Would you sign up for this class if you were in eight grade?

Spanish Cartooning and Comic Books (Spring Semester)
Ms. Drake

(Eighth Graders only)

Comics have sometimes been controversial and they are a wonderful medium to use in the study of race, class, gender, nationalism, popular culture, consumerism and national Identity. This class will look at the development of comic strips during the different dictatorships in Latin America. While newspaper comics were censored to some extent, comic books were not. Many were extremely violent and caused a move towards censorship after WWII, others had subtle political denounces that will be interpreted in class. A new comic character, the superhero appeared at this time. The amazing characters that followed him were extremely popular and had a different audience than prior comics. These heroes were created by and for people that needed them. In this class we will explore the comic medium as pop culture as well as the world that they were born out of. We will look at cartoonists from Argentina such as Quino and his idealist and pessimistic characters, and the famous series "El Eternauta" by German Oesterheld. This class will have a foundation in the spanish language. We will focus on comic strips written during dictatorship years in different Latin American countries, between 1960 and 1983. Ideas behind this will be largely student driven and can range from conversational spanish critiques to creating spanish subtitles for cartoons, and your own comic strip.