"Trillium" Jeff lemire

The subtitle of the book is "the last love story ever told."  Nika Tensmith, a scientist living in the year 3797, who is working in a military group to find a way to stop a sentient virus from destroying humankind.  William Pike is man suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder from his experiences in WWI.  For him the year is 1921 and he and his brother are in the Amazon jungles looking for the lost temple of the Incas.

Through the power of a flower called Trillium and the inhabitants of a far off planet, Atabithi, Nika and William's life come together, intertwine, and determine whether this is the final chapter in man's existence or not.

The art is fantastic.  There have been graphic novels I have read where it was the story rather than the art that captured me, such as "Fun Home" or "Fables," but in others like "Stitches" and "Black Hole" the art spoke to me as much, if not more, than the words.  "Trillium" is an excellent mix of captivating art and stunning story.  The imagery of Nika's experience when she eats the Trillium-A flower and the cosmic relationship between Nika and William are art pieces in their own right.  The story is a mind-twisting search by two people to resolve the internal conflict they suffer from past events.  The depth of story and imagery will keep me returning to the book.

"Trillium" is one of the comic books/graphic novels that Dr. Wm. Ruskin used in the Coursera/University of Colorado Boulder "Comic Books and Graphic Novels" course that I recently finished.  In the first essay assignment he gave us one page of three different comic books or graphic novels to write about.  As an example of what he wanted us to write, he showed how to create a paragraph about this page in "Trillium."

Of course, I was looking for comic books or graphic novels to read at the time.  I had spent quite a bit of money on a stack of them already from the recommended reading from the course and recommendations by other students, and so I told myself I didn't need to read the rest of this book.  But I kept studying this page and finally couldn't keep from ordering it.  Well worth it.

I asked Dr. Kuskin if I could use his assignment in a class I was teaching and he graciously said I could use it or other things from the class.  My class was a very short 1-credit writing course.  It is difficult to have the students read something of any depth in this course, and so I thought that using one-page of a comic, such as Dr. Kuskin had done, as the starting point of an essay would eliminate the reading required to develop deep ideas.  Later our Writing Center Director, Dr. Beth Beggs, told me she had done a similar thing with images rather than comic book pages in a writing course, confirming that my idea had merit.

I used pages from the graphic novel version of Kafka's "Metamorphosis" by Peter Kuper in the same way that Kuskin had used the Trillium page to help the students build a 3-point argumentative essay using one of Kuskin's rules - circle the details - and concept mapping to plan the essay, a recommendation by my Writing Fellow peer instructor, Sarah Beadle.  After writing some paragraphs on a couple of pages, I used Kuskin's choices of classic comic book pages from the first Superman appearance, the birth of The Spirit and a page from "Murder, Morphine and Me".

The class did not enthusiastically embrace the use of comics or the writing.  While these students, mostly transfers from other institutions, were competent writers in that they had good sentence structure, grammar, etc., they struggled to write an argument with evidence.  I wanted to help them get to that point with some exercises in class and a final essay.  Some did, and I was excited by the arguments that they wrote.  For instance, one student argued that Mary Kennedy in Jack Cole's "Murder, Morphine and Me" had Stockholm Syndrome.  What a great idea to look for evidence in the comic page for a specific syndrome!  Many simply chose to argue what would happen next in the comic, and that was good, too.

I want to try this assignment again.  Sarah and I learned a lot about what worked and didn't and how the timing of the assignment should be in the course.  Dr. Beggs and Dr. Kuskin provided inspiration and support in the development of the assignment.

But it all started with one page from the "Trillium" series.