School’s in session Friday for parents, teachers, librarians, anybody interested in knowing more about comic books. That’s sure to make a kid Hulk green with envy, isn’t it?
 

The School of Comics, a free, daylong series of seminars sponsored by the Miami Book Fair International will guide the uninitiated through the 21st-Century renaissance of graphic novels, the term of art for what were once known affectionately as comic books. The revival of the format is not only one of the few bright spots in the mostly moribund publishing industry, it’s part of what educator Katie Monnin calls “a visual revolution bigger than the invention of the printing press.”
 
“Our world is not only print text anymore. We’re reading images all day long,” said Monnin, an assistant professor of literacy at the University of North Florida. “We need to start talking about how we are going to redefine literacy to include not just words but imagery.”
 
At the comics school, Monnin will be joined by a team of experts including James Sturm, director of Vermont’s Center for Cartoon Studies, whose school offers degree programs in creating comics and who is the author himself of an excellent biography of Satchel Paige told in comic strips panels, and a delightful new book aimed at introducing the storytelling methods of comics to the very youngest readers called Adventures in Cartooning.
 
“I get so many inquiries from librarians who are excited by the format and encouraged that, in this day and age, there’s a way to get somebody’s eyeballs off a brightly lit screen and onto a book,” Sturm said. “The stigma has definitely been removed from being a cartoonist.”
 
That doesn’t mean there aren’t still hurdles to overcome. Monnin says teachers who want to use graphic novels in place of traditional print-only texts must fight a preconceived notion that if a book contains lots of images, it must be dumb-downed content. There’s also confusion about the term “graphic novel,” she says. “People hear ‘graphic’ and they think the content will be sexual or intense,” Monnin said. 
 
In fact, the variety of graphic novels available now ranges from retellings of fairy tales to illustrated versions of the classics, with everything in between. One of the main aims of The School of Comics is to educate South Florida teachers about what’s available in the format and to offer practical strategies for introducing illustrated books into their classrooms. 
 
“Even after you convince people of their worth, the second question is always, ‘How does this align with my curriculum?’ ” Monnin said. Teachers who have been relying on Elie Wiesel’s Night for decades must be shown that Art Spiegelman’s Maus does an equally good job of illuminating the horrors of the Holocaust.
 
Friday’s seminars will be held from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Miami Dade College, 300 NE Second Ave., Miami (Room 7128, Building 7, 1st Floor). Click here for a complete list of the sessions, or call 305.237.3841 for more information or to register.