The Graphic Cannon Response

The Graphic Cannon is one of the books from this course that I don’t think that I will use in the future as a teacher. I have never gotten truly invested in reading and understanding graphic novels, and although I see how some students would respond positively to reading a story from a graphic novel, I probably won’t use the graphic novel version of the book. If I were to even use a graphic novel in my class, I would not use it out of the graphic cannon. The main reason I wouldn’t use it out of the graphic cannon is because the graphic cannon is limited in the amount of text from stories. When I read parts of the graphic cannon I was really looking forward to reading The Water Margin which is a traditional Chinese story. The graphic cannon version of the story wasn’t really related to the main story of The Water Margin and it was only a few pages.

There are a few situations when I think that using a graphic novel version of the book is useful enough to make a difference to students. I can see myself using a graphic novel version of a play because parts of the play are meant to be seen rather than just heard. When I took Shakespeare I read the books in graphic novel version. The graphic novel version helped because the language is very difficult and hard to read in the modern age. The only difficultly with the Graphic Cannon is that it is so large, that it wouldn’t go in-depth enough for the purpose I would like to use it. I think that it can be useful for those students who are struggling with the reading, but beyond content I think that students should develop the reading skills beyond the content of the story.