'All that Shakespeare stuff': Comic books and the public pedagogy of adaptation

Students and teachers constitute an increasingly important public for comics and graphic novels. While comics and education have not always had a positive history, now it seems that the relationship has blossomed. Teachers employ graphic novels and comic book adaptations to address a changing literacy landscape dominated by visual and digital forms of knowledge. In this chapter, Shari Sabeti analyses literary adaptations into the comics medium—specifically, the most challenging of verbal texts taught in schools, Shakespeare. Using the concept of public pedagogy to foreground adaptors’ own perspectives on the pedagogical work of adapting Shakespeare into the comic book form, it posits the “educational” comic book and “Shakespeare” as sites where pedagogies are enacted between adaptors, text, and the reading public.