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The present work reports a small-scale quasi-experimental study which investigates effects of using comic strips as authentic learning materials in supporting Romanian students' motivation for learning French as foreign language. The study is based on a pretest - post-test design with experimental and control convenience groups (N= 29), which included Romanian students from an urban high school, studying French as the second foreign language. Motivational beliefs were investigated with adapted versions of three scales selected from Motivation Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ, Pintrich & De Groot, 1990): self-efficacy, intrinsic value and test anxiety. The intervention consisted in educational activities organized for eight weeks, in which comic strips have been used consistently. Results revealed significant effects of the intervention on students' test anxiety, but no significant effects on self-efficacy and intrinsic value. These outcomes suggest the potential role of coming strips, among other authentic documents, in sustaining and improving some of the students' motivational beliefs. However, more research is needed in this direction, as authentic documents, especially comic strips, are resourceful teaching and learning materials in language classes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Initially, being mass produced and sequential, comic art was excluded from fine art museums. Some comics artists themselves have expressed ambivalence about the value of inclusion (but counter-arguments are proposed, challenging the perception of incompatibility). However, a pivotal element in the break from the ranks of artistic modernism has been the appropriation of comic art motifs for use in museum-grade pop art, figuration narrative and their successors. In counterpoint, comic art is replete with examples of museum art being appropriated in order to obtain diegetic enrichment of various sorts, either for the purpose of parody or in relation to plot construction. Against this backdrop, and abetted by the twin challenge that art museums are facing to remain relevant and to increase revenue, a game-changing development is afoot, leading to a co-operative re-positioning of art museums and comics artists. With the Louvre taking the lead, many art museums in France and Italy are now commissioning works of comic art based on the museum's own collections, often launched with companion exhibits. The resultant 'art within art' lends itself readily to rich experimentation with themes incorporating intertextuality and parallel narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using work titles as an anchor point, Alessandro Arbo proposes a reading of Fausto Romitelti's output: the reader is thus led around the "perimeter of a kind of personal, Baroque, visionary multimedia library" encompassing literature, painting, comics, rock music, psychedelic universes, etc. These big themes and topics of inspiration allow the reader to get a picture of the composer. Arbo concludes with an examination of the notion of the "electric body" in connection with the work An Index of Metals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The realism continuum is a visual model that presents any image as a series of pictures, iteratively reduced in representation from its referrent. A continuum has been used before to gauge the effectiveness of educational instruction (Wileman 1993; Dwyer 1972; Knowlton 1966; Gropper 1963) or to explain the communicative potential of different comics stylings (McCloud 1993). Reference is made in new design theory to less detailed images being easier to scan for pertinent information and generally reducing demand on working memory (Malamed, 2009). None of these theorists explains how it is we can see the less-real-than-real in the first instance, even though we've evolved looking only at the real. This paper presentation shows why, psychologically we can see and understand distilled and abstracted pictures and also why our visual systems (the eyes and brain) actually prefer these to photorealistic pictures. The presentation focuses on two major tasks of the visual system and how these tasks are facilitated by pictures chosen from deliberate points along the realism continuum. Images of greater realism help to solve the homogeneity problem: distinguishing objects in the same class. That is, telling the difference between Tom, Dick & Harry. Images of reduced or distilled detail facilitate object hypotheses: distinguishing between classes of objects. That is, telling the difference between a person and any other kind of object or thing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the piece of art entitled "Queer Re-Visions," by Chitra Ganesh. The article begins with a statement from Ganesh. The author states that what Ganesh's work unsettles and reveals are the layers of repression, such as subaltern histories, memories, desires, and subjectivities, on which both diasporic nationalist and state ideologies depend. The author discusses what makes her work uncanny. Mentioned is Ganesh's work on modifying the genre of the Indian mythological comic book known as the Amar Chitra Katha.

This article examines the place of the comic strip Dan Dare – Pilot of the Future in British cultural history. It argues that the comic strip, largely ignored in histories of popular visual culture, nevertheless deserves attention for the extent to which it represents a means of instructing children in socially correct attitudes and modes of behaviour. To this extent the article considers the origins of the Eagle , the boys' comic in which Dan Dare ran from 1950 until 1969. The Eagle was conceived in response to a moral panic around so-called ‘horror comics’ in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Its flagship strip, Dan Dare – Pilot of the Future , was concerned to project a morally upstanding and honourable ideal of ‘Britishness’. The article argues that Dan Dare was both informed by and responded to issues that affected Britain in the 1950s. It demonstrates the post-war optimism for a better world, especially in its picturing of a technologically advanced future, though it also rehearses concerns around the emergence of atomic weapons. It refers explicitly to recent and contemporary aspects of the British historical experience of the mid-twentieth century, for example in replaying the history of the Second World War through its narratives of resistance to alien invasion and in mapping the geopolitics of the early Cold War onto its narratives of ‘United Nations’ intervention on other planets. The article concludes by considering the decline of the Eagle in the 1960s and by suggesting why more recent attempts to revive Dan Dare have failed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The re-issue of a nineteenth-century FrenchDrawing Courseis the occasion for an examination of issues of‘models of good practice’ in current art teaching. These are listed as an expanded set of student-centred pedagogical paradigms, which embrace the forceful popular imagery of electronic games and comic strips. The formalist adaptations of comic-strip imagery by artists in the 1970s which challenged traditional divisions between high and popular art, are contrasted with the scathing Marxist analysis by Dorfman and Matterlart, Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic, which still has political resonance. The darkly ambivalent, if much theorised, appropriations of popular imagery by contemporary artists Pettibon and Murakami are adduced as part of an on-going problematic, where ideological readings are glossed over for fear of jeopardising the liberal consensus in art and education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A justification for the inclusion of graphic comic art in post-14 art education following the development of graphic novels in Europe, Japan and the USA. in recent years. The case is based on the visual dynamics of the medium and the potential for a critical realism which can be exploited in students' studio practice and research. Particular attention is given to the Holocaust novel Maus and selected Japanese 'Manga' comics which have made an impact in the west, such as Barefoot Gen and Adolf . The article analyses the various innovative visual forms that these graphic novels utilise and considers their effectiveness as a vehicle for practice and research in the institutional art curriculum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]