Literacy

Attendees at this year's New York Comic Con are accustomed to giant-sized announcements for the latest entertainment, but this year a new sign greets visitors as they wander around the hype-encrusted Javits Center: branded...

The Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction has just announced a new MFA course in "Applied Cartooning", which is a word I hear a lot hat talks about using comics for educational and informational purposes. When the cartoon Illuminati gets together they are all about Applied Cartooning, trust me. According to the announcement, this program will explore "how comics can impact such diverse fields as health, business, public policy, and education."

It's a booming time for more scholarly looks at comics, and Ball State doctoral candidate Christina Blanch is one of the most important figures in this movement. last year she held a MOOC (massive online open course) on Gender in Comics that drew some 7,000 participants, and she's at it again with Social Issues Through Comic Books a six month online course that will examine "current social issues through comic books while understanding how popular culture is shaped by it's surroundings." Guests include Denny O'Neill, Shaenon Garrity, Scott Snyder, Gene Yang, Warren Ellis, Jonathan Hickman, Mark Waid... the list goes on. NOW how much would you pay? Well, it's FREE. Yep.

Reading with Pictures, the long running drive to create a school-certified textbook using comics, has entered into an agreement with Andrews McMeel to publish READING WITH PICTURES: THE GRAPHIC TEXTBOOK this August. The book,...

SAW—the Sequential Artists Workshop in Gainsesville, FL founded by Tom Hart and Leela Corman— has been doing some great work educating cartoonists, publishing mini comic, giving out micro-grants, and in general being a benefit to the comics community. They've been running an IndieGogo campaign for the last month or so, and it's in its final hours -- if you haven't thrown a few bucks their way, now is the time.

Hype Alert: You may (or may not) see some of this year's New York Comic Con panel on MISSION IN A BOTTLE, the Honest Tea graphic novel, on tonight's Nightly Business Reporton PBS, but you...

Librarian Karen Green has done it again! She's gotten venerable cartoonist Al Jaffee (The Mad fold-in guy) to give his archives to the growing collection at Columbia University. : Karen Green, a Columbia librarian, approached...

We've been covering the thrilling saga of the Nine Foot Tall Hulk Statue and the Northlake Library for months, and we're happy to say it finally reached it's destination and was unveiled for the...

We've been reporting for some while on the saga of the Northlake Public Library in Illinois and its quest to attain a 9-foot-tall statue of the Hulk. At first it was just a crowdsourced...

While many of you many be wondering "What's a common core?" if you're in the publishing business it's been the buzzword of the year. Simply put, it concerns basic standards in learning for all...

Okay, so there was this library in Illinois that got the idea to build a 9-foot tall statue of The Hulk out front. As you do. In order to accomplish this, The Northlake Public...

This weekend it's the Toronto Comic Arts Festival 2013, with the actual event to be held May 11-12 at the Toronto Reference Library, 789 Yonge Street in Toronto. Normally I would be listing debuts...