Comic Connections

Analyzing Hero and Identity

Edited by Sandra Eckard

Publication date:

31 January 2017

Length of book:

154 pages

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

ISBN-13: 9781475828016

Comics are all around campuses everyday, and with students arriving less prepared to tackle basics like reading, writing, and analyzing, this text helps connect what students enjoy to the classroom. Comic Connections: Analyzing Hero and Identity is designed to help teachers from middle school through college find a new strategy that they can use right away as part of their curricular goals.

Each chapter has three pieces: comic relevance, classroom connections, and concluding thoughts; this format allows a reader to pick-and-choose where to start. Some readers might want to delve into the history of a comic to better understand characters and their usefulness, while other readers might want to pick up an activity, presentation, or project that they can fold into that day’s lesson.

This book focuses on defining heroic traits in popular characters such as Superman, Batman, or Daredevil, while offering a scholarly perspective on how to analyze character and identity in ways that would complement any literary classroom.
In a creative and complex endeavor, Sandra Eckard has once again crafted a text that not only enhances the educator’s arsenal of tools but intrigues the lay reader. Bridging popular artifacts and intellectual space, she had aptly brings the superhero into the classroom as a purveyor of knowledge, source of encouragement, and venue of creative cross-disciplinary discussion. Battles of Batman and Superman are not just conflicts, instead they illustrate to the student benefits and values of literature, morals, principles of deduction, and most importantly they teach the value of critical thought in determining outcomes and connectivity of knowledge to surrounding events, locales, and concepts.