Author: Jessica Baldanzi

Photo by Jill Steinmetz I’ve been a comics fangirl since I was a kid—Betty and Veronica to my big brother’s Spider-Man comics—and Chris Ware and Lynda Barry helped complicate my understanding of the genre when I lived in Chicago and their comics were serialized in New City and The Chicago Reader. I first brought comics into my professional life when I created and taught a course called The Graphic Novel in 2008. I’ve taught that class many times since then, have also given talks about comics to general audiences and scholars alike. Commons Comics began in 2013 as a way for me to learn how to blog and to stay current in the field. It was hosted first by my college, then picked up by The Elkhart Truth, a local newspaper, before I moved it to my own page. I teach English at Goshen College, a small but mighty liberal arts school in the “Michiana” area, east of Chicago on the border of Michigan and Indiana. My specialty in graduate school was twentieth-century and more recent American Literature, but my teaching has brought me into multiple fields. My upper-level courses have ranged from critical theory and gender and popular culture to memoir writing, and my introductory courses from to composition and speech to creative writing. I am now co-editing an essay collection with comics and religion scholar Hussein Rashid about Kamala Khan, the new Ms. Marvel. Look for it on the University Press of Mississippi in the coming year. (Working title: Ms. Marvel in America.)
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Our Superhero Selves

by Anna the massage therapist

Our classes just started at Goshen College, so I’m a bit behind on my review of Lorena Alvarez’s Nightlights. In the meantime, however, I have some fun student work to share with you.

I’m teaching a course on graphic novels this semester. The students are learning about the history of comics and graphic novels, and will create short graphic memoirs of their own by the end of the class.

Part of what we practice as a class is sketching rather than drawing, so that students can create the types of simple, iconic characters that help readers engage more fully with the language of comics. Scott McCloud, in his seminal 1993 work Understanding Comics—a book in comics form about how comics work—illustrates the importance of icons to visual storytelling in these two now-famous frames:

McCloud on icons and realism
Image from understandingcomics177.wordpress.com

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A Girl and Her Dog: Review of _Fetch, How a Bad Dog Brought Me Home,_ a Graphic Pet Memoir by Nicole Georges

First review for my new site below! And as promised, I’m also beginning to upload my archives from the Elkhart Truth. I was planning on starting with my most recent, from February 2016, but today’s news about Charlottesville prompted me to start in the middle of 2015 with John Lewis’s March: Book Two. Check out the archives links to the right if you’re interested.

A Girl and Her Dog: Fetch, How a Bad Dog Brought Me Home, a Graphic Pet Memoir by Nicole Georges

Nicole Georges and the cover of Fetch, from the Center for Cartoon Studies

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