I read in the Ann Arbor newspaper yesterday about a comic version of the 9/11 commission report and I found this morning the amazon.com link, which is where I might be ordering this book from. Or I might be waiting until I get back from my upcoming summer break.
Anyway, this is the sort of thing I need to get for both my teaching in English 328 and in 516, especially the undergraduate class, Writing, Style, and Technology. For a whole bunch of reasons I won’t go into now (but which boil down to the process EMU as an institution is now going through to accredit secondary school teachers), visual elements have become a lot more important in this course in the last year or so. Because Scott McCloud was on campus at EMU in winter 2006, I incorporated some readings and activities from Understanding Comics in my version of the class last year, and I am totally sold on the value of getting students to think about “the visual” as it relates to “the textual.”
At least at this level and for this class; I’m not as sold on this for fy comp. But that’s another story.
In any event, this new 911 comic looks promising. Besides as a potential teaching tool, I am interested in reading it myself.
Might be interesting to combine it with a few issues of Ex Machina. Maybe you already know this comic, but “The First Hundred Days” ties together a few of these themes: technology, leadership, crisis, 9/11, and so on. Anyway, sounds like a promising mix.