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.

Todd Hignite's text for the Abrams' pretty The Art Of Jaime Hernandez is like the best testimonial ever written for a fancy tribute dinner, the kind of speechifying that makes you tear up a little bit in shared love for the subject of its adoration. One reads a lot of writing about cartoonists, but very little of it makes you want to shake the writer's hand, as is the case here. The love that many comics fans have for the work of Jaime Hernandez may be unique in comics because he's an artist that brings out that emotion in people that I would suggest are largely distrustful if not outright contemptuous of how frequently such feelings are expressed on behalf of so many other artists working in the medium. Jaime is a a comics artist people that find it hard to love artists love. Further, I think that people love Jaime for all the usual reasons one may love a comics artist, and then some folks love him a little more for all the reasons they love a great artist working any medium, and then a few folks love him that much more for being the avatar of a certain kind of relationship to comics, growing in seriousness of intent and human scope just as they were ready to read stories like that.

Table of Contents, Introduction, and excerpts from The Best American Comics Criticism 2010 (Fantagraphics). Whether you choose to call them "comics lit," "graphic novels," or just "thick comic books," book-length narratives told in words and pictures confidently elbowed their way into the cultural spotlight in the first decade of this new millennium - beginning with the simultaneous 2001 release of Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth and Daniel Clowes' David Boring, and continuing on through ground-breaking and best-selling works such as Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, Robert Crumb's Genesis, Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, and Joe Sacco's Palestine. This renaissance in turn brought forth a chorus of critical commentary that not only addressed these recent works, but also initiated a much-needed look back at the previous century's neglected and forgotten masterpieces. This chorus, as presented in The Best American Comics Criticism, comprises both criticism (Douglas Wolk on Frank Miller and Will Eisner, Robert C. Harvey on Fun Home, Donald Phelps on Steve Ditko and Phoebe Gloeckner) and history (David Hajdu on the 1950s comic-book burnings, Jeet Heer on Gasoline Alley, Ben Schwartz on Little Orphan Annie, Gerard Jones on the birth of the comic-book business), as well as revelatory peer-on-peer essays by novelists (Jonathan Franzen on Peanuts, John Updike on James Thurber) and cartoonists (Chris Ware on Rodolphe Töpffer, Clowes on Mad's Will Elder, and Seth on John Stanley).