viz.

Waiting in the HEB checkout line, I stared at magazines like these lined up above the conveyor belt:

Check out Madam and Eve, a great cartoon set in South Africa:

An organization called Casey Family Programs has produced several new ads about foster care that have shown up on television and the sides of buses here in the Austin area.

The website for the campaign is here: "Raisemeup.org"

Where is the line between visual and textual rhetoric? A brief event brought this question up for me on a personal level recently.

So earlier this week, I'm checking my news online and I come across this photo of Barack Obama:

Well. So much for being technologically savvy. After telling my students that I couldn’t find her bio anywhere, they hopped on the computer and found it within seconds. “Uh, Mrs. Wagner? I googled Annie Leonard and found her bio, right here on the Story of Stuff site.” In my head I thanked my years of teaching experience for my ability to not know something in front of my class. But anyhow, let me describe this class to you because it really worked well.

So I showed the video “The Story of Stuff” to my rhetoric and writing class this past week. We’re doing the basics in this class—learning how to argue by learning how to analyze others’ arguments. Made by a woman named Annie Leonard, the 20-minute half-animated video details the history of our post-World War II consumer economy.

I couldn’t be happier. After years of watching new versions of one of my favorite commercials

Microsoft finally took up the challenge and came back with a counter-ad.

Cartoons—your everyday, old-fashioned ones—are one of my true loves. I haven’t studied graphic art theory, I don’t get into manga, I have no idea who the radical artists are out there. I think it’s a great medium, full of possibilities for telling stories, presenting viewpoints, making people laugh and think. Heck, I learned most of my Vietnam-era US political history from reading old Doonesbury books. Graphic novels? I’ve read two (V for Vendetta and Fun Home) and loved them. But let’s just say I’m a casual but enthusiastic lover of the comics.

Made in 1960, Inherit the Wind is a closely rendered version of the "Scopes Monkey Trial" of 1925, with most of the courtroom arguments being taken straight from the trial transcripts.