Tillie Walden: Ideas for Tomorrow. 2024. Video. https://www.loc.gov/item/webcast-11536/.
This lecture is a valuable resource for a variety of topics. During the talk, Walden discusses the power and history of telling stories with a series of images, the existence of LGBTQ+ people throughout history, and the way people take literary inspiration from their own lives and the people around them. This work can help students explore the ways we communicate with each other and create media—taking pieces of information and transforming them into a different product.
Tillie Walden, an acclaimed cartoonist and graphic novelist, gives a keynote address about the power of graphic novels as a form that is both recognized and valued. This resource has wide applications in the consideration of how people create texts, the power of visual art as a medium, and the influence identity has over art. The lecture features examples from Walden’s own works, illustrations of salient points about comics as an art form, and examples of primary source historical documents that inspired some of Walden’s art and ideas for the presentation.
During the 2020s, many states and regions began experiencing an uptick in public hate and discriminatory legislation toward LGBTQ+ individuals, despite their existence throughout history and the gradual growth of acceptance over the prior few decades. Additionally, comics and graphic novels have historically been viewed as a “poor” art form and a “lesser” version of literature, despite their growth in popularity and relevance. Many graphic novels by and about queer individuals are at the intersection of these phenomena.
- How do our identities influence our writing?
- How can we use the strengths of different forms of media to better communicate our ideas to others?
Academic Standards for English Language Arts-Pennsylvania
1.2.8.G: Evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of using different mediums (e.g. print or digital text, video, multimedia) to present a particular topic or idea.
- Students can discuss graphic novels and comics as an art form. They can discuss characteristics of genre and advantages and disadvantages of using various genres to communicate different types of information.
1.3.8.C: Analyze how particular lines of dialogue or incidents in a story or drama propel the action, reveal aspects of a character, or provoke a decision.
- Students can analyze individual elements or panels of graphic novels to connect to literary elements and skills (for example, examining how characterization is shown in a panel or two of a graphic novel versus a paragraph of action in prose).
- Teachers can use this resource to discuss the relevance of graphic novels as an art form that communicates important details about a chosen topic. For example, students can hone their research skills and create frames from a comic or graphic novel to synthesize and display that information.
- Educators can study a graphic novel using a resource like this one found at ReadWriteThink and have students create their own graphic adaptation of a text (novel, story, poem, play, informational nonfiction, etc.). This is flexible and can be done to check for understanding of a specific text or of a specific literary element or skill. This can also be done cross-curricularly to show a graphic adaptation of a historical event or STEM concept.
- Some individuals may challenge this resource for its promotion of graphic novels if they believe graphic novels to be inferior or bad literature.
Links to resources for approaching those topics
- Resources such as this Introduction to Graphic Novels can help challengers understand the importance of this art form. Additionally, people may take issue with the author discussing her queer identity and relationship along with the existence of queer identities and relationships in history.
- Eisner on the Graphic Novel: Will Eisner, one of the most famous graphic novelists, discusses the importance of the art form.
- Gene Luen Yang: 2017 National Book Festival: Gene Luen Yang, acclaimed graphic novelist, discusses graphic novels in an interview.
- ReadWriteThink resource on graphic novel/comic terms/vocabulary.
- Education Week has a strong article about ways to engage using graphic novels and it could be the start of a lesson plan to introduce how to use them in a team planning session with colleagues.
- The Stanford Report, a daily curated newsletter highlighting transformational research and scholarship, campus news, and public events, also has a strong article about graphic novels and critical thinking development.