Technolandy

Day 53 (of 2025/26) #toontuesday have you considered Manga?

My first encounter with maga was not a traditional way… I stumbled upon my first one while expanding my comic collection as a teen: Lone Wolf & Cub was a westernized edition that caught me up in its story. But it wasn’t the same as the “backwards” comics I noticed others exploring (I was likewise captivated with the anime StarBlazers when I could catch episodes when visiting grandparents in big cities…)

One of my favourite things about the BC Curriculum is how open it is to diverse texts, voices, and ways of reading. And yet, too often we still default to the “traditional novel” when designing literature units. This year I’ve been leaning into something different: Manga. Not just as a hook, but as a legitimate and powerful form of literature that aligns beautifully with the Big Ideas and Curricular Competencies of Language Arts.

Manga offers complex narratives, rich character development, and layered themes—identity, resilience, community, justice—that match or exceed what we expect from any novel study. What makes it especially effective in the classroom is the interplay between visual and written storytelling. Students must make inferences, track subtext, navigate pacing and panel structure, and interpret artistic choices. Those are core elements of comprehending and connecting, and they build exactly the kind of multimodal literacy the curriculum emphasizes.

Whether it’s Demon Slayer’s themes of loyalty and grief, Haikyu!!’s exploration of perseverance and team identity, or Yotsuba&!’s slice-of-life humour and perspective taking, Manga lets students see themselves—and see others—in meaningful ways. It is also inherently inclusive: accessible to reluctant readers, engaging for neurodiverse learners, and open to deep literary conversations.

By building a Manga literature unit, we acknowledge that “text” has evolved. And when we honour the texts students already love, we create a bridge to the skills and understandings we want them to develop. Manga isn’t a detour from the curriculum. It’s exactly the kind of contemporary literacy our students need us to champion.

Manga – it’s an emerging unit in our New Media 11/12 coursework… probably should be within Literature Studies too…

Here’s the PDF of our list/video:

Here’s a link to the YT video: https://youtu.be/X7ZoecdCORI?si=CBiPazFygTyLev6R