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Victoria's Recomendation - El Deafo by CeCe Bell

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Victoria's Recomendation - El Deafo by CeCe Bell

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Delivered in graphic-novel format, this memoir-style book is based on the childhood of US author/illustrator Cece Bell.

At the age of four, we see her being diagnosed as deaf, following a bout of meningitis. Cece starts school, bringing all sorts of new experiences. Along with the challenges facing any first-grader, such as negotiating the confusing rules of friendship, she is also the only deaf child in school and must learn to understand other people's reactions and attitudes.

Cece feels different. This is not helped by having to wear her Phonic Ear, an unwieldy 1970's hearing aid strapped to her chest and connected to her head by long chords. With time, however, she discovers that the dreaded device can be rather useful - even enabling her to hear what teachers are up to when they leave the classroom - a 'superpower' which gains the admiration of her peers. She also finally finds a true 'best friend' and by the end of the book Cece is successfully becoming the 'El Deafo' alter ego of her imagination, capable of taking on the world.

The illustrations are accessible, engaging and highly unusual, with Bell electing to depict the entire cast with rabbit ears. The semi-anthropomorphic approach is unexpected but effective, and, along with the comic strip format, serves to keep the reader's attention focused firmly on what Bell really wants to tell us.

Deafness represents a vast spectrum of experiences and (as Bell stresses in her author's note) her story can only represent one perspective. Yet many valuable messages are shared - the importance of being able to see people's mouths properly, the challenges of sleepovers (how do you gossip together after lights-out?) and how incredibly irritating it is when 'helpful' people insist on speaking artificially loudly and slowly.

This is a story told with great charm and plenty of humour, whilst also offering a fascinating insight into what it can be like to be severely or profoundly deaf.

We've assembled a team of super books to make a super booklist for readers aged 9-12. These books feature a range of heroes - from real life people to comic book greats!

These comics and graphic novels offer a different route into discovering the pleasure of reading.

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Delivered in graphic-novel format, this memoir-style book is based on the childhood of US author/illustrator Cece Bell. At the age of four, we see her being diagnosed as deaf, following a bout of meningitis. Cece starts school, bringing all sorts of new experiences.

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Victoria Jamieson - Children’s Book Author and Illustrator

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You can learn more about me, my books, and arranging author visits to your school or library here.

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The Official Website of Raina Telgemeier

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Marc's recommendation - Immortal Sergeant 

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Marc's recommendation - Immortal Sergeant 

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MINISERIES PREMIERE

Award-winning I KILL GIANTS storytellers JOE KELLY (Deadpool, Savage Spider-Man) and KEN NIIMURA (Eisner Award-winning Umami) return to yank on your heartstrings with IMMORTAL SERGEANT

On the eve of his unwelcome retirement, Jim Sargent (aka "Sarge") a grizzled, old-school detective, catches a break on a murder case that's haunted him for decades. Unfortunately, Sarge must drag his anxiety-riddled adult son, Michael, along for the ride or risk losing the lead forever. Can this dysfunctional duo overcome their own hang-ups, blindspots, and secrets to catch a killer?

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MINISERIES PREMIERE Award-winning I KILL GIANTS storytellers JOE KELLY (Deadpool, Savage Spider-Man) and KEN NIIMURA (Eisner Award-winning Umami) return to yank on your heartstrings with IMMORTAL SERGEANT On the eve of his unwelcome retirement, Jim Sargent (aka "Sarge") a grizzled, old-school...

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Screwy Sci-Fi Monster Noir Cartoons and Comics!

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Harvey Kurtzman (1924 - 1993) was an American cartoonist, writer, editor and pioneer of comics. He is probably best known for creating the trailblazing and revolutionary humor magazine MAD in 1952 before eventually leaving the publication in 1956. However, his influence extends far beyond that legendary 28 issue run, with his work continuing to inspire generations of cartoonists worldwide.

Following his work on MAD, Kurtzman would go on to create a variety of seminal works of the medium including Trump, Humbug, Little Annie Fannie, The Jungle Book and Help! During this time, he helped to discover and mentor a number of diverse talents including Terry Gilliam, Gloria Steinem, Gilbert Shelton and Robert Crumb.

Known for his social satire and pop culture parodies, Kurtzman is looked upon as one of the most influential pioneers of comics whose towering & iconic shadow still looms large today.

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Harvey Kurtzman (1924 - 1993) was an American cartoonist, writer, editor and pioneer of comics. He is probably best known for creating the trailblazing and revolutionary humor magazine MAD in 1952 before eventually leaving the publication in 1956. However, his influence extends far beyond that legendary 28 issue run, with his work continuing to inspire generations of cartoonists worldwide.

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"

Thank you for reading. I can't say it enough.

Hark! A Vagrant, such as it is, is an archive website now. I didn't think it would be when I stepped away to work on other projects, but (not to kill the light mood around here) 2016-2018 were very difficult years in a personal sense, and emerging on the other side, I feel like this is a project that has run its course. I am so very grateful for all that this comic and my readers have given me, they have given me a career, joy, and more than I ever dreamed.

I'm still working on a graphic novel, and picture books for children. I miss making humour comics, but coming back to them, I will have to figure out what that will look like. These comics go back to my early 20s, and I am a different person. In a sense that's exciting. I'll figure it out, and I hope I'll see you there. Hark! is only one project, I personally am not going anywhere. And maybe next time I'll choose a title that I won't have to repeat ten times to people, a bright prospect.

I'd like to dedicate this archive to my sister Becky Beaton, who we lost in 2018, and who always believed in me. I love you, always.

-Kate

Friends:

Lynn Allingham
John Allison
Dawn and Margie Beaton
Marc Bell
John Campbell
Scott Campbell
Ryan Carley
Anthony Clark
Rebecca Clements
Domitille Collardey
Jillian Comeau, Kim Carson and Michelle Skelding
Aaron Diaz
Jess Fink
Eric Feurstein
Brian Fukushima
Matt Forsythe
Sarah Glidden
Meredith Gran
Lisa Hanawalt
Dustin Harbin
Christopher Hastings
Emily Horne and Joey Comeau
Jon Klassen
Steve Lambke
Hope Larson
Joe List
David Malki
Phil McAndrew
Carolyn Merriman
Carly Monardo
Vicki Nerino
Ryan North
Ryan Pequin
Neil Rough
Jeffrey Rowland
Gabby Schulz
Smart and Bird
Nathan Stapley
Julia Wertz
Britt Wilson
Steve Wolfhard
Chip Zdarsky

Good comic shops that have taught me a thing or two:

The Beguiling, Toronto
Strange Adventures, Halifax
Legends Comics and Books, Victoria
Desert Island, Brooklyn

All content (c)2006-2018 Kate Beaton

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" Thank you for reading. I can't say it enough. Hark! A Vagrant, such as it is, is an archive website now. I didn't think it would be when I stepped away to work on other projects, but (not to kill the light mood around here) 2016-2018 were very difficult years in a personal sense, and emerging on the other side, I feel like this is a project that has run its course.

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Comics

About

Shop

Patreon

Coloring Book Pages

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Underpants and Overbites is a weekly funny online comic made in ink and watercolor. This is an autobio webcomic and made in Rochester, NY.

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Cartoonist Fred Hembeck's official website with new, old, and continuing strips.

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Lew Stringer (born 22 March 1959 in England) is a freelance comic artist and scriptwriter.

Stringer began his career from the late 1970s with a series of fanzines, many featuring his popular character; these were read by several professional creators (including Kevin O'Neill, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons) who encouraged Stringer to try comics as a profession and Stringer recalls that "Alan Moore actually introduced me to one of the editors at Marvel UK - Bernie Jaye who was editor on The Daredevils".

He sold his first professional cartoon to Marvel UK (the British branch of Marvel Comics) in 1983 where it appeared in The Daredevils comic, after which he worked for a short time as art assistant to the cartoonist Mike Higgs (creator of Moonbird and The Cloak). Since then Stringer has freelanced for numerous British comics for various companies and audiences.

His best remembered creations are and Pete and His Pimple for comic (1986), which outlasted that comic and continued into comic, and Combat Colin the halfwit hero who featured in Action Force and The Transformers comics. Prior to Colin joining Transformers, Stringer had written another, similarly slapstick, strip Robo-Capers for that title. Robo-Capers was replaced by Combat Colin when the reprints of American G.I. Joe strips were added to the Transformers comic. Robo-Capers returned for a single story, which featured Colin and his sidekick, in Issue No. 200. After a change of editorial direction in 1991, Marvel UK handed the rights of Combat Colin to Stringer and he has used him in small-press titles, such as the Combat Colin Special and Yampy Tales. On 30 September 2012, Combat Colin returned in an all-new story for the launch of new David Lloyd's new online comic Aces Weekly and two other new stories featuring the character have appeared there since.

Stringer has also worked as a writer on CiTV Tellytots; was one of the main writers on Sonic the Comic, where he created several fan-favourite characters and stories; and has been a long time artist/writer for and many other publications. He has written Toxic!'s Team TOXIC! strip since the first issue (and drawn it since issue 15); this proved popular enough with the readers to gain two pages an issue and lead to other comic strips being brought in. In October 2012 reprints of Team Toxic began to appear in the magazine but brand new stories resumed in January 2014, concluding in February 2019.

He broke into the international market in 1997 creating the Suburban Satanists for the Norwegian comic . From 1999 to 2007 those characters appeared in the Swedish comic book Herman Hedning.

In April 2005, Active Images published a collection - Brickman Begins - of all of Stringer's Brickman strips since 1979. In 2006, a brand new Brickman series began in the American comic book Elephantmen, published by Image Comics, and in 2007, Combat Colin became a guest star in the strip. The series concluded in Elephantmen No.24 in 2009. In September 2015 Stringer reprinted all 20 episodes in a self-published comic entitled Brickman Returns. Stringer has since self-published other comics that reprint his older material, such as a Derek the Troll / Rock Solid special and a Combat Colin mini-series.

He began freelancing for in 2007, drawing a Fred's Bed story for the Christmas issue and a one-off Ivy the Terrible strip for an issue in 2008. In October 2008 Stringer became the artist on a new strip, Super School which is about five superhero children and their non-superpowered teacher. He started drawing for after its revamp in October 2010, providing the illustrations for Postman Prat and Kid Cops and writing and drawing The Dark Newt.

In 2014 Lew announced that he would be contributing a regular new cartoon strip to Doctor Who Magazine.

In recent years Lew has scripted and illustrated Rasher and Joe King (The Beano) for and in 2018 began work on a revival of Big Eggo for that comic.

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Lew Stringer (born 22 March 1959 in England) is a freelance comic artist and scriptwriter.

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n New Year's Eve 1995, six-year-old Calvin and his tiger, Hobbes, sledded off together for the last time. It was the final strip in Bill Watterson's acclaimed comic, Calvin and Hobbes, which appeared in 2,400 newspapers, and it looked as though it might be Watterson's final published work.

In the ensuing decades, the man who had become a cartooning legend seemed to have all but disappeared, as if he were just a figment of Calvin's rich imagination. He rarely gave interviews; his occasional small projects, including secretly filling in for another cartoonist for a few days, were newsworthy events. Last week's announcement of Watterson's first major work in nearly 30 years - The Mysteries, a vibrantly illustrated "fable for grown-ups " - stunned fans and called for celebration.

"This is pretty exciting and monumental that he's releasing a whole book," says Nevin Martell of Washington DC, a lifelong reader and the author of Looking for Calvin and Hobbes, a story of the strip and Watterson that's also part memoir. "I'm surprised and yet not surprised - surprised in the sense that he's putting something out, not surprised that since he is putting something out, it's so wildly different from what he did on Calvin and Hobbes."

Bill Watterson and John Kascht's The Mysteries. Photograph: Courtesy Andrews McMeel

After years avoiding the public eye, what prompted Watterson to come out of retirement? "He's been working creatively, painting and doing other types of art, since he ended the strip," says Jenny Robb, head curator of comics at Ohio State University's Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum, which houses most of Watterson's original strips. "From that standpoint, it makes sense that eventually he would find a project that he wanted to share with his audience."

Though Watterson has been described as reclusive, that might not be the best word; he lives a normal life, says Robb, one of the few people to have interviewed him, but "he doesn't like to be in the spotlight. He wants to let his artwork speak for itself. And he's uncomfortable in the role of a spokesperson for comics - he would prefer that people read and experience the comic strip rather than engaging with it filtered through him talking about it."

And many millions of people have. According to the publisher, Andrews McMeel, Calvin and Hobbes books have sold 50m copies, and the full collection has the unusual honor of having been the heaviest book to reach the New York Times bestseller list (not to mention the most expensive). Since the strip began in 1985, readers have embraced the adventures of the impulsive Calvin, often lost in a vivid internal world; his thoughtful tiger, Hobbes, who is real to him but stuffed to everyone else; his longsuffering parents; his babysitter and arch-nemesis, Rosalyn; and his bright and diligent fellow first-grader Susie, target of many a failed snowball throw.

The cover of The Calvin and Hobbes Portable Compendium. Photograph: Courtesy Andrews McMeel

"It has everything that can make a comic strip successful," says Robb. "It's funny, first of all. It's insightful. It's wise. It's visually appealing," particularly in the groundbreaking Sunday strips, which eventually shed the grid layout in favor of panels of various shapes and sizes to suit the story. "You see him really stretching as an artist in the Sundays and they're just beautiful to look at," Robb says. "So he brings together all the different aspects of a comic strip, the writing, the characters, the layout, the artwork, and he just has a mastery of all of those."

Robb and Martell both point to another of the strip's most potent qualities: timelessness.

"Even though we live in a very digital age now, with all sorts of devices and all sorts of connectivity that didn't exist when Calvin and Hobbes was in print, when you go back and read those strips, it's essentially a story of a boy and his best friend and the adventures that they went on," Martell says. "It's not a strip that's clouded by pop culture references or other types of references that feel really dated. It feels like it exists in a place out of time. And that's why kids today who are lucky enough to either be given a book or just stumble upon it in the library, when they pick up those strips, they make just as much sense today as when they were first released." He calls the strip "one of the greatest works of popular culture of the 20th century".

If the storylines are timeless, so are the strip's weightier themes. Watterson uses Calvin and Hobbes, best friends with opposing personalities, to explore the ups and downs of childhood; mortality, as when Calvin tries, and fails, to nurse an injured raccoon back to health; environmental fears ("Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us," Calvin says); horse-race politics, as Calvin reports on his father's approval rating with polls of "household six-year-olds"; consumerism ("Hey Mom, I saw a bunch of products on TV that I didn't know existed, but I desperately need!"); and much more.

"I think it demonstrated what was possible with the comics art form, how you can tell stories that appeal to a wide audience with visual variety," Robb says. "These are all things that had been done before. But Calvin and Hobbes brought a lot of unique features together and showed how you could create something really special and really magical."

As for the next chapter in Watterson's career, Andrews McMeel describes The Mysteries as "a compelling, provocative story that invites readers to examine their place in the universe and their responsibility to others and the planet we all share", calling it "a fable that dares to intimate the big questions about our place in the universe".

The book is a collaboration between Watterson and the celebrated caricaturist John Kascht, and it appears far bleaker than either illustrator's earlier work. The few published panels are sombre and foreboding, presented in shades of gray. "The style of the writing, the style of the art is intensely different from Calvin and Hobbes. And I think that's a very conscious decision on [Watterson's] part. He would not ever want to be pigeonholed as just the Calvin and Hobbes guy," Martell says.

"The artwork is very different from both [Watterson's and Kascht's] styles," says Robb. "So I'm really curious to know how they collaborated on that and how that worked. Because it doesn't really look like John and doesn't really look like Bill to me."

For all the darkness, the characters in the new book - sad-eyed knights, self-satisfied kings and pensive wizards - still possess the vitality that made a boy and his tiger seem to exist beyond the page. Yet the pair never appeared anywhere else: Watterson was firmly against licensing his strip, which is why there is no Spaceman Spiff: The Movie, no authorized Calvinball league or official line of Hobbes-endorsed red wagons. (Calvin himself would surely be unhappy with his creator's decision to forgo millions of dollars; Hobbes, who prefers the simple life - a tuna sandwich and a snooze in a sunbeam - would approve.)

Kirsty Melville, president of Andrews McMeel, publisher of the new book as well as Calvin and Hobbes, wasn't prepared to reveal much else about the new volume. But, she said of Watterson: "Someone who can create the brilliance of Calvin and Hobbes - who knows what else is lurking in there?"

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'He created something magical': Calvin and Hobbes fans rejoice as creator plans first work in decades

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n New Year's Eve 1995, six-year-old Calvin and his tiger, Hobbes, sledded off together for the last time. It was the final strip in Bill Watterson's acclaimed comic, Calvin and Hobbes, which appeared in 2,400 newspapers, and it looked as though it might be Watterson's final published work.

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Click here to visit the Sergio Blog!
Sergio silliness can currently be found in the Groo Meets Tarzan mini-series, available now from Dark Horse Comics. And of course, he's in still in every issue of MAD - in the margins if not on the pages - though most of that, like most of MAD these days, is reprints. You can snag other things he's done via the "Buy Sergio" link at the top of this page. And you'll hear more about what he's up to when we get around to updating this website. In the meantime, check out the shiny new Groo website. It's pretty snazzy considering it's about a mendicant.

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Click here to visit the Sergio Blog! Sergio silliness can currently be found in the Groo Meets Tarzan mini-series, available now from Dark Horse Comics. And of course, he's in still in every issue of MAD - in the margins if not on the pages - though most of that, like most of MAD these days, is reprints.

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Product Description

It's the thirtieth anniversary of THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, and now DC Comics presents this classic title in a newly redesigned edition!

Ten years after an aging Batman retired, Gotham City has sunk deeper into decadence and lawlessness. Now, when his city needs him most, the Dark Knight returns in a blaze of glory. Joined by Carrie Kelly, a teenaged Robin, Batman takes to the streets to end the threat of the mutant gangs that have overrun the city. And after facing off against his two greatest enemies, the Joker and Two-Face, for the final time, Batman finds himself in mortal combat with his former ally, Superman. The original 4-issue miniseries is presented here in its entirety.

*** COVER SUBJECT TO CHANGE ***

Product Specifications

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Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (30th Anniversary Edition)

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It's the thirtieth anniversary of THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, and now DC Comics presents this classic title in a newly redesigned edition! Ten years after an aging Batman retired, Gotham City has sunk deeper into decadence and lawlessness. Now, when his city needs him most, the Dark Knight returns in a blaze of glory.

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LICAF Live: Little LICAF

LICAF Live has something for all ages... here we have some fab events to get involved with, learn something new and just have great fun with comics!

Little LICAF Book Readings with... Stephen Holland

Join us for three unmissable book readings with Stephen Holland, from Page 45, as he takes us on a journey through the eclectic medium of comics.

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Little LICAF | Lakes International Comic Art Festival

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LICAF Live has something for all ages... here we have some fab events to get involved with, learn something new and just have great fun with comics! Join us for three unmissable book readings with Stephen Holland, from Page 45, as he takes us on a journey through the eclectic medium of comics.

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You can design your Wild Escape activity in whatever way works for you. Below you'll find downloadable activities you can use in your museum or classroom - they're all free, and you can use them as they are, tweak them to suit your needs, or use your own.

This collection of resources will keep expanding thanks to the brilliant museum learning teams and teachers across the UK who are sharing their ideas and expertise.

Do you need resources translating into Welsh? Please contact thewildescape@artfund.org.

Quick activity sheet
Activities
This activity can be done with children aged 7-11 in the classroom, playground, museum or at home. You can edit it to suit your needs!

How to contribute to the collective digital artwork

The Wild Escape will be brought to life in an epic-scale collective digital artwork on Earth Day, download guidance on how you can get involved.

Toolkit: Evaluating your Wild Escape activity

Evaluation , Planning, For museums, For teachers, Available in Welsh

Ready to evaluate your Wild Escape activity? This toolkit has everything you need to share your achievements, experiences and feedback with us

Ready to use digital marketing assets

Marketing, For museums, Available in Welsh

Guidance on using social media, press, web and email to announce you're taking part in The Wild Escape with ready to use assets and templates.

Editable digital marketing assets

Marketing, For museums, Available in Welsh

Guidance on using social media, press, web and email to announce you're taking part in The Wild Escape with editable assets and templates.

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You can design your Wild Escape activity in whatever way works for you. Below you'll find downloadable activities you can use in your museum or classroom - they're all free, and you can use them as they are, tweak them to suit your needs, or use your own.

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When purchasing multiple items at once, please note that we will ship the order in full when all items are in stock.
﻿﻿Washington, 1937. In the middle of the Great Depression, 22-year-old photographer John Clark lands a big assignment when he is brought on by the Farm Security Administration. He is tasked with documenting the calamitous conditions of the Dust Bowl, a drought-stricken area comprising the Oklahoma panhandle and surrounding states, in order to bring the farmers' plight to the public eye. When he starts working
through his "shooting script," however, he finds his subjects to be unreceptive. What good are a couple of photos against relentless and deadly dust storms? Gradually, John finds ways to reach them, taking a young boy under his wing, and getting to know a young woman, Betty. But the more he shoots, the more he sees the awful extent of their struggles, coming to question his own role and responsibilities in
all of this. What can one man do in the face of such a crisis? A moving and unforgettable tale, inspired by real-life stories of courage and perseverance against all odds.

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When purchasing multiple items at once, please note that we will ship the order in full when all items are in stock. ﻿﻿Washington, 1937. In the middle of the Great Depression, 22-year-old photographer John Clark lands a big assignment when he is brought on by the Farm Security Administration.

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Clarice Tudor is a cartoonist and comic strip artist based in Leeds, UK. Shop tees, prints, stickers and embroidered goodies here.

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Page 45 Review by Stephen

A river is in constant flux.

Its very nature and purpose is a journey.

A coalescence of rain fallen from the sky which absorbs still more as it goes, it is its own transport to the sea.

Even its height and its girth ebb and flow. In the sunnier seasons its source may dry up or it may yield itself prematurely to the skies, but that is where the water was heading, inexorably, even via fauna and flora.

This theme of continual migration runs right through the book, a silent sequence of watercolour landscapes structured as a cycle of seasons; I was mildly surprised to see even evaporation alluded to in its quiet, closing moments. But it couldn't kick off with more of a bang.

That this will be a journey is suggested immediately by the movement on the very first page. As a wild sky erupts and its bruised-berry clouds burst, the last leaves of summer scatter in the squall and birds take flight - as does a dog and its master. Could there be a greater sense of urgency?

The horizon disappears behind a curtain of rain while the river's thin skin is lashed and slashed by the cascade. As we close in on its shattered surface there is a very real sense that the river is swelling. Sure enough the cyclist encounters a long line of locals - a very long line of locals - who seem to be watching and waiting. A second dog chases the first, and the cyclist overtakes cattle on the move, racing past tall, skeletal, Lombardy poplars to find another long line of locals, their silhouettes reflected in the ripples of the ever-rising river. They start shoring up the bank as the cyclist sets off on his last stretch home. Tomorrow it will look very different.

I love a wet brush and I love this cover anchored at the bottom by the same rich, rusty browns which draw your eye higher - along with the title and credit - to the sunken horizon, its partially submerged home, and the lone dog left peering anxiously in from the bow of a boat. Alessandro writes in the back:

Here the rule of thirds is fundamental if you want to see things as they really are: one-third earth and two-thirds sky. When the river rises, the proportions are reversed.

These proportions are maintained throughout the graphic novel bar each chapter's opening full-page flourish, dominated by the endless, open heavens.

The colours are phenomenal. Throughout the opening season ('Autumn') I couldn't get ice-cream associations out of my mind, the vanilla breaking through blackcurrant then blueberry frozen crush. I promise you many more palettes but have restricted the interior art to this one so that others remain a surprise.

They're not obvious, either: 'Winter' is uncommonly clement. Sanna reserves the traditional crisp blue for 'Spring' with snow-white blossoms budding and puffing on the stark, bare branches. Instead the emphasis is on warmth emanating from within, whether it's the children crowding at the windows of a school house, smoke rising from chimneys, breath drifting from open mouths or the calf emerging, seemingly white-hot from inside the womb. The overall effect of that stable sequence is like viewing it through a thermal scanner.

As for the carnival in 'Spring' it is a riot of colour with a real sense of sound, such as I've rarely seen outside Paul Peart-Smith's contribution to NELSON.

Apparently Alessandro's own river is The Po in north-eastern Italy but 'Summer' here is even more exotic than that - unless African elephants have migrated much further than I thought. The opening flash of colour there is so bright you'll be reaching for your shades.

It's an absolute masterpiece - and I rarely write that more than once in five years. It's fluid and instinctive yet carefully controlled.

And here's another thing I rarely do: suggest a soundtrack. But after you've floated through this a fair few times in silence, I'd heartily recommend David Sylvian's 'Gone To Earth' - the entire album kicking off with 'Taking The Veil' whose musical ripples match those painted here perfectly.

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Page 45 Review by Stephen A river is in constant flux. Its very nature and purpose is a journey. A coalescence of rain fallen from the sky which absorbs still more as it goes, it is its own transport to the sea. Even its height and its girth ebb and flow.

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Barreling across a rugged 2D terrain marked by the inky lines and earth tones of the page, a young Native American boy named "Anuki" made his industry debut at a Cartoon Forum pitch session last week in Toulouse.

Produced by Pierre Meloni and directed by Yulia Aronova and Eloïc Gimenez, the fast-paced short-form development project marks the latest effort from venerable French studio Folimages - the animation house behind the Oscar-nominated "A Cat in Paris" and last year's Annecy prizewinner "Vanille."

Now, Folimages is back with a comic book adaptation that feels, in so many ways, like the scenes from page brought to vivid life. Fully embracing the graphic style of creators Stéphane Senegas and Frédéric Maupomé's source comic - a bestselling, five volume series that has quickly become a modern and ubiquitous touchstone across France - "Anuki" follows the adventures of a mischievous boy living in a mythic and pre-modern natural landscape.

Like the source comic, the series will be dialogue-free, relying instead on rambunctious activity and broad character designs. At the Cartoon Forum pitch, the show's creators likened their project to Chuck Jones' madcap Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner cartoons, explaining that the project would swap spoken dialogue for propulsive action and comic gags.

Another key inspiration would be Mother Nature herself, as the project embraces seasonal change and natural rhythms for a narrative set entire outdoors, exploring a verdant 2D world filled with bison and beavers and bears - and ponies and lice, thrown in for good measure.

"'Anuki' draws on our childhood stories," explained creator Stéphane Senegas. ""We were so often alone, going out in the forest with our friends for afternoons of fun and fighting, scaring each other with snakes and boars."

And similar to the source text, the series will equally be driven by the lead's hot temper and short fuse. "It's important for the character to have faults," added Senegas, who liked Anuki's temperamental nature to that of any (and every) child. "[The series is about] children who think that friends are a pain, but who realize that life is better with friends than without."

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France's Folimages Sets Madcap Tone For Comic-Book Adaptation 'Anuki'

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Barreling across a rugged 2D terrain marked by the inky lines and earth tones of the page, a young Native American boy named "Anuki" made his industry debut at a Cartoon Forum pitch session last week in Toulouse.

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The Wanderer by Peter van den Ende (trailer)

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An article for Charlie Waller Memorial Trust newsletter.

Black Dog: The Dreams of Paul Nash was commissioned by the 14-18Now Foundation, The Imperial War Museum and The Lakes Festival, as part of a four year slate of new artworks for the centenary commemorations of the First World War. It is a graphic novel, and a live performance piece, covering the life of the British landscape artist Paul Nash during his time as an officer in Ypres, and how his experiences there changed his art and his character. He went into the war a young, idealistic, romantic, rather wishy-washy symbolist, and emerged the other side a hardened, angry, expressive and committed socialist. He didn't label himself an 'artist', he had become a 'messenger'. His calling, to show the people back home what had happened, what the truth of war means to the men caught up in it, to 'wipe the cant and lies from English life'. And to show how the devastation we inflict on the land, on the natural world, reflects the scars and violence we inflict on each other.

The project is called Black Dog for a number of reasons. Nash painted psychological landscapes, dreamscapes that reflect our inner lives and emotions. His first childhood dream, recounted in his autobiography 'Outline', was of being trapped in a claustrophobic tunnel and encountering a black dog that leads him to safety. This strange shadowy companion, who stayed with Nash as he grew up, appeared to represent a number of things; the anxiety of a solitary and imaginative child, the darkness of war approaching, and most clearly, the depression of Nash's mother that became more and more a part of their home life as her condition deteriorated. The fact that he doesn't mention the cause of her eventual death while still a child, gives some indication how confusing it must have been - an adult world of irrational anger, solemn silence, isolation and fear that he never understood. According to her death certificate, after she had been committed, she actually died of anorexia,

This shadow never left Paul. His brother John, who, maybe because he was that much younger, or maybe because his character was always lighter in spirit than Paul's, never seemed to be as affected. John had a much tougher war than Paul, being one of only 12 soldiers, from his platoon of 80, to survive the Battle of Cambrai. Yet, he had a comparatively happy life after the war, locking his memories away, becoming a successful painter and illustrator, with a pleasing, superficial style, unlike Paul's haunted, restless work.

Paul found it very hard to adjust and refocus after his war experiences - a war artist without a war. He moved to Dymchurch and painted the shoreline, where the turbulent, angry, chaotic sea pushed against the static, hard lines and simple, certain shapes of the sea wall, again and again. Worrying over the images, he blackened the skies, reformatted the compositions, working something out. Notional people would walk through his etchings or watercolours occasionally, but Paul never committed to drawing people in any real sense, he was interested in the longer, even eternal, timelines of trees, skies, rocks, oceans. What he wanted to express could not be found in the overly specific faces of transient human beings.

In 1921, after the death of a close friend, an alarming encounter with his unconscious father (who had not died as Paul had feared), and the accumulated post-traumatic stress of the war, Nash passed out, and remained unconscious for a week. After he recovered, he never painted another person. The voice he'd discovered during the war never left his work, even when painting the most pastoral of landscapes. He managed to keep the depression that killed his mother at bay, using his landscape painting to express his innermost feelings, and finding, in the woods at Iden, the Wittenham clumps, the standing stones at Avebury, his favourite and most profoundly affecting places, solace.

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An article for Charlie Waller Memorial Trust newsletter. Black Dog: The Dreams of Paul Nash was commissioned by the 14-18Now Foundation, The Imperial War Museum and The Lakes Festival, as part of a four year slate of new artworks for the centenary commemorations of the First World War.

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Welcome to Shrig Shop

Shrig Shop is a shop in Copenhagen founded by artist David Shrigley and gallerist Nicolai Wallner. Together we make limited editions, prints, posters and other great stuff, created exclusively by David Shrigley and Shrig Shop, serving as an extension of his artistic practice in Copenhagen.

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Shrig Shop - A shop founded by David Shrigley and Nicolai Wallner

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Shrig Shop is a shop located in Copenhagen founded by artist David Shrigley and gallerist Nicolai Wallner. We make limited editions, prints, posters, clothing and other great stuff created exclusively by David Shrigley and Shrig Shop, serving as an extension of his artistic practice in Copenhagen.

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When purchasing multiple items at once, please note that we will ship the order in full when all items are in stock.
﻿﻿Fight! was originally published by Nobrow Press in 2 parts in 2011.
This collection brings both Fight! 1 and 2 together in one collected edition, in full colour for the first time.

Known by hundreds of expectant fans as the malevolent "Diablo," Lou is a professional wrestler at the pinnacle of his career. Every Thursday he battles his enemy Savior-the golden-locked "good guy." But Lou isn't happy . . . you see, both on and off stage, Lou has the appearance of a devil. However, you could not find a milder mannered or gentler creature. Lou desperately yearns to be appreciated for who he is on the inside; unfortunately being red and having horns doesn't do him any favors.

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When purchasing multiple items at once, please note that we will ship the order in full when all items are in stock. ﻿﻿Fight! was originally published by Nobrow Press in 2 parts in 2011.This collection brings both Fight! 1 and 2 together in one collected edition, in full colour for the first time.

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Demon in the Wood

A Shadow and Bone GRAPHIC NOVEL
Discover the start of a grand and sinister destiny in this must-have graphic novel prequel to the bestselling series and international Netflix sensation Shadow and Bone from spectacular new talent Dani Pendergast and #1 New York Times bestseller Leigh Bardugo.
Before he led Ravka's Second Army, before he created the Fold, and long before he became the Darkling, he was just a lonely boy burdened by an extraordinary power.

Eryk and his mother, Lena, have spent their lives on the run. But they will never find a safe haven. They are not only Grisha―they are the deadliest and rarest of their kind. Feared by those who wish to destroy them and hunted by those who would exploit their gifts, they must hide their true abilities wherever they go. But sometimes deadly secrets have a way of revealing themselves . . .

Buy Now - United States

Buy Now - International

Praise for the Grishaverse

"A master of fantasy." - THE HUFFINGTON POST

"Utterly, extremely bewitching." - THE GUARDIAN

"The best magic universe since Harry Potter." - BUSTLE

"This is what fantasy is for." - THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

"[A] world that feels real enough to have its own passport stamp." - NPR

"The darker it gets for the good guys, the better." - ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY

"Sultry, sweeping and picturesque. . . . Impossible to put down." - USA TODAY

"There's a level of emotional and historical sophistication within Bardugo's original epic fantasy that sets it apart." - VANITY FAIR

"Unlike anything I've ever read." - Veronica Roth, bestselling author of DIVERGENT

"Bardugo crafts a first-rate adventure, a poignant romance, and an intriguing mystery!" - Rick Riordan, bestselling author of the Percy Jackson series

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Wondering where to start? Click here for the Grishaverse Reading Order.

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The Worst Journey in the World: Graphic Novel

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Buds are swelling, birds are singing, and book events are popping up like daffodils ... Here are some upcoming dates if you find yourself on this side of the Atlantic: NOW to 23 March - Exhibition of 'making of' artwork at Jam Bookshop, 21a Hackney Rd, LondonA lot of the artwork from my show at...

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The Worst Journey in the World: Graphic Novel

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Buds are swelling, birds are singing, and book events are popping up like daffodils ... Here are some upcoming dates if you find yourself on this side of the Atlantic: NOW to 23 March - Exhibition of 'making of' artwork at Jam Bookshop, 21a Hackney Rd, LondonA lot of the artwork from my show at...

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Palestineby Joe SaccoJonathan Cape £12.99, pp296

If the mention of comic books still calls to mind images of caped crusaders and anthropomorphic mice, the graphic front-line reportage of Joe Sacco should upend your preconceptions. While the comic-book form typically deals with fantasy of a lurid and questionable kind, Sacco's cartoons address the extremes of an altogether different world - our own.

With a degree in journalism and a background that spans teaching at New York's School of Visual Arts, editing, publishing and a brief spell drawing Maltese romance cartoons, Sacco is perhaps an unlikely star of war-zone reporting. Yet his time is spent exploring the planet's hellholes and his work has even been championed in the Economist, a magazine not previously known for its interest in comics.

Art Spiegelman, creator of the Pulitzer-winning Holocaust comic, Maus, hailed Sacco's work as the vanguard of journalism, announcing: 'In a world where Photoshop has outed the photograph as a liar, one can now allow artists to return to their original function - as reporters.' Indeed, Sacco is arguably the only cartoonist in America to be held in equal regard by broadsheet journalists and comic-book enthusiasts.

Sacco's eyewitness illustrations have attracted attention far beyond the twilight realm of the comic book and graphic novel. Published in 2000, his first major project was Safe Area Gorazde, an unnerving first-hand account of the war in eastern Bosnia. The book earned widespread praise for its fusion of aesthetic and journalistic content, with the New York Times hailing Sacco as 'an immense talent', adding: 'This medium will not let us separate actions, faces, bodies and scenes from the words that explain and amplify them... Sacco shows how much that is crucial to our lives a book can hold.'

His cartoon narratives have also earned the Malta-born artist numerous awards, including the Eisner Award for Best Original Graphic Novel (the comic-book equivalent of an Oscar) and the 2002 VPRO Grand Prix of Haarlem, in which he prevailed over the considerable talents of Daniel Clowes and Chris Ware. In 2001, he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to work on his forthcoming project, Gaza.

Originally published in 1993 as a nine-issue comic series, Palestine is an illustrated account of the cartoonist's visit to the Occupied Territories during 1991 and 1992. Focusing on how private lives are impacted by public policies, Sacco depicts a retaliatory loop of routine horror, while navigating the region's infernal history and political sensitivities. Now republished in a single 300-page volume with a new introduction by the critic and historian Edward Said, Palestine remains, in light of recent events, as pertinent as ever. With luck, the graphic novel format will afford some measure of contact with booksellers beyond the ghetto of specialist comic stores and introduce Sacco's work to the wider audience it undoubtedly deserves.

Drawing on first-hand experiences, extensive research and more than 100 interviews with Palestinians and Jews, Sacco has gained access to unusually intimate testimony, giving space to details and perspectives normally excluded by mainstream media coverage. The enthusiasm and frequency with which Sacco is hauled into the homes of those he meets - to listen, take notes and drink endless cups of tea - underlines the desperation of the people he encounters; their hopes are pinned not on political promises but on telling their stories to a stranger who writes comic books.

Although the critical response to the American edition of Palestine has been overwhelmingly positive, a number of stridently Zionist web sites have, perversely, accused Sacco of 'Jew-bashing' and his Seattle publisher receives the occasional piece of hate mail. Yet Palestine is a remarkably even-handed work and essentially humanist in tone: 'What can happen to someone who thinks he has all the power? What becomes of someone when he believes himself to have none?'

The original Palestine comic series won the 1996 American Book Award and the illustrations have since been exhibited across the US. The book's imagery is vivid, memorably atmospheric and faithful to the landscapes and cities of Palestine. It also evokes an almost surreal routine of bureaucratic harassment, roadblocks and tear gas, punctuated only by moments of mordant humour.

Despite the careful characterisation of those around him, Sacco's cartoon self is slightly unreal - a grotesquely exaggerated figure, complete with enormously elastic lips - a formlessness that, curiously, invites identification. However, his draughtsmanship is perhaps best demonstrated by his complex crowd scenes, with their differentiated faces, pointed detail and disjointed snippets of overheard speech and interior narrative.

Although Palestine is both visually engaging and a labour of artistic love, at its heart lies a commitment to hard-edged journalism and a challenge to the objectivity of the Western (and particularly American) media: 'I came from the standpoint of "Palestinian equals terrorist". That's what filtered down in the course of watching the regular network news.' Sacco makes no pretence of the observer's invisibility and depicts his own initial disbelief of reported detentions and torture. Nor does he shy away from revealing his own ambiguities as a visiting Western journalist. (As a street demonstration threatens to erupt into violence, we see him bolstering his confidence by repeating to himself: 'It's good for the comic, it's good for the comic.')

With Palestine and Safe Area Gorazde, Sacco has assumed the unlikely role of the pre-photography war artist, while exploiting the narrative and textual devices of the comic book. Others have employed the comics form to tell political, non-fictional or biographical stories, among them Steve Darnall, Marjane Satrapi and Ho Che Anderson, but Sacco's work is unique in its scale and ambition.

Approaching such daunting topics with a disreputable and supposedly juvenile medium may seem futile, even absurd, yet Sacco's greatest achievement is to have so poignantly depicted contradiction, oppression and horror in a form that manages to be both disarming and disquieting. Palestine not only demonstrates the versatility and potency of its medium, but it also sets the benchmark for a new, uncharted genre of graphic reportage.

· Notes From a Defeatist, a collection of shorter pieces and earlier work by Joe Sacco, is published by Fantagraphics this month
Topics

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Palestineby Joe SaccoJonathan Cape £12.99, pp296 If the mention of comic books still calls to mind images of caped crusaders and anthropomorphic mice, the graphic front-line reportage of Joe Sacco should upend your preconceptions. While the comic-book form typically deals with fantasy of a lurid and questionable kind, Sacco's cartoons address the extremes of an altogether different world - our own.

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Gareth Brookes - The Black Project

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The website of Gareth Brookes, comics creator, graphic novelist, printmaker, small presser and author of The Black Project published by Myriad Editions.

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Victor Hugo’s The Man Who Laughs adapted

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The Man who Laughs (for adult readers)

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Victor Hugo’s The Man Who Laughs adapted

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David Hine and Mark Stafford unite on the SelfMadeHero graphic novel.

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Why Don't You Love Me? by Paul B Rainey - a marriage made in hell veers into the unknown

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ood as it is, I worry a little about this month's graphic novel. Will readers stick with it long enough to reach the twist that makes the effort of reading its first half worthwhile? I can't be sure that everyone will - and yet, I must not spoil this twist, even in the cause of encouragement. All I can tell you is that this is a book that requires investment; that eventually something unexpected happens, a left turn that takes the story slyly in the direction of science fiction and in doing so tips the whole thing clean upside-down. Thereafter, the reader must carefully reassess everything they thought and felt about all that preceded it and only then will they understand just what a clever and uncompromising comic Paul B Rainey has created.

But what does the reader feel initially? For a long time, Why Don't You Love Me? appears to be an unrelentingly grim account of the lives of a couple, Claire and Mark, whose relationship is in deep trouble. While Claire is depressed, drinks too much and spends her days in bed, Mark is in a state of permanent anxiety from the moment he wakes up on the couch downstairs. Newly returned to his job as a web manager following a period of sick leave (also for depression), he has no idea how anything in the office works. The pair have two children, Charley and Sally, but they're neglectful parents. The TV and the Xbox are their babysitters of choice; sometimes, they struggle even to remember the kids' names. Rainey uses an old-fashioned strip format, in black and white, as if his story had appeared first in a daily newspaper, the words "Why Don't You Love Me?" appearing at the top of every one - and after a while, it's a question the reader hardly struggles to answer. Whatever problems they might have, Claire and Mark are pretty horrible. What a pair of nihilists.

A strip from Why Don't You Love Me?

But are they really? Is it possible they're simply trapped in a realm they cannot control? Paul B Rainey won the 's graphic short story prize in 2020 and it's great to see him between hard covers now. I love the way he draws people: Mark without eyes behind his glasses, Claire's face completely featureless when the black dog is doing its worst. Their world never extends much beyond the sofa and the TV - the furthest they ever go is the pub - but Rainey imbues it with a claustrophobia so intense, it's almost a character in itself.

It's true that the book's twist, already praised by Neil Gaiman, is powerfully redemptive, but even without it, he has plenty to say about modern life; how lonely it can be and how savage. His comic reminds me slightly of , Charles Burns's classic, highly metaphorical graphic novel of adolescent angst. Like that book, it is full of ordinary, everyday fear. There is a sense throughout of paths not taken and lives not lived. In the end - again, I don't want to give things away - its message has to do with time and how it's always running out: for us and for the planet. I can't honestly say that reading Why Don't You Love Me? is an uplifting experience, but it does have a strange urgency that is all its own.

Why Don't You Love Me? by Paul B Rainey is published by Drawn & Quarterly (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

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Why Don't You Love Me? by Paul B Rainey - a marriage made in hell veers into the unknown

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ood as it is, I worry a little about this month's graphic novel. Will readers stick with it long enough to reach the twist that makes the effort of reading its first half worthwhile? I can't be sure that everyone will - and yet, I must not spoil this twist, even in the cause of encouragement.

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Curse of the Chosen vol. 1 by Alexis Deacon: 9781910620830 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

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Curse of the Chosen vol. 1 by Alexis Deacon: 9781910620830 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

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Reprinting Alexis Deacon’s Geis Vol. I: A Matter of Life and Death and Geis Vol. 2: A Game Without Rules in a brand-new format with a stunning new cover. “Fans of high fantasy, especially those who have…

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In. by Will McPhail review - only connect

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Will McPhail's funny, shrewd cartoons often feature animals - amorous crocodiles, sly mice and bickering lizards - and cast a curious eye on human behaviour. He started drawing for Private Eye while still at university, and sketches regularly for the New Yorker; his Instagram feed is a parade of sharp ideas. This clever, thoughtful debut graphic novel shows that he can produce extended narratives with just as much panache as his single-panel cartoons.

In. follows Nick, a city-dwelling illustrator who mixes his own projects with ad agency work and strikes poses in coffee shops and craft-beer bars, while feeling like there must be something more to existence. McPhail laces his middle-class, not-quite-adult life with satire. One coffee shop boast of "a mischievous blend with notes of fermented apricot and polished concrete"; another is staffed by "translucent stable boys" who "leak cold brew from crystal tanks"; a third offers free coffee but charges by the number of pages you write of your screenplay.

But In. offers more than just millennial joshing. There's a dark undertow beneath the beard oil, spherical ice cubes and milk stouts. The lonely Will repeatedly gazes out, his eyes swollen with want, wondering how to bridge the gap to the people around him, and what to send across it. Then he grabs a coffee, eyes firmly phonewards, as the barista stares quizzically at his face in turn. He sits on the train, romantic thoughts in his head, sketching the woman opposite, until she pulls him up. "You think it's cute, because you're drawing instead of taking a picture?"

Nick's world is jolted by bad news from his mother and a chance meeting with Wren, a doctor with a healthy disrespect for convention and a low tolerance for nonsense. As the mood darkens, the book's grip tightens. McPhail brilliantly catches the rhythms of conversation, the beats and platitudes and pauses that punctuate both day-to-day routines and our most meaningful moments. Many of his most moving panels are silent, holding the reader in the moment as emotions unravel. Elsewhere, he breaks from black-and-white to explore Nick's inner life, rendering vast glaciers, strange beasts and deserted cityscapes in rich, surreal colour sequences that offer a lovely counterpoint to his nuanced sketching.

In. is far from the first book to offer hipster satire or an account of a young creative waking up to the world, and love interest Wren lacks the depth of the rest of the cast. But McPhail's skill makes it all feel wonderfully fresh. At times, In. fizzes with zeitgeist-skewering wit; at others, it probes the quiet places where doubt lurks and love can flourish. It's a very fine debut, from a serious talent.

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In. by Will McPhail review - only connect

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Will McPhail's funny, shrewd cartoons often feature animals - amorous crocodiles, sly mice and bickering lizards - and cast a curious eye on human behaviour. He started drawing for Private Eye while still at university, and sketches regularly for the New Yorker; his Instagram feed is a parade of sharp ideas.

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Fast! Fierce! Fantastic! A History of Action Comic - Horrified

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1976

A year recalled for its blistering hot summer, but as the pavements cracked and tarmac melted, culturally Britain had become a desert. The year saw Hammer films belch their final horror opus into the cinema circuit in the shape of the fumbled adaptation of To the Devil a Daughter (Peter Sykes, 1976).

The Carry On film series was dying an undignified death with the addition of Carry on England (Gerald Thomas, 1976) and stiff competition in the form of Robin Askwith and his The Confessions of a Driving Instructor (Norman Cohen, 1976) film. Cinematically things reached an all-time low with another Askwith vehicle, Queen Kong (Frank Agrama, 1976), a truly diabolical waste of 90 minutes of celluloid. Musically it was even worse and the industry was even deeper in the doldrums. Disco dominated and Brotherhood of Man became number one after winning Eurovision.

The UK comic scene was also under threat - sales had fallen on all fronts, with the boy's adventure comic being particularly hard hit and many titles were struggling to break even. Much of the creative forces behind such titles as Valiant, Victor and Lion had become out of touch with a changing society, trotting out the same mixture of square-jawed sporting heroes and stiff upper lip adventurers they had since the heydays of The Eagle in the 1950s. Fresh blood and a new approach were needed. Something had to change...

The first glimmer was the launch of D.C. Thomson's Warlord in 1974, the very first UK comic devoted purely to tales of men killing men in armed conflict. It was a huge hit and rival UK comic producers IPC soon launched their response in the form of Battle, an even grimmer and grittier take on all things war. Sales figures were extremely healthy and IPC management was particularly pleased with their gamble to employ freelancers Pat Mills and John Wagner to create Battle. Whilst Wagner was given the task of revitalising the ailing flagship title Valiant, Pat Mills was quickly given another new title to oversee and bring to publication. This comic would appeal to the streetwise kids who had stopped buying the likes of Battle and its predecessors. It would be modern, edgy and tough, and went under the working title of Doc Martens. It really would put the boot in, even more than IPC could ever dream.

Mills needed an angle for the new title. He also needed to change the name, which he did to the succinct and snappy Action. The angle came in the form of pilfering from the best of American cinema taking recent hits or familiar tropes and adding a new slant. The first issue of Action hit unsuspecting newsagents on 7 th February 1976 (boasting a 14 th February cover date) with a strong lineup of eight strips for the measly sum of 7p. On the inside of the rather tame looking cover, the paper proclaimed, " You are about to experience the toughest stories ever - Fast! Fierce! Fantastic! Action is an explosive of the 70s - read it and get caught in the blast! "

Looking out for Lefty

Action's poster boy was, and still is, Hookjaw - the most enduring strip to emerge from the comic's pages, having been reprinted in several formats and relaunched as mini-series since first publication. Essentially a ripoff of the hit Spielberg film, Jaws (1975), served up with lashings of gore and graphic images realised by artist Ramon Sola, Hookjaw took his name from a large fishing hook stuck under his ever-hungry mouth. Our Chondrichthye hero saw out three adventures before the eventual banning of Action, chewing his way through the crew of an oil rig, chomping on unfortunate holidaymakers on a Caribbean island resort and devouring unfortunates of the south coast of England. Hookjaw would return after the ban, but in an emasculated form which saw much of the violence take place just out of the view of the comic panel.

Clint Eastwood and his iconic role Dirty Harry (Don Siegel, 1971) would provide the inspiration for Dredger, a no-nonsense tough guy secret agent. The strip was packed with violent deaths and tense situations, and like Hookjaw, the story survived the ban but became a bland espionage adventure series. Dredger's first adventure saw him tackle another common theme of the 1970s by violently foiling an aircraft hijacking. The Running Man was inspired by the TV series The Fugitive (ABC, 1963-67), with a dash of the Dustin Hoffman movie Marathon Man (John Schlesinger, 1976) in the mix. The story saw athlete Mike Carter the victim of a face change operation in order that he take the rap for a Mafia boss. Not only does Carter have to go on the run from both the police and the Mafia, but he also has to hunt down those responsible to clear his name. Boxing strip Blackjack told the story of a pugilist determined to become world champion and was possibly inspired by the forthcoming blockbuster Rocky (John G. Avildsen, 1976), with elements of Mohammed Ali's real-life story. In his struggle, Blackjack came across fight fixers and other miscreants before winning the title and going blind. Then the story took a truly bizarre turn with Blackjack becoming a Kung Fu fighting pop star!

Hellman of Hammer Force was the very first British comic strip to examine the Second World War from the perspective of a German soldier. Hellman was a tank commander who believed in a clean fight, bringing him into conflict with his superiors. The strip was another post-ban survivor, but was stripped of the politics and became an ordinary war strip.

Sport's Not For Losers had the most direct elements of social commentary with a pushy father who wants his son to become a top athlete. When the boy breaks his leg the father forces his other son, a chain-smoking dosser, to take his place. Despite getting into all kinds of trouble the boy starts winning.

The Coffin Sub was one of the weaker links, being a standard war story that wouldn't have been out of place in the pages of Battle or Valiant. This was the least popular of the featured strips and would soon be phased out as Mills and Wagner refined the Action formula.

Play Till You Drop was a more traditional sports story detailing the plight of footballer Alec Shaw who is blackmailed into losing games to protect the honour of his father.

The Coffin Sub came to an abrupt end in issue 8 and was replaced by Green's Grudge War, the story of two soldiers, Bold and Green. Green always gets the blame when things go wrong and is jealous of Bold who always gets the credit. Green loathes Bold but ultimately sacrifices himself to save Bold's life. This was a strip that would not have looked out of place in the pages of any other of IPC's boy titles including Battle, Valiant or Lion.

Death Game 1999 took inspiration from the violent future sports movie, Rollerball (Norman Jewison, 1975). Inmates in a future death row are forced to play a bloody, brutal and deadly sport. If they survive they become heroes to the admiring TV viewers, but secretly the prison governor plans to have them executed.

Look out for Lefty replaced Play Till You Drop as the football strip (an obligatory genre strip in any UK boy's adventure comic) and took a different angle to the traditional form of this type of strip. The central character was Kenny 'Lefty' Lampton a top-class player whose career is marred by his terrible temper. Despite his skill, and because of his anger management problems, Kenny is resigned to playing for third division clubs. With the characters working-class background, and a grandfather who surely was modelled on Albert Steptoe, the strip embraced social commentary themes as well as offering the traditional sporting adventures. Little did Action realise that this strip would provide a fatal body blow for the publication.

Kids Rule OK, possibly the second best-remembered strip, was set in an ultra-violent future where a plague has killed all adults, leaving only tribes of juveniles to fight it out on the lawless streets of Britain. Elements of then still recent films such as A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971) can be seen as an influence on the strip.

The Seven Penny Nightmare

It was soon clear that IPC had a hit on their hands. From initial sales of a quarter of a million, they soon settled down to a comfortable 170,000. Apart from circulation figures, IPC experienced overwhelming feedback from their readership via the veritable landslide of letters they were sent. There are legendary tales of mailbags cluttering up the office corridors at IPC HQ. A UK comic had never connected so well with its intended audience. However, dark forces were gathering and national sporting events, the tabloid press and Frank Bough would all contribute to the demise of Action.

The first attack came a scant two weeks into publication with The London Evening Standard highlighting the violence and gore in an article published on 23 rd February 1976. It took the tabloids a while longer to get in on the act, but when they did so it was with a vengeance. In a two-page splash on April 30 th, The Sun dubbed the comic ' The Seven Penny Nightmare'. Signs of worry set in at IPC due to an Act of Parliament that decreed explicit horror comics banned in the UK. If enough pressure was brought to bear then IPC could find itself in the courts. Despite these concerns, no one at IPC was prepared for the storm of controversy that would erupt in September 1976. Surprisingly it wouldn't be Hookjaw that would land the publication in trouble, but the two strips that had recently made their debut appearances - The Kids Rule OK and Look Out for Lefty.

The fateful issue, published 18 th September, was Action's thirty-second. The comic had matured and found its feet and market niche. Perhaps it had grown too confident, but it was also the victim of circumstances. Early in the month, football violence had once more hit the headlines when Millwall fan Ian Pratt died at New Cross station following a scuffle with West Ham supporters that led to him falling under a train pulling into the station. That week's cover sported an illustration by Carlos Ezquerra, later a stalwart of Judge Dredd in 2000 AD, and featured an angry mob in the foreground, flames behind them engulfing tower blocks. In the foreground a punky looking youth swirls a metal chain, bearing down on a middle-aged man, prone on the floor. While nearby a policeman's helmet lies on the floor. The implication that the fallen figure is a bobby is obvious.

" Aggro is a way of life in Kids Rule OK!" screamed the strapline on the cover. Inside the comic, Look Out for Lefty would only fan the flames; bearing in mind the real-life headlines of football violence. Lefty was playing his first match for his team and one his own players was determined to get Lefty dropped from the squad, by any means necessary. In the crowd, Lefty's girlfriend witnesses a deliberate kick against Lefty's ankle by his teammate and promptly picks up a glass bottle. She hurls it on to the pitch and smacks the offending player on the head, knocking him out. It was all the ammo the comic's critics needed, and sensing blood, like Hookjaw, went in for the kill.

This is a blacked publication

The self-appointed guardian of Britain's moral standards, The Daily Mail, was the first off the blocks with a headline in their September 17 th edition that frothed, ' Comic Strip Hooligans' and then went into a detailed attack of the latest edition. A torrent of parental complaints by letter and phone followed, flooding the IPC offices. Mary Whitehouse and her National Viewers and Listeners Association was next to climb on the moral bandwagon alongside other moral pressure groups such as DOVE ( Delegates Opposing Violent Education). DOVE wrote to distributors and newsagents demanding the withdrawal of Action. In their letters, they threatened to 'black' the publication by adding their own stickers to the front of displayed editions. The stickers read:

"CAUTION. This is a BLACKED publication. Certain things in this work are not cleared by DOVE as being pro-child, in that they are either by direct meaning, context or implication, an incitement for adults to breach the primary fundamental written principles of the Children and Young Persons Act 1933. Section 1 which clearly prohibits: 'Assault, ill-treatment, abandonment, neglect and/or mental derangement' of the child to age 16. In the interests of free speech this publication remains undamaged. DIRECT ACTION by DOVE, Totnes Devon. On the side of the child only - Britain's Future"

By late September, the TV news media had also got wind of things and nightly news magazine programme Nationwide invited John Sanders (IPC's editorial director) to be interviewed on air. Sanders tried bravely to defend the comic during the grilling given by Frank Bough. Sadly his appearance was not enough to convince many of the employers at IPC itself. There was rank resentment and bitterness in the air already - staff felt they had been sidelined during the creation of Battle and Action by the creative and editorial powers granted to Mills and Wagner. Pressure was building, not just externally, but internally too. The IPC parent company Reed International's board of governors had several members with strong religious and moral beliefs and they felt that Action was bringing the company into ill-repute and propagating an unsuitable image for IPC.

The final blow was the stance taken by the two biggest distributors and stockists of IPC comics, John Menzies and WH Smith. Both companies wrote to IPC threatening not to stock Action, with WH Smith taking an even stronger line and threatening to not stock other IPC comic titles or publications as well. John Sanders issued an edict to try and put the brakes on Action. He demanded the publication be toned down with all examples of excessive violence removed. All pages of artwork were to be seen and cleared by Sanders personally before they went to press. It wasn't enough, however. Action was a profitable publication, but the threat to blacklist all other IPC publications was too heavy a price to pay for the company. Under attack by the media, moral pressure groups and from within by IPC employees, and Reed board members, the comic was withdrawn.

Comics were produced many weeks in advance with several dummy copies printed for final checks before the presses rolled and the issue dated 23 rd October had reached this point by the time the decision was taken to halt publication. Some of these dummy issues have survived and there are scans in circulation on the internet. After a number of substantial changes, the 23 rd October issue would be the basis for the relaunch issue of Action, dated 4 th December. The comic did not acknowledge the reasons for the hiatus with readers.

Kids Rule OK never reappeared, just seemingly vanishing into the ether from my ten-year-old point of view. Death Game 1999 and Hookjaw were considerably less brutal, and there were two new strips - Roaring Wheels (a bland motor racing story) and Double Dynamite (an even blander and safe sports yarn). The comic rode the coattails of previous popularity, but sales saw a decline as once faithful readers left in droves. Action limped on for nearly another year until November 1977 when the title was merged with Battle.

Pre-ban vs. post-ban

So how violent was Action? It's legendary in UK comics for being very graphic with a high body count. But just how do the figures stack up - which is the most graphic strip? Is there a difference between the two runs of Action, with the post-ban issues being markedly less gruesome and brutal? Below is a strip by strip body count for the entire run, broken down into post and pre-ban runs, with a grand total of graphic incidents. To be included in the count, the death has to take place in the panel (ie. visually). Characters seen lying dead in the frame that have not already been counted are also included. There is also a count of graphic violence culminating in a character becoming beaten, wounded, maimed or disabled and these two figures are added together to provide a total. Finally, there is an average number of violent incidents for each strip per issue. This figure is achieved by dividing the v iolence total by the total number of issues the strip appeared in. Results are ranked by highest average total.

Pre-ban statistics
There are lies, damned lies and statistics. Examining the stats by average throws some surprising results into the spotlight. Accordingly, the most striking stat is the first rank placing for one of the prime strips responsible for the downfall of A ction, Kids Rule OK. The spectacular high average of 8.5 is in part due to the short run of only six issues, but also to the fact that during the strip's scant run it had a high number of violent incidents. If the strip had continued in the same fashion, and not been dropped after the break in publication, it would have been in pole position by a considerable margin. Also worth noting is the lowly placing of Hookjaw (6th), above The Running Man which ran for just over half the total number of issues Hookjaw did. Surprisingly, after a strong start to the comic strip featuring several violent incidents in each early issue, the body count quickly tailed off with only one victim, and on occasion zero deaths, per issue.

This has an effect on the placing of the strip at odds with the recall of fans as one of the 'nasty' strips. This result has to be viewed in the context of just how images of violence or death in the various strips were depicted. Whilst compiling these results I was struck with just how gruesome and brutal some of the deaths are in Hookjaw, shown in gleeful, gory detail.

War based stories The Coffin Sub, Hellman and Green's Grudge War all rank above Hookjaw, with the latter two stories having considerably higher body counts. Yet, none of these strips is recalled as being key Action stories nor particularly violent, which can also be viewed in the context of how graphic the depiction of death is. In all the war-based strips there is a high body count (no more or less than similar strips in such concurrent comics as Battle or Valiant), but they are not as gory or brutal as the ones seen in Hookjaw. Before moving on to analyse the post-ban results, keep in mind the averages and results for second-placed Dredger, Hell's Highway and Death Game 1999 with healthy averages and violence totals. These will all experience a measurable drop in both results.

Apart from the war-based comic strip, Hellman, bucking the trend by having an average of violent incidents increase by 1%, the rest of the strips continued over from the post-ban era all see a marked decrease. Dredger suffers a 2% drop in gruesomeness. Death Game 1999, rebranded as Spinball, suffers an equally obvious emasculation with its average halved. Lead strip Hookjaw also drops 1% and on researching these figures I can confirm the graphic imagery is considerably scaled back.

It is very evident, taking into account the raw stats and the way the artwork depicts death scenes, that there is a marked change in approach between the two periods of Action. This left the comic somewhat toothless and far less cutting edge and this is also reflected in the quality of the new strips featured in the comic after the relaunch. They simply do not cut-the-mustard compared to the more visceral approach of the pre-ban period. Jinx Jackson, The Loner and Double Dynamite are standard boy's adventure strips that could feature in any other contemporary comic. The edge had gone.

Action comic - A legacy in red

Does Action have a legacy? Without a doubt it does. If Action had never been produced, 2000 AD, the last man standing of the once burgeoning UK comic scene, would simply not exist. After the controversy over Action, Pat Mills moved, along with a considerable proportion of writers and artists, to his next project for IPC. Action had been a rehearsal room and breeding ground for talent and ideas that would blossom in the new science fiction-themed comic.

Conceptualised to cash-in on the growing popularity of science fiction, 2000 AD would see familiar themes and tropes from Action transplanted to a place under the cooling shade of science fiction. Mills realised that Action had been too realistic, too urban, and that was part of the reason it had fallen. 2000AD would go on to publish equally graphic content with similar controversial social commentary as Action (possibly even more so) but got away with it as it didn't register on the radars of tabloids, watchdogs and governing bodies. It was cloaked.

The 2000 AD comic strip Flesh, which saw time travellers hunting and farming dinosaurs for their meat to feed a future society, featured much of the narrative as told from the point-of-view of embittered T Rex, Old One Eye, seeking revenge on the anachronistic humans. Just as graphic as early Hookjaw adventures, the strip showed giant spiders feeding on the bodily juices of their victims, men being torn limb-from-limb and an early venture into body horror when a time travel accident combines the bodies of humans with a dinosaur. Apart from sharing a vengeful carnivore in a lead narrative role, the strip shared, not only the same artists but many other themes with Action's Hookjaw.

Hellman established a pattern for an unconventional or unsympathetic character as the hero, which carried over into many 2000 AD strips - witness Cockney freedom fighter Bill Savage remorselessly kills the occupying Volgan forces oppressing England in the strip Invasion. Many other lead characters in this vein would follow. Harlem's Heroes took its cues (deadly future sport, part-robot / part human players, etc.) from Death Game 1999 but was given more polish thanks to the sparkling art of Dave Gibbons. Looking back you may also be able to spot further similarities between 2000 AD's star strip, Judge Dredd, and Action's tough-guy lawman / secret agent Dredger. They share more than just the first couple of letters of their surname and a surly attitude to lawbreakers. Elements of Dredger could also be seen in the Six Million Dollar Man-inspired secret agent strip, Mach One.

Was Action just a victim of a moral panic that can be seen as a precursor to the Video Nasties panic of the 1980s? In some ways, yes, but the comic certainly pushed the envelope for UK comics up to that period and did deserve some of the criticism levelled at it. Action was akin to the UK comic scene as The Damned's New Rose single was to the UK music scene, a vibrant cultural firework that would send shockwaves through their respective industries and change them forever.

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Fast! Fierce! Fantastic! A History of Action Comic - Horrified

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A year recalled for its blistering hot summer, but as the pavements cracked and tarmac melted, culturally Britain had become a desert. The year saw Hammer films belch their final horror opus into the cinema circuit in the shape of the fumbled adaptation of To the Devil a Daughter (Peter Sykes, 1976).

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Understanding Visual Literacy: The Visual Thinking Strategies Approach - Philip Yenawine

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This essay is included in the book, Essentials of Teaching and Integrating Visual and Media Literacy: Visualizing Learning , Danilo M. Baylen and Adriana D'Alba, Editors. Springer, Switzerland, 2015.

By Dabney Hailey, Alexa Miller, and Philip Yenawine

Abstract This chapter makes the case for two aspects of visual literacy that the authors believe to be generally overlooked: 1) that visual literacy occurs by way of a developmental trajectory and requires instruction as well as practice; and 2) that it involves as much thought as it does visual awareness and is an integral component of the skills and beliefs related to inquiry. This chapter roots these ideas in the theory and research of cognitive psychologist Abigail Housen, co-author of Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) with museum educator Philip Yenawine. Housen identified aesthetic stages that mark the development of skills helping to define visual literacy. Her research is also the basis of VTS, a method of engaging learners in deep experiences looking at art and discussing meanings with peers, a process that, this chapter posits, furthers visual literacy. This chapter presents that body of research and details the resulting VTS protocol. It reviews academic studies to date, subsequent to Housen, that document the impact of VTS interventions in various settings, and suggests beneficial areas for future research. In order to probe what development in visual literacy looks and sounds like on a granular level, two case studies of student writing from existing studies are presented and analyzed. Visual literacy skills enabled by VTS are briefly connected to broader educational concerns.

In order to produce children who know how to read well enough to perform practical tasks, at the very least, parents and caregivers talk to children as babies, introduce books early on, and prepare them for school, where various step-by-step processes are employed to help children achieve functional verbal literacy before the end of elementary education. Not so with visual literacy.

The culture at large seems to assume that somehow, perhaps because of our constant bombardment with images, visual literacy will simply happen without specific instruction. This attitude carries over to formal education, where achievement in reading, writing, and arithmetic sets the agenda, and where leaders are often mystified as to what visual literacy even means, much less how it may contribute to the teaching of skills prioritized by convention and mandate.

Even among the few who bemoan the consequences of a visually illiterate public, a gap exists between concern for the problem and offering solutions based in relevant theory and presented in terms of values common to those who set cultural and educational policy. In fact, as this chapter explores and tries to remedy, in the field of visual literacy there is no fleshed out, generally agreed upon definition or shared understanding of the skills involved. The wider world therefore has no sense of the relevance of these skills to educational practices that result in success throughout schooling and eventually in adulthood, work and civic engagement; there is even less understanding of the potency of integrating visual literacy with teaching the "3 R's." Fostering greater understanding in this area is the essential prerequisite for visual literacy to be regarded as the broad ranging, pertinent, and teachable matter it is.

This chapter aims to deepen comprehension of visual literacy and how it can be developed through teaching a specific methodology, Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS). The authors' perspective is shaped by longstanding practice as educators using VTS and regularly engaging in close study of VTS interventions. VTS is intended to nurture growth in aesthetic thought (the cognition that takes place as people look at art) as described by cognitive psychologist Abigail Housen, who co-authored the methodology. Beginning with a consideration of the definition of visual literacy, this chapter provides an overview of Housen's theory and research, explains what is meant by aesthetic thought and how it develops, and connects Housen's insights to the wider field of visual literacy. It further describes in detail the mechanics of the VTS teaching methodology, and reviews academic studies on its impact, which in turn are discussed to illuminate how visual literacy develops.

A Developmental Approach to Understanding Visual Literacy

John Debes's (1968) definition of visual literacy-he's credited with coining the term-establishes a clear starting point for understanding visual literacy at its core. He writes:

Visual Literacy refers to a group of vision-competencies a human being can develop by seeing and at the same time having and integrating other sensory experiences. The development of these competencies is fundamental to normal human learning. When developed, they enable a visually literate person to discriminate and interpret the visible actions, objects, symbols, natural or man-made, that he encounters in his environment. Through the creative use of these competencies, he is able to communicate with others. Through the appreciative use of these competencies, he is able to comprehend and enjoy the masterworks of visual communication. (p. 27; IVLA)

This definition is one of the broadest in the literature. One of its strengths is the fact that it refers to visual literacy as competencies that "develop." Even though Debes states that they are "fundamental to human learning," these competencies are acquired and enhanced by dint of effort, exposure, and, ideally, guided experience. The intended outcome, for Debes, is fluency: the ability to differentiate among and interpret the things one sees and to appreciate "masterworks of visual communication." He also includes the ability to communicate creatively applying these skills, a topic explored at length below. (The development of visual communication abilities-from drawing to design to creating diagrams, graphs and maps-requires teaching interventions beyond what is addressed here.)

As with any literacy, visual literacy begins with the development of the brain's capacities over time, through both structured experience (i.e., teaching) and ongoing, informal interactions with the visual environment. Just as parents and teachers take pains to develop reading literacy, we can and should employ a similar process to ensure visual literacy, ideally by building on existing skills, challenging them appropriately, and structuring the experience to allow children to construct their understandings of what they encounter visually (Bruner, 1960). By stepping up attention to nurturing visual literacy through teaching methods rooted in research on its developmental and cognitive aspects, all levels of education will benefit (Arnheim, 1969).

But what are the cognitive aspects of vision? While the eye perceives, the mind processes observations, draws meaning from them, and organizes that meaning in connection with an array of current and prior experiences, memories and ideas as well as such details as the immediate physical context. Though responses to what is observed can materialize in many forms, a primary one is language. The visual cortex connects directly to language centers in the brain. The content of the eye-mind connection commonly appears in what people say and may be further facilitated by the act of speaking, an iterative process. Influencing this concurrence of observation, thought, and language (which necessarily includes other senses as well) is crucial to achieving Debes's version of visual literacy and has serious implications for teaching.

In addition to Debes's account, however, there is another powerful way to describe a visually literate person: someone who looks with a questioning state of mind. Importantly, visual literacy involves as much inquiry as it does visual acuity. "Inquiry," write the authors from the National Committee on Science Education Standards and Assessment (Olson & Loucks-Horsley, 1996), "is a multifaceted activity that involves making observations; posing questions; examining books and other sources of information to see what is already known in light of experimental evidence; using tools to gather, analyze, and interpret data; proposing answers, explanations, and predictions; and communicating the results." This definition of inquiry, applied broadly in science education, is a useful framework for considering how developing visual literacy is integral to the cultivation of inquiring minds. As students engage with works of art and with each other in a structured group inquiry process, such as VTS, their visual literacy develops in tandem with a critical pathway into inquiry generally.

Perhaps because of the apparent effortlessness of a child beginning to recognize, categorize, and classify what she sees-Rudolf Arnheim parses this brilliantly in his seminal book, Visual Thinking (1969)-society collectively fails to appreciate both the complicated cognition involved in visual literacy and the steps required to ensure it develops. One way to study its presence is through asking people to talk about what they see: by capturing in language the lightning-fast transition of perception to thought to language. Asking people to think out loud, talking about what they see as they look, and recording their comments results in concrete data about the process of visual meaning making. These insights came into focus in the work of Abigail Housen.

Housen is a cognitive psychologist who, along with Yenawine, co-created the VTS protocol. Her research casts light on both the skills involved in and the developmental arc of visual literacy. She completed her doctorate in 1983 at Harvard's Graduate School of Education alongside a number of scholars interested in how the mind develops. Her specific interest was in how viewers process what they see in art, which she knew from her reading of James Mark Baldwin (1975) and Rudolf Arnheim (1966, 1969), among others, to be a particularly rich and complicated way of thinking. While visual literacy involves visual encounters with both the natural and the human-made world, viewing art, as a particularly complex form of visual stimulus, is, it turns out, an appropriate place to study the range of looking and thinking skills involved in visual literacy. Art usually includes a certain amount of readily recognizable information, but it is intentionally ambiguous and layered with meaning, creating the impetus for searching beyond the obvious over the course of extended, thoughtful examination

Housen: Research Questions, Methods, and Findings

Housen's work began with a number of key questions: "How could looking at art make some uncomfortable, others bored or edgy, and still others animated and excited? What goes on in people's minds as they stand in front of a painting? Why do some individuals stay longer with art-finding more meaning for longer periods-than others? What goes on over their lifetimes as they look again and again at many works of art?" (1983, 2007).

Housen's research process and resulting theory is ultimately indebted to the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget (Piaget, 1926, 1951) but is even more directly influenced by the methodologies and findings of Housen's Harvard colleagues, including Lawrence Kohlberg (1971; Kohlberg & Hirsch, 1977; Duska & Whelan, 1975) and Jane Loevinger (1976, 1993). Michael Parsons (1987), another scholar working at roughly the same time, was also inspired by Kohlberg and posited a stage theory related to aesthetic development. Though their methods were quite different, Housen's and Parson's findings correspond in many ways. One significant difference concerns the detail with which Housen came to understand the novice viewer, who, as will be discussed below, is the subject of teaching strategies aimed at developing visual literacy.

Beginning in the 1970s and continuing for almost a decade, Housen interviewed hundreds of individual subjects while they looked at art. She developed a rigorous protocol called the Aesthetic Development Interview (ADI), in which the viewer speaks in an undirected way about what he sees while viewing an artwork. Housen recorded individuals at all levels of viewing experience; she simultaneously collected detailed biographical information on each participant. After transcribing the interviews, she broke the comments into distinct units of thought and studied them, eventually developing a method of categorizing and coding the immense range of thoughts she found (1983).

Housen's analysis of her data is detailed, nuanced, and extensive. Analyzing the interviews thought by thought, she found a total of thirteen domains-including observations, preferences, associations, evaluations, negative or positive comprehension, and questioning-which were further broken down into as many as thirteen discernible issues or sub categories. All the interviews were coded by way of these domains and categories. She was able to determine that people with different experience in viewing art actually think in different patterns. Like her colleagues, she concluded that these patterns represent distinct sets of behaviors, with little overlap, that occur roughly sequentially. She found five such patterns and refers to them as aesthetic stages. (See Appendix for summaries of all five stages.)

While Piaget noted that developmental changes seemed to occur naturally over time, Housen determined that a specific form of experience-deep looking at art specifically, or what Housen calls "eyes on canvas"-is required to produce aesthetic growth. Movement from one stage to the next comes as a result of extended, thoughtful examination of visually complex material over time. In other words, in the absence of observing and thinking about meaning in complex imagery, growth through the stages does not occur. Notably, it is not until the later stages that growth is usually combined with acquisition of information. Importantly, beginner viewers can be any age. The key factor is experience in looking at art, rather than life experience in general or simple maturation.
Housen's Early Stages: The Pre-Visually Literate
Housen's account of the first two stages (called Accountive and Constructive viewers) clarifies what it means to be pre-visually literate and sheds the most light on the processes involved in reaching basic visual literacy, which, this chapter argues, occurs at the end of stage 2. She determined, for example, that people in Stage 1, who have had little or no contact with art and therefore have no references for it, only apply what they know from their own lives to make sense of what they see. Experts also apply lived experience but add other ways of thinking that result from their interactions with art over extended periods of time, relying on a variety of strategies as well as specific concepts and information acquired through lengthy effort.

Usefully, Housen found that a particular kind of observation-very simple ones-dominates Stage 1. These viewers make random, basic, perhaps one-word observations of things seen piecemeal rather than holistically or systematically. At first some observations are what Housen describes as "idiosyncratic:" clear to the viewer but not necessarily seen by others or intended by the artist. With time and experience looking, viewers begin to ground these observations in the logic of the image itself. They see things as connected to other things, in context, and in space. While at first their observations are concrete-it's a tree, not a picture of a tree-gradually, the notion of images as representations created by someone with specific intentions comes into focus. Similarly, early on what is recognized in an image is based on the personal experience of the viewer making associations: that looks like my house.

When people in Stage 1 begin to make meaning from a set of observations, Housen found, that meaning usually takes the form of short pieces of narrative. For example, a beginner viewer will animate a still image by inferring that a depicted figure is walking or thinking. It is common to assign emotional meanings to what is seen, such as, he's angry or sad. An early version of comparing shows up in phrases such as, this looks like. As viewers move into Stage 2, they begin wondering why something looks as it does, comparing the image to others in their experience. At that point, the standard of reference is usually what the viewer expects based on reality. These viewers often note that discrepancies between what they see and what they expect make something weird. With additional experience viewing and thinking about art, other frames of reference are invoked during Stage 2, such as craft ( the way he painted is kind of blotchy,) medium ( this is a black and white photograph,) or time/culture ( I think this is Egyptian.)
Implications for Teaching
The great majority of the thousands of individuals across age groups studied by Housen-her research continued for two decades following the completion of her dissertation-is in the most basic stages of aesthetic development, Stages 1 and 2, with most in the former. Despite the plethora of images people encounter daily, they show little advancement in either range or scope of observations habitually made, and little development in terms of thinking. Virtually all of the individuals found in later stages (3 through 5) are directly involved in extensive and self-motivated studying, making, or collecting of art-and they've been doing it for years (Housen, 1983, 1999, 2007).

Housen's work prompted some major museums (notably the Institute for Contemporary Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, both in Boston, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York) to request studies (Housen, 1984-1991; Duke & Housen, 1998). Sensing that there are gaps in their knowledge or experience, many museum visitors seek help finding meaning in what they see, and museum education departments are charged with providing the desired assists. Could something be learned from knowing visitors' aesthetic stage? Could the impact of educational offerings be determined-did people learn what was taught in the programs provided?

Three findings from these museum studies are significant to this chapter: 1) the majority of museum visitors were at an early viewing stage and not yet visually literate, in the sense of the skills laid out by Debes (1968); 2) very little of the intended impact of educational offerings could in fact be documented; and 3) to the extent that the effects could be noted, they corresponded to the person's aesthetic stage (Duke & Housen, 1998). Consistently, the information offered and the teaching strategies adopted by museums were operating above the level of most of those who sought help. Their educational efforts failed to stick.

Fortunately, Housen's data analyses provided some major insights into how to redirect teaching, including what to avoid when creating interventions designed to help people see more, think in more complex ways, and find greater meaning and pleasure as result (De Santis & Housen, 2007; Yenawine, 2013). She and Yenawine-who was the Museum of Modern Art's Director of Education from 1983-93-set about using these analyses to create teaching methods that actually spurred aesthetic growth among MOMA's visitors. Over the course of a dozen years and several research studies, they created Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS). The process involved many refinements and clarifications; the resulting teaching methodology and an associated elementary-school curriculum were published in 2000 and 2001.

Housen's original research, built upon by subsequent studies designed to document the impact of VTS, shows that the range of processes involved in aesthetic development are not distinct from, but instead are a part of, thinking processes more generally. This finding is now corroborated broadly in neuroscience, where vision itself is understood to be "information processing, not image transmission" (Livingstone, 2002). Recent neuroscientific research continues to deepen our understanding of the art experience as particularly rich cognition. For example, Jean-Pierre Changeux (2012) describes the aesthetic experience, a multi-sensory activity rooted in the visual, as one that can make conscious short and long-term memories and elicit empathy. He also notes that aesthetic experiences are highly synthetic in terms of brain activity in that they stimulate the prefrontal cortex (the locus of complex cognition, decision-making, personality, and self-moderation) in concert with the limbic system (which involves emotions, memories, and fundamentally, self-preservation). Art historian Barbara Stafford (2007, 2008), who explores the impact of recent neurobiological research on our understandings of art, vision, and cognition, describes viewing art as a somatosensory experience, one of heightened attentiveness. She notes that it activates, and crucially has the potential to enable awareness of, high-level cognitive functions like intention, organization, and selection. These neurobiological findings cast light on why "eye-on-canvas" time is particularly influential to the development of aesthetic thought.

The cultivation of aesthetic thought-and, as this chapter argues, visual literacy-is fundamentally intertwined with active engagement with art because of art's mix of observable information, emotional valence, ambiguity, and inferred meanings, some symbolic or metaphorical. Interactions with art involve a constant exchange between stimulus and response and between the viewer's memory and current experience, building new frameworks through which to view the world. VTS is designed to fully exploit the richness of the art experience and its impact on cognition.

The VTS Protocol

VTS is constructivist in nature, aligning with precepts articulated by John Dewey (1934, 1938), Jerome Bruner (1966), and Lev Vygotsky (1962, 1978). It focuses on teacher facilitated but viewer directed discussions of art. The art is carefully chosen to provide subjects of relevance to the particular audience, always including accessible imagery to give participants a chance to begin by using their existing knowledge, interests and abilities. Images also contain enough ambiguity to pique curiosity so that what is recognized is used as the basis for exploring what's puzzling (Yenawine, 2003; 2013). The looking is activated by questions asking viewers to start with a task that is simple for them-making observations-and helps them improve upon existing skills by presenting challenges within their reach and by fostering discussion. These actions spur intensive, ongoing engagement with and authentic experience of complex visual material.

VTS was developed over an iterative process of testing and using data to make revisions that lasted ten years, beginning in 1991. The resulting protocol instructs facilitators as follows:

Present a carefully selected image. Appropriate images account for the levels of experience with art, ages, and backgrounds of the specific group, and contain:

· Subjects of interest

· Imagery that represents both familiarity and newness

· Strong narratives, accessible but layered, i.e., "deep"

· Accessible intrigue: challenge but don't completely stump them

· Ambiguity: enough complexity to puzzle and inspire debate

Allow a few moments of silent looking before beginning the discussion.

Pose three specific research-tested questions to motivate and maintain the inquiry:

· What's going on/happening in this picture? (Asked once to initiate the discussion)

· What do you see that makes you say that? (Asked whenever an interpretive comment is made)

· What more can you/we find? (Asked frequently throughout the discussion to broaden and deepen the search for meaning)

Facilitate the discussion by

· Listening carefully to catch everything that students say

· Pointing to observations as students make comments, providing a "visual paraphrase"

· Paraphrasing each comment, taking a moment to reflect on it while formulating the response to make sure all content and meanings are grasped and helpfully rephrased

· Linking related comments whether students agree or disagree, or build on one another's ideas

· Remaining neutral by treating everyone and each comment in the same way

Conclude by thanking students for their participation and by citing behaviors that are particularly appreciated.

The method was constructed from Housen's data about beginning viewers (those in Stages 1 and 2) and studied by way of her original research protocols. It was tested and tweaked to ensure that it nurtured the capacity of students to construct more and more complex meanings from works of art.

Rigorous facilitation using the specific techniques is critical to a successful VTS conversation. For example, opening with silence is necessary, for it provides each student the opportunity to form independent thought. Wording matters: phrasing the evidence-seeking question as, What do you see that makes you say that? instead of, for instance, Why do you think that? establishes a psychologically safe environment in which focus is placed on the work of art rather than the student personally; provisional ideas are welcome but visual evidence is consistently sought. The teacher's neutrality matters because it leaves students free to find and think what they will, and it nurtures mutual respect among students, necessary for wide participation and risk taking. Repeatedly asking What more can we find? extends the process, allowing the group to find many possible answers. Linking allows the discussion to cohere while honoring disparate ideas.

By adhering to the method, which is intentionally precise, ideas can be openly discussed and tested; multiple perspectives can be reasonably, simultaneously considered based in evidence found in the image. VTS provides a means to hold the group in a process of inquiry, one in which divergent and convergent thinking, evidence seeking, and wondering intermingle.

A modest intervention in terms of time, the VTS school curriculum involves ten, one-hour lessons a year using the above method to look at two to three images per lesson throughout the elementary grades. The basic curriculum covers grades Pre-K to 6 and includes recommendations for building on experience with art in other lessons, including using images as prompts for writing; it also includes additional prompts and basic research projects when students show signs of entering stage 3. Currently, VTS is being implemented in over 300 schools in the U.S. (Yenawine, 2013; Shifrin, 2008). Versions for middle school and high school are being tested. Variations have been devised for use in museum teaching, university classes (Miller & Yenawine, 2014; Hailey, 2014), medical education (see below), and the professional world.

Data from studies designed to determine if VTS achieved the desired effect in elementary schools documented that it did indeed cultivate aesthetic development through Stage 1 and well into Stage 2; in concert, the techniques create a vigorous learning environment applicable with other imagery, subjects, and materials. Teachers currently use the strategy to allow students to construct meaning from a wide range of images as well as texts, and many teachers have implemented VTS in history, literature, math, and science lessons (Yenawine, 2013).

Literature Review and Findings

What is known in research about the impact of VTS? What do these findings mean for our understandings of visual literacy? This chapter's summary of existing research is limited to peer-reviewed literature, two federally funded studies, and one recently published dissertation, though substantial knowledge from the realm of practice shapes the analysis of this research. It is important to note that Housen, Yenawine, Karin DeSantis and others studied additional examples of VTS teaching and learning throughout the development of the VTS curriculum (DeSantis & Housen, 1984-2003). Findings from many of these unpublished studies (undertaken in various school systems and in museums in different parts of the country) have been shared collegially across sites and at conferences. They were used to evaluate and inform the content of VTS curricula yet do not exist in peer-reviewed journals.

Data discussed here come from two distinct realms in education: first, K-6 partnerships with art museums and second, training programs within the healthcare professions (often in collaboration with art museums). It is important to acknowledge a key difference between VTS in K-6 and in medical education; research from K-6 interventions reflects the impact of the sequential VTS curriculum (discussions of a consistent body of carefully chosen images facilitated at regular intervals, approximately ten hours a year over three or more years, using the method of teaching across sites), while the VTS-based interventions in healthcare vary widely in scope (the longest intervention capped at about 12 total hours of VTS, allocated over three months), in the works of art used, and in the integration of VTS with other methods (such as structured reflections, clinical didactics, and drawing).
Impact Shown in Elementary Education
The VTS school curriculum was tested in studies beginning in 1991 at MOMA in New York City as well as in St. Petersburg, Russia; Vilnius, Lithuania; Byron, Minnesota and San Antonio, Texas (Housen, 2002 & 2007; DeSantis & Housen, 2007). Formal academic longitudinal research was conducted in one semi-rural school in Byron. The study tracked two cohorts, one advancing from second to sixth grade and the other from fourth to eighth, and was published in 2002. Another formal study-still unpublished-was conducted in one urban school in San Antonio; it tracked mostly English Language Learners from grades 3 through 5 (DeSantis & Housen, 2007). Both studies included matched control groups, the differences being that only the experimental students received VTS. Housen's protocols for determining aesthetic stage were applied before and after the sequential curricular intervention during each of the study years and were enlarged to include additional methods.

The published data from Byron from 1993-1998 (as well as the unpublished San Antonio research) indicate that roughly thirty hours of focused experience with art-Housen's "eyes on canvas"-nurtured a transition from the first stage of aesthetic development to solid ground in the second. In Bryon, all the students grew by an entire aesthetic stage over the course of three years (Housen, 2002). The study further documented the impact of aesthetic growth and VTS itself on a broader range of skills, including thinking behaviors considered aspects of critical thinking: habitually providing evidence to back up inferences and speculating among various possible interpretations, for example. The predictable expansion of these habits in the vast majority of students was correlated to their aesthetic growth; critical thinking capacities began to emerge predictably when students advanced into Stage 2.

The Byron study also showed that these thinking skills transferred from art images to objects from other realms such as science. These findings were derived from thoughts expressed in an additional protocol, the "Material Object Interview," in which students were given an unfamiliar object-fossils, foreign coins, unusual tools-and asked to look and talk about what they saw. Unexpectedly, Byron intervention students also improved in performance on standardized tests after three years of VTS, gaining 2.5 times the state average increase on Minnesota achievement tests, suggesting possible transfer of skills from aesthetic development to other domains.

Two separate, federally funded studies (Curva, Milton, Wood, Palmer & Nahmias 2005; Adams, Foutz & Luke, 2007) were conducted in schools participating in VTS projects at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston (Burchenal & Grohe, 2007) and at the Wolfsonian-FIU Museum in Miami (Rawlinson, Wood, Osterman, & Sullivan, 2007). These longitudinal interventions, which included roughly thirty hours of VTS lessons over three years, were shown to impact student thinking patterns in a manner that correlated with the increases in critical thinking skills observed in Byron. VTS students consistently talked or wrote significantly longer than control students about artwork in post-test interviews and writing samples (examples of which are detailed below), indicating increases in students' capacities to observe, infer meaning, and back up inferences with evidence. In the Gardner Museum study, for example, VTS students averaged 28 lines per interview compared to 14 lines for control students. Across the three K-6 studies (Byron, Boston, and Miami), all treatment students looked longer, had more to say, and demonstrated a wider range of thought categories in their responses following VTS interventions. Consistently, thirty hours of VTS discussions over three years facilitated changes from Stage 1 into late Stage 2 within the groups.
Impact Shown in Healthcare Education
The literature on VTS interventions with students in medical training programs echoes the K-6 findings in the development of thinking and language skills, and also indicates attitudinal impact. A 2008 study at Harvard Medical School analyzed a ten-week intervention with first- and second-year medical students that mixed VTS with clinical didactics and drawing (Naghshineh, Hafler, Miller, Blanco, Lipsitz, Dubroff, Khoshbin & Katz, 2008). Results in post-test writing samples included significant increases in frequencies of observations-students made 38% more observations on both medical and art imagery than control group students-and in frequencies of use of evidence to back up interpretations. Importantly, students who attended eight or more sessions increased observation and language skills significantly more than students who attended seven or less. This "dose effect" speaks to the developmental nature of acquiring visual literacy skills. This finding is underscored by a researched pilot experiment at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School (RWJMS) (Jasani & Saks, 2013), in which students who participated in one intensive VTS-based workshop (they discussed eight images over three hours) did not show any differences in frequencies of observations made in writing post-tests.

The Harvard and RWJMS studies, along with others from the healthcare sector, also illuminated the impact of VTS on language development. The Harvard study included qualitative analysis of student writing samples documenting "increased sophistication" in the words students chose to describe both clinical and art imagery (i.e., the increased or new use of words such as "shading," or "contour"). These language changes reflect that students' abilities to observe, infer and express meaning from visual material (either clinical or artistic) became more robust and precise. In addition, their descriptions of visual material became more comprehensive, as demonstrated in the RWJMS intervention, where analysis of writing samples documented increases in use of speculative language, visual analogies, and in the scope of interpretations.

A third study conducted at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio (Klugman, Peel, & Beckmann-Mendez, 2011) looked at the results of three 90-minute VTS-based sessions with medical and nursing students; researchers examined student responses to both art and clinical imagery with both qualitative and quantitative tools in order to assess learning. Across the three studies-Harvard, RWJF, and Texas-students looked longer and had more to say following VTS interventions, indicating their enhanced performance of three crucial aspects of clinical observation: the ability to describe concretely what is perceived, the ability to separate fact from inference, and the understanding that observation takes time (Boudreau, Cassell & Fuks, 2008).

Finally, one radically different program in the Netherlands using VTS with brain-injured patients further probed the impact of VTS on language abilities (Ter Horst & Kruiper-Doesborgh, 2011). This pilot study with 13 patients documented increases in the tendencies to take time to reflect before speaking and to give reasoned opinions. Subjects also reported increased awareness of their own abilities with regards to critical thinking and their difficulties in this respect. This study underscores the way in which changes in visual literacy connect with metacognition and are reflected in language use.

In addition to looking at skill development, studies on VTS from the healthcare professions have also focused on the methodology's effect on attitudes and beliefs about learning. Klugman et al. (2011) documented increases in positive views towards the essential role of communication within healthcare and the importance of discussions about what is seen and found as being necessary for effective diagnosis; they also showed an increase in participants' tolerance of ambiguity-a cognitive variable significant to aspects of medicine including worldview, test-ordering, defensive practice, and discomfort in scenarios of death and grief (Geller, 2007). A separate qualitative study on nursing students' experiences with VTS at Indiana University revealed two standout themes: "feeling safe in learning" and "thinking and seeing differently" (Moorman, 2013). Students particularly valued that during VTS discussions, they were able to express differences of opinions without feelings of criticism or judgment. They also positively emphasized the experience of having their own judgments change based on observations made by others. "Ok, I can see how you got to this" is how one student describes this experience, which connects with "mutual respect," a sub-theme of the Indiana study.

A qualitative study from the social work field, conducted at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, examined an intervention in which VTS was used in diversity training for teachers (Chapman, Hall, Colby & Sisler, 2013). The researchers looked at both "schema change" and how images function in catalyzing dialogue. Their findings noted changes in participants' descriptions of "shifts in awareness, perspective-taking, attitude change, and more complex thinking about Latino/Latina immigrants" (the subject of most of the images used in this case). Many of these attitudinal findings reflect participants' reconciliation of their own visual experiences with the experiences of others, suggesting the persuasive influence of social interactions as part of the visual literacy learning process and its potential to alter schemas about the construction of knowledge.

What Do Shifts into Visual Literacy Look Like?

While the research findings synthesized above speak to the impact of VTS on elementary school and medical students, this section offers descriptions of the behaviors that mark shifts into visual literacy and provides specific examples. Understanding of these behaviors has evolved over time, through tracking both VTS discussions and writing samples. Here is what these authors have come to look for:

· Participants make more observations than when they started, and their observations become more complex and include more detail. Things seen singly come to be seen in a context.

· As participants begin to make meaning from their observations, they draw more and more complex inferences. They develop the habit of providing visual evidence to back up their inferences, interpretations, and opinions.

· They increase their use of conditional language to indicate awareness that what they suggest might be open to other interpretations.

· While at first they might be content with a single interpretation of what they see, they come to speculate among possible meanings, often holding several as equally plausible, including those offered by peers.

· After some time, they counter their own first thoughts and knowingly revise earlier impressions, often stimulated by the ideas put forth by others.

· They begin to cycle back to earlier ideas to elaborate by adding detail or clarifying.

· They develop a desire to know more about the makers of images and their intentions, the motivation for seeking additional information from other sources to fold into their analysis.

· They apply all of these thinking and language skills to a range of visual vocabularies across many media and images from diverse times and cultures. This capacity eventually transfers from art to material objects, historical documents, medical imagery, and scientific imagery including scientific imaging systems (maps, charts, diagrams). It can even extend to their understanding of other people, such as fellow students, medical patients, or colleagues.

Two examples of changes in student writing illustrate some of these points on a granular level: one from a third grader, the other from a third-year medical student. The third grader's samples show the developmental nature of visual literacy as it is facilitated by VTS experiences. They make visible how language reflects thinking about what is seen, and how thinking patterns change in response to effectively stewarded, open-ended discussions about art-in other words, how visual literacy grows.

Fig. 1 Snap the Whip, 1872 (oil on canvas), Homer, Winslow (1836-1910) / Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OH, USA / Museum Purchase 1918 / Bridgeman Images

On November 14, 2003, a third-grader in a Miami, FL, school (Adams et al., 2007; Curva et al., 2007) wrote for a "pre-test," which sampled his thinking as it appeared in writing before beginning the VTS curriculum. He (and his classmates) were asked to look at Winslow Homer's painting, Snap the Whip, and to write an answer to the question, "What do you think is going on in this picture?" They were also asked to include as much detail as possible and to provide evidence of their ideas. He wrote:

I think that the boys are playing in a field outside a school and that there are no girls in the picture.

The student summarizes what he sees in the picture, noting "boys playing" (observation and inference) as well as other observations-"a field" and "outside a school"-providing no evidence. He also observes the absence of girls. He begins with "I think" perhaps responding to the phrasing of the assignment but possibly indicating awareness that this might be a subjective opinion. Overall, he puts forth a reasonable description of the scene depicted, albeit minimal and lacking in details.

In a follow up "post test," given the same instructions and image in early May 2004 after the first year of ten VTS lessons, he wrote:

I think that the boys just got out of school because I see that there is a building that looks like an old fashion school house. I also think that the boys are having recess. I think that they are playing ring around the rosies. I also think that they are at the country side because I see mountains.

Again introducing each comment by "I think," the boy's opening compound sentence contains a description of the central figures ("the boys") as "out of school" argued with a detailed observation as evidence: "an old fashion school house." He infers that the boys might be at recess, a conclusion likely based in the same logic, and he further infers that they are playing a specific game ("ring around the rosies") though he provides no evidence to back this up. He concludes with a comment that takes in the context ("the country side") providing evidence ("I see mountains").

This child's dramatic shift from two basic, unsupported observations to several inferences (three out of four backed up with evidence) documents his growing ability to infer meaning from observation and the provision of visual evidence, as well as his persistence in looking and finding more. To convey his deeper looking, he wrote a good deal more and included descriptive detail.

Fig. 2 Paul Mathey, Woman and Child in a Room, 1890s. Oil on canvas. Musee D'Orsay, Paris. By permission of Art Resource, NY/Photo Eric Lessing.

Another sample of his writing, written shortly before this post-test but after a discussion of the image included here with his classmates, also reveals burgeoning visual literacy, especially behaviors borne in group meaning-making experiences.

I think the boy is punished because his face looks sad. I also think he got into a fight because his knees look dirty. I also think that the man at the top left of the picture is a ( maid ?) and the lady is the boy's mom because it looks like she is using a sewing machine. I also think that the boy just came in from outside because in the old days people used to play with those types of hula hoops. I think that the time of the day is afternoon because the light is very bright. I also think the wallpaper design is a tree because I see leaves.

This writing sample reflects a dramatic difference in terms of inferences made (nine), all but one argued in evidence (the "maid.") He provides significant details including reference to the boy's expression, time (both historical time "the old days" and time of day "afternoon"), and several aspects showing his attention to space ("at the top left," "in from outside," and "wallpaper design"). While the post-test shows what sticks with the student when working on his own, the post-discussion sample shows the rich impact of peer interaction on the growth of individuals (Yenawine, 2013).

Can we see similar shifts in visual literacy as a result of discussions among adults? A second example, below, shows a shift in observation skills and language from pre- and post-VTS samples from a medical-school student highlighted in the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School study. Written in response to the picture of a clinical patient, this sample is cited by the study authors as an example of shifting away from "subjective terminology":

Pre-test: "His right arm and leg are positioned normally..."

Post-test: "Her right arm and leg are straight and lay flat. Her left arm is flexed at the shoulder and elbow with the hand clenched in a fist with the thumbs extended away from the fingers. The left leg is flexed at the hip and knee.

This pairing shows the students' initial impulse to use an assumptive word ("normal"), which she then changed in favor of describing the observations that triggered associations with the word normal. These changes rendered the description lengthier (from eight words to 45) and based specifically upon what was actually observed rather than inferred.

These changes in vocabulary suggest the student gained the insight to separate observation from inference at a metacognitive level. This pattern, reflected broadly among VTS students, involves the conscientious mental work of suspending judgment. "Overcoming the inertia that inclines one to accept suggestions at their face value," writes Dewey in How We Think (1910, p. 13), "involves willingness to endure a condition of mental unrest and disturbance." Such work is not easy (Dewey later calls it "painful" (p. 13)), yet such careful management of our impulses to arrive at conclusions is not only the basis of thoughtful decision making, but also essential to avoiding errors in judgment. In medicine, for example, "search satisfaction error" and "premature closure" are two types of error undergirding a significant proportion of medical misdiagnosis (Croskerry, 2003); at the root of both lay the cognitive tendency to close searches too early.

What Does Research on VTS Indicate about Visual Literacy?

The same careful looking, thinking, and precise description demonstrated by expert diagnosticians are at the heart of visual literacy-and cultivated by VTS. Visually literate people have the disposition to sustain the act of observation, recognizing that taking time to look is an essential part of the inquiry process and remaining confident that such looking will reveal new information and possibilities. The studies cited above begin to describe how group experiences discussing art through VTS, in which participants engage with one another as well as the work of art, nurture the linked skills of observation, inference, speculation, elaboration, and seeking and providing specific evidence, while concomitantly developing language.

The findings underscore the longitudinal nature of developing visual literacy and indicate how it is entwined with attitudes and beliefs about knowledge. As students develop visual literacy, they learn how knowledge is created, their role in creating it, the time it takes to acquire it, the role of biases in shaping it, and the sense that it is rarely fixed but instead constantly evolving. Related, they also become comfortable with ambiguity, a capacity essential to discovery in any discipline from the arts to history and science-indeed, to grappling with the real world in general. While most schooling prepares students to expect problems to be resolved fully and speedily, the process of becoming visually literate fosters the disposition to accept ambiguity as fundamental and the capacity to address it as a basic element of inquiry-one that requires time, a commitment to questioning any material confronted, and the awareness that understanding is enriched by the perspectives of others.

These capacities are markers of visual literacy as described by Debes (1968), the pioneering thinker in the visual literacy field whose definition grounds this chapter's considerations. They fall into place as students move into Housen's Stage 2, a long stage that involves the development of multiple frameworks for figuring out why an image looks as it does as well as probing its possible meanings. Over the course of VTS interventions, spread over time to allow for gestation, the pattern of thinking that emerges by the end of Stage 2 aligns neatly with the basic capacities included in Debes's definition of visual literacy to "discriminate and interpret" as well as "comprehend and enjoy" what one encounters in the visual environment. In addition, the process of VTS-a teaching strategy of carefully facilitated group discussions-nurtures the ability to "communicate with others."

The findings reviewed above suggest that key aspects of the VTS protocol were essential to the results: open-ended, rigorous facilitation, provocative works of art, ample gestation time, and a context of peers. Moreover, an environment in which students feel safe to cross boundaries into the experiences and perspectives of others is particularly important to attitudinal shifts. Visual literacy requires the propensity to integrate new information from different and perhaps unexpected or atypical sources, suggesting change across the thinking and sensory spectrum. As Moorman's dissertation indicates, effective experiences in visual meaning-making depend on a learning context of psychological safety and mutual respect-one that must be cultivated with deliberate pedagogical actions.
Need for Further Study
More research is needed on the impact of longitudinal VTS interventions in the development of visual literacy, on the relationships between aesthetic thinking and visual literacy, and how Housen's research and theory on aesthetic development might be expanded and built upon, in particular in concert with flourishing discoveries in neuroscience.

One significant potential area of research concerns how VTS impacts teachers. Because facilitating VTS discussions about works of art is quite different from most pedagogical methods, and because the process of learning the facilitation method takes time, practice, and both personal and analytical reflection, its effect on transforming teacher practice may be significant. While changes in teachers as they come to understand VTS have been observed and discussed anecdotally for years by Housen, Yenawine (2013), and colleagues at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (Grohe & Egan, 2014), as well as some practitioners in the medical field (Hershman, Miller & Yadavalli, 2013; Fleischer, McManama, Miller & Zea, 2014), this potential impact deserves far more systematic study. Informal reports indicate that VTS facilitation strengthens abilities to teach using authentic, open-ended problems across subject areas, enhances teachers' abilities to listen to and understand students, provides teachers with awareness of their own communication habits, and offers them an opportunity to examine the alignment between their philosophies and practices as educators. In addition to testing these anecdotal findings, research questions might include: how does the aesthetic stage of the teacher impact the ability to teach visual literacy? How does implementing the VTS curriculum shift the attitudes and practices of teachers across subjects, and by extension, their performance and job satisfaction?

Beyond the question of teaching, proposed future research topics comprise, but are not limited to, the following:

· How does the development of visual literacy affect attention and metacognition? What parts of the brain are activated during VTS discussions, and what does this tell us about cognition and the impact of discussions of art on the development of visual literacy?

· What is the impact of VTS on critical thinking, communication and language at various ages, and with challenged students (from English Language Learners to those with impairments and on the autism spectrum)?

· How does aesthetic stage influence the ability to construct visual communication, from drawings to graphs to films to digital media?

· What is the impact of increased visual literacy on standardized test performance in K-12 education?

· What gaps might be filled by using VTS to advance visual literacy within undergraduate studies? How might the methodology be implemented within intra- as well as cross-disciplinary studies with a variety of visual materials? What might be the outcomes for both faculty and students?

· What impact does increased visual literacy have on diagnostic accuracy and patient satisfaction?

· How does VTS and enhanced visual literacy impact collaboration, leadership and team roles, and problem-solving within a range of settings, from schools to hospitals to professional organizations and business environments?

To pursue these and other avenues of research, scholars and scientists will need to apply many additional verified measures of achievement in education, quality in healthcare, collaboration between individuals, and job satisfaction in the workplace. Advances in neuroscience and brain imaging open a world of opportunity to understand the mechanics of aesthetic development and visual literacy that could be used to create additional pedagogical models that nurture both. Researchers may also interrogate aesthetic development and cognition according to protocols other than those of developmental psychology or Housen. All of this research should lead to deeper understanding of VTS as well as additional approaches to the teaching of visual literacy by other means.

In Conclusion

In all of the contexts in which it is regularly practiced, VTS discussions of art play several important roles essential to understanding, developing and valuing visual literacy. First, by enhancing participants' aesthetic thought and thereby deepening the range and complexity of frameworks through which they analyze what they see, VTS enables students and teachers to experience artworks as generators of ideas, not mere illustrations of concepts normally confronted through texts or other non-visual means. Effective integration of discussions about art into traditional teaching contexts supplements, and can potentially transform, traditional knowledge bases and problem-solving techniques.

Second, the VTS discussion is a rare space in which students' personal knowledge and experience (including their memories and beliefs) are authentically activated and applied to useful advantage. They may experience, safely, some cognitive dissonance as they come into friction with other ways of knowing and being-ways posited by the work of art itself as well as the opinions and ideas of their peers. Over time, students become empowered to discover themselves and interrogate their and others' constructions of identity and society-and propose new alternatives-through the practice of active looking.

Third, VTS models what might be called participatory visual literacy, or visual experiences that are essentially social exchanges. It is important to understand visual literacy as interactive and in flux-as an ongoing, developing way of functioning critically within and responding to the full sensory environment with a questioning, curious mind (Crouch, 2008; Dallow, 2008). Humanities and digital media scholar Peter Dallow (2008) describes the visual "as being like an interface or cultural zone of social exchange....a social sphere or arena where contemporary views of reality are displayed;" he adds that "a notion of visual literacy could be the capacity to negotiate or 'navigate' this visual cultural zone" (p. 98). The simple yet rigorous structure of VTS can become a powerful compass for this zone, as students together traverse spaces of wonder, inquiry, and uncertainty-art.

Fourth, VTS cultivates an inquiring, attentive mind. In How We Think, John Dewey (1910) wrote, "the most important factor in the training of good mental habits consists in acquiring the attitude of suspended conclusions, and in mastering the various methods of searching for new materials to corroborate or to refute the first suggestions that occur" (p. 13). During VTS discussions, students listen and talk with equal attention, reflect on their own and others' thinking, shift perspectives based on what others notice, gain comfort with ambiguity, learn the impact of providing visual evidence, hold multiple perspectives simultaneously, fail and recover through persistence, and realize there can be more than one plausible answer. To put it another way, the work of art changes before their very eyes and in their minds as they discuss it. The attentiveness fostered by VTS deepens and extends the meaning-making experience, as they find more and more, constructing and deconstructing an array of viewpoints as the visual is persistently mined.

Barbara Stafford (2007, 2008), whose work focuses in part on "conscious vision in the construction of experience" (2007, p. 98) calls for pedagogy that can enliven the brain's attentive functions. She argues that the ten percent of the brain's neuroprocessing that is not automatic (or autopoietic) has the potential for what she calls "willed perception" (2007, p. 202) and should be nurtured. She describes the creation of art as an example of this kind of conscious visual activity. Of developing a similar, full sensory attentiveness through education, she writes,

Seeing, not seeing as, enables knowledge to grow. Educating the remaining ten percent, then, is about showing students the deep effects of volition and effort.... By changing the way they think about their thoughts, they can change their brains as well as the world. (2008, p. 46)

VTS structures experience to cultivate tolerance of such "volition and effort," or in Dewey's words again, the "willingness to endure a condition of mental unrest and disturbance." Students eventually come alive to their own thinking and become aware of their role in understanding what they encounter-indeed, potentially, of how they construct their knowledge of the world and by extension, their construction of the world itself. Experiencing that meaning can be plumbed through extended looking helps them increase their comfort with, and willingness to explore, ambiguity; understand and empathize with each other; and exist in a more attentive, present state of awareness. They learn that interactions with the world and our fellow beings require multi-sensory engagement and thinking across domains.

Just as medical professionals who slow their process become better care providers, most of us across the working spectrum could benefit from the heightened awareness of and empathy toward other people that visual literacy affords. These qualities could become part of the values of those who govern and create social policy. Intentional teaching of visual literacy is, in these authors' view, core to addressing the issues we face globally. Who knows how many problems such skills might help us solve?
Appendix
Abigail Housen's Stages of Aesthetic Development with details about Stages 1 and 2 added. All quotes appearing here are taken from Aesthetic Development Interviews Housen and associates conducted over 18 years. Aesthetic Development Interviews are nondirective, stream-of-consciousness-type interviews (Housen, 1983).
Stage I
Accountive viewers are list makers and storytellers. Using their senses, memories, and personal associations, they make concrete observations about the work of art which get woven into a narrative. Here, judgments are based on what is known and what is liked. Emotions color their comments, as viewers seem to enter the work of art and become part of the unfolding narrative.
Sampling of thoughts
At Stage I, Accountive, viewers make simple, concrete observations:

Lines, ovals, squares ...

At times, the Stage I viewer makes observations and associations that appear

idiosyncratic and imaginative:

A] giraffe's back ... a dog's face.

Likewise, the Stage I viewer may incorporate people and objects into an idiosyncratic narrative:

I see two ladies, holding each other.

It seems to me he's going home now, and he can't find his clothes.

Judgments are based on what the viewer knows and likes:

The wallpaper is beautiful.

Emotions color the comments, as the Stage I viewer animates the image with words and becomes part of an unfolding drama:

... Like he's hurt [his arms] when he was swimming or like he was mad or something the way he was holding his arms.

The Stage I viewer (the "storyteller") and the image (the "story") are one. The viewer engages in an imaginatively resourceful, autonomous aesthetic response.
Stage II
Constructive viewers set about building a framework for looking at works of art, using the most logical and accessible tools: their own perceptions, their knowledge of the natural world, and the valuesof their social, moral and conventional world. If the work does not look the way it is "supposed to"-- if craft, skill, technique, hard work, utility, and function are not evident, or if the subjects seem inappropriate--then this viewer judges the work to be "weird," lacking, and of no value. The viewer's sense of what is realistic is a standard often applied to determine value. As emotions begin to go underground, this viewer begins to distance him or herself from the work of art.
Sampling of thoughts
At Stage II, Constructive, viewers observations have a concrete, known reference point:

And they have five fingers, just like us.

Aspects of images that do not conform to expectations can be seen as "weird:"

The hair on the first person is blond, and it is true, but there is no such thing as a purple face.

As this viewer strives to map what she sees onto what she knows from her own

conventions, values, and beliefs, her observations and associations become more linked and detailed. The viewer looks carefully and puzzles. An interest in the artist's intentions develops:

The person has chosen, instead of using circles for the background, he used lots of diamonds.
Stage III
Classifying viewers adopt the analytical and critical stance of the art historian. They want to identify the work as to place, school, style, time and provenance. They decode the work using their library of facts and figures that they are ready and eager to expand. This viewer believes that properly categorized, the work of art's meaning and message can be explained and rationalized.
Stage IV
Interpretive viewers seek a personal encounter with a work of art. Exploring the canvas, letting the meaning of the work slowly unfold, they appreciate the subtleties of line and shape and color. Now, critical skills are put in the service of feelings and intuitions as these viewers let underlying meanings of the work--what it symbolizes--emerge. Each new encounter with a work of art presents a chance for new comparisons, insights, and experiences. Knowing that the work of art's identity and value are subject to reinterpretation, these viewers see their own processes subject to chance and change.
Stage V
Re-creative viewers, having established a long history of viewing and reflecting about works of art, now "willingly suspend disbelief." A familiar painting is like an old friend who is known intimately, yet full of surprise, deserving attention on a daily level but also existing on an elevated plane. As in all important friendships, time is a key ingredient, allowing Stage V viewers to know the ecology of a work--its time, its history, its questions, its travels, its intricacies. Drawing on their own history with one work in particular, and with viewing in general, this viewer combines personal contemplation with views that broadly encompass universal concerns. Here, memory infuses the landscape of the painting, intricately combining the personal and the universal.

References

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Understanding Visual Literacy: The Visual Thinking Strategies Approach - Philip Yenawine

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In order to produce children who know how to read well enough to perform practical tasks, at the very least, parents and caregivers talk to children as babies, introduce books early on, and prepare them for school, where various step-by-step processes are employed to help children achieve functional

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Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS): Critical Thinking and Inclusive Discussion

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Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS): Critical Thinking and Inclusive Discussion

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VTS is an education nonprofit providing schools and museums with curriculum, professional development, and training in critical thinking skills.

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Hacking Graphic Novels: 8 Ways to Teach Higher-Level Thinking with Comics and Visual Storytelling: 25 (Hack Learning Series) - Miller, Shveta V.: 9781948212632 - AbeBooks

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Hacking Graphic Novels: 8 Ways to Teach Higher-Level Thinking with Comics and Visual Storytelling: 25 (Hack Learning Series) - Miller, Shveta V.: 9781948212632 - AbeBooks

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Hacking Graphic Novels: 8 Ways to Teach Higher-Level Thinking with Comics and Visual Storytelling: 25 (Hack Learning Series) by Miller, Shveta V. at AbeBooks.co.uk - ISBN 10: 1948212633 - ISBN 13: 9781948212632 - Times 10 Publications - 2021 - Softcover

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Welcome! I am a thought partner for educators and leaders seeking support with creating rich literacy learning experiences for all students. I facilitate ongoing job-embedded professional learning services to decrease disparities, disproportionality, and predictability in student outcomes.

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Reading With Pictures | Empowering lifelong literacy through the comic arts!

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Register now for Reading With Pictures Presents: Teaching with Comics, a FREE three-day fully virtual conference for educators and parents who are interested in harnessing the value of sequential art for teaching content, developing social-emotional skills, and fostering creativity among students as young as preschoolers up through university, which takes place August 9-11, 2021! But act fast - registration closes August 6, 2021!
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This text tells the story of Marjane Satrapi’s life in Tehran from six to 14, years that saw the overthrow of the Shah’s regime, the triumph of the Islamic Revo

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Humanity, having faced extinction at the end of the twentieth century, would not have entered the new millennium if it weren't for them. In 1969, during their youth, they created a symbol. In 1997, as the coming disaster slowly starts to unfold, that symbol returns. This is the story of a group of boys who try to save the world.

Naoki Urasawa's career as a manga artist spans more than twenty years and has firmly established him as one of the true manga masters of Japan.

Born in Tokyo in 1960, Urasawa debuted with BETA! in 1983 and hasn't stopped his impressive output since. Well-versed in a variety of genres, Urasawa's oeuvre encompasses a multitude of different subjects, such as a romantic comedy ( Yawara! A Fashionable Judo Girl), a suspenseful human drama about a former mercenary ( Pineapple ARMY; story by Kazuya Kudo), a captivating psychological suspense story ( Monster), a sci-fi adventure manga ( 20th Century Boys), and a modern reinterpretation of the work of the God of Manga, Osamu Tezuka ( Pluto: Urasawa x Tezuka; co-authored with Takashi Nagasaki, supervised by Macoto Tezka, and with the cooperation of Tezuka Productions).

Many of his books have spawned popular animated and live-action TV programs and films, and 2008 saw the theatrical release of the first of three live-action Japanese films based on 20th Century Boys.

No stranger to accolades and awards, Urasawa received the 2011 and 2013 Eisner Award for Best U.S. Edition of International Material-Asia, and is a three-time recipient of the prestigious Shogakukan Manga Award, a two-time recipient of the Osamu Tezuka Cultural Prize, and also received the Kodansha Manga Award. Urasawa has also become involved in the world of academia, and in 2008 accepted a guest teaching post at Nagoya Zokei University, where he teaches courses in, of course, manga.

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VIZ: The Official Website for Naoki Urasawa's 20th Century Boys

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Humanity, having faced extinction at the end of the twentieth century, would not have entered the new millennium if it weren't for them. In 1969, during their youth, they created a symbol. In 1997, as the coming disaster slowly starts to unfold, that symbol returns.

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This bestselling series is now available in a complete box set. Includes volumes 1-27, plus extras including the Fullmetal Alchemist novel: The Ties that Bind, and a full-colour, two-sided poster.

In an alchemical ritual gone wrong, Edward Elric lost his arm and his leg, and his brother Alphonse became nothing but a soul in a suit of armor. Equipped with mechanical auto-mail limbs, Edward becomes a state alchemist, seeking the one thing that can restore his and his brother's bodies...the legendary Philosopher's Stone.

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This bestselling series is now available in a complete box set.

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Dav Pilkey has written and illustrated numerous popular, award-winning books for children, including the Captain Underpants and Dumb Bunnies series.

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The Award-winning all-ages graphic novel series MEGA ROBO BROS, by Neill Cameron originally published in UK comic The Phoenix.

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Four Inklings who can switch between human and squid forms get caught up in a Splatoon Turf War that launches them into all-new adventures based on the hit Nintendo video game series!

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Four Inklings who can switch between human and squid forms get caught up in a Splatoon Turf War that launches them into all-new adventures based on the hit Nintendo video game series!

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Fans of Pokemon won’t want to miss this cool graphic novel with 2 new stories!

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Author: Keiko Tobe

Translated by: Alexis Eckerman

Author: Keiko Tobe

Translated by: Alexis Eckerman

Born during the sunrise-an auspicious beginning-the Azumas' newborn son is named Hikaru, which means "light". But during one play date, his mother notices that her son is slightly different from the other children. In the alternately heartwarming and bittersweet tale, a young mother tries to cope with both the overwhelming discovery of her child's autism and the trials of raising him while keeping her family together. This is a story that resonates not only for those whose families have been affected by autism, but also for all past, present, and future parents.

With the Light... Vol. 1: Raising an Autistic Child

With the Light... Volumes

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With the Light... Vol. 1 | Manga | Yen Press

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Author: Keiko Tobe Translated by: Alexis Eckerman Author: Keiko Tobe Translated by: Alexis Eckerman Born during the sunrise-an auspicious beginning-the Azumas' newborn son is named Hikaru, which means "light". But during one play date, his mother notices that her son is slightly different from the other children.

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Shigeo "Mob" Kageyama is an eighth-grade student blessed with extraordinary psychic powers. However, Mob decides to suppress his abilities in public due to its destructive and conspicuous nature. To keep his psychic powers honed, he works under Arataka Reigen-a self-proclaimed esper looking to make use of Mob's skills.

Alongside Reigen, Mob spends his days exorcising evil spirits at Reigen's behest. With the simple wish to impress his childhood friend Tsubomi Takane, Mob works toward making himself more desirable. But troubles keep on bombarding his daily life, slowly breaking his shackled feelings. With his repressed emotions welling up, there's no telling what will happen once he reaches his limit.

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Mob Psycho 100, Chapter 1

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Mob Psycho 100 - Mob Psycho 100 Manga Online

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Shigeo "Mob" Kageyama is an eighth-grade student blessed with extraordinary psychic powers. However, Mob decides to suppress his abilities in public due to its destructive and conspicuous nature. To keep his psychic powers honed, he works under Arataka Reigen-a self-proclaimed esper looking to make use of Mob's skills.

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One-Punch Man

Life gets pretty boring when you can beat the snot out of any villain with just one punch.

Created by ONE and Yusuke Murata

If you like One-Punch Man, Shonen Jump recommends:

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VIZ | Read One-Punch Man Manga Free - Official Shonen Jump From Japan

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The world's most popular manga! Read free or become a member. Start your free trial today! | One-Punch Man - Life gets pretty boring when you can beat the snot out of any villain with just one punch.

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In the 1930s, a major entertainment studio brought a German fairy tale about a beautiful princess, an evil queen, a magic mirror and seven dwarfs to the animated screen for the first time. It wasn't the beloved adaptation you're thinking of: The first animated " Snow-White" was actually produced by Fleischer Studios in 1933, four years before Walt Disney released his version. And Betty Boop, a charming, baby-faced flapper, was its star.

Created by brothers Max and Dave Fleischer in 1930, Betty-envisioned not as a cartoon version of any single performer, but rather as an archetype of Jazz Age culture-appeared in animated shorts throughout the Great Depression. She was an instant success. Publications compared her to such stars as Greta Garbo, calling her an " overnight hit" and "the most popular personage on the screen today."

At a time when cartoons were largely opening acts before a featured movie, Betty's stardom was an outlier. "She's a big hit," says Katia Perea, a cartoon scholar at City University New York, "and she's a big hit in the same way that Felix the Cat is a big hit, where she was drawing audiences to the movie. ... They would come for the Betty Boop cartoon."

The enduring image of Betty is a flapper in a strapless minidress, with a garter peeking out above her knee and large hoop earrings in her ears. Beneath that iconic look, however, is a more complex story of aesthetic transformation, from what Heather Hendershot, a media historian at MIT, describes as a "flapper-secretary-adventurer" in the early 1930s to a "middle-class homemaker" by the end of the decade. Betty's appearance continues to evolve today, with the character donning ripped jeans, joggers and sneakers, and overalls in merchandise and on social media. Her constantly shifting design offers an intriguing case study of how representations of women-including fictional ones-are shaped by censorship, the public's response and changing conceptions of morality.

Initially, Betty was depicted as a dog with a button nose and floppy ears. She appeared in the Fleischers' " Talkartoons" series as the girlfriend of main character Bimbo and was such a success that the studio promoted her to its star. After a makeover, Betty became the first fully human, fully female animated character.

At its height in the 1930s, Fleischer Studios was a giant in animation, rivaled only by Disney. The dueling studios' styles were diametrically opposed. From its home in California, Disney was laying the groundwork for the idyllic, fantastical fairy tales that would soon dominate its oeuvre. In New York, meanwhile, Fleischer created a grungy, often dangerous urban world for its characters to navigate.

In the Fleischer landscape, anything was possible, and seemingly nothing was off limits. As Max's grandson Mark Fleischer recalls, his grandfather's motto was "If you can do it in real life, why animate?" Fleischer Studio's seven-minute "Snow-White" short includes such surreal images as the evil queen's face morphing into eggs in a frying pan; a tree stump fighting with Betty's co-stars, canine beau Bimbo and his friend Koko the Clown; and Betty, interred in an ice block coffin, being led down a mountain by the dwarfs on skis. Halfway through the film, jazz legend Cab Calloway (a regular guest in Betty Boop cartoons) performs a spooky musical number, embodied first by Koko and then by a ghost.

"The Fleischer Studios had a really experimental and kind of Surrealist style," says Hendershot. "In fact, they were inspirational to the Surrealists."

Unlike her contemporary Minnie Mouse, Betty wasn't a sidekick, but rather the star of her own show. "Betty has two leading men in every picture," noted the News-Herald in 1932. "When that happens to most feminine stars they are flattered. But Betty Boop takes it for granted that Bimbo and Koko will form a background for her talents in each production."

As the star, Betty played a range of roles. She was a circus performer, a racecar driver and a presidential candidate. But she was first and foremost a sex symbol. As the wrote in 1932, "Mister Fleischer gave her a doll-like face with those baby eyes BUT also a mature figure with oo-la-la curves and a boudoir languor in her walk." The News-Herald added, "Betty has another claim to fame. She is the only film star who wears fewer clothes than Jean Harlow."

Though Betty was aware of her sex appeal and often used it to her advantage, her sexuality also proved to be a liability. Men were constantly chasing her down and forcing her into unwanted sexual interactions. " She Wronged Him Right" (1934) opens with a teary-eyed Betty telling her landlord that she can't pay her mortgage. "Pay me or be my wife," the villainous landlord demands, whispering in an aside that "I've got her in my power now." In " Boop-Oop-a-Doop," a 1932 short whose name references Betty's scat catchphrase, circus performer Betty returns to her dressing tent to find her boss waiting to assault her. She escapes with Koko's help, singing, "He couldn't take my boop-oop-a-doop"-in this case, her virginity-"away."

"The idea is that it's inherently funny for cartoon women to be assaulted or chased," says Hendershot. Though Betty was usually able to escape, these kinds of storylines depended on the entertainment derived from the chase. Hendershot sees this as a flaw in the way Betty's character was conceived. "She's a more developed character than other female characters at the time, but the development is not inherently positive," the historian says. "It's great that she's an actual character, but it's a troubling character."

Fleischer wasn't the only 20th-century studio engaging in this type of sexualization and crass humor. In Disney's " Plane Crazy " (1928), Mickey Mouse tries to trick Minnie into kissing him aboard their airplane. When she rejects his advances, Mickey speeds the plane up, sending Minnie rocketing toward the sky and placing him in the ideal position to catch her. Believing that a terrified Minnie will be so grateful that she'll concede to being kissed, Mickey tries again. When Minnie still refuses, Mickey forces himself on her.

By 1935, Betty's heyday was nearing its end. Headline-making scandals in 1920s Hollywood had led to intense public scrutiny of the industry, with a slew of states enacting film censorship laws. Moviemakers decided they needed a trade organization to help protect their interests; in 1927, the resulting Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) created a list of "Don'ts" and "Be-Carefuls" for films to adhere to in order to avoid further censorship. That list served as the framework for the 1930 Motion Picture Production Code (commonly known as the Hays Code after MPPDA president Will H. Hays), which outlined how to approach subjects like sex, dancing, drugs, vulgarity and crime.

"Excessive and lustful kissing, lustful embraces, suggestive postures and gestures are not to be shown," the guidelines declared. A section on costumes, meanwhile, forbade "[i]ndecent or undue exposure."

The Hays Code came into full effect for live action films in 1934 and animation around 1935. For Betty, that meant changes to her look, personality and plotlines. She became taller and older, and her dresses started stretching past her knee to hide her trademark garter. Fleischer Studios had "revamped their star," noted the Central New Jersey Home News in 1938. "She's lost most of her curls, the jewelry-and the curves. She dresses more modestly-censors, you know."

"Theoretically, these shifts in Betty Boop's design represented an uplifting of the character's 'morality,'" wrote Hendershot in a 1995 journal article. As the Great Depression continued, men concerned about women supposedly stealing their jobs began directing their hostility toward working women. "Betty was a timely character not only because she was a 'working girl' sporting revealing clothes and bobbed hair," Hendershot argued, "but also because cultural anxieties about such women could repeatedly be played out (and embodied in) her pre-Code narratives."

Betty's stories evolved from exciting, outlandish and dangerous to domestic and demure. Koko the Clown was replaced by eccentric inventor Grampy, and Bimbo was swapped out for Pudgy, a cuddly pet puppy. Instead of eluding unwanted suitors or getting giddy on laughing gas, Betty spent her days bathing an uncooperative Pudgy in " A Little Soap and Water" (1935) or serving an ever-increasing flood of demanding hotel guests in " Service With a Smile " (1937).

"With that kind of sanitation, there's this compulsion to present ... this normative representation of middle-class sensibilities, and that ends up taking away the joie de vivre," says Perea. "It's no longer something that's exciting to see."

Mark Fleischer says the Hays Code "really was the beginning of the end for Betty Boop. [A] lot of the spirit went out of it." He theorizes that the studio was simply less invested in creating great cartoons after the guidelines took effect: "I wouldn't be surprised if [my grandfather had just said], 'Well, you know what, we're not gonna let you ruin her. We're just going to comply and then just move on.'"

In 1939, the Fleischers retired the Betty Boop cartoons. Soon after, the studio-acquired by Paramount and rebranded-shut down production. Betty lay dormant until 1955, when Paramount sold most of its pre-1950s shorts to a television syndicator. In the decades that followed, Betty was visible mainly through merchandise and some scattershot cameos. She was the star of a 1985 CBS television special titled " The Romance of Betty Boop" and made a brief appearance in the 1988 feature film Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

Today, a revamped, family-owned version of Fleischer Studios is trying to bring Betty into the 21st century and keep her image alive. The studio memorializes her as a pre-Hays Code flapper; now, though, she's also a biker and a champion of recycling. She hikes, practices yoga and uses TikTok slang. Last year, Mark's wife, Susan Wilking Horan, collaborated on a self-help book in which Betty dresses in jeans and promotes values like independence, self-care and kindness.

Ultimately, Betty's legacy is one of contradiction.

"On the one hand, Betty Boop was a creation of the heterosexual male gaze, with an endless parade of lecherous male characters trying to see under her skirt, yet on the other hand she wore power like a light shawl, her image an in-your-face depiction of unashamed sexuality," wrote critic Gabrielle Bellot for the in 2017. "... She was a stereotype, yet she also defied stereotypes of what female cartoon characters could do onscreen."
Editor's Note, March 10, 2022: This article previously misspelled Heather Hendershot's last name.

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In the 1930s, a major entertainment studio brought a German fairy tale about a beautiful princess, an evil queen, a magic mirror and seven dwarfs to the animated screen for the first time. It wasn't the beloved adaptation you're thinking of: The first animated " Snow-White" was actually produced by Fleischer Studios in 1933, four years before Walt Disney released his version.

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STORY

Princess Sapphire is a girl raised as a Prince. Through the mischief of an angel, the princess is born with both a girl's body and boy's mind. Since there is no boy successor in her kingdom, Sapphire is raised as a boy, but evil ministers try to reveal her secret. Unable to put up with the kind of vicious conduct prevailing in the kingdom, Sapphire disguises herself as "Princess Knight" and wields her sword of justice. This is an animated version of the girls' Manga featuring Sapphire's romance and adventure, which marked the first made-for-TV animated program geared towards girls in Japan.

CREDIT

(c) Tezuka Productions Co., Ltd. / Mushi Production

Broadcast by FNS (Fuji Network System) / 23 minutes / In color / 52 episodes
Mushi Production/ April 2, 1967 - June 25, 1967, Sundays 6:30-8:00; July 2, 1967 - April 7, 1968, Sundays 6:00-6:30 PM

CAST

Sapphire: Toma Yumi
Sapphire as a girl: Toma Yumi
King: Maruyama Eiji
Queen: Yamada Miho
Duke of Duralumin: Chahurin
Sir Nylon: Kakegawa Hirohiko
Prince Franz: Miyata Koki
Tink: Kumagai Nina
Uranari:Sakurai Toshiharu
Boy:Yamada Miho
Killer A:Miyazono Takehiro
Killer B:Sakurai Toshiharu
Killer C:Kakegawa Hirohiko
Girl A:Kawaragi Shiho
Girl B:Kumagaya Nina
Lady:Kumagaya Nina

STAFF

Original Manga, Executive Director: Tezuka Osamu
Producer: Watanabe Tadayoshi, Hirokawa Kazuyuki
Settings: Akabori Kanji, Maruyama Masao
Chief Directors: Katsui Chikao, Akabori Kanji
Layout: Fujimoto Shiro
Picture Director: Nakamura Kazuko, Miyamoto Sadao
Animation: Ueguchi Teruto
Original pictures: Miwa Takateru
Motion: Nitta Toshio
Art: Nishida Minoru
Backgrounds: Tsukima Hachiro
Color Design: Sawai Hiroyuki
Coloring: Ochiai Sachiyo
Shooting: Kumagai Akifumi
Editing: Furukawa Masashi
Sound: Aketagawa Susumu
Effects: Mushi Pro Effects Team
Resources: Iizuka Masao
Assistant Producer: Koyanagi Sakuro
Production Desk: Wakao Hiroshi
Music: Tomita Isao

Theme Songs:
"Princess Knight" and "Ribon no Maachi (March of the Princess Knight)":
lyrics by Nou Kahei, conducted by Yokoyama Seiji, music by Tomita Isao, performed by Fool Sounds, vocals by Maekawa Yoko
Concept: Kume Minoru

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Princess Sapphire is a girl raised as a Prince. Through the mischief of an angel, the princess is born with both a girl's body and boy's mind. Since there is no boy successor in her kingdom, Sapphire is raised as a boy, but evil ministers try to reveal her secret.

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A remastered 2-in-1 edition of the all-time classic hit from one of Japan's most beloved creators, available for the first time in a format faithful to the original work. One day, teenage martial artist Ranma Saotome went on a training mission with his father and ended up taking a dive into some cursed springs at a legendary training ground in China. Now, every time he's splashed with cold water, he changes into a girl. His father, Genma, changes into a panda! What's a half-guy, half-girl to do?

Contains volumes 5 and 6! Chinese Amazon warrior Shampoo hasn't given up on Ranma yet - only instead of killing him, she now wants to marry him! There are just a few obstacles in the way of their future happiness, though, starting with a childhood phobia of Ranma's and followed by Shampoo's suitor, Mousse, martial arts master of hidden weapons. Can Ranma escape Shampoo's soap opera? Or a better question might be, does he even want to?

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A remastered 2-in-1 edition of the all-time classic hit from one of Japan's most beloved creators, available for the first time in a format faithful to the original work. One day, teenage martial artist Ranma Saotome went on a training mission with his father and ended up taking a dive into some cursed springs at a legendary training ground in China.

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Marcia Williams is a highly successful, prize-winning author and illustrator who has published over thirty books in her distinctive, entertaining and accessible comic-strip style. Her many awards include UKLA Children's Book Award and The English 4-11 Picture Book Award. Her books are extremely popular in schools for their humorous and approachable way of introducing the classics to a young age group. She is also a much sought-after panellist at literary festivals and educational conferences. Her titles include: Archie's War; Flossie's Secret War Diary; Mr William Shakespeare's Plays; Bravo, Mr William Shakespeare; Greek Myths; The Stone Age, Hunters, Gatherers and Woolly Mammoths and Three Cheers for Women! Her books are returned to time and again by children of all ages - from 6 to 60 years!

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Marcia Williams | Prize-winning Author & Illustrator

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Marcia Williams is a highly successful, prize-winning author and illustrator who has published over thirty books in her distinctive, entertaining and accessible comic-strip style. Her many awards include UKLA Children's Book Award and The English 4-11 Picture Book Award. Her books are extremely popular in schools for their humorous and approachable way of introducing the classics to a young age group.

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National Literacy Trust | UK Literacy Charity

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Early years

Resources and tools for early language development and parental engagement.

Primary

Deliver outstanding literacy provision at primary school stage.

Secondary

Help students develop the literacy skills they need to succeed at school and in their future lives.

We empower parents and families

Parents - you're not alone! Discover a wealth of practical tips to help your child's literacy journey, fun activities to try together as well as reassuring support and guidance on our Words for Life website. We have plenty of creative ways to nurture your child's reading, speaking, listening and writing development at home.

We collaborate with communities and local areas

We work collaboratively in 20 areas of the UK that face the biggest challenges with literacy and where we can make the most difference. We work alongside teachers and football coaches, to librarians and youth leaders - to create bespoke solutions that support literacy at home, in school and in the community.

We are 30!

This is a significant year for us at the National Literacy Trust as we celebrate our 30th birthday. Over the past three decades, we have been supporting families and children to change their life stories through the power of literacy and we are ready to celebrate!

News

How we are helping get a library into every primary

On Wednesday 8 November, we welcomed over 100 authors, partner organisations, funders, fellow charities, MPs, peers, and supporters, to Portcullis House in Westminster, to celebrate the anniversary of our Libraries for Primaries campaign.

Read more

News

Celebrating the first of 25 amazing Coronation Libraries

On Wednesday 1 November, we celebrated the opening of the first of 25 Coronation primary school libraries, at a special event at Harris Primary Academy Croydon.

Read more

News

Wicked Writers: Be the Change competition will launch in January 2024

Open to all UK schools and launching on 29 January 2024, Wicked Writers: Be the Change asks 9 to 14-year-olds to harness the power of persuasive writing to think about any environmental issue they feel passionately about.

Read more

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National Literacy Trust | UK Literacy Charity

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We are an independent charity working with schools and communities to give children the literacy skills to succeed in life.

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Home | The Black Heritage Support Service

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Empowering The Black Community Through Advocacy And Education

who are we

We are an advocacy service that has been established to support the Black community through crisis. This website is an educational hub and humanitarian directory. Since our founding in June 2020, we have been determined to make an impact. Coronavirus exacerbated the disparities between the Black community and wider society, while highlighting these disparities remains important, we also want to become solution focused.

OUR MISSION

Our mission is to stand as a fundamental support mechanism for the Black community. We are aware of the systemic barriers that the Black community face. Including but not limited to, late diagnosis of illnesses, poor communication from health professionals, inner city deprivation, social isolation and pre-existing medical illnesses. The hardships that our community face have encouraged us to look for solutions internally. We want to see improvements in four areas, the physical health of our community, raise awareness about environmental racism, medical racism and offer opportunities in career development.

Our mission is to see a self-sufficient community that will transcend tokenism and stand by other communities to create a stronger society. Colonialism have left destructive remnants that continue to prohibit the progression of the black community and while there is a time to lobby for reparations, we feel it is important that we become our own saviours. Our online educational platform contains black health literature and a growing video library; led by certified black health professionals who provide life saving medical information that will help to lower the risk of death if individuals were to contract Covid-19 or similar. We are continually seeking funds to continue our help-line service, we want ensure that members of the black community understand their rights and can seek us to help clarify information given to them by the NHS.

CONTACT THE BLACK HERITAGE SUPPORT SERVICE

admin@bhss.co.uk

Quayside Tower

Broad Street

B1 2HF

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Home | The Black Heritage Support Service

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Empowering The Black Community Through Advocacy And Education who are we We are an advocacy service that has been established to support the Black community through crisis. This website is an educational hub and humanitarian directory. Since our founding in June 2020, we have been determined to make an impact.

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One Piece Box Set 1 East Blue and Baroque Works

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As a child, Monkey D. Luffy dreamed of becoming King of the Pirates. But his life changed when he accidentally ate the Gum-Gum Fruit, an enchanted Devil Fruit that gave him the ability to stretch like rubber. The only drawback - He'll never be able to swim again - a serious handicap for an aspiring sea dog! Years later, Luffy sets off on his quest to find the One Piece, said to be the greatest treasure in the world...

This box set includes volumes 1-23, which comprise the first two story arcs, East Blue and Baroque Works. With exclusive premiums and great savings over buying the individual volumes, this set is a pirate's treasure for any manga fan!

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One Piece Box Set 1 East Blue and Baroque Works

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As a child, Monkey D. Luffy dreamed of becoming King of the Pirates. But his life changed when he accidentally ate the Gum-Gum Fruit, an enchanted Devil Fruit that gave him the ability to stretch like rubber. The only drawback - He'll never be able to swim again - a serious handicap for an aspiring sea dog!

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The Many Deaths of Laila Starr by Ram V and Filipe Andrade

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Humanity is on the verge of discovering immortality. As a result, the avatar of Death is cast down to Earth to live a mortal life in Mumbai as twenty-something Laila Starr.Struggling with her newfound mortality, Laila has found a way to be placed in the time and place where the creator of immortalit…

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Sara Alfageeh is a Jordanian-American illustrator and creative director in San Francisco. She is passionate about history, teaching, girls with swords, and the spaces where art and identity intersect. Her award-winning debut graphic novel SQUIRE is on shelves everywhere, and upcoming picture book NOT YET: THE STORY OF AN UNLIKELY SKATER is in the works. Sara is currently co-founder of One More Multiverse.
---

Twitter / Instagram

---I can be reached by placing a fresh cup of chai at dawn while humming out of tune, or by email at
alfaillustration@gmail.com

---

charlie@inkwellmanagement.com

Education

Lesley University

College of Art + Design

BFA - Illustration

Awards

- Harvey Award, Best Children or Young Adult Book (Author)- Selected by Atlanta, Tribeca, Cordillera, and Bronze Lens Film Festivals (Art Direction)
- New England Book Award, Best Young Adult Book (Author)

- Society of Illustrators (Art direction)

Select Clients

+ Credits

Scholastic
Google

Disney

Marvel

Abrams

Star Wars

Chronicle Books

NYU Game Center

BBC

Harvard

Hank Green

Speaking + Exhibitions

"Illustrators As Entrepreneurs: Making Your Own Way"

Panelist / August, 2020 / Society of Illustrators

"Salaam Fandom: Islam, Fandom, Comics, Nerds, and Pop Culture"

Panelist / October, 2019 / New York Comic Con

"Drawing From Other Cultures: Orientalism in Comics"

Panelist / October, 2019 / New York Comic Con

​

"GOOD FUN MUSLIM FRIENDS CLUB"

Speaker + Curator / August, 2019 / The SHED

"Representation in the SPIDER-VERSE (and why it matters)"

Panelist / March, 2019 / Chicago Entertainment and Comics Expo

​

"Colonized Dreams"

Speaker + Curator / March, 2019 / The Knockdown Center

​

"Searching for 3-Dimensional Religion in 2-Dimensional Fiction"

Panelist / November, 2018 / Columbia University

​

"Women of The Galaxy"

Panelist + Signing / October, 2018 / New York Comic Con

"Advocacy in the Arts"

Speaker + Exhibitor / March, 2018 / Boston College

"New Rules"

Speaker + Curator / January, 2018 / MIPSTERZ

"Comics and Islam"

Speaker / ​October, 2017 / Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo

"Re: Claiming Narratives"

Speaker + Curator / October, 2017 / MIPSTERZ

"Hoodies to Hijabs"

Speaker + Organizer / November, 2016 / Lesley University College of Arts and Design

​

Frequently Asked Questions

"Do you draw digitally? What programs do you use?"

Yep, I draw digitally. I first tend to do rough sketches on paper because it's easier for me to get ideas down quickly that way, and then I do almost all work entirely in Photoshop CC. I use the kyle webster brushes.

​

"What tablet do you use? I'm new to art what do you recommend I use?"

Cintiq 22 HD, and rely on my cheap intuos4 when I travel. One costed nearly 2 thousand bucks and one costed $100. Both get the job done honestly.

​

​

"Can you give me a portfolio review?"

If you ask nicely, and can come up with specific questions for me, sure. ​

​

​

"Can you promo my kickstarter/book/webcomic/dog's IG?"

If I like it, yeah of course. ​

​

"Can you draw for my indie comic/kids book?"

Probably not.

​

"Do you do commissions at conventions?"

No. If you'd like something traditionally done that you'd like to pick up in person at a convention however, email me. We can maybe sort something out.

​

"Does drawing ever get easier?"

No. If it ever does I'll report back.

​

​

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Sara Alfageeh is a Jordanian-American illustrator and creative director in San Francisco. She is passionate about history, teaching, girls with swords, and the spaces where art and identity intersect. Her award-winning debut graphic novel SQUIRE is on shelves everywhere, and upcoming picture book NOT YET: THE STORY OF AN UNLIKELY SKATER is in the works.

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A digital tabletop-roleplaying platform and artist marketplace. Play free, in-browser or in-app.

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Discover this spellbinding debut from S.A. Chakraborty. 'An extravagant feast of a book - spicy and bloody, dizzyingly magical, and still, somehow, utterly believable' Laini Taylor, Sunday Times and New York Times bestselling author

Among the bustling markets of eighteenth century Cairo, the city's outcasts eke out a living swindling rich Ottoman nobles and foreign invaders alike.

But alongside this new world the old stories linger. Tales of djinn and spirits. Of cities hidden among the swirling sands of the desert, full of enchantment, desire and riches. Where magic pours down every street, hanging in the air like dust.

Many wish their lives could be filled with such wonder, but not Nahri. She knows the trades she uses to get by are just tricks and sleights of hand: there's nothing magical about them. She only wishes to one day leave Cairo, but as the saying goes...

Be careful what you wish for.

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The City of Brass (The Daevabad Trilogy, Book 1)

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Discover this spellbinding debut from S.A. Chakraborty. 'An extravagant feast of a book - spicy and bloody, dizzyingly magical, and still, somehow, utterly believable' Laini Taylor, Sunday Times and New York Times bestselling author Among the bustling markets of eighteenth century Cairo, the city'

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﻿When purchasing multiple items at once, please note that we'll ship the order when all items are in stock.
﻿﻿Collects Ms. Marvel (2014) #1-5, All-New Marvel Now! Point One (Ms. Marvel story).

Marvel Comics presents the all-new Ms. Marvel, the groundbreaking heroine that has become an international sensation! Kamala Khan is an ordinary girl from Jersey City - until she is suddenly empowered with extraordinary gifts. But who truly is the all-new Ms. Marvel? Teenager? Muslim? Inhuman? Find out as she takes the Marvel Universe by storm! As Kamala discovers the dangers of her newfound powers, she unlocks a secret behind them as well. Is Kamala ready to wield these immense new gifts? Or will the weight of the legacy before her be too much to handle? Kamala has no idea either. But she's comin' for you, New York!

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Ms Marvel Volume 1: No Normal by G. Willow Wilson, Adrian Alphona and Ian Herring

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﻿When purchasing multiple items at once, please note that we'll ship the order when all items are in stock. ﻿﻿Collects Ms. Marvel (2014) #1-5, All-New Marvel Now! Point One (Ms. Marvel story).Marvel Comics presents the all-new Ms. Marvel, the groundbreaking heroine that has become an international sensation! Kamala Kha

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Saga Volume 1 by Brian K Vaughan and Fiona Staples

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OK Comics | Written by Brian K Vaughan Illustrated by Fiona Staples Published by Image Comics Paperback Two ex-soldiers from warring alien species have fallen in love and are now battling to survive. Think Romeo and Juliet but... in space!

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Brian K. Vaughn's classic 60-issue post-apocalyptic series is now available in this new omnibus.

WINNER OF THREE EISNER AWARDS.

A WORLD WITHOUT MEN...

In 2002, the world changes forever. Every man, every boy, every mammal with a Y chromosome everywhere on Earth suddenly collapses and dies. With the loss of nearly half the planet's population, the gears of society grind to a halt, and a world of women are left to pick up the pieces and try to keep civilization from collapsing entirely.

The "gendercide," however, is not absolutely complete. For some unknown reason, one young man named Yorick Brown and his pet male monkey, Ampersand, are spared. Overnight, this anonymous twentysomething becomes the most important person on the planet--the key, it is hoped, to unlocking the secret of the mysterious sex-specific plague.

For Yorick himself, the most important person on the planet is 10,000 miles away--and he will stop at nothing to find her. In setting off across the post-male landscape, however, man and monkey are about to learn just how valuable they are--both as a prize and as a target.

Collected for the first time in a single, comprehensive omnibus, writer Brian K. Vaughan and artist Pia Guerra's Eisner Award-winning Vertigo series Y: The Last Man brings to vivid life the age-old speculation: What would really happen to the last man on Earth? Collects Y: The Last Man #1-60 and a sketchbook featuring behind-the-scenes art by Pia Guerra.

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Brian K. Vaughn's classic 60-issue post-apocalyptic series is now available in this new omnibus. WINNER OF THREE EISNER AWARDS. A WORLD WITHOUT MEN... In 2002, the world changes forever. Every man, every boy, every mammal with a Y chromosome everywhere on Earth suddenly collapses and dies.

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n New Year's Eve 1995, six-year-old Calvin and his tiger, Hobbes, sledded off together for the last time. It was the final strip in Bill Watterson's acclaimed comic, Calvin and Hobbes, which appeared in 2,400 newspapers, and it looked as though it might be Watterson's final published work.

In the ensuing decades, the man who had become a cartooning legend seemed to have all but disappeared, as if he were just a figment of Calvin's rich imagination. He rarely gave interviews; his occasional small projects, including secretly filling in for another cartoonist for a few days, were newsworthy events. Last week's announcement of Watterson's first major work in nearly 30 years - The Mysteries, a vibrantly illustrated "fable for grown-ups " - stunned fans and called for celebration.

"This is pretty exciting and monumental that he's releasing a whole book," says Nevin Martell of Washington DC, a lifelong reader and the author of Looking for Calvin and Hobbes, a story of the strip and Watterson that's also part memoir. "I'm surprised and yet not surprised - surprised in the sense that he's putting something out, not surprised that since he is putting something out, it's so wildly different from what he did on Calvin and Hobbes."

Bill Watterson and John Kascht's The Mysteries. Photograph: Courtesy Andrews McMeel

After years avoiding the public eye, what prompted Watterson to come out of retirement? "He's been working creatively, painting and doing other types of art, since he ended the strip," says Jenny Robb, head curator of comics at Ohio State University's Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum, which houses most of Watterson's original strips. "From that standpoint, it makes sense that eventually he would find a project that he wanted to share with his audience."

Though Watterson has been described as reclusive, that might not be the best word; he lives a normal life, says Robb, one of the few people to have interviewed him, but "he doesn't like to be in the spotlight. He wants to let his artwork speak for itself. And he's uncomfortable in the role of a spokesperson for comics - he would prefer that people read and experience the comic strip rather than engaging with it filtered through him talking about it."

And many millions of people have. According to the publisher, Andrews McMeel, Calvin and Hobbes books have sold 50m copies, and the full collection has the unusual honor of having been the heaviest book to reach the New York Times bestseller list (not to mention the most expensive). Since the strip began in 1985, readers have embraced the adventures of the impulsive Calvin, often lost in a vivid internal world; his thoughtful tiger, Hobbes, who is real to him but stuffed to everyone else; his longsuffering parents; his babysitter and arch-nemesis, Rosalyn; and his bright and diligent fellow first-grader Susie, target of many a failed snowball throw.

The cover of The Calvin and Hobbes Portable Compendium. Photograph: Courtesy Andrews McMeel

"It has everything that can make a comic strip successful," says Robb. "It's funny, first of all. It's insightful. It's wise. It's visually appealing," particularly in the groundbreaking Sunday strips, which eventually shed the grid layout in favor of panels of various shapes and sizes to suit the story. "You see him really stretching as an artist in the Sundays and they're just beautiful to look at," Robb says. "So he brings together all the different aspects of a comic strip, the writing, the characters, the layout, the artwork, and he just has a mastery of all of those."

Robb and Martell both point to another of the strip's most potent qualities: timelessness.

"Even though we live in a very digital age now, with all sorts of devices and all sorts of connectivity that didn't exist when Calvin and Hobbes was in print, when you go back and read those strips, it's essentially a story of a boy and his best friend and the adventures that they went on," Martell says. "It's not a strip that's clouded by pop culture references or other types of references that feel really dated. It feels like it exists in a place out of time. And that's why kids today who are lucky enough to either be given a book or just stumble upon it in the library, when they pick up those strips, they make just as much sense today as when they were first released." He calls the strip "one of the greatest works of popular culture of the 20th century".

If the storylines are timeless, so are the strip's weightier themes. Watterson uses Calvin and Hobbes, best friends with opposing personalities, to explore the ups and downs of childhood; mortality, as when Calvin tries, and fails, to nurse an injured raccoon back to health; environmental fears ("Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us," Calvin says); horse-race politics, as Calvin reports on his father's approval rating with polls of "household six-year-olds"; consumerism ("Hey Mom, I saw a bunch of products on TV that I didn't know existed, but I desperately need!"); and much more.

"I think it demonstrated what was possible with the comics art form, how you can tell stories that appeal to a wide audience with visual variety," Robb says. "These are all things that had been done before. But Calvin and Hobbes brought a lot of unique features together and showed how you could create something really special and really magical."

As for the next chapter in Watterson's career, Andrews McMeel describes The Mysteries as "a compelling, provocative story that invites readers to examine their place in the universe and their responsibility to others and the planet we all share", calling it "a fable that dares to intimate the big questions about our place in the universe".

The book is a collaboration between Watterson and the celebrated caricaturist John Kascht, and it appears far bleaker than either illustrator's earlier work. The few published panels are sombre and foreboding, presented in shades of gray. "The style of the writing, the style of the art is intensely different from Calvin and Hobbes. And I think that's a very conscious decision on [Watterson's] part. He would not ever want to be pigeonholed as just the Calvin and Hobbes guy," Martell says.

"The artwork is very different from both [Watterson's and Kascht's] styles," says Robb. "So I'm really curious to know how they collaborated on that and how that worked. Because it doesn't really look like John and doesn't really look like Bill to me."

For all the darkness, the characters in the new book - sad-eyed knights, self-satisfied kings and pensive wizards - still possess the vitality that made a boy and his tiger seem to exist beyond the page. Yet the pair never appeared anywhere else: Watterson was firmly against licensing his strip, which is why there is no Spaceman Spiff: The Movie, no authorized Calvinball league or official line of Hobbes-endorsed red wagons. (Calvin himself would surely be unhappy with his creator's decision to forgo millions of dollars; Hobbes, who prefers the simple life - a tuna sandwich and a snooze in a sunbeam - would approve.)

Kirsty Melville, president of Andrews McMeel, publisher of the new book as well as Calvin and Hobbes, wasn't prepared to reveal much else about the new volume. But, she said of Watterson: "Someone who can create the brilliance of Calvin and Hobbes - who knows what else is lurking in there?"

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'He created something magical': Calvin and Hobbes fans rejoice as creator plans first work in decades

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n New Year's Eve 1995, six-year-old Calvin and his tiger, Hobbes, sledded off together for the last time. It was the final strip in Bill Watterson's acclaimed comic, Calvin and Hobbes, which appeared in 2,400 newspapers, and it looked as though it might be Watterson's final published work.

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Children in a sleepy Wisconsin town begin to go missing with most never returning, and those that do have disturbing stories of horrific creatures that live in the shadows.

There is one person that believes the children and claims to be the only who sees what they can see. Her name is Erica Slaughter. She kills monsters. This is all she does, and she bears the cost because it must be done.

Experience the critically acclaimed series by GLAAD Award-winning writer James Tynion IV (Department of Truth, Batman) and artist Werther Dell'Edera (Razorblades) like never before.

Collects Something is Killing the Children #1-15 in a single deluxe edition hardcover for the first time.

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Something is Killing the Children Deluxe Edition Book 1 by James Tynion IV and Werther Dell'Edera

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Children in a sleepy Wisconsin town begin to go missing with most never returning, and those that do have disturbing stories of horrific creatures that live in the shadows.There is one person that believes the children and claims to be the only who sees what they can see.

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The online store and blog for London UK comic shop Gosh! Comics

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The Many Deaths of Laila Starr by Ram V and Filipe Andrade

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Humanity is on the verge of discovering immortality. As a result, the avatar of Death is cast down to Earth to live a mortal life in Mumbai as twenty-something Laila Starr.Struggling with her newfound mortality, Laila has found a way to be placed in the time and place where the creator of immortalit…

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Indies Choice Book of the Year * National Book Award Finalist * New York Times Bestseller * New York Times Notable Book * Kirkus Best Book * School Library Journal Best Book * Publishers Weekly Best Book * NPR Best Book * New York Public…

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When an unassuming man stumbles upon a dark-web contract assassin's vicious plot to kill an innocent target, he turns himself into one. The Professional meets Road to Perdition in this story of a family's unlikely guardian being hunted by rich and powerful men who are used to getting away with everything. Join New York Times bestselling writer RICK REMENDER (DEADLY CLASS, BLACK SCIENCE) and ANDRÉ ARAÚJO (GENERATION GONE, Man Plus) for a uniquely atmospheric murder mystery with sudden bouts of brutal violence. Collects A RIGHTEOUS THIRST FOR VENGEANCE #1-5

﻿When purchasing multiple items at once, please note that we will ship the order in full when we have all items in hand.

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A Righteous Thirst for Vengeance Volume 1 by Rick Remender and Andre Araujo

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When an unassuming man stumbles upon a dark-web contract assassin's vicious plot to kill an innocent target, he turns himself into one. The Professional meets Road to Perdition in this story of a family's unlikely guardian being hunted by rich and powerful men who are used to getting away with everything.

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Please note that this is a pre-order and is estimated to arrive on November 7th. When purchasing multiple items at once, please note that we will ship the order in full when all items are in stock.
RETURN TO THE RONIN-VERSE! In TMNT: The Last Ronin, readers were taken on a pulse-pounding trek through time-past, present, future-to witness the final gut-wrenching days of the Heroes in a Half Shell.Last Ronin-Lost Years,

In new secrets of the Turtles' past are revealed as we learn more about the devastating series of events leading up to the Last Ronin's final battle, as well as its aftermath. Kevin Eastman and

For Michelangelo in particular, the march to his heartbreaking last battle was long and dangerous, taking him from New York City, to Japan, across Asia and Europe, and then back home again to administer final justice against those guilty of killing his family. But what happened during those fateful years when he had only the need for vengeance and Master Splinter's journal to guide him? What battles did he fight? What hard lessons did he learn?

The time has come to find out as original miniseries writers Tom Waltz join artist Ben Bishop (TMNT: The Last Ronin) and SL Gallant (G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero) to finally reveal what adventures the Last Ronin experienced during his vengeful journey. While in the present, a new master, Casey Marie Jones, prepares her young terrapin students to be the next generation of...Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles!

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Pre-Order Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Last Ronin Lost Years by Kevin Eastman

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Please note that this is a pre-order and is estimated to arrive on November 7th. When purchasing multiple items at once, please note that we will ship the order in full when all items are in stock. RETURN TO THE RONIN-VERSE!

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Written by Brian K Vaughan

Illustrated by Fiona Staples

Published by Image Comics

Paperback

Two ex-soldiers from warring alien species have fallen in love and are now battling to survive. Think Romeo and Juliet but... in space! It's ingeniously narrated by their newborn baby. Once you start reading this series, be prepared to be sucked in!

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Saga Volume 1 by Brian K Vaughan and Fiona Staples

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OK Comics | Written by Brian K Vaughan Illustrated by Fiona Staples Published by Image Comics Paperback Two ex-soldiers from warring alien species have fallen in love and are now battling to survive. Think Romeo and Juliet but... in space!

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Maus Complete Collection by Art Spiegelman

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When purchasing multiple items at once, please note that we will ship the order in full when all items are in stock. The first and only graphic novel to win the Pulitzer Prize, MAUS is a brutally moving work of art about a Holocaust survivor -- and the son who survives him’The first masterpiece i…

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Beano | Quizzes, Games, Jokes and Comic Fun for Kids

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Take the best quizzes, play free online games, find hilarious jokes and pranks. The official home of funny stuff for kids, Beano comic, Dennis and Gnasher.

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Official website: Discover the whole universe of the Adventures of Tintin, the world-famous comic book series created by Hergé.