Graphic Novels

Chalk it up to Spidey-sense, but after the recent box-office success of superhero Spider-Man, Maryland's superintendent of schools has adopted a novel approach to motivate reluctant readers: using comic books and graphic novels to enhance reading lessons. Superintendent Nancy S. Grasmick created the nation's first state-sanctioned template of lesson plans featuring word balloons and bubbles and action-packed animated panels that teachers can use for a variety of optional lessons. "I just think that it's an opportunity to do something that will supplement our more traditional reading and be highly motivating to students and will engage them in reading in a much more enthusiastic manner," Grasmick said.

Greetings boys and GHOULs! The second season of AMC's 'The Walking Dead' premieres on Sunday evening , and before I get going with this new TV Lust blog, I wanted to share a few thoughts on the series and introduce myself. My story is fairly typical. I watched the George Romero 'Living Dead' series of films growing up, listened to White Zombie, and started dressing up like a zombie every Halloween. I'm no Tom Savini, so my 'zombie' get-up involves wearing some old torn up clothes, painting my face white with sunken black eyes, and then squirting liberal amounts of stage blood all over my head.

As a new parent, one of the first things you are told -- right after "Your life will never be the same" -- is "Read to your child every day."You conclude -- although this is never actually promised -- that this will imbue your child with a devotion to books and reading.Suddenly it is fourth grade and he's doing a book report on the comic-book version of Cal Ripken's biography and you realize you are in trouble. Your child has decided that reading a book is not transporting, it is work. Especially when pictures no longer take up the whole page.

Zipcars march on! Based on the success of the recent Zipcar sites at the 36th Street and Chestnut Avenue, the company and Baltimore City are looking to place more of these rent-by-the-hour automobile stations in Hampden - specifically near 36th Street and Falls Road. This should come as welcome news to folks in need of easily accessible transportation. Meanwhile, here are some events well within walking distance: Thanks to the crack staff at the Golden West Café, 1105 W. 36th St., as well as local promoters like Dana Murphy and Adam Savage, there is a run of really excellent bands playing there over the next few weeks.

COMIC BOOKS have been maligned, linked to juvenile delinquency and called junk food for the mind. But now, a longer, embellished version of the form, called graphic novels, has attained respect. They are part of young adult collections at libraries across the country, including Mount Airy Public Library, and parents are learning how these longer comic books are introducing a love of reading to children. "Graphic novels are really an excellent way to convince reluctant readers that reading can be fun," said librarian Jody Sharp.

Who says that the neon-bright world of comic books can't explore serious and subtle themes? Eighteen-year-old Orpheus Collar used the graphic novel to investigate the question of how people would behave if they knew they had just 15 minutes to live. It was this entry, along with some paintings, that won a silver medal this year from the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts -- making Collar one of the three top teenage painters in the United States, in the opinion of competition judges.

Even in the ever-morphing world of the graphic novel, Steven Parke's illustrations stand out. Instead of drawing, he uses photographs to tell a story. But he doesn't just point his camera and shoot. Parke manipulates his images digitally, lifting pieces from different shoots, tinkering with the lighting. The results duplicate reality, but with a twist. Parke started out studying acting, then spent time in the music industry, including 13 years as Prince's personal art department. Now, working with writer Jonathon Scott Fuqua, he is close to wrapping his third graphic novel, the story of a teen whose special ability helps her fit right in with a traveling sideshow.

Many of the classic comic books -- including Superman, Batman and Spider-Man -- were created by the children of Jewish immigrants struggling to assimilate into mainstream America. Jewish authors creating contemporary graphic novels -- cartoon books with more sophisticated themes -- continue that literary tradition, softening heavy issues with ample doses of Yiddish humor. McDaniel College's Hoover Library in Westminster is hosting a five-part discussion series this fall on this evolving genre, titled "Modern Marvels: Jewish Adventures in the Graphic Novel."

Last month, when the teenage daughter on NBC's The Book of Daniel turned out to be a talented manga artist selling drugs to pay for her software, adults may have said, "Huh?" But their teenage daughters probably knew exactly what manga was. These black-and-white comics, translated from Japanese best-sellers and meant to be read back to front and right to left, are a huge hit with American teens and 'tweens. They can find manga (pronounced mahn-ga, with a hard G as in "girl") in the popular teen magazine Cosmo Girl or they wait impatiently for the next book in a series to be translated and brought to the shelves of a nearby Barnes & Noble or Waldenbooks.

When my classmates demand that I defend filing Daredevil next to Dante, I can only stammer. I am hard-pressed to say that comic books aren't meant for kids. Their numbers swell with corny superhero stories. The characters' gaudy costumes and mystifying abilities give the average comic as much artistic credibility as a summer action flick. A comic book even resembles the storyboards filmmakers churn out. What are comic books if not movies that weren't good enough to get made? The word "comic" has been stretched beyond capacity, describing both works lighthearted and grim, works spanning a few panels to a few hundred pages.

The ultimate question raised by the movie version of the celebrated graphic novel Watchmen may not be "Who watches the Watchmen?" but "Who will check their watches during Watchmen?" Ticking in at two hours and 43 minutes, this slavish exercise in revisionist comic-book lore takes more than an hour to get started, and then never gets its scale or proportion right. This is the kind of apocalyptic movie in which murder by meat ax delivers far more punch than a doomsday clock marking the seconds to the end of the world.

W atchmen arrives in theaters Friday, riding a wave of pop anticipation as fierce in its own way as the return of Star Wars. The reputation of Alan Moore's original creation has been building ever since it appeared in 1986 and helped turn high-class comic books into "graphic novels." Time magazine named it one of the 100 best English-language novels since 1923. It has brought many a grown-up comic-book fan back into the fold and won over collegiate, with-it readers with its apocalyptic tone and its deconstruction of superhero mythology.

When the bell rang, the 15 third-grade students would ignore it. They stayed glued to their seats, engrossed in their assignment of reading comic books. For the last month, the students in Starlet. Lindblad and Jennifer Palmer's reading class at Forest Lakes Elementary School seemed to be intrigued as they followed the adventures of Donald Duck or sketched their own comics. At the end of the school year, they put together their own comic strips - from a superhero clash between Water Girl and Fire Boy, to tales about two puppies visiting the beach or Donald Duck's visit to DisneyWorld.

Many of the classic comic books -- including Superman, Batman and Spider-Man -- were created by the children of Jewish immigrants struggling to assimilate into mainstream America. Jewish authors creating contemporary graphic novels -- cartoon books with more sophisticated themes -- continue that literary tradition, softening heavy issues with ample doses of Yiddish humor. McDaniel College's Hoover Library in Westminster is hosting a five-part discussion series this fall on this evolving genre, titled "Modern Marvels: Jewish Adventures in the Graphic Novel."

Even in the ever-morphing world of the graphic novel, Steven Parke's illustrations stand out. Instead of drawing, he uses photographs to tell a story. But he doesn't just point his camera and shoot. Parke manipulates his images digitally, lifting pieces from different shoots, tinkering with the lighting. The results duplicate reality, but with a twist. Parke started out studying acting, then spent time in the music industry, including 13 years as Prince's personal art department. Now, working with writer Jonathon Scott Fuqua, he is close to wrapping his third graphic novel, the story of a teen whose special ability helps her fit right in with a traveling sideshow.

Playback Raymond Chandler; adapted by Ted Benoit; ill. by Francois Ayroles; intro. by Philippe Garnier A Scanner Darkly Philip K. Dick; additional text by Harvey Pekar; book design by Laura Dumm and Gary Dumm Pantheon / 190 pages / $23.95 Beginning in the late spring and summer of 1947, and extending through the fall and into the early months of 1948, Raymond Chandler toiled over a script he would later assess as some of the best film writing he...

Sin City raises the question, "Does every milestone comic book demand to be made into a movie?" and answers it with a resounding "No." Frank Miller has co-directed three of his own Sin City graphic novels with Robert Rodriguez, who also shot and cut the film, composed the music and plays a corrupt priest. The result is probably the most literal adaptation of a published work ever committed to celluloid - also the most repetitive and assaulting. The grabby graphics exert a hypnotic spell.

Imagination is your best companion through a novel. My complaint about the graphic novel is that it attempts to illustrate what most readers should imagine on their own. You will far more enjoy your own imagination than some cartoonist's. Even so, graphic novels can be evocative -- and even fun -- when skillfully done. And they can bore one to tears when drawing or writing skill is wanting. First, the oddest piece of publishing in many moons: In the Shadow of No Towers, Art Spiegelman's consideration of 9 / 11 (Pantheon, 42 pages, $19.95)

The grim, near-future world outlined in Shooting War, a compelling new serialized online graphic novel, is not hard to imagine - a world where terrorist bombings on American soil are routine, sectarian chaos in Iraq has spread far beyond its borders, an Islamic insurgency has evolved to be as media-savvy as it is ruthless, and a blogger finds himself thrust onto the world stage by a salivating global news corporation after bearing witness to the latest...

Who says that the neon-bright world of comic books can't explore serious and subtle themes? Eighteen-year-old Orpheus Collar used the graphic novel to investigate the question of how people would behave if they knew they had just 15 minutes to live. It was this entry, along with some paintings, that won a silver medal this year from the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts -- making Collar one of the three top teenage painters in the United States, in the opinion of competition judges.