ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

From my thesis: Comics in the Classroom as Literature and Educational Tools

I would like to thank my darling wife Lisa, who has been my guide and my shepherd throughout this whole process. I would also like to thank Dr. Hutchinson, who has been wonderfully patient with me, Dr. Bowman who introduced me to research, and Dr. Martin who has always believed in me.

Besides the people who helped me personally, I would like to thank those brave and intelligent comic creators who made an entirely new printed format within their generation. These include Stan Lee of Marvel Comics who cemented the expectation of a high vocabulary to comics. Albert Lewis Kanter, the immigrant who created Classics Illustrated and showed that comics could be used to tell great literature. Harvey Pekar, the “Mark Twain of comic books”, and numerous other contributors who have used comics as a format for autobiography. Art Speigelman, creator of Maus, the graphic novel that brought literary attention to comics and provides one of the most poignant portrayals of the holocaust in print. Paul Sacco, creator of Palestine and innovator of comics journalism, who showed comics were capable of great social relevance and continues to do so. Alan Moore, the writer whose prose has done more to convince the media that comics are worthy literature than anyone else, much to his eternal chagrin. Gene Yang, comics creator and educator, who has studied along similar lines as mine.

Special thanks to Will Eisner, the comics creator who believed from the very beginning that comics were capable of more, used comics for education in the military decades ago and innovated the graphic novel, and Scott McCloud, whose groundbreaking work has revolutionized how everyone looks at comics.