Comics & Education - News/interviews

Briefly: the Denver - Rocky Mountain Comics/Ed conference rocked! Got to hang out and learn from folks like Maureen Bakis, James Bucky Carter, Charles Hatfield, RC Harvey, and Scott McCloud! Plus met a lot of new folks doing great work in comics along the way. Thanks to Christina Angel and crew for hosting a fantastic gathering.

In the meantime, UK journalist Matt Finch presented a series of interviews on comics and education here. The series includes interviews with Jessica Abel, Dimsum warrior scribe Dr.  Yen Yen Woo, and me - sharing thoughts about comics and education. 


Also this week, on the Chronicle's Professor Hacker column, Anastasia Salter wrote a sweeping column generated from a THATCamp event talking comics and education - and featured a kind nod to my work here. Great post filled with terrific resources for those interested in comics and education.

Thanks Matt and Anastasia for the support!

Oh, and one panel from a new page. I've been plugging away and will have more excerpts to share soon. - Nick

Rocky Mt Comics conference and Rabbits at GLC

This week, I'll be hitting the road for Denver to present at the Rocky Mountain Conference for Comics and Graphic Novels - attached to the Denver Comic Con. I'm giving a talk on my dissertation work entitled "Comics as a Tool for Inquiry: A Dissertation in Comic Book Form Reimagines Scholarship", which builds on previous presentations including this one from HASTAC last December. Scott McCloud is keynoting, RC Harvey, James Bucky Carter, Maureen Bakis and more will be there presenting. Should be fun.

At the same time, my comic "Possibilities," originally created for Game Show Detroit and reprinted for Game Show NYC last year, is back in print again as part of the annual Games for Learning Conference in Madison, Wisconsin. Thanks to organizer Arnold Martin for the invitation. To go along with that, i thought i'd share the "rabbit" page from "possibilities" along with the text key to it that explains all the rabbits - and the number of rabbits... More pages from Possibilities can be seen here and the entire piece is reprinted in the new collection of all my works of the last several years here. More dissertation pages when I get back. - Nick

A quick note - I never set out to do a page of rabbits, but when a student was wearing a Trix rabbit shirt and I'd been thinking about the busy-ness of adults in terms of no time for play - things set in motion. Suddenly I was seeing rabbits everywhere...

The Key to the Rabbit Page: 

Panel 1: Trix the Cereal Rabbit. P2: The White Rabbit, “Alice in Wonderland.” P3: Peter Rabbit, Beatrix Potter Tales. P4: ? P5: Thumper, Bambi. P6: Jessica Rabbit, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? P7: Jackelope. P8: Uncle Wiggily. P9: Pat the Bunny. P10: Playboy Bunny. P11: Lucky rabbit’s foot. P12: Miffy, by Dick Bruna. P13: B’rer Rabbit. P14: Chocolate Rabbit – yumm! P15: Energizer Bunny. P16: Rabbit in hat. P17: Easter Bunny. P18: Hand Shadow Rabbit. P19: Velveteen Rabbit – Real. P20: Velveteen Rabbit – Alive. P21 (Left to Right): 1) Rabbit, “Watership Down,” 2) Rabbit, Winnie the Pooh, 3) Peter Cottontail, 4) Captain Carrot, 5,6,7) Flopsy, Mopsy, & Cotton Tail – Beatrix Potter Tales, 8) Bongo, “Life in Hell,” 9) March Hare, Alice…, 10) Yusagi Yojimbo, 11) Frank, Donnie Darko, 12) Jimmy “Bunny Rabbit” Smith – Eminem, “8 Mile,” 13) Bugs Bunny.

NOTE – The rabbits per row number 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, with 13 rabbits in the final panel. This is the famous Fibonacci Sequence – originally conceived to estimate the growth of … rabbit populations!

Arts & Humanities...

This past year I've served as a PAGE fellow (Publicly Active Graduate Education) within the Imagining America consortium. A little while back in the midst of presidential candidate debates, PAGE hosted a tele-conference to discuss the importance of the university experience and Arts & Humanities education to push back against some of the candidates' views. After the call, I sketched out a quick piece on the train and soon after transformed it into the short comic below (with text input from IA's communications manager Jamie Haft). While not a page from my dissertation - some of the themes and the tetrahedrons will be rearing their heads in chapters to come...  - Nick 

Boxes - dissertation pages

Wanted to share two recent pages from the first chapter of my dissertation. These are around pages 8 and 9. When i finish the chapter - I may post the earlier pages and all of it in its entirety. Anyhow, this has to do with the boxes we find ourselves in and the boxes we make for ourselves. (In some ways, these pages are a spiritual cousin to this earlier work: Little Boxes). As is always the case, I've reduced the resolution tremendously for putting on the web, and some of the tiny detail inherent in the work likely disappears. Thanks - Nick