Description of project
Projects based on comics and cartoons can offer students the opportunity to learn how visual and text-based rhetoric intersect, how form can affect or offer meaning, and how the conventions or history of the genre, the context of the form itself, can shape a reader's understanding of a text.
Comics are sequential narratives (Eisner) and in this way they are directly related to text-based or traditional narratives; but instead of moving from word to word, comics expand the reader's notion of "text" to include a variety of visual rhetorics. In this way, comics make the reader consider the canon of delivery, one that can be obscured by text-only compositions. The reader can see who is speaking, engaging with representational strategies that are attached to understandings of character, but they can also see how something is being said, patterns of speech affected not only by the graphic representation of text but also the shape and size of the speech bubbles that contain the text.
Comics and cartoons therefore emphasize the multimodal forms of communication typical of non-essayistic rhetoric and can be a helpful way to encourage your students to understand how text works with image to communicate meaning. Finally, comics and cartoon, with their foregrounding of delivery, can be a good way to introduce your students to a study of sound or enunciation and how this too affects communication.
Technology available
The simplest, most user-friendly software for composing your own comic strip is Comic Life. This application works on both Windows (1.34) and Mac (1.41) and provides formatting templates for comic strips and speech bubbles. The CWRL has Comic Life loaded on all of its Macs. Digital Media Services does not currently have Comic Life but are considering adding the application to their lab computers.
While it is not pre-formatted like Comic Life, similar texts can be created with Adobe Creative Suite applications including Adobe Illustrator. These applications are available in the Computer Writing and Research Lab and Digital Media Services.
There are also web-based photo hosting services that include speech bubbles in their editing options. These services (such as Photobucket) are usually free and their editing functions easy to understand.
Suggested Reading
Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (pictured at right) is an accessible and yet challenging text to use in class if you want to undertake a project related to sequential art. McCloud's text, itself a comic book, explores the history, formatting and representational strategies at work in comics, providing students with a critical and creative language for investigating and/or composing in this genre.
Understanding Comics was originally published in the early nineties, but if your students are interested in creating web comics or looking at how new technology has affected this mode of composition, McCloud's second theoretical book, Reinventing Comics: How Imagination and Technology Are Revolutionizing an Art Form, looks at how digital media and internet culture changes the way comics are created and read.
Perhaps a more classic text, and one that McCloud cites in Understanding Comics, is Will Eisner's Comics & Sequential Art (1985). In this text Eisner works to expand the concept of "reading" to include visual texts like comics, and through a series of demonstrations he explores the different methods of composition used in producing these texts. Eisner's second volume Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative in 1996, is considered more theoretical than methodological.
There are several visual rhetoric textbooks that could give your students the tools to look at this medium. Faigley et al's Picturing Texts has a good selection of Scott McCloud ("Through the Door: Digital Production") from Reinventing Comics. Please see the visual rhetoric bibliography for a list of other texts.
Example
Jezebel, a Gawker Media blog that focuses on women in/and popular culture, has recently developed "Conceptual Confrontations" as a way to imagine a particular convergence of ideas and people. In this manifestation, we see Judge Judy confront the very young man at the center of a recent car theft and damage lawsuit.
The composition plays on the conventions of daytime court television and comic books and thus effectively combines different type of media within the constraints of one. Television, print, and digital technology all pull the reader towards a certain understanding of delivery, appeal to different audiences, and offer different meanings for the single text. Looking at compositions such as this one can be an entertaining way to consider the influence of new media on old, and even how new media (in this instance the web comic) is in turn influenced by its predecessor.
Additional resources
Blog entries about comics on Viz. (A visual rhetoric project in the Computer Writing and Research Lab)
Cartoon Research Library at Ohio State University (Home of the journal INKS: Cartoon and Comic Art Studies)
Jan Baetens's article on comics and constrained writing
Duke's Writing Studio worksheet on writing about comics
Scott McCloud's website