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Using a Graphic Illustrator in Higher Education: Comic Life

March 21, 2011, 3:00 pm

By Billie Hara

A few years ago, I taught a writing course—a first-year seminar—on the graphic novel.  We read Art Spiegelman’s, The Complete Maus: A Survivor’s Tale; Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s, V for Vendetta; Charles Burns’, Black Hole; and Percy Carey’s, Sentences: The Life of M.F. Grimm.  Students wrote some typical first-year composition essays on topics of their choosing (related to the course texts).  Additionally, throughout the term, we discussed the meanings behind the rhetorical conventions of the graphic novel:  why did the author choose to use three frames in this scene instead of the typical two he used throughout his novel?  Why is one page in black and white and all the others in color?  What does the font shift mean in this section of the text?  How do these conventions relate to the novel, to the message of the novel, to the artist?  We talked about image placement and manipulation, colors, fonts, styles, language.  And of course, all of this related to writing.

Talking about how writers and illustrators created these graphic novels was fine.  When students created their own graphic novels, and had to make choices about colors, fonts, sizes, layouts, and language, however, they understood the abstract concepts much more clearly.

For their end-of-semester projects, after reading five disparate graphic novels, introductory material by Scott McCloud, and related scholarship about the graphic novel genre, students created their own graphic novels.  They used traditional literary texts that they translated into a graphic novel form, or they could use their own stories, again translated into an 8-10 page graphic novella.

The process was much easier than it might first sound.  Students used Comic Life, a graphic novel program and their own imaginations.  Comic Life is a rich program that offers an easy-to-use interface that integrates with images (those you might find on Flickr, for example, or images you take yourself) and many types of image files.  Comic Life includes photographic filters (making image-editing software largely unnecessary), it uses a variety of font sizes and types, it has dozens of premade templates, and it’s very easy to use.

The quality and the creativity in the novellas that students produced were simply amazing.  I am unable– because of space limitations– to produce an entire graphic novella in this post.  I can, however, display a few pages of a student-produced text.  (The student has provided permission to display the work.)  This particular student told a translated version of a scene in Hamlet.

Comic Life has a 30-day free trial download, but at about $30, Comic Life Deluxe is worth spending the money to own the program.  (When I had students create their own graphic novellas, they used the free-trial download version.  Several of them liked the program so much that they purchased their own copies.)

Comic Life is available in many downloadable formats:

For the Mac:

  • Comic Life
  • Comic Life 2 (Comic Life 2 is a recently-released upgrade that is more robust than the original program.)

For the PC:

For portable devices:

  • Comic Touch is the iPhone and iPod touch version costs $2.99.
  • Comic Touch Lite is also available as a free app.
  • Plasq has recently announced that Comic Life for the iPad will soon be released.

Comic Life allowed students to create their own texts and be as creative (or not) as they wished.  They used their own writing and images, but they were able to make use of the rhetorical principles they’d learned in the course.

This kind of software has many, many uses in education.  Plasq, the creator of Comic Life, offers an “education” forum where educators can share their experiences and student-produced products.  While the Plasq forums are geared for K-12 educators, those in higher education can also find uses for these useful and inexpensive programs.

How about you?  Have you used Comic Life or any other graphic illustrator program in your courses? How has the program worked for you?  How have your students responded?  What other uses have you found for these types of programs?  If you have other (similar) programs that you’d like to see us review, please leave suggestions and other comments below.

[Images used with permission from original author and are Creative Commons licensed.]

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  • http://twitter.com/hoboacademic john lennon

    Really fascinating! I’m certainly going to explore this in my classroom somewhere down the line. Thanks!

  • bleckb

    This is great to see. I’m doing something like this for our spring term starting in April, for FYC. I am also using Understanding Comics by McCloud. Along with what you mention above, I’m using Persepolis. I just ordered Sentences as I hadn’t see that one. I want to pair two novels about real people and two with superheros (V and Watchmen). Now I have to decide between Persepolis, Maus, Blackhole (still undecided about that one though) and Sentences. I may have students choose their own. Rather than write a graphic novel, though, I was/am going to have them do a page of frames as their meta-cognitive portfolio cover sheet.

  • drnels

    Yes, I, too, used Comic Life when I taught The Graphic Memoir. I’m teaching the course again in Fall 2012 and am thinking of having students work with Prezi for their final project since I like how that can incorporate movement and zooming in and out, but this post is now making me think about both: a project in Comic Life and a project in Prezi. Most students really did like Comic Life.

  • rickman

    What a wonderful idea, and what a nice example. I might try this with English as an additional language students.

  • http://www.briancroxall.net Brian Croxall

    This is a great tool, Billie, and one that is making me want to teach a whole class on graphic novels just so I could use it for a project like this at the end of things.

  • http://www.samplereality.com Mark Sample

    I’m shifting to more creative assignments like this in my non-composition classes. And it’d be a perfect assignment for my classes on graphic novels and narrative.

    I’m curious about the evaluation aspect of this assignment. I’m feeling my way toward a fair and useful way to evaluate student assignments that focus on what I call “creative analysis,” but I’d love to hear what approach you or others have taken for grading creative assignments.

  • eszter

    Northwestern alum Stephen Colbert’s Northwestern Commencement speech is a must-see. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6tiaooiIo0 You probably missed it, because the full speech is not on the official Northwestern YouTube channel and it’s been up for less time than the other videos since NU is on the quarter system so Commencement isn’t until later in the year. In the less than three weeks the video has been up, it’s gotten over 231,206 views, for good reason!

  • http://twitter.com/jryoung Jeff

    Interesting — I wonder why Northwestern didn’t put this on their official channel. This article only considered videos on YouTube EDU (official channel).

  • http://www.facebook.com/brian.t.flanagan Brian Flanagan

    The Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies at Grand Valley State University posted to YouTube a debate between Christopher and Peter Hitchens (on religion and the Iraq War). It has attracted more than 125 thousand views, which would place it sixth on the Chronicle’s list!

    http://bit.ly/10fhrb

  • http://twitter.com/jryoung Jeff

    This list only considered hits during a one-year period.. there are definitely some videos on YouTube EDU that have scored more views over their lifetime — I think the alltime winner is the
    Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo  (more than 13 million hits)

  • rachel_wiseman

    Northwestern did in fact upload a version of Colbert’s commencement speech onto their YouTube EDU channel, but three days after a spectator did. Predictably, the video that went up first went viral first, which explains why the official Northwestern version only received 4,000 views. It’s an interesting case of universities competing with regular users for hits on the videos they post.

  • http://ericstoller.com/blog/ Eric Stoller

    One of my favorite university YouTube “hits” is the Ohio Union flash mob video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDNOB6TnHSI It’s more of a commercial for the union, but with more than 2.5 million views, I’d say it did fairly well….

  • http://twitter.com/HCCBrobstCenter Hawkeye Brobst Cntr

    Excellent! Very informative post!

  • http://twitter.com/vanishingirl Michele

    Wonder if this performance by Cal’s Noteworthy, with 4.4 million views, is the most seen YouTube video recorded at UC Berkeley?   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bW5czKqT05A

  • phillipsmith03

    Such aninteresting post! The Austin Whitney video is so inspirational, as are the
    commencement speakers. Even Conan gets a little serious! The school I work at,
    Westwood College, created a great video I wanted to share: http://bit.ly/oPCZbn.
    It provides helpful info on financial aid and explains how students can get
    assistance in paying for college.

  • rei727887

    I love Noteworthy. (It may have something to do with the fact that my son’s in the group.)   :-)

  • ming1951

    David C. Levy…former academic and administrator. I glanced at his piece in the Post, but after working all weekend I’m too tired after this full Monday to slog through it. But his reference to

    “[Americans who] they continue to pay for teaching time of nine to 15 hours per week for 30 weeks, making possible a month-long winter break, a week off in the spring and a summer vacation from mid-May until September”

     got my attention.

    Let’s see, on Saturday I spent about four hours reading in an area not my own to accurately insert a four or five-line paragraph into the text that I write for my freshman comparative culture class.

    Is it conceivable that this Levy chap was…let me put it gently…unconscious during his career as an academic and administrator?

    Or perhaps silly season is upon us.

  • 11291652

    Faculty don’t work 9-5, don’t answer to supervisors in the conventional manner, and do intellectual work, which is largely incomprehensible to most people who do work 9-5, answer to supervisors, generally dismiss or even despise intellectuals and/or do more quantifiable and visible work. K-12 teachers are somewhat susceptible to the same misunderstandings, but they babysit so there’s a general reluctance to come down too hard on them.

    To chucckle I would say that every place I’ve ever worked, from pubs to Wall Street to the university has it share of slackers. It’s unfair to generalize to everyone else.

  • theskeptic

    I also wonder if Levy was projecting given the dissociation with how most faculty operate. It sounds like he was another out of touch administrator. 

  • mscarbecz

    Sigh. How many times do we have to make the same arguments over and over again. Some pundit or state legislator outside academe writes that profs are under-worked and overpaid, and those of us inside higher ed write back that we do much more than our 9, 12, 15+ hours/week in the classroom. This argument will never end because the general public has a fundamental misunderstanding of higher education and data doesn’t matter.

  • agp293

    I don’t understand… some faculty slack off in their teaching/prep work?  I have only seen that in situations where the Professor knows he is leaving and going to another position… =/  How did those slacker professors get through grad school?  

  • olmsted

    Not that I disagree with the author, but the rhetoric of overused terms like “constantly” and “countless” and “long hours” mean little.  If anything, they are the sort of grasping at straws defense that academics are renown for.  Moreover, they are flat out weak explanations in the face of such attacks.  

    I think it is fair to assert that if we work such withering hours and give so much for the dollars we earn, then we ought not to shy away from adding up the numbers to tell how much we give.

  • kgodwin

    This is certainly true at my institution.  Our faculty are contracted to work 33 weeks a year (3 10 week terms plus three finals weeks), plus a handful of “work” days, and probably average 40-50 hours per week during that time, for a total of about 1650 hours a year.  We require a master’s degree (and very few of our instructors have PhDs).  Their salary scale ranges from roughly 47K to roughly 68K.

    In contrast, my position requires a master’s degree, I work 40 hour weeks, 50 weeks a year (I get two weeks of paid vacation), which is roughly 2000 hours a year.  For my extra 350 hours a year, my salary ranges from 39K to 51K.

    I have little doubt that faculty are undervalued and given an unfair shake in the media.  Just like the rest of us…

  • kgodwin

    Or any support staff?

  • drjennycrisp

    Fair enough. Looking over my calendar, I see that last week, I worked 57.5 hours. That was a bit excessive; most weeks it’s closer to 50.

  • d_opiniated

    Here in California a high school teacher fresh out of school and with little more than a BA starts at about $50K with incredible benefits. Many will retire with 100% of their highest pay for life. They certainly work hard the first year or two, but after that, most enjoy winter break, spring break and summers. What percentage of college professors do that well?

  • d_opiniated

    The question isn’t how hard professors work. Lots of people work long hours. Lots of people work hard. Lots of people ruin their health in the process. The real question is how much value the public places on their contribution. The public seems to value coaches and entertainers. Professors … not so much.

  • docfinance

    Of course Levy’s piece is ridiculous on its face.  I cannot remember a time when faculty productivity was measured by how many hours per week they were in class.  One thing we still DON’T do, however, is measure productivity by how many hours we’re in the office.  That’s for bureaucrats and clockwatchers.  Technology requires us to remain connected nearly all the time, and I for one carry work everywhere that I go, all the time.  Certainly that’s what my online students expect, and what they deserve, so I cater to them.  To quote an administrator at a faculty meeting a few years ago: it is no longer enough to just walk into the classroom and teach.  When we stopped laughing, we asked “when was that the case?”

    Sure, there are slackers in every profession. But those of us who are engaged in all aspects of the profession (teaching, research and service for those who’ve forgotten) have little time to speak up and defend the progress that we’re making in educating students, administrators and the public. Those of us who are engaged remember what our role is all about and are busy getting to it.

  • baatap

    I agree with you . . . sort of.  I am sitting in an air-conditioned office, and I enjoy my work.  I can probably work until I’m 80 if I want, so I don’t need to make a ton of money in a few short years.  But I would like to be able to take my three children off of state health care.  I can’t afford my school’s insurance, and my income is low enough that I qualify for government assistance.  But with a small raise, I probably won’t, and then I will be even worse off.  (Can one negotiate for a pay cut?)  A problem that nobody seems to be willing to address nowadays is that it is becoming a profession very unfriendly to men with children.  But that’s another issue for another article.

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