Comic Connections

In a creative and complex endeavor, Sandra Eckard has once again crafted a text that not only enhances the educator's arsenal of tools but intrigues the lay reader. Bridging popular artifacts and intellectual space, she had aptly brings the superhero into the classroom as a purveyor of knowledge, source of encouragement, and venue of creative cross-disciplinary discussion. Battles of Batman and Superman are not just conflicts, instead they illustrate to the student benefits and values of literature, morals, principles of deduction, and most importantly they teach the value of critical thought in determining outcomes and connectivity of knowledge to surrounding events, locales, and concepts. -- Annessa Ann Babic, PhD, author, "Comics as History, Comics as Literature: Roles of the Comic Book in Scholarship, Society, and Entertainment"
Comic Connections offers educators a meaningful way of navigating the complexity of the American comic book tradition through the paths of greatness and heroism, of identity and self-awareness, and the place of canon in academic and everyday lives. Thoughtfully constructed, Comic Connections, offers teachers concrete examples from works Daredevil, Captain America, and Batman and with themes like heroism, to help students navigate their own realities within the nestled confines of human history. These seamless examinations in Comic Connections offer not only examples that can be explored in the classroom, but guidelines that can be manipulated for other themes and texts as well. -- Maryanne A. Rhett, PhD, associate professor of History, Monmouth University