Special - A Will Eisner Week Panel Discussion, "The Relevance of Graphic Novels in Culture and Modern Education"

On this special episode of The Comics Alternative, the Two Guys with PhDs wrap up Will Eisner Week by featuring a recording of an event that took place on Saturday, March 7, at Collected Comics and Games's Keller location. The title of the panel was "The Relevance of Graphic Novels in Culture and Modern Education," and speaking on it were Derek, Matthew Kolman of the Forth Worth Public Library, and Christopher Kilgore of the University of Texas at Arlington. All three shared their experiences using comics for educational purposes and discussed the many facets of their presentational potential. Along the way, they covered such issues as strategies for visual learning, labeling and categorization -- e.g., how useful of a term is "graphic novel," anyway? -- comics and literacy, the presence of a de facto graphic novel canon, reader maturity and visual explicitness, the place of seriality and cartoon one-shots, and the various forms in which comics are published. The audience members asked a variety of challenging questions, and some even shared their own experiences as both readers and teachers of comics in the classroom. All in all, it was an engaging conversation, and one that truly participated in the spirit of Will Eisner Week.