Hello ASTU readers,

Reading through some of the amazing blogs of the class I found one that really called my attention: Ben’s blog on the impact of comic books on global citizenship. Ben‘s blog explores the idea of comic books and their impact on students in the learning process through Marjane Satrapi’s “Persepolis” and Hilary Chute’s academic essay on the same graphic narrative. Ben first introduces Hilary Chute’s brilliant perspective on Satrapi’s work and on how the world of graphic narratives is no longer dominated by men. He also talks about how much he liked the presence of images at recounting Marji’s story because they expressed everything that Satrapi could not express with words. Ultimately, Ben argues that the simplicity of comic books attracts readers, and he promotes the idea that it would be good for schools to start including books in the reading syllabus, because it would encourage more students to become global citizens and learn from the rest of the world in a more comprehensible manner. More often than not however, comic books and graphic narratives are taken for granted, they are underestimated because they seem to “lack content”. This is why Ben shows a picture of a frame in “Persepolis” where Satrapi invokes a significant emotional response through an abstract image, something that a novel would never be able to do, hence contesting this idea that comic books are limited in content.  Graphic narratives embark a wide range of topics, which is why students would benefit from reading them in school because they would actually engage with the material and discover that they find some topics interesting through the use of images, instead of finding them tedious and difficult by reading a novel.