BBC America: Five Songwriters Who Deserve The Comic Book Treatment

By: Fraser McAlpine Posted: Friday, August 5th, 2011

http://blogs.bbcamerica.com/anglophenia/2011/08/05/five-songwriters-who-deserve-the-comic-book-treatment/

This November, at the Tucson Comic-Con, a new comic will be launched, called Unite and Take Over: Comic Book Stories Inspired by The Smiths. It’s the 78-page brainchild of publisher Shawn Demumbrum, who brought in artists like Christian Vilaire, Henry Barajas, Jeff Pina, and Shelby Robertson, to help him illustrate a series of stories which take Morrissey’s lyrics as inspiration.

And this set us thinking. Who else from the British rock and pop firmament has the kind of material which would lend itself to a comic book setting? Which other singers or songwriters have created a body of work which would lend itself to a visual retelling?

Here’s our list. You can add yours underneath:

NB: Clearly there are already comics devoted to some of the artists in this list, Roch & Roll Comics does illustrated biographies, what we’re talking about is using their work to fuel the imagination of comic book artists, rather than their life history.

Elvis Costello

Well this guy already dresses like Clark Kent, and the lyric to his song “The Comedians” appears in Alan Moore’s mighty Watchmen, so he’s got form. But it’s his song lyrics which would best suit a little bit of illustration. Can you imagine a noir-ish comic, like Sin City, set to the lyrics of  “Watching The Detectives”? That’d work. Or a dark, obsessive comic, detailing one man’s epic jealousy after losing the girl of his dreams to another man, set to the lyrics of  “I Want You”?

Heck, he even did a song called  “God’s Comic,” although that was about a comedian, and God himself. It would, however, still make a brilliant comic book.

Alex Turner

Again, Peter Parker on the outside, seething superbrain on the inside. The whole of the first Arctic Monkeys album was intended to describe a night out in Leeds, taken from various different perspectives, where everyone behaves badly, and all viewed by a gimlet-eyed watcher, for whom no detail is too small.

Now, Watchmen readers, isn’t that what Rorschach does? Granted, he’s a little more pro-active about changing things, and a little less keen to see the humour, but the job is essentially the same one. Not that we’re suggesting Rorschach would be a good songwriter.

Pulp

Two words: adult Archie. C’mon, if you used a song like  “Babies” or  “Disco 2000″ as the basis for an Archie-type comic, one in which the teen protaganists acted more like real teenagers, that would be rather great, wouldn’t it?

Imagine the whole gang sitting around discussing the first time they had sex. Imagine a furious Jughead giving some girl a verbal lashing over her desire to live like common people? Imagine the gang going out raving for the first time ever, and poor Archie (or, without wishing to get ourselves into legal trouble, a character along the lines of Archie but not Archie himself) getting left behind afterwards.

The Cure

You’ve all read The Crow, right? If ever there was a comic that shared a common aesthetic with the Cure’s singular body of work, it’s that. Imagine a monochrome comic reinterpretation of classic creepy Cure songs like  “Lullaby” or  “The Walk,” interspersed with day-glo psychedelic Yellow Submarine artwork, detailing the happy songs like  “The Lovecats” or  “Friday I’m In Love.”

Wouldn’t that kind of juxtaposition create the most bipolar comic on Earth? And what if the Crow side invaded the Yellow Submarine side? An invasion of the Black Meanies? OK, I’m getting carried away now.

Adele

The X Men have Banshee, an Irish mutant fella (based on the female mythical creature), who can perform a ‘sonic scream’, capable of destroying all in its path, and deafening anyone foolish enough to wave an ear in its direction. The real world has Adele, a Londoner who appears to be blessed with this very real power.

Why is she not using it to fight evil? Why is she not going out in the dead of night, dressed in skin-tight lycra, and shouting at muggers until their heads explode? And assuming she is not, why isn’t anyone making a comic out of her doing that exact thing? A couple of bars of  “Rolling In The Deep” should be enough to scare the most fearsome gangster into going straight.

Who did we miss? Tell us here:

Why Integrate?: A Case for Collating the Curriculum

By Elena Aguilar

There is a strong case to be made for integrating curriculum. It strengthens skills that students encounter in one content area but also practice in another, and it can lead to the mastery of those skills. It is also a more authentic way of learning because it reflects what we experience, both professionally and personally, in the world. And it can be a way to engage students who might otherwise check out when we introduce them to a challenging subject or to one they don’t feel is relevant.

Sometimes, if you’re really lucky, integrating curriculum can create the conditions in which students discover their passions. They find something they love doing so much that it compels them to persevere through all kinds of personal and academic challenges, to graduate from high school, and to go to college to pursue their dreams. And in the part of Oakland, California, where I work, this achievement often constitutes saving a life.

So when I think about making a case for interdisciplinary studies, I think immediately of George. (All student names in this post are pseudonyms.) I wonder what would have happened to him had Keiko Suda not put a video camera in his hands in seventh grade.

The Curriculum

Keiko Suda was George’s seventh-grade math and science teacher. She was charged with teaching cell biology as part of California’s seventh-grade standards. At the ASCEND School, where Suda and I taught together, teachers were encouraged to develop curricular units that emphasized depth over breadth and to teach our students how to transfer their acquired knowledge to other contexts. (See this Edutopia.org article and this Edutopia video about the school.)

Suda designed a semester-long study of HIV/AIDS with the guiding question “How does HIV/AIDS affect us physically and socially?” Students learned about the immune system and cell biology and explored what it means to live with HIV/AIDS.

As a culminating project, students wrote, directed, produced, edited, and starred in a movie that answered their guiding question. One class focused on the social implications of living with HIV, while the other class depicted what happens to the immune system.

Evidence of Learning

A skillful teacher must assess an instructional unit while it is under way and afterward, and the evaluation must be based on evidence of learning. Suda’s formative and summative assessments provided overwhelming evidence that students had mastered the science standards. This finding, however, was just the beginning.

During that semester, I witnessed students transferring their knowledge of HIV. In the portable classroom next to Suda’s, I taught history and English to the same group of students. Our content for that semester was the bubonic plague, and students explored how the plague transformed the social, economic, political, and religious structures of medieval Europe.

When we began the study, a few weeks or so after they’d started studying HIV, one of the first questions from a student was, “Who was scapegoated during the plague?” Based on her understanding of what some HIV-positive people have faced, she predicted that the same experience might have occurred during another epidemic — and she was right. This was powerful evidence of deep learning.

The culminating project in my class was a dramatic performance. As students applied the concepts they’d learned with Suda to their understanding of the plague, they also practiced and perfected scriptwriting and acting skills for this project.

I credit my own deeper understanding of viruses to the movies students created with Suda. It took Nestor’s frightening portrayal of an HIV cell to permanently etch into my mind how HIV operates. In One Strike, he hovers menacingly over the bound and immobilized immune system cell and declares, “You’re going to be my host. I will enter you and hijack your nucleus.” This statement permanently stuck to some receptor in my brain, whereas before, I had never been able to retain the same information when it was delivered in print.

More evidence of deep learning became apparent once our students had graduated from the ASCEND School and had gone off to high school. In ninth grade, Maria wrote a poem about a young woman who contracts HIV. Her moving poem, one of thousands of entries, won an award in a contest sponsored by author Alice Walker.

Click here to finish the article

Starting at the Beginning: Revisiting our First Post

At the intersection, Pop Goes the Classroom is on the edge where traditional education meets the digital native learner. We empower teachers to become facilitators by embracing the tools of tomorrow ultimately creating meaningful learning experiences for a new generation. Huh? Pretty lofty stuff but what does it mean? Well it comes down to a pretty simple question, “Is your goal to teach or is your goal for your students to learn?” because the two goals aren’t always the same.  We believe knowledge is constructed by the learner not taught by the teacher.  We believe that to be a good educator you must be a facilitator not a teacher. And because knowledge is built and not taught we believe it’s important to begin in a place learners are comfortable. For tweens and teens that place is popular culture. So we give you the knowledge and skills to move away from teaching toward facilitating and we help you use what the kids know and are interested in engage them in building the knowledge they need to have. The technical term is scaffolding. We use a learner’s strength to build on as we address an area for growth.

Sounds good but,” how on earth do I use what these kids are watching on tv, reading about and listening to in the classroom . I have these kids for 6 hours a day or 40 minutes a day or“…well you get the idea. “I’ve got a scope and sequence I already don’t have time to complete in the year and you want me to add more?” No, we don’t want you to add more. We want to help you apply that scope and sequence to something that is of interest to the kids so you can speed up the lessons and maybe actually get through the whole thing by the end of the year.

It’s going to take some work on your part, but once you’ve mastered the techniques we’re talking about it’ll be second nature to you. Welcome to the convergence. It’s the Infinite Spectrum Productions tag line. We’ll use techniques that go all the way back to John Dewey for you educational history buffs and we’ll show you how to use them in today’s classroom. And best of all we’re going to show you how to do it with Pop Culture. It can’t get much cooler than that!