Over the last twenty years or so comic books and video games have been adapted in to movies. Novels have been adapted into comic books. Many of these products have been licensed as toys. Indeed two Singaporeans are actively engaged in such adaptations: Sonny Liew is working on a comic book version of Jane Austin's novel Sense and Sensibility for Marvel Comics, and Eric Khoo is doing a film adaptation of Yoshihiro Tatsumi comic A Drifting Life. Increasing there are convergences between media forms and products.
This conference held in conjunction with the Singapore Toys, Games and Comics Convention examines the issues involved in these developments from a scholarly perspective with a focus on Asia.
Increasingly comic books and graphic narratives/novels find their way onto literature syllabi. Recent anthologies such as _Teaching Visual Literacy: Using Comic Books, Graphic Novels, Anime, Cartoons, and More to Develop Comprehension and Thinking Skills_, edited by Nancy Frey and Douglas Fisher, and _Building Literacy Connections with Graphic Novels: Page by Page, Panel by Panel,_ edited by James Bucky Carter, emphasize the use for such texts in secondary schools. But what are the benefits of teaching comic books and graphic narratives/novels in college? And how do we best go about doing it? This panel seeks papers that discuss the benefits of teaching these new genres in the Literature classroom. Papers may address pedagogical issues and concerns as well as sample lesson plans and/or anecdotes from experience.