Comics and graphic novels are an increasingly popular literary medium that current students steeped in visual culture can readily understand. The form can be used creatively as an in-class assignment to imagine dialogues between historical figures, summarize recent learning, or approach writing in a targeted way that incorporates a visual component. Sketching out a comic in class can easily be transformed into a digital writing assignment with the use of art programs, simple web tools or apps that enable millennial Rembrandts and stick figure-artists alike to create comics fit for a classroom blog.
There are a number of intellectual web comics that can serve as an inspiration to your class. Philosophy in particular has been a ripe field for web artist-writers, with Existential Comics and Dead Philosophers in Heaven both using historical philosophers as characters, and making jokes about their texts and personas. The equally funny Hark! A Vagrant often uses literature and historical figures as characters in strips, like this one called “Dude Watchin’ with the Brontës.” The poignant comic of stick figures, xkcd, may sometimes tackle pop culture and love but tends to feature mathematic, scientific and philosophical in-jokes.
Comics like these can be achieved with any drawing program, even the freeware that is loaded in an OS, like MS Paint on Windows, or the free Paintbrush for Mac, which is how the webcomic Hyperbole and a Half is drawn. Photoshop or its freeware counterpart, GIMP, can provide higher-level platforms for freeform webcomic making, like for this Thomas More quote stylized as a comic I made, inspired by the style of Dead Philosophers in Heaven:
For students or instructors that are more interested in dragging and dropping to make more of a webcomic collage, there are a number of tools available.
Bitstrips, which was very popular on Facebook a few months ago, is available to use as an app across mobile device platforms, or on the web. You will need to use a Facebook account. You can customize the stock characters a great deal, choose from a number of scenarios to put your characters in, and modify text. Here is a Thomas More character (maybe not quite in historical garb) I made with Bitstrips:
Make Beliefs Comix is designed with educators in mind, but allows much less customization, and seems to be targeting elementary school kids. It is still a quick way to get ideas across, though with limited art, and does not require signing up. For my example using this tool, I casted Utopia’s Raphael Hythloday as a zen alien (it kind of makes sense) and the character of T. More as a middle-aged mid-level manager (sorry):
Strip Generator is a little more slick. It has clean black and white lines and has a wider cast of characters with a greater ability to modify the panels. You also don’t need to sign up for this. Here is some dialogue between Peter Giles and Raphael Hythloday, who now can almost look like they’re from the Renaissance for real:
Pixton allows greater customization of character movements but seems more limited in terms of character and scenario design if you’re a casual user. They do target schools in particular, but are not a completely free service in any case, and require a sign-up just to play around. I could not get any of their characters close to looking like More for this one.
A lot of the mobile apps use photos as the major element for comic creation, which make me think of the a softer world webcomic. Some of the apps available (none of which are free, although they’re not expensive) include Comic Book!, Strip Designer and PhotoComic (this looks a little less slick than the other two judging by the previews). If you are teaching a philosophy class and provide students with one of these apps it may be additionally entertaining to have students act out scenarios in class (may I suggest historically-inspired paper dress, à la #FashionbyMayhem?), and working on the digital comic as a group.
