Memo 3B

There is very little information out there about teaching superhero comics in the high school English classroom.  I was able to find one article: “Lesson Plans using Comic Books and Superheroes” by Robin Lamb.  While I can find other articles about teaching superhero comics, and I can find articles about teaching comics in high school English, this is the only article I could find on teaching superhero comics in the high school English classroom.  The article discusses lesson plans for various subjects and writing lesson plans are among them.  One lesson plan is for the students to write there own words in the dialogue and thought bubbles (similar to my lesson plan for God’s Man).  Another is for the students to using problem solving skills to get a superhero out of a predicament.  There is also an idea about having students create their own superheroes, I was assigned a similar assignment in high school but with epic heroes.  Analysis papers and reviews are also mentioned.  Before reading these lesson plans I came up with some of my own.  One was for me to copy some comic pages then cut then cut out the different panels and the students would find different ways in which they could fit together.  They would learn how panel placement and “the gutter” work in telling a story in comics.

I am also looking into some books and articles that treat comics as a serious medium and analyzes them.  I am looking into Understanding Comics and Superheroes & Philosophy.

Following are two pages from two different superhero comics.  With both I look at what could be taught in a high school English class from these pages.



Solar Man of The Atom: Second Death by Jim Shooter and Don Perlin

Here Phil Seleski has lost apart of himself, in the form of his favorite childhood superhero, Solar.  He wants to get this part of himself back in him, but he’s having trouble.  Strands of Solar’s energy is being shot around the room, but none is going back into Phil.  In a page like this a student could write an analysis paper about the metaphor of Solar’s split from Phil.






Magnus Robot Fighter: Steel Nation by Jim Shooter and Art Nichols

Not much going on here, right?  It is merely the robot 1-A asking back a question “The whole story?”.  But this is a story of a birth of a new type a robot.  A robot that isn’t a non-thinking machine, but sentient self-aware being.  It is a story of evolution.  So when he asks back this question in front of a sweeping ocean scene filled with fish, we are connecting this to the evolution of all things, as life started in the ocean.  From a page like students can write about what can be put into the background of the comic to enhance the themes, and how seemingly meaningless images are full of meaning.