Ohio Schools Magazine: December/January 2020-2021

M*A*S*H, Covid Teaching, and my favorite time of year

…from a longer story I’m working on.

Covid Comics

Teaching My Friend Dahmer

I spent a great weekend at the Chicago Comics and Entertainment Expo and one of my favorite parts of spending time at C2E2 was getting to sit in on some panels that dealt with topics around teaching, literacy, and comics. I was struck with a lot of the conversations centering around how to get started teaching with comics in the classroom, which is a topic I know an awful lot about.

A few years ago I taught Derf Backderf’s My Friend Dahmer to my students and I drew a series of comics about the experience. Comics about teaching comics, yeah you read that right.

I thought it might be a good idea to repost some of those strips here for some of my new followers.

This is not a guide just a collection of my experiences teaching comics… although I do think there are some helpful tips in here.

Another posts for my students’ projects…

These are pics for my students

Hourly Comic Day 2020

Christmas Comic Cavalcade: The Beginning of the End

Something sad happened to me this year. As years go, 2019 had a lot of highs and lows and I like to think I took most of them in stride… but probably the lowest low was having our basement flood this March.

We lost stuff. Ellen and I were lucky that we had most of our photographs in plastic bins and electronics secured high enough not to get wet. Electronics were well about the line. The real gut-punch of the damage was to our books. Ellen collects a lot of cookbooks and I’m into all types of random garbage… you name it, I’ll buy it. Old issues of Creem Magazine.  Movie novelizations. Lots and lots and lots of comic books.

The movie novelizations were fine. My Creem Magazines were set above the gushing water. My comics however… they got hit. They got hit bad. While I was able to move most of my collection, I lost about three and a half long boxes of comics.

IT COULD HAVE BEEN A LOT WORSE. I had just begun on a cataloging/organization of all my floppy copies and as such, had comic boxes stacked on top of comic boxes in a fort-like capacity, three or four tall. Had this flood happened a few weeks before my organization project, I would have lost almost ALL of them… but they were stacked, so many were untouched.

It was, however, those boxes on the lowest level of those stacks that took the brunt of the water. Sadly, two of those boxes were filled with unbagged comic books… ranging from the 1970’s to today. Most of the comics I lost weren’t worth anything. I’m a sucker for $1 dollar comics sales (or lower!) and I like to have a lot of books to look through. A lot of those comics will be easy to replace…

but the hardest thing that was hit was my half box worth of Christmas/holiday comics.

I don’t have many comics that have SENTIMENTAL value.

I will ditch a comic pretty quick if I’m looking to downsize. Stack ‘em all up and just get them gone. I’ll buy a trade paperback.

Those Christmas comics though?

They have a lot of sentimental value for sure.

Comics I bought when I was a kid.

Comics I read to tatters.

Also, writing these Christmas comics posts! “Blogging” as a fad has come and gone but I always enjoyed giving myself the assignments. Giving myself an excuse to sit down with these types of comics and see how creators took to the challenge has become part of my holiday tradition.

Anyway, here’s what I’m going to try to do. I still have the box of comics. They are in pretty rough shape but I have saved a few choice books. I haven’t decided if I’m going to rebuild this collection but let’s squeeze the last bit of toothpaste out of this metaphorical tube over the next few weeks.

If you’ve never read the Christmas Comic Cavalcade before, I recommend checking out the Master list!

It’s Batman Day