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This chapter details how engaging students in digital comics creation might support adolescents in strengthening their narrative writing capabilities. This chapter first provides a more detailed explanation of the micro and macrostructural elements involved in narrative production. Second, the chapter provides an introduction to comics and important design features. The authors also illuminate the complexity of multimodal texts (texts that combine images and words) and link visual narrative pedagogy and curriculum to classroom equity and accessibility. Across these opening sections, academic standards are referenced to show how the comics medium aligns with national visions of what robust English Language Arts education entails. The chapter concludes with descriptions of specific pedagogical strategies and digital comic-making tools that teachers and interventionists might explore with students within various classroom contexts. Examples of digital comics designed using various web tools are also shared.

Up to now, no extensive work has addressed the capacity and resiliency of pre-school children, nor the importance of extending disaster preparedness education to them. The purpose of this paper is to show that given the right learning tools to engage them, in this case a comic strip designed for this purpose by the first author, pre-school children are able to demonstrate the extent of their learning well.

Comic strips have been used in a number of ways to enhance knowledge and education, including for disaster risk reduction (DRR). Their use as learning stimuli is outlined, showing their historical context as well as their potential for future use. The methodology used included classroom observations, coupled with interviews with some of the class.

The research showed that pre-school children engaged with and responded to the comic strips in a positive manner while the blank comic strips allowed learners to make sense of the topic through the retelling of the story, allowing them to be placed within a schema of understanding deemed essential for deeper level learning.

The research is significant because it shows that, even at a young age, complex cognitive process were engaged in order for learners to take their new knowledge, place it within the context of their own experience and re-tell it to others. This pattern of reflection, reasoning and testing is important for triple-loop learning, which may hold the key to truly resilient individuals and communities.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the rituals and communicative practices that simultaneously create community, out-groups and perceptions of stigma at a local comic book retail organization through autoethnography. As such this piece explores personal identity, comic book culture and how this comic book shop acts as important third place as defined by Oldenburg.

Autoethnography allows for the simultaneous research into self, organizations and culture. As a layered account, this autoethnography uses narrative vignettes to examine a local comic book retail organization from the first person perspective of a collector, a cultural participant and geek insider.

The term geek, once brandished as an insult to stigmatize, is now a sense of personal and cultural pride among members. Various rituals including the “white whale” moment and the specialized argot use help maintain community in the comic book shop creating a third place as categorized by Oldenburg. However, these shared communication practices and shared meanings reinforce the hegemonic masculinity of the store, leading the author to wonder if it can maintain its viability going forward.

This autoethnography was performed at a local comic book shop, connecting communicative and ritual practices to organizational culture, hegemonic masculinity, geek culture and personal identity. It also argues that one need not be an embedded organizational insider to perform organizational autoethnography.

This study took place in an elementary English language arts classroom during a comics writers workshop unit and focused on one fourth-grade author. This paper aims to explain how a fourth-grade student receiving special education services positions himself and is positioned by others as an expert during a unit on comics. When students’ knowledge about multimodal composition is recognized and valued, the classroom community can become a place where students can author themselves into positions of power and authority.

Informed by sociocultural theory, social semiotics and positioning theory, the authors conducted a qualitative study to analyze the focal participant’s published comic, classroom interactions and interview data using open and in vivo coding systems.

The findings documented how the focal participant was positioned as an expert by others and how he positioned himself as an expert. The findings also explore how this fourth-grade comics expert left an authorial residue that extended beyond the boundaries of this particular comics unit, impacting his teachers and future iterations of the comics workshop.

Scholars have theorized multimodal approaches to reading and writing pedagogy as an equitable enterprise that values meaning-makers using a wide variety of semiotic resources. This study shows how incorporating an explicit multimodal composition opportunity allowed one fourth-grade author space to craft a comic and re-author traditional classroom positions of power.

The purpose of this paper is to encourage and assist collection of adult‐level, graphic novels and book‐length comics by women, and to demonstrate the breadth and depth of such work.

This paper provides a brief history of women and independent comics, tracing the medium's development from the 1970s underground comix movement to the present day. Individual creators and their works are discussed.

In the early years of independent comics, many of the women creating them were consciously reacting to an overwhelmingly male‐dominated profession. There was a high degree of shock value in these early works. As time went on the comics still tended towards the autobiographical, but storytelling gained importance. Most of the women creating comics today are still doing so from a woman's point of view, but their target audience seems more universal.

Graphic novels are in increasing demand, both for scholarly and leisure reading. Guides to collecting graphic novels exist; however, the vast majority of the artists included in these guides are men. This paper fills a gap by introducing librarians to several women graphic novelists who have been overlooked thus far.

In analysing the beancounter image's trajectory, from its birth to its persistence, in European French language comics between 1945 and 2016, this paper explores why artists continue beancounter image usage in popular culture.

Beancounter characters have been studied in an application of Iconology (Panofsky, 1955) in order to unravel how individuals make sense of cultural artefacts and how, in turn, the visuals shape cultural belief systems at a given time.

This study reveals that comics artists usage of the beancounter image results from their critical reactions to management and capitalism whilst at other times the usage is an indication of authenticity. Motivation for the usage is not constant over time nor is the impact of the beancounter image. Both appear dependant of the level of artistic freedom experienced by the artist.

Based on a single media (comics) with a unique characters (European French language) this study deepens exploration of the ways in which accounting becomes entwined with the everyday and implies that further research is needed.

Extends the work of Smith and Jacobs (2011) and Jacobs and Evans (2012) by focusing on a genre of popular culture over a long period, and by adopting a critical viewpoint. Also expands the possible applications of Panofsky's (1955) Iconology in accounting studies.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the potential of participant-created comics as a research method through a project to investigate the life stories of British–Bangladeshi women.

The author worked with a group of ten women through a series of workshops exploring their personal and community histories. Each of the women produced a digital comic that represented her story using text in any languages, photographs and drawings.

The experiences of the Graphic Lives project suggest there is considerable unexplored potential for the use of comics creation as a research method when working with community groups that may be considered “hard-to-reach”. A crucial difference between the comics created for the Graphic Lives project when compared to many other visual methods is that they do not seek or attempt to represent a verifiable truth. The project acknowledged and accepted the presence of fictional elements of autobiography and the difficulty in drawing boundaries between fiction and non-fiction. Indeed, this was seen as a strength of the stories as the use of imaginary elements offered participants a way to express emotional truths that they may otherwise have found difficult to convey.

Whilst interviewing participants could be one way to analyse participant-created comics in certain circumstances, this should not simply be the default. In the Graphic Lives project, it was important to accept that participants had already voiced their story in a certain way – using words and images – during the creative process. The project needed to accept and respect their voices as they had chosen to present them and not expect the participants to transform this into something that was more aligned with what the researcher might want to hear. A limitation of this method is the time and resourcing required to undertake such a programme of in-depth work, in addition to the need for close collaboration with community partners.

The paper questions the appropriateness of research interviews when working with many “marginalised” groups. It suggests that alternative methods, such as the comics creation method described, may be a more effective way to engage “hard-to-reach” groups in research.

This research has implications for the involvement of groups who, for a variety of reasons, are often excluded from research. It outlines a method that may be more socially acceptable than more established methods such as interviewing for some groups.

To date, exploration of the potential of comics as method of participatory knowledge construction has been limited. In addition, the use of comics to engage communities in research, especially adult groups who may be more reluctant to participate via traditional research methods, has received relatively little attention. This paper addresses these issues through a discussion of the use of comics creation as the research method adopted in a project working with a group of British–Bangladeshi women in the UK.

The purpose of this paper is to look into the topic of IP category extensions in an entertainment setting. The main goal of the study is to explore the reciprocal spillover effect of customer experience (CX) ratings with an intellectual property (IP) in one medium (i.e. film) on the sales of the same IP in other media (i.e. comic books).

The study is based on 21-years of monthly top 300 comic book direct market sales data linked to the release schedule and domestic box office gross figures for films featuring Marvel and DC comic book IP appearing in the weekly top 50 films over the same time period. The analysis is based on a hierarchical linear (i.e. mixed) model to account for the nested structure of the data.

The analysis reveals that CX ratings of weekly top 50 films featuring comic book IP have a quadratic relationship with comic book sales by the two major publishers. Films receiving very good but not excellent ratings are associated with the highest levels of incremental comic book sales.

The model is based on sales of periodical comic books in the direct market only (i.e. specialty shops) and does not account for sales of digital comics or collected editions through other channels. The analysis is also limited to IP for the two major publishers (Marvel and DC comics).

This study expands current knowledge on CX spillover effects between different media, contributing to entertainment and CX-literature alike.

This paper aims to provide an historical perspective and current guidance for youth librarians collecting graphic novels for teens.

The paper provides a brief review of the historical issues involved with censorship/intellectual freedom and comics and of current teen‐oriented graphic novels with gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning of sexual orientation (GLBTQ) content in Canada and the USA. It also provides a context for negotiating intellectual freedom and collection management policy issues, and suggestions for targeted acquisitions of teen graphic novels with GLTBQ content.

The paper provides a brief overview of US and Canadian censorship of comics, including how this legacy affects today's market. It recognizes the difficulty of obtaining information and recommendations for teen‐appropriate graphic novels containing GLBTQ content, and makes suggestions for core collection items.

Only English sources from the USA and Canada are reviewed. Francophone Canadian literature is relevant but outside of the scope of this paper.

The paper is a useful source of information for the librarian looking for collection development suggestions, and/or for the librarian dealing with or preparing against intellectual freedom challenges to graphic novels or GLBTQ material for teens.

This paper furthers discussion of censorship of graphic novels and of GLBTQ material, and provides concrete suggestions to librarians developing a teen graphic novel collection. The issue is timely, as the graphic novel industry is booming and the ALA has documented an increasing number of challenges to graphic novels in libraries. Few previous papers on graphic novels or comics have included Canadian content, although the Canada‐American library worlds, publishing industries and legal codes are historically and currently intertwined.