Graphic Canon: Student Edition Planned

During an interview with ComicBook.com, Russ Kick -- editor of 7 Stories Press's The Graphic Canon-- revealed that not only will the critically-acclaimed anthology series be expanding beyond the already-announced third book due out in May, but that one of them will be a "Student Edition" geared toward some of the most widely-taught literature among high school and junior high school students. "We do have the next two volumes lined up after volume three. The volume after that, probably is going to be a young adult version of the Graphic Canon, or a student edition, or something like that where it's going to be directly aimed at junior high and high school students, and it's going to cover a lot of the most heavily-taught works," Kick said. "And then of course bring in some interesting stuff--throw in some curveballs in there that they probably wouldn't get exposed to in school." He said the Student Edition was planned for release in Spring 2014. That fall, he said, there are plans to apply the Graphic Canon anthology approach to dozens of creators tackling a single work--in this case, Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. "Every artist will take a different poem by Whitman and adapt it," he explained. "So that will be the next volume, and then after that it gets a little hazy. All of these ideas are kind of floating around and we haven't decided on anything beyond that." A recent study conducted at the University of Oklahoma shows that graphic novels "may improve memory and be more effective in teaching students than a traditional textbook," and so this could be the ideal time to enter the student market with a project like this. The study suggested that readers of graphic novels retained more information and were more readily able to directly quote from the works than readers of traditional texts.