Images and the Graphic Novels: Their potential for teaching

 It wasn’t until I started reading Ghost World that I became interested in graphic novels. I even started looking for more exemplars of graphic novels and I realized their potential to be used as a student-friendly material that can eventually increase motivation in students when it comes to reading and, in turn, hopefully enhance reading and writing abilities.

 You may start reading graphic novels as an assignment and end up reading them for pleasure because there is something appealing about its format; the images that can stand on its own and can still mean 1000 word, the mixture of text and images, the black & white or coloured panels  that engages and makes it really easy to read.

However, here I would like to digress a bit from the main point I’m trying to put forward, to assert that images in graphic novels must not be thought as just visual representation to support what is being written, but images also represent concepts that we immediately recognize because we have “unintendedly” conventionally agreed on its meaning as a way to understand reality.

Bringing this point to Daniel Clowes’s Ghost World, there is a part in which Enid enters a sex shop and instead of purchasing any object related to sex she just gets a “mask” of Catwoman. This is key to understand the character and in part the plot of this graphic novel; the Catwoman mask is a sex symbol since, culturally, we know that people get this “customs” for sexual purposes; however, Enid wears this mask in everyday life and breaks with the conception of this mask as a sexual icon. This clearly reflects the character’s attempt to go against the “culturally established”, not caring about what people think.

In the case of Art Spiegelman’s Maus, something similar happens. To help the reader understand what occurred in the Holocaust and to imagine the relationship between Nazis and Jews, the author employs the images of cats and mice as a metaphor. Since we conventionally know that cats are the natural predators of mice (even though I’ve never seen a cat hunting a mouse) we can assert that the cats represent the Nazis chasing and capturing mice, the Jews.

Coming back to graphic novels and its application in classrooms, I’ve discovered that many topics have been covered in graphic novels and would be a great idea to introduce certain contents in the classroom by using graphic novels. Whether it is a serious matter like the Holocaust, one of the most horrible events in history or whether it is a teenage story like the one presented in Ghost World, graphic novels can be a very useful tool to engage students in reading because of both content and format.

Finally here’s the link with the 50 best graphic novels (Ghost World in number 17 and Maus in number 5) in case you are looking for more graphic novels to read, there is a brief summary of each one of them.

https://forbiddenplanet.com/picks/50-best-graphic-novels/