Our decision to tell Felix and Anya’s story in a comic book was inspired by several observations. We swim in an ocean of images created to stir powerful thoughts and feelings. It takes effort and expertise to critically assess the daily tsunami of images that vy for our increasingly limited attention. Visual literacy, or the capacity to make meaning from images, is an essential tool for citizenship in the 21st century, therefore we wanted to create a resource that would tap into students’ interest in visual media and equip them with the requisite skills to navigate a shifting multimedia landscape.

Research by Concordia’s Centre for Learning and Teaching suggests that, as we increase the number of senses we engage (auditory, visual, olfactory, tactile, and taste), we increase the likelihood that we will remember and apply what we learn. Multi-sensory education has also proven to be more inclusive: the more senses we engage in the classroom, the greater likelihood of engaging most if not all students. Gardiner’s theory of multiple intelligences is instructive here: among us there are those can think and see in pictures (“visual-spatial intelligence”), those who can see the big picture (“existential” intelligence”), and those who respond best to learning through feelings, attitudes and emotions (“intrapersonal” intelligence). Comics also stimulate learning through written and spoken words (“verbal-linguistic” intelligence). Learning to see the big picture, thinking and seeing in pictures, empathy for others and learning through texts and dialog--all of these capacities are engaged with comic books. In any class you are likely to find some students gifted with multiple, overlapping intelligences and even some with particularly acute senses, but it is rare to find in any one student all of these gifts.

A number of artists and scholars have pointed out how comics are the medium par excellence for presenting personal stories of trauma and recovery, in part because drawing bypasses language and can therefore suppress the ordinary inhibitions against revisiting and revealing certain overwhelming experiences. Comics scholar Hillary Chute analyzes this phenomenon in landmark comic memoirs such as Keiji Nakazawa’s I Saw It and Barefoot Gen, Art Spiegelman’s Mauss, and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and Are You My Mother? Because comics enable the visual juxtaposition of two or more time periods within a single frame, the writer-artist can situate the past in the present and foreground intrusive memories commonly associated with post-traumatic stress disorder in a sophisticated ways that do not cost a fortune in special effects. I highly recommend you check out Chute’s monograph Why Comics?  for further detailed analysis and rich illustrations of this phenomenon.

Comics also enable a kind of free association, a therapeutic method developed by Freud for psychoanalysis where words and images from the subconscious are brought forward for reflection and critical examination. Numerous times during our production of Felix and Anya, illustrator Alain Chevarier and I would be startled by images and associated childhood memories that emerged and which we ultimately drew upon to guide our representation of fictional characters in the comic. We had not planned to include such images or memories nor had we consciously thought about or discussed them in decades.

By presenting visual storytelling media like comic books you maximize the likelihood of engaging most if not all of your students. And as we have learned through our 2019 pilot project funded by Entente-Canada-Québec, giving students the tools to tell their own stories in a comic book enables students who struggle writing fiction and non-fiction texts to communicate sophisticated content with simple drawings. I conclude this brief essay with comments from students who participated in artist Chevarier’s visual storytelling workshops at John Abbott and Dawson College.