An end of the quarter treat: "Batman Is My Boss."

The final assignment of my visual rhetoric course is called Rhetoric in Practice (or RIP).  It has two components.  To paraphrase the rubric: the students create their own rhetorical performance, explore questions of how to target an audience, follow the conventions of a genre, choose the medium for their message, and all the while, use the critical tools they’ve been learning all quarter to develop their ideas.  They then perform a rhetorical analysis of their own work via a detailed writer's memo. 

The pedagogical theory behind this is sound: by forcing them to do something fun at the end of the quarter, I get better evaluations the tools I taught them over the course of it become more solidly ensconced in their brain-space.  Only this time, instead of deducing the rhetorical intent behind someone else's decisions, they must decide how to communicate their message to their target audience most effectively.  Over the years I've had many successful projects, including

• a Batman-centric version of The Game of Life that opens with pegs for two parents and one child already in the car and an Alfred peg in the wing awaiting the inevitable
• a pop-up book of Watchmen, in which the first page consisted of pulling a tab that sends the Comedian crashing out a window and into the reader's lap
• a scored and recorded soundtrack to Alan Moore's The Killing Joke
• a New York Review of Books style review of the novelization of Batman Begins, in which the book is slammed for its Ludlum-lite car chases and unconvincing fisticuffs
• an adaptation of this issue of Planetary by Cormac McCarthy
• a Master Legend-type recruitment video for a superhero academy

This quarter it looks like I'll be adding a few more to my personal hall of fame.  One of them is so conceptually brilliant in its timeliness that the idea alone sent my head spinning: a comic in which a super-heroic University of California student punches a certain unpopular university president in the face repeatedly (this idea elicited cheers from classmates when the student first shared it).  The second is a web-comic by this student entitled "Batman Is My Boss."  Here's a sample page in which she uses moment-to-moment transitions to great effect:

 

She plans on updating it both for the class and, with encouragement, after it ends.  Go encourage her already!

Comments

[Ahistoricality]

It's neat work. The visual style reminds me of something but I can't quite put my finger on what: Delirium, perhaps.

[Sisyphus]

Ooh that's lovely! I'm not sure I'd want to get the other projects you describe though. Maybe this is why I'm not the creative and inventive teacher. I just make em write papers.

[Bob Reed]

That sounds like a fascinating course SEK. Too bad I live on the opposite coast. And "Batman Is My Boss" looks pretty cool; like AHISTORICALLY mentioned it's unusual style is vaguely familiar to me for some reason...

Maybe it's as he says, and I just go through life in a state of delerium.

[James T]

Reminds me of Andi Watson; I slightly prefer this person though.

[Thomas]

I'm curious, are a majority of the projects comic-book themed or are you a comic fan and thus such projects tend to be your favorites?

[SEK]

I'm not sure I'd want to get the other projects you describe though.

The trick is the Writer's Memo. They get all excited about the project, but their grade relies heavily on the rhetorical analysis of it they perform in the Memo.

I'm curious, are a majority of the projects comic-book themed or are you a comic fan and thus such projects tend to be your favorites?

It's the way the course is set up that makes all the final projects comic and/or comics-in-film related. In previous quarters, when I taught stuff closer to my dissertation, the results were far more conventional: recreations of late C19th debates about evolution and society, essays about current sociobiological material written in the style of H.L. Mencken, etc.