Meghan Parker is an artist and an educator. If this truly was her thesis, I think it's revolutionary! I think it combines her passion for teaching and her love of art well. I hope colleges and universities take note of this style and we see more and more thesis work in graphic novel form. I would go back and do my PDF if it meant that I would have a published graphic novel combining my life and my research by the end of it.
The panels are whimsical, informative and playful. Parker plays with gutters and lines in some panels. It’s brilliant. I love how Parker incorporated research and quotes into a graphic novel. I haven't ever seen this done before. She included her full source list at the end of the graphic novel and I thought it was genius.
Many of Parker's thoughts and reflections on teaching resonates in my soul. I would find myself shouting at the novel that this is my life! I don't teach art, but I still empathized with all her statements on education and educators as a whole. I think she captured life as an educator in a beautiful and creative manner.
Recommended for: any teacher, educator, lover of graphic novels

ARC provided courtesy of NetGalley & the Publisher

This is a little book somewhere between a memoir and an educational theory graphic novel. I admit that I expected this to be more similar to Scott McCloud's books on comics, or Lynda Barry's Syllabus/Making Comics books, but it really isn't focused primarily on teaching art itself, so much as talking about the pedagogy of art, and the importance of visual literacy. For example, the section on "line" is not about lines in art, the use of line, it's purpose or meaning as an element of art -- but instead using the word "line" to talk about education. I think the Scott McCloud pull quote did sort of lead me to believe there would be more art instruction itself, and without a more precise summary of the book available, I think a lot of readers will have misplaced expectations.

Basically: buy this for an educator friend, but don't pick it up thinking it will teach you art history, or drawing. It's a bit of a mishmash of extended quotes, a section of visual poetry, and in the end, it really does feel like a thesis as a graphic novel - which I think aptly describes both its strengths and weaknesses.

There biggest flaw of this book is of course, the font. It's handwritten and thin, sometimes too small, and a bit hard to read. It really feels that to maintain consistency and readability, the author should have made a handwriting font that would be digitized for use. Hopefully the published product doesn't have the same noise/artifacts that surrounds the text, making it look like a bad scan. But even without that extra visual clutter, it feels like professional typesetting would help. It made it harder to connect to the actual material in the book.

I could not get into the book. The choice of font made me not want to keep reading this book. I had to make the font bigger to read the words. I don't know who this book is meant for. I would not be able to work this into the classroom. The illustrations are what turned me away and I was unable to finish it.

The illustrations are 5/5--adorable and brightly colored--but the text is illegible. The entire book is handwritten and is incredibly hard to read in the digital format. The letters are connected inconsistently with spiraling descending flourishes on the y's and g's. At points, the text is shrunk down to "fit around" the illustrations, making it even harder to read. The author is a talented artist, and I appreciate the home-made qualities of the book, but the execution seems irresponsibly inaccessible for a book on education.

Meghan Parker is art teacher in a high school in Canada, she uses this graphic novel to show her point of view in some topics related with art teaching and visual comunication, she enphashizes the importance of starting to teach to understand visual concepts and symbols from early ages. The book is crowded with visual metaphores and is created using a charming drawing style.

What is it you say about art? That you may not know it until you see it? If that is true, how do you teach art? And how do you teach people how to create art?

This book attempt to tell just how to do so, and although it has many good points, it is also very dry, while being very beautiful at the same time. The illustrations are very colorful, and she has many citations of what others have said before her.

I would like to say that she succeeds, but I found myself glossing over what she was saying, most of the time. She tell us how she has taught her students, trying to engage them, and get familiar with their own talents. And she does have some good ideas.

And she says things like she creates to know, which is sort of how I write, which makes sense.

I am not sure what I found lacking. Perhaps it was just a case of "too many notes for the royal ear"

A good cartoonist to read is <a href="https://www.npr.org/2019/11/27/782921983/cartoonist-lynda-barry-drawing-has-to-come-out-of-your-body" target="_blank">Lynda Barry.</a> Two of her very good books are <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29011.One_Hundred_Demons?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=isbr27FFpn&rank=1"> One Hundred Demons</a> as well as <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43317485-making-comics">Making Comics.</a>

Normally I wouldn't tell you to seek out another author when reviewing a book, but in this case, although I agree with what she says, when she does touch me, such as the fact that you lose your ability to be free with your art as you get older and take classes at school, but Lynda said it so much better before.

Thanks to Netgalley for making this book available for an honest review.

Well, I did try with this, I really did, but I don't think this is for the casual narrative comics fan at all. There was me, thinking I'd be up for a representation of someone learning to teach art, but it's a quote-heavy visual essay about pedagogy, and if the layers of it are supposed to be about art and this artist in particular it didn't come across at all that way for me in the important early pages. A lot of her visual metaphors and imagery I'd seen copious times before, and her hand-lettering makes every page an ordeal. Cute wardrobe, though.