We don’t need just the DFC, we needs lots of comics, and what’s more, we can make them. Let’s get to it!

Comics have too often been dismissed as unsophisticated, popular culture texts or as a phase of reading which children are encouraged to move out of towards more ‘worthy’ literary fare. Mel Gibson, in exploring the recent comics-book initiative by David Fikling, The DFC, defends the attraction and value of comics culture and the complexity of its multimodal narratives

'"So what is this mango, anyway?" understanding manga, comics and graphic novels (Primary and Secondary'

Graphic novels, comics and manga can play an important part in encouraging reading for pleasure amongst students of any age and also have a role in teaching in many subject areas. I'm going to offer a small snapshot of the least well known of these, manga, below, but want to start with a few general points about the comic strip medium ..

The medium became the message: the MEDAL project as learning space

Our contribution offers a retrospective glimpse into some perspectives on the MEDAL (Making a difference: educational development to enhance academic literacy) project, a three-year initiative that created a pedagogic network for childhood studies (CS), a new, complex and rapidly evolving area of research and undergraduate study. It aims to capture the sense of community that evolved throughout the project, because this underpinned our sense of the conceptual change and professional development that MEDAL brought about for the individuals working within it. Our narrative incorporates the core team’s perspectives and explores the ways that this group worked with others in a community that came to encompass members with a range of experiences, disciplines and backgrounds. In particular we will focus on the ways that MEDAL co-collaborators included students and emerging pedagogic writers, and highlight some of the common issues and ideas that emerged across the various electronic, physical and metaphorical spaces that the project developed. We draw on our own reflections and on data gathered by an independent researcher in interviews with staff and students, illuminating the ways in which MEDAL offered us what Savin-Baden (2007) calls “learning space”

Let’s hear it for the girls! Representations of girlhood, feminism and activism in comics and graphic novels

Notions of agency and activism loom large of late in feminist debates; however, the relevance of such concepts to young women and girls in particular is often recuperated via the language of postfeminism, a manoeuvre which is pernicious in its deflation of a radical feminist politics. For this reason, I contend that the comics Sally Heathcote: Suffragette by Mary Talbot, Kate Charlesworth and Bryan Talbot (2014), Lumberjanes (2015-date) by Shannon Watters, Grace Ellis, Brooke A. Allen, Noelle Stevenson and others, and Ms Marvel (2014-date) where the creative team is also flexible (but is predominantly led by G. Willow Wilson and Adrian Alphona, with Sana Amanat as editor) collectively represent a vital intervention in terms of young feminist politics. In short: these three titles foreground agentic, activist and feminist perspectives which are aimed at specifically a young female audience. In what follows, through close reading, I will outline why this is important: for as Berry Mayall states regarding childhood, agency is the way that children are now seen as people who can make a difference through their individual actions, ‘to a relationship, a decision, to the workings of a set of social assumptions or constraints’. (Mayall 2002: 21

‘Who’s the girl with the kissin’ lips?’ Constructions of class, popular culture and agentic girlhood in Girl, Princess, Jackie and Bunty in the 1960s

This article focuses on four British periodicals incorporating or dominated by comic strips aimed at girls of different ages: Girl (Hulton Press, 1951−64), Princess (Fleetway, 1960−67), Jackie (DC Thomson, 1964−93) and Bunty (DC Thomson, 1958−2001). It will explore how these titles depicted agentic girlhood, class and popular culture. The periodicals show varying degrees of engagement with popular culture, varying according to adult constructions of girls as vulnerable and in need of protection. Some are more permissive and the voice of the girl appears within them, in others there is a more paternalistic approach. This has an impact, in turn, on the kind of content that they offered

The war of the worlds? - Classics, comics and manga - ways of thinking about adaptations, with some suggestions about using them in classrooms.

Recently, a gentleman who has attended a talk I had given asked a familiar question about comics. He wondered if I had heard of the adaptations of classic fiction that he had read and enjoyed in his youth. He argued that they had opened him up to the possibility of reading classics, which, he said, he would never have willingly done otherwise, and that it had led to a lifetime of enthusiastic reading across genres and canons. The same gentleman said that whilst these comics were seen by teachers in his era as ‘cheating’, by which he meant enabling students to avoid reading the full text of books that were part of the curriculum, he thought that they would offer a good plot summary and get key ideas across well. His hope was that they were still available, although he feared that they would be rather dated. Many readers will already have recognised that the texts under discussion are the Classic Illustrated series, which began in the 1940s http://www.classicsillustrated.co.uk. What I'm going to outline here are a number of the different approaches taken by various creators and publishers who have created comic or manga versions of a range of texts. In doing so I hope to show that whilst the memory of the Classic Illustrated series, ably summed up by the gentleman above, is dominant, there are actually a range of ways of thinking about creating and working with such texts. I’m also going to make a few suggestions about ways of using these texts in schools

“Badgers? We don’t need no steenkin’ Badgers!” Talbot’s Grandville, Anthropomorphism and Multiculturalism

This chapter investigates how issues around multiculturalism explored in the Grandville series of graphic novels by Bryan Talbot. It focuses on how economics and multiculturalism are linked in Grandville and then turns to a brief consideration of how language and national identity operate. The chapter also focuses on some aspects of the relationships and tensions between the British and the French, humans and animals and between animal species. Instead anthropomorphism is employed as a lens to examine human interactions in our world. The fragmentation and economic insecurity chimes with the world of Grandville, especially given the recent achievement of independence for Britain from the Empire. The England and France of the first Grandville graphic novel have distinctive palettes. Further, in Grandville, the narratives suggest that the creation of a dangerous "other" might be a governmental and national policy or strategy

Dr Peter Venkman: 'Scuse me Egon? You said crossing the streams was bad!...' Dr Ray Stanz: 'Cross the streams...': Comics, manga, graphic novels and the challenge and excitement of cross-curricular work (with apologies to Ghostbusters [1984])

Sequential art of all kinds lends itself to cross-curricular work within schools, colleges and beyond. Most typically, this draws in art and literature in a number of different ways, depending on the chosen emphasis and who the lead department or member of staff is. I have come across a range of approaches to using the medium and will flag up a few examples from around Britain in this article, but will concentrate in the latter part of the article on a very intensive ‘Theme Day’ that took place at Driffield School, East Yorkshire (www.driffieldschool.net