After having good luck with "The Thrifty Spendthrift" and "A Cool Deal", I decided to go back to Carl Barks a 3rd time for my story time project.
With The Thrifty Spendthrift, I had just gone ahead and done the first Carl Barks story I clicked on (figuring they were probably all more or less the same.)
But this time around, I did a bit of Internet research to find out what are usually considered the best Carl Barks stories. There's a big list, but this was one of them.
This has a lot of the hallmarks of classic Carl Barks--Traveling to exotic lands, and encountering fantastic creatures.
That's all to the plus side. On the minus side, the story relies on knowledge of the Greek Myth "Jason and the Golden Fleece".
My Vietnamese students did not have this background knowledge, so that made sections of this comic difficult for them to understand. Especially in the beginning when there were a lot of information dumps about the Golden Fleece.
I considered doing a Story Time on "Jason and the Golden Fleece" first to give my students the necessary background information. But I couldn't find any materials suitable for ESL learners.
....And besides which, for some strange reason, the names are changed in Carl Barks's version. In the original Greek myth, the winged woman are called "Harpies". In Carl Barks's version, they are called "Larkies". (Anyone out there in Internet land know why they changed the names for this comic?) So I figured it would just confuse my students to tell them the story of The Harpies.
The first section of this comic my students found very boring, but they put up with it. The second half, in which Donald and Uncle Scrooge encounter the Larkies and the Sleepless Dragon, went over much better.
As with before, much of the language was above my students' heads, but the visuals carried the story. And I believe with Krashen that as long as the students are engaged in the story, i+1 will be in there somewhere, even if not everything is i+1.
Other notes:
* Nitpick: Uncle Scrooge seemed out of character to me. Usually he goes to great lengths to save money. In this story, he is throwing away a lot of money in his quest for a golden coat, which is an extravagance. (Although maybe someone more versed in Carl Barks can help me out. Is this out of character for Uncle Scrooge, or is this typical?)
* This story seemed vaguely familiar to me. I think I may have read it at one point in my childhood, but I don't remember clearly.
* This story was also adopted for an episode of Ducktales. I don't remember seeing that either (although who knows--I might have), but there's an interesting blog post which breaks down the differences between the comic book version and the Ducktales version. HERE.
Below are the materials I used when teaching this book in class.
I was a kid when I last read this story, and I recall it fondly enough but hardly as one of the stellar Barks adventures. Where is this list of best Barks?
ReplyDeleteMy primary source was Wikipedia. I just clicked on their list of Carl Barks stories , and figured that any story famous enough to have a hyper-link to its own article was one of the better ones. (Golden Fleecing's write up is here ).
ReplyDeleteBut it does also seem to pop-up on best of lists. See here , for example.
I should have asked you this to start out with before I started this project, but what are your Carl Barks recommendations?
I've enjoyed mulling over some of the challenges you mention when it comes to relating these comic book stories to another culture. It never would have occurred to me that the Jason myths were anything but universally known. Similarly, The Phantom of Notre Duck (one of my personal favourites) might be difficult to explain, as it riffs off both The Phantom of the Opera and Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris. Mind you, I was ignorant of both when I first read the comic as a child. In fact, I could not have sung "My Bonnie Lies Over The Ocean" either, which also plays a prominent role in the story.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if "The Many Faces of Magica De Spell" might be easier to relate to? Or maybe "The Golden Helmet."
Now that I think of it, the later Barks stories are probably complicated by the "bible" Barks had created for himself. How do you explain The Junior Woodchucks, for example, and the inestimably handy manual that comes to the rescue again and again?
ReplyDeleteThere are a lot of references that my students are missing--including both "in universe" references and "real world" references.
ReplyDeleteSince my students were initially not familiar with the Duckverse, they initially had no idea who these characters are. (Although, the re-booted Ducktales TV show will begin airing in Vietnam at the end of this month, so I expect in the very near future familiarity with these characters will increase. But at the moment I'm a few months ahead of my time by trying to introduce these stories to Vietnamese children.)
My theory is that as long as they are engaged with the story at some level, they don't need to catch all the references for the language input to be beneficial. (And I think there's some research to support this, but I won't bore you with the references). They seem to enjoy the stories, and that's enough for me to justify using them.
I almost did "The Many Faces of Magica De Spell". The Website I was stealing from had all the comics in order of original publication date, and "The Many Faces of Magica De Spell" was the one directly after "The Thrifty Spendthrift."
In the end, though, I opted for "The Loony Lunar Gold Rush" instead. But I may come back to "The Many Faces of Magica De Spell"
I don't think I've read "The Golden Helmet" yet, but I'll try to check it out on your recommendation.
I've got one more of these Carl Barks reviews coming up in the next few days (The afore mentioned "The Loony Lunar Gold Rush"). And that was the last one I did in my class. I figured it was time to take a break from Carl Barks for a while, and we're reading the comic book version of "Treasure Island" right now. But after I finish Treasure Island, I might well come back and do another Carl Barks story.