud’s central concept revolves around “closure.” According to him, “Closure is the phenomenon of observing the parts but perceiving the whole” (McCloud). This process prompts readers to actively engage as they bridge the gaps between comic panels, crafting a seamless story in their minds. This is a truly dynamic interaction for the readers.

McCloud’s model of panel transitions highlights how comics manipulate time and space through moment-to-moment, action-to-action, subject-to-subject, scene-to-scene, and aspect-to-aspect shifts. This framework underscores comics’ ability to evoke emotions and emphasize elements in ways that conventional media forms generally don’t.

“Changing The World: How Comics and Graphic Novels Can Shift Teaching and Doing Social Sciences Via Comics and Graphic Novels” brings in an exciting phase for comics studies, showing their potential in education and social sciences. This work proves comics’ role as an effective tool for conveying concepts, historical narratives, and societal issues in an accessible format.

“Comics are an ideal medium for educators to bring abstract social science concepts to life” (Strong, et. al.). By presenting social science content through visual narratives, comics open themselves to a more diverse audience, including those who might find conventional academics boring or frustrating. This type of learning embraces diversity and shows other ways in which ideas can reach a broader group of learners.

Integrating comics into academics supports and promotes critical thinking. “Comics provide a unique opportunity for students to think critically about representation, power, and social justice” (Barberis & Grüning). Urging students to analyze and break down visual narratives and examine artistic decisions allows for more insight into the subject matter.

We live in a world in which information is flying at us all the time, and I think comics can be a new communication tool and education method. McCloud’s theories tell us that comics are unrestricted by age, genre, or format and that they are a medium ready to be used in education.

Scott McCloud’s ideas and the application of comics in education and social sciences demonstrate how adaptable this medium can be. I’m appreciative of the opportunity to explore the realm of comics this quarter and sharing my creation More than a Squak . It’s clear that comics are evolving, and their narratives offer us valuable perspectives on the world while also providing us with important lessons.

Works Cited: McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. Reprint edition, William Morrow Paperbacks. 1994. Strong, M. T., Cook, T., Belet, L. A., & Calarco, P. (2023). Changing The World: How Comics and Graphic Novels Can Shift Teaching. Humanity & Society, 47(2), 245–257. https://doi.org/10.1177/01605976231158969 . Barberis, Eduardo & Grüning, Barbara. (2021). Doing Social Sciences Via Comics and Graphic Novels. An Introduction. 125-142. 10.6092/issn.1971-8853/12773.

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Author: Lyndsay Campbell

Published: August 22, 2023

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Comics in the Classroom as an Introduction to Genre Study

• Resources & Preparation
• Instructional Plan
• Related Resources

This lesson capitalizes on the popular appeal of comics by using them to introduce the concept of genre. Students begin by working in small groups to analyze differences and similarities among a selection of comics from a variety of subgenres. Based on their discussion, they determine what subgenres are represented and divide the comics accordingly. They then analyze the professional comics' uses of conventions such as layout and page design. Finally, they create their own comics using an online tool.

Featured Resources

Comic Creator : Students use this online tool to create their own comics.

From Theory to Practice

Recently emerging as a genre "worth" studying in school, comics can act as a springboard for genre study as well as tap higher-order thinking skills. Versaci (2001) points out that "[A]side from engagement, comic books also help to develop much needed analytical and critical thinking skills. A common goal, regardless of the level we teach, is to help students read beyond the page in order to ask and answer deeper questions that the given work suggests about art, life, and the intersection of the two. Comic books facilitate this . . ." (64).

Further Reading

Common Core Standards

This resource has been aligned to the Common Core State Standards for states in which they have been adopted. If a state does not appear in the drop-down, CCSS alignments are forthcoming.

State Standards

This lesson has been aligned to standards in the following states. If a state does not appear in the drop-down, standard alignments are not currently available for that state.

NCTE/IRA National Standards for the English Language Arts

• 1. Students read a wide range of print and nonprint texts to build an understanding of texts, of themselves, and of the cultures of the United States and the world; to acquire new information; to respond to the needs and demands of society and the workplace; and for personal fulfillment. Among these texts are fiction and nonfiction, classic and contemporary works.
• 2. Students read a wide range of literature from many periods in many genres to build an understanding of the many dimensions (e.g., philosophical, ethical, aesthetic) of human experience.
• 3. Students apply a wide range of strategies to comprehend, interpret, evaluate, and appreciate texts. They draw on their prior experience, their interactions with other readers and writers, their knowledge of word meaning and of other texts, their word identification strategies, and their understanding of textual features (e.g., sound-letter correspondence, sentence structure, context, graphics).
• 4. Students adjust their use of spoken, written, and visual language (e.g., conventions, style, vocabulary) to communicate effectively with a variety of audiences and for different purposes.
• 8. Students use a variety of technological and information resources (e.g., libraries, databases, computer networks, video) to gather and synthesize information and to create and communicate knowledge.
• 11. Students participate as knowledgeable, reflective, creative, and critical members of a variety of literacy communities.
• 12. Students use spoken, written, and visual language to accomplish their own purposes (e.g., for learning, enjoyment, persuasion, and the exchange of information).

Materials and Technology

• Access to the Internet
• Overhead or LCD projector
• Examples of comics

Student Objectives

Students will

• explore a variety of comic strips.
• discuss components of comic strips.
• examine conventions of comic strips.
• analyze online  Comic Creator interactive and create a planning sheet for using the tool.
• apply what they have learned about comics by creating one of their own.

Instruction and Activities

• Begin by brainstorming with the students the names of different comics that they know. Also have the students give descriptions about them.
• Pass out samples of many different types of comics and comic books. Be sure to include historical, political, Illustrated Classics, "funnies," superheroes, and examples from contemporary books such as Spiegelman's Maus.
• Is there dialogue? How is it presented?
• What are the characters doing? How is that shown?
• What is the shape of the comic frames? What does that represent?
• How is action shown?
• What happens from one frame to the next?
• Using the information from their discussions, have the students come up with the different comic subgenres such as those noted in #2 above. The students should realize that within comics there are many genres and sometimes genre determines convention.
• Comics manipulate space on a page to guide the reader and affect the interpretation of the story.
• Page layout and design can represent different organizational models, especially for storytelling. For example, a page with many frames can represent an ongoing scene with a lot of action. Larger frames with a great deal of detail may be an artist's attempt to set a forthcoming scene. Even page divisions add a certain element of story organization.
• Comic "storytellers" are careful not to include too many disjointed scenes on one page; as with a written narrative, such a mixture would make for a confusing and jumbled story.
• Layout is important when combining images and text, and with comics, students can transfer knowledge of visual organization to verbal and written organizational models.
• The concept of exploring one idea fully before moving onto the next could be likened to the page-break concept in graphic art.
• With the new information they have, students should observe the conventions of page design and layout. Then they should analyze professional comics' use of the conventions.
• Using an LCD projector, demonstrate the Comic Creator student interactive and all of its tools. The students can use their knowledge of comic components and conventions to guide the teacher through a whole-class created comic.
• Finally, using the  Comic Creator on their own, students experiment with the conventions of page design and layout in their own comics.
• As a writing activity, the students in small groups can create a planning or tips sheet that can be given to  Comic Creator users. This sheet would help them make decisions about creating their own comic strip. The creation of this tips sheet is also the assessment that determines how much the students understand from the first session of the lesson.
• If you want to continue using comics in your classroom, visit the National Association of Comics Arts Educators for additional lesson plan, activities, and other resources.

Student Assessment / Reflections

As this lesson is the introduction to a longer unit on comics and genre study, teacher observation and conferences and interviews should make up the bulk of the assessment to ensure that students are grasping and retaining the material as they move through the unit. Participation in guided discussion should also be considered. If grades are to be given, teachers can assess the creation of the comic strip as well as the tips sheet if they chose to do the extension activity.

• Student Interactives
• Lesson Plans
• Professional Library
• Calendar Activities

The Comic Creator invites students to compose their own comic strips for a variety of contexts (prewriting, pre- and postreading activities, response to literature, and so on).

In this article, Versaci details the many merits of using comics and graphic novels in the classroom, suggests how they can be integrated into historical and social issues units, and recommends several titles.

Students create a short, humorous story with at least one action character, and then use online tools to make a flipbook.

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Over the last decade, comic books have transitioned from niche market to the engine of popular culture. This rise in the medium has prompted a discussion on the educational potential of comic books and graphic novels. While students may be versed in comic books and popular culture, classroom implementation is dependent on teacher familiarity with and literacy in comic books and culture. The materials below will provide you with media-rich resources to develop knowledge and promote English language learning through visual literacy. 

Table of Contents

Panels and Perspectives: Creating Comics in the English as a Foreign Language Classroom is an instructional guide to creating comics for educators of all English language learners. Presented in comic book format, Panels and Perspectives includes insights, strategies, and practical applications for making comics in any American English classroom to improve both language skills and critical thinking abilities. English teachers will discover there are many correct ways for students to create comics, whether they use photos, sketches, superheroes, or funny animals with superpowers to tell their stories.

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The Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs is prohibited from distributing its print materials in the United States by the Smith-Mundt Act.

Description:

Combining the written word with even the simplest doodles can be a powerful means for students to demonstrate their understanding.   Panels and Perspectives: Creating Comics in the English as a Foreign Language Classroom  is an instructional guide to creating comics for educators of all English language learners.  Presented in comic book format,  Panels and Perspectives  includes insights, strategies, and practical applications for making comics in any American English classroom to improve both language skills and critical thinking abilities. English teachers will discover there are many correct ways for students to create comics, whether they use photos, sketches, superheroes, or funny animals with superpowers to tell their stories. 

Here are some comic book resources to use in your classroom or home.  

Zonk! Comics for the Classroom

Zonk 1 and Zonk 2, sponsored by the U.S. Embassy in Peru, created by professional comic illustrators Benjamin Ilka and Fabricio Rivas, showcase local talent from students and teachers across Peru. The goal is to get students and teachers excited about sharing their knowledge of local culture through comic book stories as a way to improve the language learning experience and enhance critical thinking skills. The stories come from communities across Peru, but they are intended to reach people around the world. The books have practical tips to adapt each story for use in your classroom or home. 

Trace Effects Comics

Text: These comics follow Trace on his adventures throughout the United States. Geared toward young people, Trace Effects exposes users to American society and explores themes related to entrepreneurship, community activism, empowering women, science and innovation, environmental conservation, and conflict resolution. 

Why English? Comics for the Classroom 

The stories in Why English? Comics for the Classroom – written by teenagers and young adults – will appeal to learners of all ages. These stories provide an enjoyable opportunity to increase vocabulary, reading comprehension, listening, speaking, and writing. The stories and exercises together are a whole-language anthology designed to improve communication skills. This book provides exercises that employ the cooperative/collaborative learning philosophy and address multiple learning styles.  

Teacher's Corner: Reported Speech This lesson plan uses the Trace Effects comics.  

COMIC BOOK TEACHING MATERIALS

Zonk 1  (PDF)

Zonk 2   (PDF)

Chapter 1   (PDF)

Chapter 2   (PDF)

Chapter 3  (PDF)

Chapter 4    (PDF)

Chapter 5  (PDF)

Chapter 6   (PDF)

Chapter 7   (PDF)

Why English? Comics for the Classroom

Trace Effects Classroom Language Learning Activity: Reported Speech

Creating Comics to Think Critically

This session, "Creating Comics to Think Critically," provides strategies global educators can use to help English language learners create comics as a means of developing their language and critical thinking skills.

Using Comics in the English Language Classroom

Using comics in the EFL classroom is a terrific way to incorporate the target language in a fun, engaging way. This webinar demonstrates the universality of comics for any language classroom, showing how multi-skill comic activities can be used with students of all ages and ability levels.

Animating Your Instruction: Using Comics and Graphic Novels in the English Language Classroom

This session, "Animating Your Instruction: Using Comics and Graphic Novels in the English Language Classroom," explores the popularity of illustrated stories among teachers and students alike and offers suggestions on how to use them to “animate” your classes. 

Webinar: Using Comics to Think Critically

Webinar: Using Comics in the English Language Classroom

Webinar: Animating Your Instruction: Using Comics and Graphic Novels in the EFL Classroom

Teacher’s Corner: Comic Books for Learning In this article, teachers will explore ways in which comic books can be used effectively in the classroom.

FORUM: Using Comic Strips in Language Classes The author of this article discusses how comics can motivate younger learners, provide a context for language learning, and aid in comprehension through visual literacy.

FORUM: Student Storytelling through Sequential Art This article provides helpful advice for teachers interested in using sequential art as a source of authentic reading material in their classrooms.

FORUM: Creating Cartoons: A Learner-Centered Approach to Comprehending Texts This article carefully describes the technique of having learners create cartoons based on a reading passage to explore their understanding of the passage and to help teachers reflect on what the learners comprehended.

Teacher’s Corner: Comic Books for Learning

Forum:  Using Comic Strips in Language Classes

Forum:  Student Storytelling through Sequential Art

Forum:  Creating Cartoons: A Learner-Centered Approach to Comprehending Texts

Volume 1: Hope and Power

In this anthology volume, you'll find the stories of our teachers, centered on the topics of access to education, empathy and understanding, healthcare and wellness, gender equity, and climate change, all in comic form. This anthology was created by participants of the inaugural American English Global Comics Virtual Exchange Program in spring of 2020.

Volume 2: Agents of Change This volume contains collected comic stories from the participants of the AE Global Comics Virtual Exchange Program Pilot, Fall 2020.  Participants created these comics using Pixton EDU, hand-drawing, or by using a combination of digital tools and comics.  Comics are generally read in panels, left to right.  Each pair has an introduction to their projects, containing their biographies.  We hope you’ll enjoy reading these amazing stories!  

Volume 3: The World on Paper 

This volume contains collected comic stories from the participants of the AE Global Comics Virtual Exchange Program Pilot, Winter 2021.  The theme for this volume is “The World on Paper” and participants, either working in pairs or alone, developed an original comic story featuring a participant-created national superhero working to address a global challenge.  Topics include technology and innovation; media literacy and disinformation; climate change; entrepreneurship and economic mobility; and democracy and human rights.  Participants created these comics using Pixton EDU, hand-drawing, or by using a combination of digital tools and comics.  

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Comics in Education: Benefits and attitudes

Many researchers and educators have been advocating the idea of implementing comics in the classroom due to how appealing and motivational comics can be in a learning environment. Indeed, a number of experiments and observations showed that comics are effective in engaging the learners to the lesson. Yet, other studies revealed that teaching with comics is still a challenging endeavor. This is due to the attitudes that teachers and learners may have towards the material.

The following article is an attempt to report and review the studies that dealt with the educational advantages of comics while illustrating with examples of comic titles that addressed issues congruous with the claims of the mentioned works. It also discusses the shortcomings by addressing the attitudes and challenges that this medium can represent in the educational context.

The definition of comics

The very first question to ask is how to define the keyterm comics. Popular culture enthusiasts have long been giving attention to this medium and considering it an art form. One of the most influential comic artists and theorists Will Eisner referred to it as “sequential art” that conveys narrative information to the reader through visual storytelling. 1 It may or may not contain words and when it does, it is usually in the form of captions to lend voice to the narrator or speech bubbles to show the discourse of the characters. Comics have distinct language that makes it stand out from other art forms. These include icons, pictorial runes, panels, page layout or external compositional structure, speech balloons, captions, sound effects, etc. All of these elements are combined to create a story in the form of a sequence making it appealing to the readers. In this context, Scott McCloud defined comics as “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence.” 2

The image below displays and defines the components of comics that contribute to the creation of its language.

The benefits of comics as a learning tool

First and Foremost, comics proved to be effective pedagogical materials in developing learning and literacy skills. Frey and Fischer revealed that using graphic novels in class developed the learners’ writing skills. They discussed the dialogues, vocabulary, and ideas found in the comics and that led to generating more ideas about the invoked themes and coming up with complex sentences. The visual stories helped understand the author’s mood and tone. The learners became motivated to “explore more sophisticated word choice.” Implementing graphic novels also encouraged the teachers to create more writing activities based on them. 4 Similarly, Leon and Cardenas asserted that implementing comics in the classroom improved reading comprehension skills, particularly vocabulary and narrative plot. As a narrative text, it also helped raise motivation and interest in the story. 5 In the same vein, Zsuzsanna deduced that students could recall words better with comics unlike students who underwent traditional text conditions. 6 Vinoliya claims that comics ameliorate linguistic intelligence in that learners seem to learn more vocabulary, pronounce words correctly, and make usage of appropriate grammar. 7

Along the same line of thoughts, connecting concepts with the visual context of comics allowed students to build knowledge in multiple modalities. This entails that comics promote learning and develop literacy skills. In fact, Bolton-Gary experimented with comics in her class and found out that they aided her students in biochemistry by “provid[ing] cognitive-psychological and pedagogical-technical effects.” 8

Notwithstanding, the researchers have only applied the aforementioned studies in specific contexts, mainly in Western environments including the United States and Europe making it challenging for the results to be generalizable and applicable to African populations, for example. These latter tend to be inexperienced with this material and that would be hard for teachers and learners alike to get familiar with comic-based curricula. Besides, the authors did not address different learning styles and how some learners may not feel motivated despite the appealing nature that comics offer to the readers. These types of learners may be more inclined towards novels and books or they may learn best by watching videos. They mainly focused on the potential of comics without paying attention to their limitations.

Comics and critical thinking

As far as critical thinking skills are concerned, Krusemark ascertained that comics make readers think outside the box to teach them about life lessons, develop their cognitive skills, foster their reading motivation and imagination, grow their vocabulary, and engage them with art appreciation. Learners can discuss a myriad of debatable topics using comics and that would automatically invite them to think critically of a particular theme or issue.

“Randolph-Seng and McKenny (2013) found that a graphic text approach, as opposed to a traditional textbook, encouraged readers to engage in a storyline, assess the situation, and update their evaluations all while considering content.” 9

As the author of this article claimed, the study targeted comic readers and did not consider how non-comic readers may use critical thinking when reading comics about leadership. This undoubtedly creates a shortcoming that dismisses non-comic readers and that results in considering to include them in a future research to make the findings more reliable. In fact, non-comic readers most probably outnumber comic readers in the classroom and that makes it even more appropriate to conduct a study on how the majority use critical thinking skills in comics.

To illustrate with manga, Heads by Higashino Keigo and Mase Motoro 10 tells a story of a young man who got shot in the head while attempting to save a little girl during a robbery. He eventually undergoes a brain transplant whose donor is the criminal himself. The main character gradually becomes perplexed and torn between two personalities, his own personality which is kind and loving and the donor’s which is rebellious, rude, and aggressive. The protagonist discovers the mystery of his operation and realizes that the donor who is also the criminal that shot him was in rage against the banker who sabotaged his mother, which made their life a living hell. The fact the criminal himself chose to have his organs donated after his death makes him someone who is not inherently evil even though he appeared to be so while attempting a robbery and a murder. Of course, this does not mean that criminals are allowed to do however they please. Everyone must be responsible for their behavior in society no matter how they feel. The point of this story is to simply understand that most humans are fluid beings who cannot be labeled as inherently evil or good. This is definitely a critical point of view that would spark a debate on morality and whether we can control the way we are with the brain we have and the experiences that shape our individuality.

The picture above shows the choice of the main character after undergoing this chaotic experience that a medical surgery caused. He pointed two guns to his head to kill both brain hemispheres which represent a part of him and his donor. Both characters have merged into one and decided to put an end to this misery. This is a tragic end and it reveals how inhumane and unethical the operation was. This is also a painful lesson that sometimes dying is better than living in hell. Death is natural; it can happen anytime and through different causes, whereas trying to preserve life in cruel conditions is unacceptable and unfair.

Comics and emotional intelligence

What is more intriguing about comics is that research further indicates that they have potential to foster emotional intelligence competence. The manga Heads mentioned previously helps its audience recognize that experiencing reality from others’ perspective can facilitate empathizing with them on a deeper level and understanding their struggles. Bolton-Gary asserts that comics have the potential to release emotions of a particular problem by creating a positive environment of learning. In her experiment, the way learners perceive the course has changed thanks to the implementation of comics in the classroom in that it generated more enjoyment and intrigue. Actually, comics promote empathy by helping students relate to the characters’ struggles.

One example is Craig Thompson’s autobiographical graphic novel Blankets 11 in which he tells the story of his life with a Christian community. The reader can relate to the ups and downs the main character goes through as in how he was struggling in his relationship with his first girlfriend and how he had to go to the camps to be taught about Christian principles. Most importantly, one can empathize with his pain of growing up in poverty. Another example would be American-Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang. 12 This graphic novel tells the story of a Chinese child who moved with his family to an all-American neighborhood and in which the child has to fit in at school while enduring the bullies. The reader, here, can feel how being different can be tough particularly in a homogeneous environment. Similarly, Mirion Malle published a graphic novel entitled This Is How I Disappear 13 depicting mental health problems like trauma and depression. It is a novel that makes the reader sympathize with the feelings of the protagonist even if they have not experienced these kinds of mental issues before.

Attitudes towards comics

Even though comics have proved to be valuable tools in education and teaching, attitudes toward their implementation in the classrooms remains controversial. This is due to how they are perceived as an art form in the first place. In fact, they used to be considered artistically insignificant because of the juxtaposed pictures and words nature of comics, the low-quality literary form compared to literature, their belonging to “low” art of caricature, and the stereotype of them being targeted to children only. Nowadays, comics are gaining attention worldwide that even “universities are teaching comics. It’s now part of the culture without having to be something to apologize for.” In this regard, it is possible to wonder why this shift in the way comics are perceived. Weiner explains this rise by stating four counter reasons including more movies are being based on graphic novels, there are more publications of literary graphic novels, novelists are getting involved with the medium by joining the industry to “explore serious literary novels,” and the media is giving it more attention. 14

Accordingly, comics started becoming even more popular and educators began using it in pedagogy. Kachosrky addressed this issue to observe how teachers and learners perceive comics in the classroom. In the science class, the teacher perceived comics as a tool while the learners saw it as entertainment. The English class, on the other hand, the teacher was hesitant to label comics either as a medium or a traditional form of literature. The learners, however, thought it was simply a medium. Therefore, “different positionings of the comics proved meaningful in different contexts and with different participants.” The researcher concluded that there is a clash between teacher’s objectives for using comics and their literacy practices, teachers and students did not perceive comics in the same way, and traditional methods kept controlling the lessons even with the use of multimodal texts. 15

The limitations of comics

In addition to the problematic attitudes towards comics that are mentioned previously, this medium still has other limitations including how it can seem confusing for some learners, particularly those who are inexperienced with it. Likewise, the connection between words and pictures can lead to misinterpreting information due to how complicated it can be for certain types of learners. In some countries where comics are not that popular, there is a limited number of comic books and buying them can be extremely expensive. This makes them almost unavailable in markets and that inevitably leads to their difficulty to gain access to classrooms. What is also important to consider is that comics are mostly effective for visual learners. Auditory and kinaesthetic learners may find it uninteresting or challenging to study using this material. However, this invites more research to be conducted to assume whether such a claim is valid or not.

So what should be done?

Consequently, more research needs to be conducted on comics in language teaching and pedagogy as a whole. This will impact the development of curricula by including comics in the educational programs and textbooks. This should be applied in foreign language contexts as well while considering the cross-cultural effects that may influence the teaching environment. For instance, using comics among a cultural group that is inexperienced with the medium may hinder the learning process. Yet, this does not mean educators and researchers motivated to implement comics in the classroom should drop the idea and continue sticking to traditional methods. These latter can propose remedies by offering training to the teachers to apply comic-based intervention programs and introducing students to the medium and helping them understand its idiosyncratic features.

In a word, comics can develop literacy, linguistic, emotional intelligence, and critical thinking skills making them a highly significant material that is worthy of attention and consideration to be included in education. Despite witnessing tremendous positive changes, ambivalent attitudes toward this art form continue to dominate and hinder the way teachers and students are supposed to perceive them. This entails that educators interested in comics should work on changing these perceptions and raising awareness about the benefits of comics.

Works Cited

• Eisner, W. (1985). Comics and sequential art. Poorhouse Press. ↩
• McCloud, S. (1993). Understanding comics . Kitchen Sink Press. ↩
• Differenceengine. (2018). Elements of a comic strip [image]. https://differenceengine.sg/for-educators/elements-of-comics/ ↩
• Frey, N. & Fisher, D. (2004). Using graphic novels, anime, and the internet in an urban high school. English Journal, 93 (3), 19-25. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/4128804 ↩
• León, A.P.M., & Cardenas, B.A.C. (2018). Improving reading comprehension through comics as a narrative text [Bachelor’s thesis, Corporación Universitaria Minuto De Dios Education Faculty]. https://core.ac.uk/reader/323208960 ↩
• Zsuzsanna, K. (2017). The possible benefits of using comic books in foreign language education: A classroom study. Képzés és gyakorlat, 15, 243-260. ↩
• Vinoliya, D.A. (2016). Implementing comics in ELT in primary schools. Indian Journal of Applied Linguistics, 6 (6), 281-3. ↩
• Bolton-Gray, C. (2012). Connecting through comics: Expanding opportunities for teaching and learning. US-China Education Review , 389–95. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED533545 ↩
• Krusemark, R. (2015). The role of critical thinking in reader perceptions of leadership in comic books. Sequential Art Narrative in Education (SANE), 2 (1), 1-25. ↩
• Keigo, H., & Motoro, M. (2003). Heads . Young Sunday (Weekly). ↩
• Thompson, C. (2003). Blankets . Top Shelf Productions. ↩
• Yang, G.L. (2006). American-Born Chinese. First Second Books. ↩
• Malle, M. (2020). This is How I Disappear . Drawn and Quarterly. ↩
• Williams, R. (2008). Image, text, and story: Comics and graphic novels in the classroom. Art Education, 61(6), 13–19. ↩
• Kachorsky, D.P. (2018). I am not Prometheus: Traditional literacy and multimodal texts in secondary classrooms [Unpublished doctoral thesis]. Arizona State University. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/158457042.pdf ↩

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90 Comments

I can see how it comics could prove to be an aide in mathematics and the sciences; it uses more of the senses.

I think comic books designed for educational purposes can also be oriented for scientific lessons, which would be engaging for both the teachers and learnes, at least to a certain degree.

An absolute must, if you’re teaching this area, or have an interest to incorporate comics into your teachings, is Scott McCloud’s “Understanding Comics”. I think it is arguably one of the best books I’ve read, and used with students, when it comes to developing an understanding of visual literacy….very beautifully put together, very clever, very readable. Highly highly recommended.

Indeed! I actually have a copy of that book and I am urged to read it again. It is a golden work about comics that will always be a valuable reference for any scholar working in the field of comics, visual literacy, semiotics, and linguistics.

Disagree. I think there are only ten pages worth reading, those on which McCloud explains his concept of ‘closure’, or the way sequential meaning is made via reading the transition between one panel and the next in comics. This is the essential component in comics and McCloud should be applauded for his explanation of it. He spoils it a bit by deciding to name it with a term widely used to mean a sense of finality and cohesion in narrative and experience but McCloud’s powers of graphic invention when it comes to non-fiction subjects are so powerful that any initial confusions are swiftly swept aside. The rest of the book is a variable mix of ill-chosen and fractionally baked ideas (some half-baked, some threquarters baked, some barely baked at all) and can pretty much remain ignored.

I’ve taught comics in schools, and the kids have loved it.

There is a danger in comics getting too “respectable” and losing their edge, but it seems to work okay in Japan. There are still plenty of “disreputable pictures” over there.

It’s a challenge. You’ll need it given the closed minded skeptical people who have no understanding of the medium and look down on it just because it has pictures and doesn’t consist entirely of prose. These people never look to see for themselves that comics can tell interesting and complex stories as well as tackle important subject matter and does not entirely consist of men in capes and the very best writers/artists can still do interesting work with deconstructing or re imagining the standard superhero tropes.

You know what has loads of pictures? Films! Heck, I would go so far as to argue they’re nothing BUT pictures!

…is an argument I might use in another context.

“You’ll need it given the closed minded skeptical people who have no understanding of the medium and look down on it just because it has pictures “…..although the same people would queue around the block for the latest Marvel movie without a hint or irony!…I’ve got better stories in my old 2000ads in my loft. And I don’t have to pay £10 a seat and have it spoiled by a brat on a mobile…

There is a serious lack of books for children with learning difficulties who don’t want to read the ‘baby’ books. Maybe this is an area where graphic novels could step into the void.

Asterix were always huge favourites of mine when I was a kid and ignited my love of history.

Jeff Smith’s superlative ‘Bone’ comic would be the answer there. Perfect for kids but still great fun to read as an adult. Beautifully drawn and genuinely funny.

The range of great adult comics is a mile long nowadays. For people that prefer story and dialogue to prose (or those like myself that enjoy both) there are plenty of excellent comics that are nothing to do with superheroes.

You should try the Phoenix Weekly comic. A great children’s comic with adventure and humour strips.

I run many workshops for schools and libraries and kids with learning difficulties devour the comic with great enthusiasm.

If you read one graphic novel in your life I recommend reading Maus. Took me a while to get around to it as the artwork seemed a bit crude and the subject too depressing. It really surprised me how good this book is.

Also, I am frustrated at how few European works seem to get translated into English. Why is that? Just have a browse in a French bookshop to see what your missing.

Short answer: Because of the nature of the market.

Long answer: Because there are only a handful of major comic traditions and two of them necessitate a culture of translated media to gain an audience.

The US has the easiest way into the UK market because you can essentially reprint the work you have and be done with it.

For European comics, you have to pay a very good translator (I would argue that in many ways comics are more challenging to translate than pure prose), edit the whole thing (esp. where length issues develop), set the whole thing all over again … a risky investment for a market in which American comics have grabbed the biggest share in a way that diminishes interest in the other (mainly Belgian/French) styles. There are few truly excellent translators to begin with, and fewer who are willing to go through the ordeal of translating a comic, with its low word count and high technical requirements compared to other projects.

Then there’s Japanese comics, which have managed to ride the wave of hype for Japanese animated series — they get translated and published because the market of Japanophile or Anime-obsessed is enough to guarantee sales without having to worry about competition too much.

If you want to see what a country with a truly diverse comic readership and publishing industry looks like, try Germany — France has its blind spots with everything non-French as much as the UK has a problem with anything not in English. Everything apart from a handful of local artists is translated, English and French and Japanese language works, so they all require some investment into translation. Result: more diversity.

Acceptance of translated media in general is dismal in the UK because the dominant culture is that of the US. In the rest of Europe, that dominant culture has to be translated first as well, so there’s a general acceptance of the concept (and lately a great deal of snobbery from people who greatly overestimate their English comprehension, insisting that they watch/read everything in English while missing half the content — especially true in Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden).

Nice one. Germany has some great comics of their own (I’m a Nick Knatterton fan) but isn’t adverse to translating comics from other nations, although I get the impression that children’s/young adults manga has taken the upper hand in last couple of years.

Good read. But am I alone in liking comics because they are cheap and lurid entertainment.

Probably not alone, but not all comics are cheap and lurid, just as “proper literature” is not all cheap and lurid.

Actually they’re expensive, lurid entertainment.

Comics was my gateway drug into the greater world of literature.

A parallel thought. In our Sign Language class, one woman said she didn’t ‘get’ cartoons. I explained about the first frame setup with a conclusion or punchline in the final frame, but no – cartoons did not make sense for her. Interestingly, she also struggled with the ‘mime’ part of sign language.

Abstract ideas are not universally understood and if the recipient has not heard your message, you haven’t really sent it.

Comics and Sequential Art by the great Will Eisner is a good one: Eisner really broke the ‘square box’ approach while retaining the narrative. Sheer genius.

My university has an English class with Watchmen as a unit so that’s cool.

That is really cool! I loved that graphic novel!

Interesting. I will try to incorporate this into my lessons.

Great article. Piggying back on it, I feel we need to make Comics studies more relevant! What do you all think?

Thank you! I am working on that in my research to help make the medium more accessible both in my country and at schools.

I think the real key to making comic studies and the entire medium more relevant and better appreciated is to break down the barriers that prevent many would-be creators from access due to privilege and/or class.

Right now a lot of the medium seems more like a playground for almost anyone BUT the folks who most want to get involved. So it’s brushed off lightly in much the way other forms of art that are deemed to be simply the realm of a certain type are. Remember, there’s a reason a lot of people shun or look down on fine/modern art.

The artforms with the most acclaim, relevance and appreciation in our culture tend to be ones that at least attempt an even playing field for all who want in. Literature, film, music, etc may not actually be the platonic ideals we wish they were when it comes to letting everyone in. But they seem way more accessible to all than comics have in most of recent history.

That’s just my two cents. I’m not an expert. But yes, I believe the key to making comics appreciation as essential and ubiquitous as other forms is to expand accessibility.

I’d say that depends on what you’re hoping to output. To start out in cinema you need a functioning camera… to start out in comics you just need some printer paper and a decent pen. Self-made black-and-white ‘zines were done in people’s bedrooms and then printed using a library photocopier.

Professionally printed comics may be a more restricted field, but start looking into webcomics and suddenly it opens up massively. People are making comics and posting them online weekly just for the love of it, and then gaining enough of a following that printed versions, (sometimes personally funded, sometimes crowd-funded) become possible later. Most of these webcomics don’t make it into the shops because they survive solely off and cater solely to their existing fan base. The anonymity of the internet also allows for stories on a greater range of topics that probably wouldn’t make it past a publisher due to perceived lack of selling potential or inappropriate material.

Of course that means that some web comics are of lower quality, because no one’s regulating what gets posted but the artist, however others are of a very high story-telling or artistic calibre. ‘The Less Than Epic Adventures of TJ and Amal’ is a personal favourite of mine, posted one page per week by the artist over 4 years.

Yes that gives webcomics a somewhat ephemeral nature – they can appear and disappear at the discretion of the artist, or their ability to pay for a web domain if they want one – but that’s always been the draw of comics. The move from photocopier print to internet blogs hasn’t changed that.

Glad to have The Artifice as an ally in bringing comics to kids.

Pupils get so much out of the different genre and often Graphics novels are a great way in to more difficult subjects such as physics and Shakepeare and WW2- brilliant.

The genre could be taught across the curriculum, from Art to Literacy to politics and philosophy. Detractors who dismiss comics as “kids’ stuff” clearly don’t think children are intelligent.

I like comics but I think that they have some obvious limitations. The biggest one is how there isn’t room for long passages of text unless you want to distract from the picture and make it like you’re reading a comic and reading a book at the same time. The other is that you only see limited glimpses that mimic moments in time and thus you’re only getting a truncated version of real events. That can be a plus when you’re showing multiple people talking at the same time but is a disadvantage more often than not, especially when you’re using the medium of comics as an educational tool.

Comics have unique limitations like any other medium. You mention not being able to have long passages as a limitation but you’re comparing comics and books too much by doing so. A long passage can span the course of pages of panels, accompanied by an array of images. The pacing of the text can elicit a different reading experience because you have to pause and consider the associated panel.

The second “limitation” you mention is also taken from a perspective that I just can’t agree with because it feels like you are comparing comics to movies. You are right, comics generally cannot physically move (there are examples of animated webcomics that do though), but then you need to consider WHY an artist deliberately decided to snapshot a moment. Sure, you can argue it’s a truncated experience, or you could argue that it brings attention to that particular moment and highlights it as significant. Why this expression, why that composition, why is the panel this shape, what is included in the framing, what is being cropped? You can do a lot of analysis on just a single panel in a comic depending on how you approach it.

I think it’s very helpful to look at adaptations to see how different mediums can elevate or take away from a story. For example, I recently read the graphic novel adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. The artist did an amazing job at taking advantage of the way that comics uniquely work as their own medium in adapting the story, making use of the paneling, varying colour palette, and dynamic style to create a really powerful presentation. I don’t think Slaughterhouse Five is easy to adapt either, time travel and the fractured narrative play such an integral part of the story that no one’s attempted another film adaptation since the 70s. But comics were the perfect medium for an adaptation.

If you work with comics as an educational tool, you have to work with it as its own medium. Books, movies, comics – they are all excellent tools for teaching but they all require different approaches to be useful.

Thank you for your comment! I have benefited from your critical viewpoint and I agree with your last point about how all media can be used as educational tools. I think that comics are just one of them. It would be interesting to compare different adaptations as well like you said.

I see what you’re saying. You strike a good point about how you can share a written passage over several panels. I’m not as sold on your other point about highlighting a single moment being special. My reasoning on that front is that you have to stuff a lot of moments into one and I much prefer say, an animated film where everything is arranged more organically. To each their own. There are good things about comics too, as they’re good at showing scenes that books can’t and animation often doesn’t. I wanted to highlight some of the negative aspects of comics since the article, for better or worse, deals only with the negative aspects of comics for education, not the limitations of comics themselves.

It’s exciting to see teachers and librarians starting to pick up on comics as a way to inspire kids to read, write, draw and get into storytelling.

We had some awesome comics making with families at the Pop Up Festival a few years back in London with Neill Cameron, Jamie Smart, Nana Li, Gary Northfield, Jamie Littler, David O’Connell…

Delighted to see this article. I’ve been visiting schools for the last few years giving kids my Comic Art Masterclass, based on my 25 years working for everyone from The Beano to Marvel comics and Doctor Who. This year alone I’ve taught comics in Jordan and Switzerland as well as everywhere from the Mull Of Kintyre to Cornwall & all points inbetween.

Since I did my masters’ dissertation on the translations of Asterix (how the medium works in different cultures, the translation of humour and the translation of cultural concepts) back in 2003, I am glad to read and support this article.

Your master’s dissertation seems like a really interesting source. I am sure it is a valuable contribution to the literature on comics. If it is available on a database, can you give me its full title? Thank you for supporting and liking my article.

If comics is an art form, it is an art best characterized by Bernadette on The Big Bang Theory as “picture books of flying men in their underwear”.

Great line but totally untrue.

Graphic novels may or may not be art, depending on their content.

What they definitely are is accessible and in terms of teaching basic literacy are very effective.

– V For Vendetta – Maus – We3 – The Invisibles – The Walking Dead – Some of Neil Gaiman’s work

The public perception of comics by people who have no understanding of the medium have no clue that you can tell a wide array of stories that don’t need to always involve an impossibly square jawed flying muscular man with a cape.

May I add “Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid in the World” or “Building Stories” both by Chris Ware. These are a couple of the tenderest works I’ve ever read.

Although not read any (yet), Joe Sacco’s work would also be an obvious addition of non-cape comics.

There are plenty of comics without “flying underwear” if you care to look.

Watchmen obviously doesn’t qualify, but its prose easily stands up to non-graphic novel standards. When I read it as a comics novice 20 years ago that was the most surprising thing about the book for me.

You could argue it’s one of the more ancient art forms; after all, some cave paintings are stories made from pictures with a time line. What could be more natural?

So The Big Bang Theory is a superior art form to comic books?

You’re confusing a genre (superhero stories) with a medium (graphic art / comic books / graphic novels, whatever term you like).

Based on your statement, prose fiction is a complete write-off because 50 Shades of Grey exists.

Watch out, apparently the minute you start studying anything in schools children hate it and are traumatised for life.

It would be great if comics were accepted in schools but the industry is almost extinct, with actual extinction just around the corner I imagine. Point of sale being a major factor along with distribution costs. People keep telling me print is dead, yak yak yak, it’s dead here because it’s been strangled, a look at the diverse market abroad, tells a different story.

Depends on where you live. The UK comic industry is far from dead, in fact it is thriving. For the past five or six years, successful UK comicbook/graphic novel publishers have been going from strength to strength, including, SelfMade Hero, No Brow, Blank Slate, Jonathan Cape and Titan amongst others, all of which have seen plenty of international success.

It might not be the comics industry we recognised from years ago with kids spending their precious weekly pocket money on comics that filled the newsstands. Now, it’s a burgeoning book market, with its own dedicated areas in Waterstones and Foyles, with parents putting their hands in their pocket instead.

These days there are dozens of Comic Conventions dotted around the country, littering the calendar year, packed with guest stars from all over the world, and not just your Marvel pencillers; French BD Auteurs mix with Manga superstars as well as our home-grown talent.

Kids comics too, in danger of being trampled underfoot by the unstoppable juggernaut that is adult graphic novels, are seeing a resurgence with The Phoenix weekly comic and its parade of book collections, and The Beano, which has had a fantastic revival the last couple of years and steadied its sales, bringing in young and vital new blood to the art and writing chores. No Brow have also brought out a fantastic imprint, Flying Eye Books, including the international success story that is Hilda by Luke Pearson.

I’ve been knocking around in this industry for 12 years and it’s fantastic to see what a diverse, exciting and successful medium comics has become in this country.

Couldn’t agree more. Also what’s happening now is pretty much what many people in comics envisaged when the graphic novel was first established in the uk booktrade during the 80s. It took a long time in construction but a thriving scene has been built.

Comics certainly not cheap these days. That much is true.

And the quest for comics to be taken seriously continues… if the uncultured must be taught to understand why blobs of oil on a canvas are worth millions then surely the cultural elite must be taught that a comic can be as worthy as a urinal.

No argument from me that graphic novels are an art form… But wish people wouldn’t keep lumping them in with literature… They’re clearly not the same thing.

Clearly? Really?

That’s funny. Because I think they very clearly are. They’re very clearly not novels (as in “just novels”) or short stories (as in “just short stories”), but they fulfill every criterion there is for being literature.

Nonsense. They are a visual medium and have more in common with film or “art” i.e. painting, etc, than they do with literature.

Surely comics came first and painting, films and writing are its children. The question is more, where do the other arts stand in relation to comics?

As a comic artist, this is a topic I’m really passionate about and I was happy to see such a well articulated and researched article on this subject! You did a great job covering it. Thank you for sharing your work!

I am so glad a comic artist commented on my article! I wish I could see your work. Thank you so much for your positive feedback!

While I agree that academic study is valuable and important (I’m an academic myself, in a different field), I think general accessibility is more important. And the media has a huge role to play in this.

Headlines for articles about comics which start which “POW! ZAP!” or some similar rubbish are still infuriatingly regular, and just serves to reinforce the mistaken assumption that all comics are about superheroes, and are for kids (though this is true for many, and many of those are excellent, thank you very much).

Then there’s the constant calling comics a genre (ARGH!).

The Times had a piece about the comics laureate recently, which predictably made both of those mistakes when trying to advertise the promotion of comics, ironically.

But articles like this make a great contribution. As do excellent projects like CLAw and the wonderful annual Comics Art Fest in the Lake District.

Academically it’s on the grow, too (see Nick Sousanis’ PhD thesis about comics, written in comic form – wonderful!). And long may this growth on all fronts continue!

Thank you for your comment! I agree that comics still have a lot of negative stereotypes and the idea of implementing them in academia is still being challenged. I would love to check that thesis you mentioned. It is really interesting that he made it in a comic form. I have just checked the art and it looks appealing. I will definitely read it when I get my hands on it! thank you for this recommendation.

I love me comics. Helped me get o levels grade As in English lit and lang. Only got a c in PE.

the more kids read the better, but it doesn’t have to be classic fiction books. it’s this narrowminded vision that puts kids off reading and education in general. my daughters teacher told us not to be concerned she was shunning the classic kids stories her sister devoured, instead she likes to research topics online, mostly about animals, but also countries, natural phenomena etc ….. she makes power point presentations up. she also likes to read those glossy coffee table books you get as gifts and put away the day after boxing day, never to be opened again. not all kids like enid blighton.

Thank you! I try to tell people the value of comics, but every one just looks at me sideways, maybe you can change this mindset. I mean people learn to read because of comics, yet they are frowned upon and outright banned for reading material in schools.

As an adolescent, interested in learning, I love educational graphic novels, and I would really love more of them!

Reading them is a unique experience. It’s somewhere in between a book and a movie. The artwork styles vary and people will no doubt has their favourites just like I do.

Too many people have the opinion that they are above comics and that they’re just for kids. Go into any comic shop and its full of businessmen in suits picking up their favourite books! Give comics a chance. You might just enjoy it!

My best friend has dyslexia and she had a lot of trouble with reading when I introduced her to comics they completely sucked her in and now she loves reading just like me. we read chapter books together. I am really proud of her.

That is really awesome! I’m glad you introduced her to comics.

Comics are a much faster way of conveying information and easier to memorize than plain text.

I enjoyed reading this article a lot. It is great to see referenced work here as well, it means I can come back here and read more on the topic if I want to.

Other comments mentioned how the stigma on comics used in the classroom is similar to film. I would like to read more about interpretations from critics on comics as an art medium as I have seen film hit a ceiling where it is either regarded as grossly commercial and arthouse with no traction. Do you have any recommendations on sources for this?

I wonder if reading more about comics journey through this criticism could help me more effectively champion film as an artistic medium as well.

Thank you! Sadly, I haven’t found a lot of sources that worked on the stigma of comics in the classroom except the one I mentioned by Kachorsky (2018).

I finished High School last year, one year and even though nobody did, when we got to choose books to read for projects, comics and graphic novels were completely allowed.

Great article! I too am interested in alternative mediums of storytelling that can be incorporated into the classroom alongside (or in some grades replace) traditional modes of storytelling. Perhaps, as comics are both visual and literary, they can be analysed for both content simultaneously. What I mean is, literary analysis as well as techniques specific to the medium such as composition, colouring and art style, which all contribute to story and impact.

Interesting examination, especially in the era of so many graphic novels.

Great discussion. Indeed comics in the classroom have a lot of value, but as with anything need to have a clear and focused purpose in the selection and use. Good to see this up here.

I love the visual of the comic components! Super helpful to know for anyone teaching about comics. Comics appear to be much like fiction: ways to broach a difficult or dry topic (as well as build emotional literacy and critical thinking skills). Thanks for sharing this article. It will be interesting to see whether policy makers will integrate comics into Australia’s curriculum at any point or whether graphic novel adaptations will find their way into the classroom.

It’s about time that someone started advocating for the educational use of comic books! When I was learning to read, my mother actually encouraged me to read comics, namely old Archie and Howard the Duck comics she owned as a child. Of course, I went on to read Superman and The Incredible Hulk instead, but comic books not only taught me how to read, but also served as my gateway to classic and modern literature.

This was an interesting ready, especially because I want to become an educator in the future.

From an educators perspective, comics are a GREAT resource in the classroom for any age/grade. I used graphic novels and comics in my 7th grade ELA classroom and it was extremely engaging. At first, the “non-comic readers” were not enthusiastic about it– they thought it would be too easy, boring, “childish,” etc. The “comic readers” were the most excited about it. Coincidentally, the students who would fight tooth and nail against reading novels were the ones practically leading our comic lessons every day. But the trick to successfully teaching with comics is to be creative; make lessons engaging, interesting, and challenging. Yes, it may be difficult to hit all the different learning styles but it is not impossible. I believe teaching comics are worth the effort. If done correctly, they will learn many skills that will translate through every aspect of life such as problem solving, critical thinking, analyzing, literacy, how to use text features properly, etc. Teaching with comics will make the self-identified “book-haters” look forward to reading and will help educators and students see the endless possibilities in the classroom (if we aren’t scared to try something new).

Thank you for your comment!

I think that everyone learns differently and comics, if done properly, can help learners who have difficulties reading textbooks and/or often find themselves easily immersed in a storyline. I use a book by Robert Cialdini in my course and one semester a student accidentally bought the comic book version, which I had no idea existed. I asked her to bring it in and said that I would pay her for it since she wanted to get the actual book anyway. My coworker said he knew about it, but would never tell students because it wasn’t educational. It was written by the author himself!

I did not find it easy to engage with personally, but I loaned it to one student in a different class who was interested in the topics but found it hard to do research. He read the entire book. He learned that way and the other student learned from the more standard presentation of text. All mediums have their place in education.

I abhor people who don’t see comics as genuine literature. There’s so much to be gleaned from stories like Dark Knight Returns and Maus and they don’t deserve to be dismissed as “childish.”

I use them at the college level. If you choose the right ones, it works very well.

Excellent article. Education and comics are nothing really new in Europe. When I was a teen, the Belgian government have used comics to pass general public health information such as safe sex practices, drug prevention, bullying, depression, suicide and the likes. Interesting to see this approach in the US which always seems to be late when it comes to those subjects.

This is really fascinating. I worked in an elementary school library for a time and so often teachers would discourage their students from checking out graphic novels. I always thought it was a bit unfair. The amount of pictures doesn’t lessen the impact the story can have on someone.

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Teaching with Comics and Graphic Novels 1st Edition

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35th Annual Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards Nominee!

This text will allow you to harness students’ love of comics and graphic novels while increasing critical thinking and engagement in the classroom. Author Tim Smyth offers a wide variety of lessons and ideas for using comics to teach close reading, working with textual evidence, literature adaptations, symbolism and culture, sequencing, essay writing, and more. He also models how to use comics to tackle tough topics and enhance social-emotional learning. Throughout the book, you’ll find a multitude of practical resources, including a variety of lesson plans―some quick and easy activities as well as more detailed ready-to-use unit plans. These thoughtful lessons meet the Common Core State Standards and are easy to adapt for any subject area or grade level to fit into your curriculum. Add this book to your professional library and you’ll have a new and exciting way of reaching and teaching your students!

• ISBN-10 0367520370
• ISBN-13 978-0367520373
• Edition 1st
• Publisher Routledge
• Publication date July 6, 2022
• Language English
• Dimensions 7.01 x 0.5 x 10 inches
• Print length 218 pages
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"Comics and graphic novels are finally being appreciated for the rich literary experience they offer readers. They allow students to see themselves in literature, and to engage with diverse voices, experiences, and perspectives. The powerful lessons in this book empower educators to use the power of comics and graphic novels to reach every reader. Highly recommended!"

―Laurie Halse Anderson, author of the graphic novels Speak and Wonder Woman: Tempest Tossed .

"Tim Smyth's Teaching with Comics and Graphic Novels is the preeminent text for any educator or librarian working to bring sequential narratives into the classroom. Tim makes it real and makes it plain how comics can be used to reach students in ways no other medium can. Teaching with Comics and Graphic Novels is an essential text for every classroom and library."

―Andrew Aydin, co-author of the graphic novels March and Run .

About the Author

Tim Smyth is a high school social studies educator and Reading Specialist of more than 20 years who travels the country giving professional development to educators on the power of teaching with comics. Smyth was also part of a global online comics in education program through the US State Department. He has been published in many outlets, such as PBS, and he also shares many resources on his website, TeachingWithComics.com. Smyth loves interacting on social media (@historycomics) and is the founder of two Facebook education communities―"Comic Book Teachers" and "Teaching With Comics." He lives in Bucks County, Pennsylvania with his wife and three comic book-loving children.

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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Routledge; 1st edition (July 6, 2022)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 218 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0367520370
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0367520373
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 14.1 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.01 x 0.5 x 10 inches
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Saefur Rochmat

Jurnal Pendidikan Fisika dan Teknologi

This development research will produce a product in the form of a comic-based physics module on vibration and wave material. The research objectives are to determine: (1) Feasibility, (2) practicality, and (3) the effectiveness of the module to improve students&#39; critical thinking skills. The research uses Research & Development which refers to the development of ADDIE namely Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation and Evaluation. The analysis and design stages are developed based on the needs of students by displaying the discussion of comic characters which aims to make students able to think critically. The product validation stage involves 4 validators, namely two media experts and 2 material experts to assess the module design, material feasibility, and language feasibility. The results of the validation of the feasibility of the module obtained 82% from the 2 media experts and 82% from the 2 material experts--all of which were within the category of &quot;Very Valid&q...

Jurnal Ilmiah Pendidikan Fisika

Devi Retno Rosdiana

This study was conducted to develop temperature and heat learning media for high school students to improve their critical thinking skills regarding the phenomena related to temperature and heat material. This study uses the DDDE (Decide, Design, Development, Evaluation) method. This research begins with the stages of determining digital comics as learning media, compiling storylines and sketching comic images, compiling complete comics along with character dialogues, and evaluating the final results of digital comics. Three validators carried out validation test. The results of the validation test showed that digital comics were significantly suitable to be used as supporting media for temperature and heat learning based on several criteria, including learning aspects of 89.78%, material aspects of 93%, and media aspects 93.17%. These digital comics were consequently suitable to be used as a medium for supporting online learning and had time efficiency in delivering material. The i...

International Online Journal of Education and Teaching (IOJET)

Nur Akcanca

Comics, which attract attention with their adaptation to changing conditions in the historical process, are increasing their popularity both in current life and in the field of education. They can be used as a powerful supplementary teaching tool concretizing abstract concepts, especially in lessons such as Science. They can also be used to convey abstract concepts to students in an entertaining way. From this point of view, the study aimed to reveal the general characteristics, structure, elements, and historical development of comics at a theoretical level. The study, which adopted a qualitative research design, was based on a wide range of a literature review focusing on comics in an educational context as alternative resources to use in science education. The data collected were coded, grouped, and reorganized as a report to present within the context of science education for the teachers who might plan to use comics in their classes, and researchers who might scrutinize the influence of comics in teaching science at different levels.

Al-Jabar : Jurnal Pendidikan Matematika

Baiduri Baiduri

To prepare students to compete in 21st-century skills, the Ministry of Education and Culture of the Republic of Indonesia integrates character education into school subjects. However, as a medium, comics do not contain the level of character values, exploration, and critical thinking skills in problem-solving on geometry material. Therefore, the aim of this study is to produce digital media based on character values on mathematical critical thinking skills in solving problems related to learning styles for eighth-grade students. This development research employed the 4-D method (Define, Design, Develop, and Disseminate). The study indicates that the digital comic learning media is valid with a total average score of 3.60 based on the material expert’s validation and 3.50 based on the media expert’s validation. The eight-grade students&#39; responses were positive (92%) based on the trials. The learning outcomes in terms of kinesthetic, auditory, and visual learning styles used in th...

Filiz Demirci

The objective of this study is to research the effects of using concept cartoons in the " Solar System and Beyond " unit, which is included in seventh grade science lessons, on students' critical thinking skills. The study group consisted of 58 students, selected using an appropriate sampling method, who were students in a state secondary school, which is close to the city centre. The study used a pre-test and post-test matched control group design. During the three-week-long experimental teaching process, the students in the control group (n=30) were taught according to the curriculum of science lessons, while concept cartoons developed by the researchers were used with the students in the experimental group (n= 28). The Cornell Critical Thinking Test-Level X (CCT-X), as developed by Ennis & Millman (1989), was used as the data collection tool. The results of the study showed decreases in the critical thinking skills scores of the students in the control group, while a statistically significant difference was found in the critical thinking skills of the students in the experimental group. In addition, a statistically significant difference was observed in favour of the experimental group when comparing the CCT-X scores of the experimental group's use of concept cartoons and those of the control group's used existing teaching methods.

GATR Global Journal of Business Social Sciences Review

tria umbara

Objective - The fundamental scientific literacy skills of primary learners remains crucial as the STEM and Industry 4.0 thrusts begin to configurate across levels. Espousing the view that a visual fun-laden learning medium fosters learners’ understanding on natural phenomena and its scientific literacy, this research aims to examine the effect of inquiry-based science comics as a learning medium in improving primary learners&#39; scientific literacy skills. Methodology/Technique –This study employs the quasi-experimental method, specifically, the pre-test/post-test control group design. Three levels of learners’ scientific literacy which covers scientific concepts and phenomena (LTC-1), thinking (LTC-2), and scientific inquiry processes (LTC-3) were quantitatively measured by using problem-set tests. The inquiry sequences of observing, questioning, exploring, discussing and evaluating were integral features of the inquiry-based comics and provided the direction of the learning sessi...

Jurnal Penelitian Pendidikan IPA

nia maulidah

This study aims to determine the increase in understanding of elementary school science concepts using media science comics. The method used in this research is qualitative research with data collection techniques, namely literature studies. The data collection technique used is by collecting and studying data on various research results from journals, theses, scientific articles, and relevant journals. The data that has been obtained, analyzed, and studied in-depth, systematically, and critically are then described in a narrative. Based on the results of research, the literature study states that the use of media science comics can improve understanding of the concept of science in elementary schools. From the results of the research analysis showed that the results of the pretest scores of students had low concept understanding in the experimental class and the control class. After being given treatment, the results of the posttest scores showed a significant increase in the exper...

GATR Journals

Objective-The fundamental scientific literacy skills of primary learners remains crucial as the STEM and Industry 4.0 thrusts begin to configurate across levels. Espousing the view that a visual fun-laden learning medium fosters learners' understanding on natural phenomena and its scientific literacy, this research aims to examine the effect of inquiry-based science comics as a learning medium in improving primary learners' scientific literacy skills. Methodology/Technique-This study employs the quasi-experimental method, specifically, the pre-test/post-test control group design. Three levels of learners' scientific literacy which covers scientific concepts and phenomena (LTC-1), thinking (LTC-2), and scientific inquiry processes (LTC-3) were quantitatively measured by using problem-set tests. The inquiry sequences of observing, questioning, exploring, discussing and evaluating were integral features of the inquiry-based comics and provided the direction of the learning sessions. Improvements in the learners' scientific literacy skills were qualitatively triangulated through series of class observations, learners' experiments and related artefacts, and post-mortem group discussion. Finding-The results show that there was a significant difference in students' scientific literacy using the inquiry-based comic. The increase in gained score occurred in the first (LTC-1) and second (LTC-2) level of scientific literacy. The skills of making diagrams, charting data and drawing conclusions also progressed in the experimental group. This finding indicates that inquiry-based science comics provide a support platform in developing the fundamental scientific literacy skills of primary graders. Novelty-The results of this study contribute to the limited literature on the use of instructional inquiry-based science comics in order to leverage scientific literacy skills of primary years. Type of Paper: Empirical.

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The 42nd Annual International Conference on Critical Thinking

Join Us for The 42nd Annual International Conference on Critical Thinking

Includes 10 Weeks of Free Membership at Our Subscription Website: The Center for Critical Thinking Community Online ! Access Begins July 13th!

Webcam Highly Recommended

Conference Theme:

Critical Thinking - Essential to Effective Reasoning in All Subjects, Fields and Professions

How Do We Make Sense of the World's Growing Complexity & Become More Effective Within It?

The Answer: Critical Thinking

A different type of conference.

• Highly interactive sessions filled with stimulating discussions and activities.
• Concepts and tools you can immediately apply to your work, life, learning, and teaching. Nothing "purely academic" is taught here!
• Sessions occurring multiple times to accommodate participants in different time zones.
• Ten weeks' free access to the Center for Critical Thinking Community Online - the world's largest repository of critical thinking publications, videos, activities, and interaction among fellow critical thinking enthusiasts.

Conference Rates

Types of sessions, focal sessions.

This year's Focal Sessions are live online workshops led by Fellows and Scholars of the Foundation for Critical Thinking. These sessions are 'Focal' because they focus on the very foundations, or the central ideas, in a rich conception of critical thinking. Each Focal Session targets one or more essential concepts or sets of principles in critical thinking, often in connection with essential applications of critical thinking. Most Focal Sessions are appropriate for both new and returning attendees, while a few are for those who have worked with us before; these will be plainly marked as 'Advanced Sessions'

Focal Sessions involve minimal lecture and a great deal of interactive group work. 

Guest Presentations

"how can i prepare to get the most from this conference", focal session presenters, dr. linda elder.

Dr. Gerald Nosich

Dr. Gerald Nosich is a noted authority on critical thinking and has given more than 250 workshops to instructors and governmental agencies on all aspects of teaching it. He is the author of Reasons and Arguments, Learning to Think Things Through: A Guide to Critical Thinking Across the Curriculum , and Critical Writing: Using the Concepts and Processes of Critical Thinking to Write a Paper . Dr. Nosich has given workshops for instructors at all levels of education  in the United States, Canada, Thailand, Lithuania, Austria, Germany, Singapore and England. He has worked with the U.S. Department of Education on a project for a National Assessment of Higher Order Thinking Skills; given teleconferences sponsored by PBS and Starlink on teaching for critical thinking; served as a consultant for ACT in Critical Thinking and Language Arts assessment; and been featured as a Noted Scholar at the University of British Columbia.  He is author of numerous articles, audio- and videotapes on critical thinking.  He has been Assistant Director at the Center for Critical Thinking at Sonoma State University. Dr. Nosich is Professor Emeritus at the State University of New York Buffalo State and at the University of New Orleans.

Dr. Carmen Polka

Dr. Carmen Polka has worked diligently to infuse critical thinking into her classroom instruction, curriculum, and assessment for nearly twenty years. Focused on transforming education through the implementation of quality instructional practices, Dr. Polka instigated and co-authored the Colorado Academic State Standards targeting research and reasoning based on the Paul-Elder framework. As a leader and critical thinking expert in her district, she led professional development and coached K-12 teachers to effectively utilize Paulian theory. Dr. Polka is currently a principal at an elementary school, and she recently earned her doctorate in the Educational Leadership and Policy Studies program at the University of Northern Colorado. She is also a licensed K-12 Special Education teacher.

Dr. Paul Bankes

For nearly twenty years, Dr. Bankes has played an important leadership role in fostering the Paulian conception of critical thinking in multiple school districts. As a principal, he led the implementation of this critical thinking approach to bring about state-recognized levels of achievement in three different Title I schools – a high school, a middle school, and an elementary school. He helped author the reasoning portion of the Colorado Academic Standards that are based on the Paul-Elder framework. In addition to his administrative experience, Dr. Bankes was an elementary school teacher, continues teaching critical thinking courses at the college level, and is currently serving as a Director on his School Board of Education.

Dr. Brian Barnes

Dr. Brian Barnes holds a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Humanities and an MA in Philosophy from the University of Louisville. Barnes is a veteran of the US Army, along with other non-academic careers, and currently teaches face-to-face and online classes at several universities in traditional philosophy topics, sustainability, and critical thinking. He has co-authored articles examining critical thinking strategies and tactics for the National Teaching and Learning Forum and is author of the textbook, The Central Question: Critical Engagement with Business Ethics . Barnes co-hosts the weekly radio show, Critical Thinking for Everyone! , on 106.5 Forward Radio in Louisville; he also created Adventures in Critical Thinking , a critical thinking comic book series.

Dr. Linda Tym

Dr. Linda Tym is an Associate Professor of English in Tennessee. Originally from Canada, she completed her PhD studies at the University of Edinburgh and was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at The Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. She is currently pursuing her Certification in the Paul-Elder Approach to Critical Thinking under the mentorship of Dr. Elder. In addition to Dr. Tym's focus on critical thinking, her research focuses on memory studies, Scottish literature, and Scottish-Canadian diasporic literature. Her work has been published in the Scottish Literary Review, Journal of the Short Story in English, Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks: Gender series, and Gale Cengage’s Contemporary Literary Criticism series.

What People Say About Our Conferences

Overview of sessions.

• A more visually intuitive Overview of Sessions is available her e
• A detailed daily schedule can be seen here
• Full Session Descriptions can be seen here

Sunday, July 24:

1:00 p.m. - 7:00p.m. edt.

Pre-Conference

• Placing Critical Thinking at the Heart of Teaching and Learning Every Day … Dr. Brian Barnes
• Improving Student Writing in Any Class Through Explicit Tools of Critical Thinking... Dr. Gerald Nosich
• Advanced Session: Improving Your Instruction Through an Enriched Understanding of Critical Thinking Fundamentals... Dr. Paul Bankes

MONDAY, July 25:

Pre-recorded.

• *Introduction to the Conference … Dr. Linda Elder *Please view before attending sessions.

12:00 p.m. - 2:30 p.m. EDT

Focal Sessions I Choose from the following…

• Foundational for New Participants: Understanding Critical Thinking as Essential to Education in Any Field of Study and at Every Level… Dr. Linda Elder
• For Business and Government: Using Critical Thinking to Analyze Problems … Dr. Paul Bankes
• For Returning Attendees: Practice Deconstructing Problems in Your Classes or Profession… Dr. Linda Tym
• *Introduction to the Conference … Dr. Linda Elder *If you haven't already, please view before attending sessions.

3:30 p.m. - 6:00 p.m. EDT

Focal Sessions II

Choose from the following …

• Teaching Students to Properly Assess Reasoning in Every Course… Dr. Gerald Nosich 
• Connecting Evidence-Based Instruction to the Rich Tools of Critical Thinking... Dr. Paul Bankes
• For Returning Attendees: Where Are You in the Stages of Critical Thinking Development?…  Dr. Carmen Polka 

8:00 p.m. - 10:30 p.m. EDT

Focal Sessions III

Choose from the following…

• Repeat (Foundational for New Registrants): Understanding Critical Thinking as Essential to Education in Any Field of Study and at Every Level... Dr. Gerald Nosich
• Repeat: Connecting Evidence-Based Instruction Based on the Broader Tools of Critical Thinking... Dr. Linda Elder
• Repeat (For Returning Attendees) : Practice Deconstructing Problems in Your Classes or Profession … Dr. Linda Tym

TUESDAY, July 26:

Focal sessions iv, choose from the following…  .

• Helping Students Learn the Fundamental and Powerful Concepts in Your Courses ... Dr. Linda Elder
• For Business and Government: Using Critical Thinking to Evaluate Alternatives in Complex Contexts... Dr. Brian Barnes
• Practice Deconstructing the Reasoning Embedded in Articles or Chapters to Improve Your Instruction and/or Knowledge Base in Any Field... Dr. Paul Bankes

3:30 p.m. - 6:00p.m. EDT

Focal Sessions V

Choose from the Following Focal Sessions...

• Why Education Should Entail the Development of Intellectual Character as Well as Skills and Abilities... Dr. Gerald Nosich
• Helping Students Learn to Reason Through Social, Political, and Environmental Issues Using the Tools of Critical Thinking... Dr. Carmen Polka
• How Egocentric and Sociocentric Thinking Lead to Belief in Misinformation, Fake News, Conspiracy Theories and All Manner of Nonsense... Dr. Brian Barnes

Focal Sessions VI

Choose one of the following sessions to attend…

• Repeat: Helping Students Learn the Fundamental and Powerful Concepts in Your Courses ... Dr. Gerald Nosich
• Educating for Freedom of Thought and Why This is Essential to Cultivating Fairminded Critical Societies  … Dr. Linda Elder
• Repeat: Practice Deconstructing the Reasoning Embedded in Articles or Chapters - to Improve Your Instruction and/or Knowledge Base in any Field ... Dr. Paul Bankes 

WEDNESDAY, July 27:

3:00 p.m. edt.

Guest Presentations Posted

• Read Guest Presentation Descriptions Here

8:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m. EDT

Special Meetings on Professional Development (interested participants can choose one at the conference)...

• K-12... Dr. Linda Elder
• Higher Education... Dr. Gerald Nosich
• Business & Government... Dr. Brian Barnes

THURSDAY, July 28:

Focal sessions vii.

• How to Approach Students as Thinkers in K-12 Instruction ... Dr. Paul Bankes
• How to Assess Yourself as a Reasoner; How Students Can Assess Themselves as Reasoners... Dr. Brian Barnes
• Why Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Social Justice and Anti-Racism Require Critical Thinking... Dr. Linda Elder

Focal Sessions VIII

• Reworking Your Syllabus Using Critical Thinking Foundations ... Dr. Gerald Nosich
• Distinguish Questions of Fact, Preference and Judgment ... Dr. Paul Bankes
• For Administrators: How to Support Critical Thinking at Your Institution ... Dr. Carmen Polka

Focal Sessions IX

• Repeat: How to Assess Yourself as a Reasoner; How Students Can Assess Themselves as Reasoners ... Dr. Brian Barnes
• Repeat: Reworking Your Syllabus Through Critical Thinking Foundations ... Dr. Gerald Nosich
• Critical Thinking Therapy for Mental Health and Self-Actualization ... Dr. Linda Elder

FRIDAY, July 29:

Choose from the following closing sessions..., 12:00 p.m. - 1:00 p.m. edt.

• Early Closing Session ... Dr. Linda Elder
• Late Closing Session... Dr. Gerald Nosich

'X-Men '97's Asteroid M Explained: Where Is Magneto Hiding Out?

It has a swimming pool. I'm not kidding.

Editor's note: The below contains spoilers for X-Men '97 Episode 9.

The Big Picture

• X-Men '97 Episode 9 re-introduces Asteroid M, Magneto's base of operations and a symbol of the ongoing conflict between Magneto and Charles Xavier's philosophies.
• X-Men: The Animated Series features Asteroid M in a two-part episode that foreshadows X-Men '97 's themes.
• Asteroid M has a long and complicated history in the X-Men comics, with Magneto repeatedly transforming his orbiting space station into a mutant refuge.

As of X-Men '97 Episode 9, Magneto ( Matthew Waterson ) has truly had " enough ." The Master of Magnetism is re-embracing his former ways, even turning his rage upon his own kind by brutally sundering Wolverine's ( Cal Dodd ) Adamantium-infused skeleton from his flesh. Most of Magneto's scenes in this penultimate episode, including that harrowing Wolverine incident, occur on a giant floating asteroid furnished with habitable rooms. This is Asteroid M , Magneto's " supervillain " lair and the physical embodiment of his desire for mutant safety. The location first appeared in Stan Lee and Jack Kirby 's inaugural X-Men comics run and evolved across the decades. Although Asteroid M makes its X-Men '97 debut in Episode 9, X-Men: The Animated Series Season 4 introduces Asteroid M and its thematic connotations.

X-Men '97

A band of mutants use their uncanny gifts to protect a world that hates and fears them; they're challenged like never before, forced to face a dangerous and unexpected new future.

What Is Asteroid M in Marvel Comics?

Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created Asteroid M as a headquarters for Magneto that's separate from Earth-bound threats , be they humans or X-Men. (Who can blame him?) The orbiting space station fuses asteroid rock with cutting-edge technology, including a weapons arsenal and a cloaking device that hides the base from human radar. Asteroid M's levels are divided into private rooms, a hangar bay, a library, and an observation area overlooking the planet (which is quite the metaphor). Its title, although in line with Magneto's alliterative naming conventions, references astrophysics. According to the Oxford University Press's Reference website , M-class asteroids "are believed to have metallic (nickel–iron) compositions" higher than other asteroids.

Asteroid M has taken several forms throughout the years. In 1964's X-Men #5, Magneto creates the base to house his Brotherhood of Evil Mutants . The organization's newest recruits, Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch , don't believe in their father's agenda and serve Magneto out of obligation. Wanda solves the twins' moral dilemma by helping the X-Men destroy Asteroid M. Magneto repairs what remains only for Warlock, an alien being, to decimate it during a separate encounter.

What Happens to Asteroid M in the ‘X-Men’ Comics?

Magneto's "third time's the charm" attempt might be a contingency plan in case his alliance with the Hellfire Club fails, but it boasts lavish hotel amenities like a swimming pool. Those design choices could be slightly indulgent since Magneto self-isolates on Asteroid M after he breaks up with Rogue in the Savage Land and his twins once again abandon him for the X-Men. A mutant group named the Acolytes interrupts his solitude . The Acolytes, led by Fabian Cortez, worship Magneto as their lord and savior. Cortez, however, is an undercover agent for the Upstarts, a competitive group where mutants kill other mutants.

The Acolytes inspire Magneto to reform Asteroid M into a mutant refuge. Cortez then destroys Asteroid M, murdering the Acolytes and spreading rumors of Magneto's martyr-like death. Asteroid M's shattered pieces fall into the ocean. The X-Men turn the remnants into Utopia , their new base and one of several failed mutant nation-states like Genosha . Describing Utopia as a failure spoils its fate: After enduring several incursions , the events of the Avengers vs. X-Men comic demolish Utopia.

Naturally, Magneto survived Cortez's assassination attempt. Because he isn't one to be deterred, he co-opts Cable's own orbiting space station and enhances it with Shi'ar Imperium technology . The result is Avalon, a new Asteroid M in all but name. The mutant stronghold falls in battle, but not before an infuriated Magneto tears Wolverine's skeleton out. Since then, Asteroid M was last seen in 2018's X-Men: Blue . Similarly to X-Men '97 , humanity's evil drives Magneto to his breaking point. He surrenders leadership of the X-Men and reforms the Brotherhood of Mutants , using Asteroid M as his base.

How Does ‘X-Men: The Animated Series’ Use Asteroid M?

X-Men: The Animated Series incorporates Asteroid M via Season 4's two-part episode, "Sanctuary." Magneto ( David Hemblen ) sends the United Nations into a tizzy by announcing his plan to establish Asteroid M as an independent mutant haven. He also intends to liberate the enslaved mutants on Genosha. For all his theatrics, Magneto only promises violence if humanity interferes. Asteroid M — built by scientists using Savage Land technology — symbolizes mutant independence and peace . If Magneto uses stolen missiles as nuclear deterrents, that's because he knows how humans work .

'X-Men ‘97' Goes Back to Its Roots With the New (Old) Suits

X-Men: The Animated Series reinterprets Fabian Cortez ( Jeffrey Max Nicholls ) and the Acolytes as Genosha-based resistance fighters. Cortez doesn't have ulterior motives, and his loyalty evaporates once he realizes that Magneto won't make the first move against humanity . "I came here to rescue my people," Magneto declares, "not to avenge them." Cortez, who can increase or decrease another mutant's ability, drains Magneto of his powers, usurps Asteroid M, and frames the X-Men for Magneto's "murder." The X-Men stop Cortez by infiltrating the station. Healed by Earth's electronic fields, Magneto delivers the final blow against the base he created.

Before X-Men '97 kicked off its three-part finale, former showrunner Beau DeMayo listed the "Sanctuary" two-parter as one of six original episodes with ties to the finale . Indeed, Magneto brings a rebuilt Asteroid M to the X-Men's doorstep in Episode 9, "Tolerance Is Extinction — Part 2." It's a literal offering: Magneto promises mutantkind a new dream to replace Charles Xavier's ( Ross Marquand ) broken one. Roberto Da Costa ( Gui Agustini ) and a demoralized Rogue ( Lenore Zann ) accept, joining Magneto on Asteroid M.

Asteroid M Symbolizes ‘X-Men ‘97’s Themes

The symbolism goes even further once the X-Men breach Asteroid M's defenses. Magneto has constructed a throne from the head and hand of the Sentinel responsible for demolishing Genosha , the same one Gambit ( A.J. LoCascio ) destroyed with his dying breath. Not only is it a justifiably vindictive move on Magneto's part, Gambit's sacrifice saved countless mutant lives. His final actions embody Magneto's lifelong fight.

X-Men: The Animated Series ' "Sanctuary" episodes do more than establish Asteroid M for X-Men '97 . They're a narrative precursor poking fundamental holes in Charles Xavier's philosophy and the devastating consequences his stance has wrought . A mutant from Charles's past declares that he "made [Asteroid M] necessary," a notion the emotionally eviscerated Xavier cannot bear. Much like X-Men '97 acknowledges that Magneto has always been right without sanitizing his flawed choices, "Sanctuary" sympathetically explores Charles' psychology but doesn't excuse his culpability. And when Charles believes Magneto died on Asteroid M, he leads his dear friend's funeral by revealing his backstory as a Holocaust survivor. "Though I abhorred his methods," Charles muses, "I cannot fault his strength of character."

Undoubtedly, Magneto's strike against Wolverine questions that strength of character. Hate has long poisoned Magneto's veins, and after Genosha, it's rotting them. Yet as disheartening as it is to see Charles and Magneto on opposing sides again, what else can Magneto do? The first Asteroid M failed. Genosha failed. He won't permit another tragedy. And if the comic book arcs X-Men '97 has adapted are any indication, then Season 2 holds a far worse future for both men .

New episodes of X-Men '97 premiere every Wednesday on Disney+ in the U.S.

Watch on Disney+

Comics in the Classroom – Latest

Comics in the classroom.

The use of comics in the classroom has continued to gain traction as an effective educational tool. Here are some trends and developments you might find in the latest discourse:

• Diverse Content: Comics have increasingly featured diverse characters and narratives, reflecting a broader range of cultural backgrounds, identities, and experiences. This inclusivity helps students relate to the material and promotes empathy and understanding.
• Graphic Novels as Literature: Graphic novels are increasingly being recognized as legitimate works of literature. Leading to their inclusion in school curricula alongside traditional texts. Educators appreciate their ability to engage students who may struggle with traditional prose and to teach literary analysis through visual storytelling.
• Visual Literacy: Comics help develop visual literacy skills by requiring readers to interpret visual cues alongside written text. Teachers use comics to teach students how to analyze visual elements. Such as panel layout, framing, and character expression, fostering critical thinking and comprehension skills.
• Cross-disciplinary Applications: Comics are used across various subjects, including English language arts, history, science, and even mathematics. Educators create or incorporate comics that explore complex concepts in a visually engaging manner. Making abstract ideas more accessible and memorable for students.

More here…

• Digital Platforms and Tools: Digital comics platforms and creation tools are increasingly integrated into classrooms. Allowing educators to access a wide range of comics and facilitate student creation of their own comics. These digital resources offer additional opportunities for interactive learning and collaboration.
• Social and Emotional Learning (SEL): Comics are used to address social and emotional learning goals by exploring themes. Such as empathy, resilience, and conflict resolution. They provide a safe space for students to explore and discuss complex emotions and social issues.
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Brennan lee mulligan teases calamity's impact on critical role campaign 3.

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How Billy Baker Is Returning In All American Season 6 (Despite His Season 5 Death)

George’s last young sheldon line highlights the real tragedy of his death, why phoebe dynevor's daphne is missing from bridgerton season 3.

Brennan Lee Mulligan discusses connections between EXU: Calamity and Critical Role's third campaign. Mulligan was the Dungeon Master for EXU: Calamity set centuries before the events of Critical Role's main campaigns, exploring the events leading up to The Calamity, an apocalyptic event that changed the course of Exandria's history. Campaign 3 led to a cataclysmic event with the Apogee Solstice and is exploring the fallout.

In an exclusive interview with Screen Rant to promote Dimension 20's new season, The Ravening War , Mulligan shared his excitement about the EXU: Calamity Easter egg in a recent Critical Role episode. He also discusses the ramifications of EXU: Calamity on Campaign 3, revealing what he and Matt Mercer talked about during their preparation for EXU: Calamity . Mulligan also teases the larger cosmological connections, saying a lot of ties between Campaign 3 and EXU: Calamity have already come into play. Check out Mulligan's full quote and interview below:

Brennan Lee Mulligan: When Laerry's name came up, I went, [Gasp]. There's this wonderful moment especially because the moment is Aabria at the table being like "Lauren?" It has such a joy to it. Thinking about the ramifications and the fallout of Calamity, and how they moved throughout campaign 3. In early conversations about Calamity we were talking through leylines and Apogee Solstice and a bunch of the bigger cosmological things. One of the benefits of going that far in the past is that Avalir can have whatever shape it needs to have, because it's destroyed X amount of centuries before the events of campaign one. But the cosmological stuff is incredibly pression. Those things have big world spanning, leylines and the moons and all of that stuff. It's quite, quite significant. So I think that in a lot of ways, a lot of that has come back into Campaign 3 already.

How EXU: Calamity Could Play Into Critical Role Campaign 3

Campaign 3 has been the most interconnected of Critical Role's campaigns, tying together elements from Campaign 1 , Campaign 2, and Exandria Unlimited . Episode 51 saw the Apogee Solstice come to pass and Ludinus Da’leth enact his goal, revealing he wants to end the Gods control over Exandria. During his monologue, Da'leth revealed that he has been working towards this goal for a thousand years, pointing to him living through the Calamity.

Related: Critical Role's House Rules On Resurrection Makes Death In D&D Better

The Calamity changed everything, ending the Age of Arcana and separating the Gods from Exandria either by banishment or the Divine Gate. A recent episode of Critical Role dropped the name Laerryn, Aabria Iyengar's EXU: Calamity character, and with Da'leth potentially living through the Calamity, this could be the first of many direct tie-ins. EXU: Calamity only shows the start of the cataclysmic event from one group's perspective, but it did show the catalyst that set the events in motion. This could be crucial to understanding Da'Leth's motivations.

The cosmological elements that Mulligan references have played a major part in Critical Role's Campaign 3 from the start. However, EXU: Calamity left a lot of loose ends, including Cerrit escaping with his children and the Otiluke's Resilient Sphere sent to them by Patia Por'co. Hopefully, the actions taken by those lost in the Calamity could prove to be the key to stopping Da'leth, potentially redeeming them for having a part in starting the Calamity and allowing them to finally be remembered.

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Serge Schmemann

Editorial Board Member

Silencing Independent Voices Is Not the Way to Join the West

In Tbilisi, Georgia, the country’s parliament passed a “foreign agent” bill on Tuesday that, according to the ruling Georgian Dream party, will increase transparency on foreign funding of nongovernmental groups and media outlets.

But the thousands of Georgians who have been demonstrating in the streets since the measure was first introduced don’t agree with that description. Nor does the Biden administration, nor the European Union. They see the bill for what it is: a repressive measure intended to silence independent NGOs and media and move Georgia closer to the Kremlin’s orbit.

The law is modeled on one Russia enacted in 2012, which the Kremlin has used to smear or silence anyone challenging the government. The Georgian variant — widely known as the “Russian law” — would require organizations getting more than a fifth of their funding from abroad to register as “bearing the interests of a foreign power” or face stiff fines. The law was first introduced last year and withdrawn under heavy protest; this year the protests failed to dissuade the ruling party. Georgia’s largely ceremonial president, Salome Zourabichvili, says she will veto it, but Georgian Dream has enough votes to override her.

Why is the ruling party doing this?

One reason is the national elections set for October: Tamping down the opposition and the independent press will help Georgian Dream stay in power, which it’s held since 2012. The party has demonstrated distinctly authoritarian ambitions.

The more worrisome possibility is that Georgian Dream, the creation of the richest man in Georgia, Bidzina Ivanishvili, wants to get on the right side of Russia. Ivanishvili, who was prime minister from 2012 to 2013 and still wields considerable power behind the scenes, initially took a robust anti-Moscow stance, but that has been changing, especially since Russia invaded Ukraine.

The ruling party maintains that it is still keen on joining the European Union, which formally granted Georgia candidate status in December. The party has little choice, given that the overwhelming majority of Georgians are in favor of moving westward. But the party’s actions and words have pointed the other way, either out of fear of Russia — not irrational, given that Russia invaded Georgia in 2008 — or for gain, or to keep the party in power.

The United States and the European Union have made no secret of their alarm and annoyance. A State Department statement condemned the “foreign influence” legislation, warning that the law and Georgian Dream’s anti-Western rhetoric “put Georgia on a precarious trajectory.” A U.S. official warned that Washington may slap some financial and travel restrictions on some Georgian officials. It may not be too late.

Paul Krugman

Opinion Columnist

Is Disinflation Back on Track?

The latest news on inflation has been pretty good. It has also been extremely weird. And that weirdness is, in a way, the message.

With underlying inflation fairly low but probably still above the Fed’s 2 percent target and people still worried that it might go back up, quirky measurement issues can lead to big mood swings that are quickly reversed when the next numbers come in — or sometimes even a few hours after the initial announcement, once knowledgeable people have had some time to dig into the details.

There were two big official inflation reports in the past couple of days: the Producer Price Index (what we used to call wholesale prices) on Tuesday and the Consumer Price Index on Wednesday morning . There was also a private survey from the National Federation of Independent Business that may add some clarity.

So what do I mean by “weirdness”? On Tuesday I was busy most of the day with plumbers and dentists, so I was able to check in on events and commentary only once in a while. But this enforced limitation on the information flow might actually have given me more perspective. The first thing I saw was a hot P.P.I., with inflation coming in well above expectations. There was much wailing and rending of garments. Then, as the analysts I follow had time to parse the details, they started to declare that this was actually a good report.

Financial markets seemed to agree. One quick and dirty way to judge how markets view inflation data is to look at the yield on two-year U.S. Treasuries, which largely reflects what people think the Fed is going to do. If inflation looks hot, they expect the Fed to keep rates high and maybe even increase them; if it looks cool, they expect the opposite.

And if you look at two-year yields over the past few days, you see the market reaction matching my sense of the commentary:

Yields spiked when the P.P.I. report was released, then fell back once there was time to dig into the numbers, ending the day lower than they started.

On the other hand, markets from the get-go liked the C.P.I., which seemed to show inflation resuming its downward trend, with yields falling sharply. But as I write, analysts are still digging into the details. Will they be less optimistic by evening? Probably not: Early commentary seems, if anything, to be saying that the numbers were even better than they first appeared. But after yesterday, I’m going to wait and see.

I also mentioned the survey from the N.F.I.B., which represents small and medium businesses. One question it asks is whether businesses are planning to raise or lower prices over the next three months; the percentage difference from current numbers is often a useful indicator of inflation trends. And that spread is currently close to what it was before the pandemic, although slightly higher:

So my best guess? The acceleration in measured inflation over the past few months was probably a statistical illusion; inflation wasn’t as low as it seemed in late 2023 but probably hasn’t risen much, if at all. Underlying annual inflation is probably around 2.5 percent, maybe even less. So my guess is that we’ve already won this war — that we have basically achieved a soft landing, with low unemployment and acceptably low inflation.

But I could be wrong, and even if I’m right, it’s going to take at least a few more months of good inflation news before this happy reality sinks in.

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Frank Bruni

Contributing Opinion Writer

Biden’s Daring Debate Proposal Could Recharge His Campaign

I’ve been waiting and hoping — no, I’ve been desperate — for President Biden to do two things. One, boldly project strength. Two, recognize that he cannot coast to re-election and that he needs to shake up the state of the presidential race.

With his offer on Wednesday to debate Donald Trump at least twice before the election and as early as next month, he has done just that.

The Biden campaign’s proposal came with the condition that the debates be in a television studio and there be no audience present to hoot, holler and otherwise interrupt. Trump subsequently indicated that he was onboard, though it wasn’t clear if he would agree to Biden’s terms.

By emphasizing debates and suggesting that they start soon, Biden is taking a risk. But it’s a necessary one. Trump and his supporters lean hard on the charge that Biden is too rickety — in terms of both energy and intellect — to face off against Trump, and they have sold that idea skillfully and mercilessly, with the help of right-wing news organizations that portray Biden as a doddering wreck. It’s selective and often malicious stuff, but that doesn’t mean that Biden can ignore it. He must refute it. Signaling an eagerness to debate is the crucial first step.

The next one is performing well in those debates, should they happen, and that’s where the risk comes in. Some Democrats who’ve spent time with Biden over the past year privately express concerns about his sharpness and stamina, and a debate is less scripted — and arguably more draining — than a State of the Union speech read from a teleprompter. But a reluctance or refusal to debate could be as damaging to Biden as half a dozen terrible moments at the lectern.

Besides which, Trump could have scores of such moments, to go by his bizarro stump speeches of late. That’s where the rewards that Biden could reap come in. Do I think that he will turn in debate performances for the ages? No. Do I think that Trump will have a harder time insisting on Biden’s wobbliness if he has demonstrated his own profound unsteadiness on the same stage where Biden is standing, with plenty of swing voters watching? Yes.

I also think that it’s past time for Biden to pivot from caution to daring. Maybe that pivot is finally here.

Putin’s Defense Shake-Up Is a Danger for Ukraine

With Vladimir Putin’s revival of Soviet-style centralized and secretive rule, the old art of Kremlinology is making a comeback. It’s not quite the same as when the lineup atop Lenin’s mausoleum on May Day was scrutinized for signs of who was on the way up or down, but Putin’s abrupt replacement of the long-serving Sergei Shoigu as defense minister last Sunday was still a distinct blast from that dismal past.

Technically, Shoigu was kicked upstairs, to head up the national security council. Putin is not given to publicly punishing loyal courtiers, and Shoigu was about as loyal as they come, even going fishing and hunting with the boss. Still, Kremlin-watchers have long expected his ouster, given the sloppiness of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the widespread corruption in the military-industrial complex, and Shoigu’s reported unpopularity with the generals. There was also the dramatic rebellion of the mercenary commander Yevgeny Prigozhin, who marched on Moscow last June demanding Shoigu’s head (only to lose his own in a plane crash broadly presumed to have been an assassination).

So, very briefly, here are the questions and speculation now keeping Kremlinologists busy:

Shoigu’s replacement at the Defense Ministry is Andrei Belousov, a senior Kremlin economist. That he is not a military man is not surprising; neither was Shoigu, a former construction foreman, nor his two predecessors. Military matters are handled by the generals of the General Staff; the defense minister looks after the military-industrial base. The thinking is that Belousov’s task will be to manage the rapid growth in Russia’s military spending and to clean up the corruption that is siphoning off huge amounts of the money earmarked for the Ukraine war.

How long Shoigu will be allowed to survive remains an open question. One of his top deputies, Timur Ivanov, was arrested on bribery charges in April. One of Ivanov’s nicknames was “Shoigu’s wallet.” And on Tuesday morning, government investigators announced that a senior general on the General Staff, Lt. Gen. Yuri Kuznetsov, had been detained on suspicion of “large-scale” bribe-taking.

A big question is what happens to Nikolai Patrushev, who is being displaced by Shoigu at the helm of the Russian security council. Patrushev, like Putin a former K.G.B. official, is among the oldest and closest members of Putin’s ruling clique, and among the most hawkish. Where he lands — or fails to land — will say a lot about where Putin is headed.

On balance, the musical chairs point to a major overhaul of the military as Russia moves toward what is basically a war economy. Russia is making incremental but steady advances in Ukraine, albeit at an astounding cost in casualties and armaments. Putin’s plan is to press on at any cost, squeezing Ukraine and its ever more reluctant Western backers, and keeping China on board as a major supplier. None of that bodes well for Ukraine.

Jonathan Alter

Where’s the Devastating Takedown of Michael Cohen That Trump Needs?

For months, we’ve known that the cross-examination of Michael Cohen would be the decisive moment of Donald Trump’s New York felony trial — the day we learned whether his defense team could plant reasonable doubt in the minds of jurors.

On Tuesday it became clear that the team was struggling with its most important task.

Todd Blanche, Trump’s lead defense lawyer, was like a baseball pitcher assigned to start Game 7 of the World Series after only two or three wins in his major-league career. Though a seasoned former federal prosecutor, he has little experience as a defense attorney — and it showed.

We’re only about a third of the way through Blanche’s cross, but so far, he’s too meandering and pleasant for the sharp-toned, rat-a-tat style necessary for the role.

Blanche spent more than an hour showing that Cohen, like Stormy Daniels last week, despises Trump, and this line of inquiry was entertaining if not informative. When he quoted Cohen calling Trump a “boorish cartoon misogynist,” Cohen wielded the same mild and effective rejoinder he used twice earlier: “Sounds like something I would say.” My kids would like to see me in that T-shirt.

Blanche spent a long time depicting Cohen as a publicity hound cashing in on his decision to flip on Trump. Guilty as charged. But Cohen’s unwise decision to make sport of Trump in an orange jumpsuit (and worse) earlier in the trial, while angering both the prosecution and defense, doesn’t relate to the falsification of business records at issue in the case. And Cohen made it clear that he was merely responding in kind to Trump’s childish posts, a few of which jurors have seen more than once. All told, an annoying waste of the jury’s time.

Blanche had trouble finding a rhythm. For instance, he asked Cohen if he had appeared on MSNBC shows anchored by Ali Velshi and Joy Reid. When Cohen said yes, Blanche had no follow-up.

But his real problem is that he has so little to work with. Cohen delivered devastating direct testimony all day Monday and again Tuesday morning, and he has been careful and low-key on cross.

Instead of attacking the prosecution’s case head-on, Blanche has been handcuffed by a client nursing a perverse desire to see Cohen’s insults — and his own — aired in open court.

At around 4 p.m. Tuesday, shortly before court adjourned for the day, Blanche began delving into why other prosecutors have passed on this case. That could be promising for him. But after all the runs the prosecution has already scored, he’ll have to strike Cohen out with the bases loaded to get back into the game.

Michelle Goldberg

Top Republicans Come Face to Face With Trump’s Seamy Past

On a day when Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former fixer, testified about the price of loyalty to Trump, a group of Republicans, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota and Vivek Ramaswamy, a former presidential candidate, showed up at the courthouse to demonstrate their loyalty to Trump.

Sitting in the courtroom on Tuesday on my first day at the trial, I kept wondering what they were thinking as they heard Cohen, seeming every bit the weary, reluctantly reformed TV gangster, testify about his mafia-like interactions with Trumpworld.

He described how, after his home and office were raided by the F.B.I., Trump encouraged him, both through a “really sketchy” lawyer and through his own Twitter posts, to, in Cohen’s words, “Stay in the fold, stay loyal, don’t flip.” He described how once he decided “not to lie for President Trump any longer,” the then-president publicly attacked him.

Cohen now seems like a man whose life has been essentially wrecked — he went to prison, lost his law license, had to sell his New York and Chicago taxi medallions and is still on supervised release. Though his implosion has been particularly severe, he is far from alone; many people who’ve served Trump, no matter how faithfully, have been ruined in various ways by the experience.

Nevertheless, as Trump runs for re-election, Republicans are climbing over one another to get as close to him as possible. Toward the end of his testimony for the prosecution, Cohen was asked about his regrets.

“To keep the loyalty and to do things that he had asked me to do, I violated my moral compass, and I suffered the penalty,” he said. I’d like to know if Johnson, hearing this, had even a flicker of foreboding.

The Increase in Drowning Deaths Should Be a National Priority

Drowning deaths in the United States rose by more than 12 percent to an estimated 4,500 per year during the pandemic, according to grim new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The increase, from 4,000 per year in 2019, comes as this long-neglected public health crisis is slowly beginning to draw some attention from government policymakers.

“It’s moving in the wrong direction,” the C.D.C. director, Dr. Mandy Cohen, told The Times. The agency said more than half of Americans had never taken a swimming lesson.

The sobering data is an opportunity for President Biden and health officials to finally make drowning prevention a national priority.

Drowning is the leading cause of death for children ages 1 to 4 in the United States and the second leading cause of death by accidental injury for children 5 to 14. Tackling the issue has clear bipartisan appeal and would improve quality of life in every American community.

Despite the obvious need for action, federal, state and local governments in the United States have invested very little to prevent these deaths.

The rise in deaths has caught the eye of former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, whose philanthropy told The Times this week it plans for the first time to direct millions of dollars to drowning prevention efforts within the United States to improve data collection and help fund swimming lessons in 10 states where drowning rates are highest: Alaska, Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Michigan, New York, Oklahoma and Texas.

The planned $17.6 million investment by Bloomberg Philanthropies is modest compared with the $104 million it is spending globally on preventing drownings. But the focus by Bloomberg, whose prominent public health campaigns helped ban smoking in bars and restaurants in New York, could help raise the profile of this issue. Executives at the philanthropy said they planned to work with the C.D.C.

Many Americans of even wealthy backgrounds have lost children to drowning. But drowning is also an issue of equity. Black people and Native Americans are at substantially increased risk of drowning. So are teenage boys. The C.D.C. report found that these trends have continued. In 2020, they said, Black Americans saw the greatest increase in fatal drownings.

Red Cross surveys suggest that a majority of Americans lack basic swimming abilities. With C.D.C. data showing the existence of more than 10 million private pools in the United States and fewer than 309,000 public ones, it’s clear that large numbers of Americans lack access to basic information about water safety, as well as safe places to learn to swim. Instead of a public health issue, drowning is treated as a private matter and swimming as a luxury. To save lives, this needs to change.

David Brooks

Why Trump Is Ahead in So Many Swing States

What do American voters want? The latest New York Times/Siena polls of swing states offer some confusing evidence on this point. Some of the polling results suggest that Americans are in a revolutionary frame of mind: Asked whether the political and economic systems need major changes, 69 percent of respondents said those systems need major changes or should be entirely torn down.

On the other hand, when the pollsters gave voters a choice between a candidate who would bring the country back to normal and one who would bring major changes, 51 percent said they would prefer the back-to-normal candidate and only 40 percent would prefer the major-changes candidate.

So which is it? Is 2024 a change election in which people want someone who will shake things up, or is this a stability election in which people are going to vote for the candidate of order over the candidate of chaos?

Well, different voters want different things. But if I had to write a single sentence that reconciled these diverse findings, it would be this: The people who run America’s systems have led the country seriously astray; we need a president who will shake things up and lead the country back to normal.

When they hear “systems,” I assume voters are thinking of the network of institutions run by America’s elite — corporations, governing agencies, higher education, the news media and so on. If voters believe one thing about Donald Trump it’s that he’s against these systems and these systems are against him.

Voters clearly see President Biden implicated in these systems. The heart of his problem heaves into view when people are asked which candidate will bring about change. Seventy percent of voters said that Trump would bring about major changes or tear down the system entirely if elected. And 71 percent of voters said that little or nothing would change if Biden was re-elected.

In other words, the evidence suggests that the swing voter wants reactionary change, not revolutionary change. The mood suggested by the evidence is angry nostalgia. That would be my explanation for why Trump is so convincingly ahead in most of the swing states.

Trump Told Cohen Disclosure of His Fling Would Be a ‘Total Disaster’

When Michael Cohen took the stand for the first time in Donald Trump’s hush-money trial on Monday morning, he almost accidentally sat down without taking the oath. But after he raised his hand and swore to tell the truth, he seemed to do so.

In dry language, with his impulse-control problems nowhere in sight, he landed blow after blow on the former president.

Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer and fixer, is willing to look like a stooge — pathetically eager for any praise from the boss — to implant in jurors’ minds that even in the absence of incriminating emails, he should be believed because of all the time he spent looking for Brownie points from Trump. When he did so, he was implicating Trump.

Cohen’s testimony about the Playboy model Karen McDougal, who says she had a nine-month affair with Trump, is important beyond Trump describing her to Cohen as “beautiful.” It cemented Trump’s attention to detail, which we’ve heard a lot about already. He constantly asked for updates on the hush money that American Media Inc., publisher of The National Enquirer, was paying at his direction to McDougal, replying, “Great!” or “Fantastic,” when Cohen delivered them.

Cohen’s tape of Trump discussing that deal landed hard when it was played, and not just because it was Trump’s voice talking about “150” — a clear reference to the $150,000 in hush money that Trump — through Cohen and A.M.I. — was originally going to pay McDougal. Trump’s micromanaging, which we’ve heard about for two weeks, came to life in a way that didn’t help him. And when Cohen dissected practically every moment of the call, there was no mistaking the meaning of the brief conversation.

When Cohen told Trump that Stormy Daniels was shopping her story, “Trump was really angry with me,” he said. Trump told Cohen: “‘I thought you had this under control, I thought you took care of this! … Just take care of it!’”

According to Cohen, Trump thought he would surely lose the 2016 election if the Daniels story came out. He testified that Trump said, “This is a disaster, a total disaster. Women will hate me,” and added that “guys, they think it’s cool” to have sex with a porn star, “but this is going to be a disaster for the campaign.” In combination with the fallout from the “Access Hollywood” tapes, they agreed, it would send his already low polling with women into a tailspin.

“Get control of it!” Trump barked, Cohen testified. “Just get past the election. If I win, it’ll have no relevance when I’m president. And if I lose, I don’t really care.”

Here the prosecutor, Susan Hoffinger, asked if Cohen inquired about Melania Trump. He said yes, and said Trump responded: “Don’t worry. How long do you think I’ll be on the market for? Not long.”

Wow. With Trump, every time you think he’s touched bottom, he crashes through the floor. Here he was already looking ahead to his third divorce.

Cohen is doing very well on direct examination. The test will come Tuesday afternoon, when cross-examination is likely to begin.

Farah Stockman

Israel Needs to Allow More Aid Crossings to Keep Gazans Alive

An already unbearable situation in Gaza is getting far worse, as hundreds of thousands of desperate Palestinian families flee an Israeli ground operation in Rafah, in southern Gaza. Aid groups say the so-called humanitarian zone near the sea, where people are being told to move, doesn’t have enough shelter, food, water or sanitation to support the people who are already there. Without a significant infusion of new aid, this place is at risk of total famine and social chaos.

One glimmer of good news came on Sunday, when Israel opened the Western Erez crossing in northern Gaza. But virtually no aid has got through to southern Gaza for nearly a week, aid groups say. The reality is that the Gaza Strip needs many, many more crossings.

“If you have only one entry point in, then it becomes extremely valuable, and every adverse actor can disrupt it for their own gain,” Dave Harden, a former U.S.A.I.D. mission director in the West Bank and Gaza, told me.

If there were a dozen access points, spread across every two or three kilometers, then no single crossing would become a choke point, vulnerable to attack. He said there’s no reason that Israel, which controls the security envelope around Gaza, could not open far more checkpoints.

“People complain that Hamas is stealing aid, but there would be no incentive to steal if there was enough food going in,” said Harden, adding that he shared a plan to open more than half a dozen more border crossings in Gaza with a branch of the Israeli military about six weeks ago.

But since then, the opposite has occurred. The main artery for humanitarian aid, Kerem Shalom, was shut down on May 5 after a Hamas rocket attack killed four Israeli soldiers. Then Israel seized the border crossing at Rafah , gaining full control over the vital entry and exit point for people and goods for the first time since 2005. Israeli officials have blamed Egypt for the halt in humanitarian goods through Rafah since last week. But for months aid groups have cited the onerous inspections of aid convoys, Israeli attacks on aid workers and protests by right-wing Israeli settlers who have destroyed or delayed truckloads of aid as the cause of famine in Gaza.

“The situation is absolutely desperate,” Sean Carroll, who leads Anera, an American aid organization that has operated in Gaza for decades, wrote in an email on Monday. His staff members have been forced to evacuate Rafah at a moment’s notice, just like the rest of the population, and were forced to leave vital supplies in a warehouse behind.

“They are trying to keep delivering but there’s not much to deliver,” he told me.

Believe It, Democrats. Biden Could Lose.

Donald Trump may be the presidential candidate whose midday snoozing has generated headlines and animated late-night comics, but President Biden is the one who needs to wake up.

He’s a whopping 12 points behind Trump among registered voters in Nevada, according to polls by The New York Times, Siena College and The Philadelphia Inquirer that were released on Monday morning. Biden won that state by nearly 2.5 points in 2020. He’s behind among registered voters in Arizona, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan — in all of the six battleground states surveyed except Wisconsin. That’s not some wildly aberrant result. It echoes alarms sounded before. It speaks to stubborn troubles.

And it’s difficult for Democrats to believe. I know: I talk regularly with party leaders and party strategists and I’ve heard their incredulity. They mention abortion and how that should help Biden mightily. They mention the miserable optics of a certain Manhattan courtroom and a certain slouched defendant. They mention Jan. 6, 2021. They note Trump’s unhinged rants and autocratic musings and they say that surely, when the moment of decision arrives, a crucial share of Americans will note all of that, too, and come home to Biden.

From their lips to God’s ear. But with stakes this huge, I can’t help worrying that such hopefulness verges on magical thinking and is midwife to a confidence, even a complacency, that Biden cannot afford. He needs to step things up — to defend his record more vigorously, make the case for his second term more concretely, project more strength and more effectively communicate the most important difference between him and his opponent: Biden genuinely loves America, while Trump genuinely loves only himself.

The new polling shows that Democratic senators up for re-election are doing better than Biden , so his party affiliation isn’t his doom. That’s the lesson, too, of the favor enjoyed by Democratic governors in red and purple states . Look, for prime example, at Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania .

But Biden seems to get the blame for the war in Gaza. For the high cost of living, too. Regarding the economy, he has a story to tell — infrastructure investment, the CHIPS Act, low unemployment — and must tell it better, with an eye not on his liberal base, but on the minorities and young people who are drifting away from him. That’s the moral of the latest numbers: Take no voter for granted. And there’s not a second to waste.

Patrick Healy

Deputy Opinion Editor

Will Michael Cohen Throw Cold Water on Trump’s Polling Lead?

Every Monday morning on The Point, we kick off the week with a tipsheet on the latest in the presidential campaign. Here’s what we’re looking at this week:

The next two weeks are critical for Donald Trump. He is leading President Biden in most polls in Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania and other swing states that will decide the 2024 election. But on Monday, the star witness in Trump’s criminal trial — Michael Cohen, his former lawyer — will begin telling a Manhattan jury that he gave $130,000 to the porn star Stormy Daniels in exchange for her silence about a sexual encounter with Trump. And based on the pace of the trial, the case could go to the jury as soon as next week.

Cohen is the linchpin to any conviction, acquittal or hung jury for Trump. More than any other witness in the case, he will put words in Trump’s mouth for jurors — telling them how the former president directed the payment to Daniels. Expect the cross-examination to be withering, but in the end, Trump’s lawyers may be hard-pressed to contain or thwart the damaging Cohen testimony without strong witnesses who can rebut it.

The trial matters because some voters say a conviction could change their thinking about Trump — a man who for years has shaken off scandals like Teflon. Failure to convict, in turn, could boost the martyr message that he’s been campaigning on at rallies like his big one in New Jersey on Saturday.

I just did a focus group with Trump voters from 2020 about how they see him now, which will be published on Tuesday. Most of these voters want to support him again because they think the economy will do better under him. But these voters volunteered how much they dislike Trump’s chaotic and inappropriate behavior, and several of them are looking at R.F.K. Jr. as a third-party candidate. What happens in the trial could steer some of these Trump voters away from him.

Biden had a successful fund-raising weekend on the West Coast, but it’s Israel’s military actions in Gaza and the cease-fire talks that will loom over both his week and the biggest event on his schedule: his commencement address at Morehouse College next Sunday. Many voters are unhappy with Biden’s approach to Gaza and general handling of the war, and he came in for some criticism over his latest move on U.S. weapons to Israel.

This isn’t an easy time for Mr. Biden to set foot on a college campus, but he’s been an admired figure at many historically Black colleges like Morehouse — and he and his campaign need to improve his standing with both Black voters and Georgia voters, where he is lagging Trump in polls. No single event will turn it around for Biden, but I think this will be one of his highest-stakes speeches of the spring.

The Table Is Set for Michael Cohen to Testify Against Trump

For months, we’ve heard that the prosecution’s entire case in Donald Trump’s New York felony trial boils down to one man: Michael Cohen.

It turns out that it doesn’t — as long as Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer, behaves himself on the witness stand beginning early next week.

For three weeks, I’ve sat in the courtroom and watched prosecutors carefully set the table for the feast of Cohen’s testimony against his longtime boss. Knowing that Cohen is a disreputable witness, they’ll basically argue that you don’t have to like the chef to swallow the food he serves.

The arc of the prosecution’s narrative has taken the jury from the “catch and kill” scheme (a coherent prelude to the crime) to the validation of highly incriminating records to the debunking of arguments for the defense. It all adds up to an effective precorroboration of Cohen’s likely testimony.

Stormy Daniels had no connection to the falsification of business records, the fundamental charge against Donald Trump. But by establishing that she did, indeed, have sex with Trump, her testimony provided important proof of motive. It’s increasingly clear to the jury that Trump coughed up the hush money to save his 2016 campaign after it was sent reeling by the “Access Hollywood” tape. He knew that a credible story of sex with a porn star would sink him. So he broke the law.

The defense has responded mostly by grasping at straws. It tried to make the hush money look like an extortion scheme, with the former president in his favorite position as victim — a difficult maneuver, considering that Trump has spent years in the same tawdry milieu.

On Monday and Friday, the defense attorney Emil Bove used technojargon and innuendo to suggest, without a shred of proof, that a key piece of evidence — a Sept. 9, 2016, call in which Trump and Cohen discussed hush money for the Playboy model Karen McDougal — was somehow tampered with by Cohen, the F.B.I. or some other sinister force and that it might not have been Cohen on the call. The idea was to use a nanosecond gap in the call and a change in phone ownership to capture the imagination of even a single conspiracy-minded juror. It takes only one to create a hung jury.

But Bove’s cross-examination crashed when a young prosecution witness explained that when people (in this case, Cohen) buy new phones, they usually keep their old numbers.

Is that all they’ve got? No, the defense is betting on the offensiveness of Cohen, who has been ignoring repeated pleas from prosecutors to keep his mouth shut in the days before he takes the stand. (Justice Juan Merchan strongly suggested he do so.)

If Cohen can straighten up and fly right, riding on a trove of evidence and surviving cross-examination, a conviction is well within sight.

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• Character Actor Extraordinaire: Comedian Adam Ray On The Origins Of His Viral Digital Series ‘Dr. Phil LIVE!’

By Matt Grobar

Matt Grobar

Senior Film Reporter

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After hustling for nearly two decades to build a career as an actor and stand-up comedian, Adam Ray has recently hit on an entirely new level of exposure. The person he has to thank for it, you might be surprised to hear, is none other than Dr. Phil .

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Well known for his gifts as an impressionist, having been tapped to play everyone from Jay Leno in Pam & Tommy to Vince McMahon on Young Rock , Ray has been drawn to character work since he was a child. “I wasn’t the kid that was entertaining the family at dinners and stuff like that,” he clarifies. “My family didn’t even know I was funny until, I don’t know, a couple hours ago.” But from an early age, he idolized everyone from Jim Carrey to Robin Williams and Eddie Murphy, multi-hyphenate comedic performers who could capably ground and sell the audience on even the most absurd of characters.

Ray’s journey with Dr. Phil LIVE! began, inadvertently, in 2019, when he decided to invest money from voiceover work in a pilot showcasing his own range as a performer. “I’ve always been big on investing in myself, not wanting to feel like I didn’t give it a shot with whatever it is I’m going for,” he says, “so I was like, ‘Well, what would be the show that I would want to make?'” Titled Jeremy , the pilot saw him playing three different characters, opposite famous friends like Thomas Lennon, Joel McHale, Ron Funches and David Koechner.

“It was really a Curb -style shoot,” Ray recalls. “I kind of beated out everything, and then we improvised two, three hours for each thing and made this really fun dysfunctional family show.”

After production wrapped, Ray decided to stay in the prosthetics a bit longer, doing a stand-up set as Dr. Phil at the Laugh Factory, where he “crushed.” While Ray knew little about Dr. Phil McGraw to this point, the general notion he had of him was of “an advice guy,” who was “abrasive but kind of likeable” — “a likable a**hole,” in other words, as so many of his favorite characters are.

“You look at Steve Carell in The Office or Alec Baldwin from 30 Rock , guys that are a little delusional, but also just unapologetic about looking at life through their set of goggles,” Ray reflects. “I love those guys, where you almost feel bad for them, even if they are a little too cocky at times. They just don’t know any better.” Sure, his version of Dr. Phil could at times be quite crass, but he made his remarks with an earnestness that was endearing.

The next extension of Ray’s Dr. Phil experiment came amid the pandemic. In an effort to keep busy during lockdown, he and Jeremiah Watkins, another comedian known for his gifts at character work and improvisation, began shooting what was meant to feel like “a lost Dr. Phil episode” every couple of weeks. Depicting Phil’s interactions with a range of Watkins characters, including “a Starbucks barista, a troubled teen, a rich billionaire and a feminist,” these pieces afforded Ray the “reps” he needed as Dr. Phil to lock the character in.

When last year’s double strike hit, Ray again returned to the character, which helped him regain access to the “joy” with which he entered the business. By this point, he had tired of a “monotonous” routine, involving a rotation of voiceover work, podcasts, stand-up and film and TV auditions. “Frustrated with just being at the beck and call of Hollywood,” he felt in his gut that he was capable of more. “I think I’ve honed a lot of my s**t at this point. I’m 41, I feel good. I’ve built a lot of cool relationships…So then I was like, ‘All right, well what’s a fun thing?'” Ray remembers. “What can bring that joy back for why I came out here and got into this?'”

He realized after some reflection that he was never more happy than when he found himself making silly sketches for YouTube, hiring friends to shoot and edit his sketches “for dinners and coffees,” as he had in college. Eventually, he came around to the idea of summoning this spirit via a live Dr. Phil show, comprising “a late-night version of a daytime guy.”

While Ray initially felt the idea was perhaps too ambitious, he wound up bringing it to fruition at The Comedy Store in Los Angeles, the historic comedy venue where he’d spent three years working phones and built his career from the ground up. In his mind, the show would involve a monologue, crowd work, fake, pre-taped commercials, and more. One of the early champions of the project was Bill Burr, the Grammy-nominated Boston comic whose involvement signaled a big turning point. When he pitched Burr on the show, recalls Ray, “He couldn’t have responded quicker and [was] like, ‘Dude, yes, let’s f***ing go. That sounds f***ing hilarious. Make fun of my anger issues. Go at me hard.'”

Recently making four appearances as Dr. Phil at Netflix Is a Joke Fest — including before a sold-out crowd at the Kia Forum, as part of the hit podcast Kill Tony — Ray presently puts on Dr. Phil LIVE! once a month. He feels the show resonated from the jump because “it was something different, but it was still utilizing all these branches of the comedy scene, as far as how it’s blossomed right now, taking people that people are big fans of in putting them in a different setting.”

“A playground to really be silly,” the show’s success reflects a larger trend in comedy. While the notion of the comedian as a philosopher was widely embraced by talent up until around the pre-#MeToo peak of Louis C.K., what audiences are now responding to more so is comedy for comedy’s sake — material that doesn’t pretend to bear any great meaning.

Several months ago, Ray was surprised to learn via representatives for Dr. Phil that he not only is aware of his talk show parody, but approves of the project, having prepared himself to learn the opposite. With that possibility in play, “I was just like, I’ll enjoy this as much as I can, be present, make the most of it,” says Ray. “But I knew my intentions were always good. I wasn’t defaming him. I’m not up there saying really nasty s**t. I’m not taking what he’s doing out there in the public eye and putting it in the show; it’s a completely different version.”

Recently, Dr. Phil even went so far as to offer praise for Ray on comedian Steve-O’s podcast Steve O’s Wild Ride! . “What really stood out to me is he goes, ‘You’ve got to laugh at yourself. Life’s too short.’ And he was like ‘I also heard he’s a good guy, and so that makes it cool,'” Ray recalls. “And I was like, ‘That rules.’ That, I really appreciate.”

Going forward, Ray’s hope with the show is to continue to challenge himself to make it “bigger and more entertainment” each time out, taking his “little boost” in professional momentum and exploring and “peeling back” as much as he can. While he’s currently preparing to bring the show into theaters for the first time, with performances in Portland and Seattle, he’s at the same time cognizant of not overstaying his welcome with Phil and running the show into the ground.

“Inevitably, people just find a way to ruin something. The people will speak at some point and be like, ‘We’re done,'” Ray reflects. “But that’s the benefit of being 17 years into stand-up and 19 in the entertainment business, is that if I was two or three years in, I’d probably be leaning super hard into this and making this my identity. But I know that having something like this is fleeting.”

Thankfully, even if interest in Dr. Phil LIVE! is short-lived, Ray has plenty of other characters to fall back on. Recently introducing Elaine, “an older, kind of whimsical, loungey, old comic type lady,” he also has in his arsenal the likes of “a really nerdy kid named Jeremy,” party planner Bruce Robbins, and an old man named Tony Caruso. What’s been critical in achieving the fullest expression with each has been to fearlessly go all in, and certainly, his commitment was on display recently at Netflix Is a Joke. Last weekend, he greeted Dave Chappelle in full prosthetics at The Comedy Store following one of his own shows, going so far as to sleep in prosthetics and wear them up through his performance the next day.

Certainly, Ray’s efforts haven’t gone unnoticed by his peers. “There’s a respect for the grind that you can’t replace,” he says. “We’re in a really interesting club of, people know that you’re hustling, and if you keep it clean and you’re not doing shady s**t and you’re not a d*ckhead, it’s really a pretty simple formula to follow, to give yourself a chance to get something cool to happen.” On the heels of both a pandemic and a double strike, building a career on screen is perhaps more of a “crapshoot” than it’s ever been, he says, which furthers the importance of being creatively self-sufficient.

In a perfect world, Ray’s hope going forward is to continue pursuing a model “of making things for your buddies and with your buddies,” à la Adam Sandler. Noting that “anyone’s a role away from taking things up a notch,” he shares that there are already a few opportunities on the horizon, as an actor, that have gotten him “really excited.”

What’s most important to Ray, though, is to continue finding ways to stay creatively challenged, whatever form they might take. “I want to take care of myself. I want to enjoy this little bump I’m getting. I’m trying to be a little bit more in the moment with stuff,” he says. “This business is so uncertain, I just want to continue to control what I can control, which is being disciplined in making sure that I am not making excuses for myself on things that I want to do. So the goals are to just keep it moving, but keep thinking outside the box and try to keep my own enthusiasm for what I’m doing alive. Because that’s what got me to here.”

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