I thought I’d share some illustrations I did for the National Council of Teachers of English’s annual NCTE Conference in Atlanta, GA! I was super happy to be asked to contribute some of my doodles and they came out looking really great. Some examples are behind the cut.
Hell’s Kitchen is an American-style restaurant in downtown Minneapolis. We left before the live music started but it was good eats.
Elizabeth Wein is an author I occasionally wax rhapsodic about here. You should read her books.
Day 2 of my trip to Minneapolis to the NCTE convention… even though this is the third comic page.
Richard McGuire’s Here truly is mind-blowing. He’s been working on it for a long time but I had never heard of it before this weekend.
Craig Thompson on the other hand is one of my favorite cartoonists. If you haven’t read Blankets, Goodbye Chunky Rice, Habibi, or most recently, Space Dumplins, get on that. Also you can check out some of the cool doodles he did in our books at CXC this past fall.
Cece Bell wrote the tremendous graphic novel El Deafo.
For the next few days, I’m going to be doing some comics about my trip to Minneapolis, visiting the National Council of Teachers of English convention, and winning one of Penguin Random House’s Teacher Awards for Literacy.
I know these aren’t exactly the kinds of comics I normally do about being a teacher – think about them as being “teacher adjacent” if it makes you feel better.
Also, these comics are taking a HUGE amount of time to produce so I might miss a day or two. I hope they’ll be worth it in the long run!
One of the things I was most excited about for this year’s NCTE convention was to get the chance to meet Elizabeth Wein, author of one my favorite YA novels, Code Name Verity.
Longtime readers of the comic probably remember my doing a run of CNV related comics a few years ago. Elizabeth was nice enough to give those strips some notice when I published them… and I was able to give her a couple of copies of my mini-comics today.
Looking forward to reading her new book, Black Dove White Raven!
A few weeks ago, I mentioned the National Council of Teachers of English asked me to draw a comic for their September newsletter. I was beyond excited for the assignment and chose the topic of student choice in independent reading. Me being me, I of course skewed it toward comics and graphic novels. I was happy to namecheck great books like Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Jeff Smith’s Bone, Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples’ Saga, and Raina Telgemeier’s Drama. All of those great comics have been banned in schools and libraries for what I view as laughable reasons. All of those comics should absolutely be available to young people to read and enjoy.
Tomorrow I’ll be making my way to the annual NCTE convention in Minneapolis where I’m receiving a Teacher Award for Literacy, so I thought on the eve of my trip, posing a nice version of this comic was worth doing.
Here’s something cool- The National Council of Teachers of English hired me to do a comic for their bi-annual magazine The Council Chronicle. I wrote about empowering students through personal choice in their reading.
Besides being excited to do something like this for a great organization like NCTE, I was happy to focus it on some of the asinine reasons great graphic novels get banned in some libraries – like how apparently Bone promotes an unhealthy agenda for children because Smiley Bone smokes a pipe.
I’ll post a higher resolution version of the comic later this week.
Teachable Moments 