Four Color Teaching – How to teach a comic book

When I first approached my principal about wanting to teach All-Star Superman, I was surprised by her full support. Not that my admin wasn’t supportive because she was fantastic, but I was surprised that I didn’t receive ANY resistance at all. She knew that I knew my stuff and she trusted me with teaching it. However, in order to cover myself, she wanted me to write out exactly what students would be learning from it.

Fortunately, I had already done that in anticipation of that very argument. I could have just written down some vague objectives, but instead, I aligned everything to the Common Core Standards.

As much as conservative talk radio wants you to be afraid of the Common Core Standards, they really aren’t different from any other standards that we’ve used in the past. The Mo-Step standards were Missouri’s state standards prior to the Common Core, and they read almost exactly the same. I can’t speak to any of the elementary or math standards, so I won’t comment on that because I know people who have legitimate concerns and that’s fine. But in terms of English standards, it boils down to: can students read and write?

So, my interpretation is that as long as students are challenged in their reading and their writing, it doesn’t really matter what text they are reading. For the sake of completeness, here is my All-Star Superman Common Core alignment. I should have broken it up into individual lessons, but it’s clear what students will be doing in the unit.

All Star Superman Common Core Alignment

When I talk to teachers about teaching comic books, the common thing I hear is either “I don’t know what to do.” But teaching comics isn’t as complicated as some people make it out to be. Here is the best way to think about it:

Use the text as a jumping off point for whatever it is you really want to teach. 

It’s not that novel of an idea, but it’s one that teachers need to remind themselves of all the time (at least, I do). My students don’t read The Great Gatsby just because they should. They read it because it’s a jumping off point for us to talk about issues of money, of power, of the American Dream, of motivation, of character, etc.

Leading into The Great Gatsby, I give them incredibly brief overviews literary criticisms like semiotics, feminism, and Marxism. I do this so my students will see that viewing writing from a particular lens is important and it allows them to see that reading is interpreting and there are many ways to interpret a story. But I could just as easily do the same type of front-loading activities on ANY novel and it would work. I just chose The Great Gatsby because it’s one of my favorite novels and I think it’s important for them to read.

So, why should comic books be any different?

Obviously, there are pictures that go along with words so the form is different, but during discussion, I point out what we should really be analyzing. And All-Star Superman is a perfect place to start with that because Frank Quitely is so great at motion and subtle visual cues. For instance, we talk about his use of motion

And we talk about his subtle jokes about Clark saving people while looking like a bumbling idiot.

And students often notice things that I have missed over the 100 times that I’ve read All-Star Superman which shows that they are reading critically. They pour over text and images and talk about their relationship with one another, but that’s not all we do. If it were, then it would be no different than analyzing each and every time Huck lies in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; it’s fun to talk about, but is ultimately just discussing craft and how the writer gets his or her point across. It’s further important to talk about the themes and ideas that are present in the text and then also to craft their own texts as well.

But we’ll talk more about that in the coming weeks.