NYC school system comic books

 by Bruce Guthrie

 

 While I was at San Diego Comic-Con, Paul Levitz mentioned there was a New York City project which brought education comic books to city schools.  He mentioned they had one on Jack Kirby.  Afterward, I had to look it up.

The link for these is:

https://sites.google.com/schools.nyc.gov/social-studies-and-civics/resources/comics-group?pli=1&authuser=1

It's described on the site as:

The Civics for All Comics Group began in early 2020 as a collaboration between the New York City Department of Education and various comics creators to publish non-fiction graphic texts for educational use. Spearheaded by the Department of Social Studies and Civics, the imprint has published twenty-seven comics as of July 2024. In addition to publishing comics, the Civics for All Comics Group regularly presents at conferences and freely shares its resources to educators and schools throughout the country.

The page provides links to all of the individual titles.  All are PDFs that can be read online or downloaded and printed.  (There is a link to request hard copies but it says it isn't supported until late August.  Most of the titles have "Free in NYC" where regular comics would have previously had the Comics Code Authority seal.  In theory, if they send these outside of NYC, it should only be to educational facilities anyway.)  Also provided are associated links to online resources.

Most of the titles are 24 or 28 pages in length.  I saw a few that were 40 or 44 pages long.  One was 26 pages which is an unusual count -- books are almost always in multiples of 4 pages.

They're clearly labeled for their intended age group ("K-5" or "7-12").  Most of them read like "educational" comic books for kids and are probably one and done.

Most of the ones geared toward younger readers were  done by Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey but the older-intended ones have a variety of authors.  Nick Bertozzi gave me a copy of his "The Draft Riots" title at last year's NYCC.  Others have contributions from Sarah Myer, Andrew Aydin (his Good Trouble Productions was involved in several books but he personally wrote one of them), Paul Levitz, Joe Staton (Joe and Paul did the book "Sketches on the Sidewalk: Secret History of NYC's Jewish Comic Creators"), Janice Chiang, Amy Chu, Greg Pak, Gene Luen Yang, Nate Powell (you'll immediately recognize his style on the cover), and Kami Garcia.

Basically, none feature straight, white, male, Christian hero figures as the saviors of all people and property.  If DEI is Kryptonite to you, you may need to have an enema before you feel clean enough to kiss the ring of the blonde dictator.  Reading more than a half dozen of these probably qualifies us for being deported but you may want to risk it anyway.  

EHR Insights - A Secret History of Comics story

by Mike Rhode

In 2011, 3 issues of EHR Insights were published by the Defense Health Information Management System (DHIMS) which was based in Falls Church, VA at the Skyline complex. The comic book was built on the same lines as Will Eisner's WWII-and-beyond-era PS Magazine. The comic was "the new training booklet for the military's Electronic Health Record" which was designed by the Army to complement its pre-existing AHLTA system.

Unlike PS Magazine, EHR Insights survived for only a year and has mostly vanished without an electronic trace. ComicsDC writer R.M. Rhodes gave me a copy of issue 2 today and I started poking around looking for information on it. The main source of information online is a blog post by Brandon Carr who was the creator of the comic.

The comic itself is a mixture of single page comics and text, and a feature story. In #2 it's an Indiana Jones takeoff, "Montana Jackson on the Quest for the Golden Record."

Carr wrote that 10,000 copies of each comic were printed, but none are currently cataloged in WorldCat and only my copy is now indexed in the Grand Comics Database, although a set should theoretically be in the National Archives. My copy of this issue will be sent to Michigan State's Comic Art Collection soon, but it's also now scanned and available in the Medical Heritage Library.

I've reached out to both DHIMS's successor agency and Carr, and and the successor agency says they have no information on it.