Farewell to Academia

As I pack up my North Dakota life and head back to Illinois as a resigned academic, I made one last push to produce something for the field of rhetoric (or, for Twitter users, #TeamRhetoric).

I've been hinting at this project for a few months, and I'm happy to conclude my time as a Rhetoric Professor by putting my comic "Isocrates Against the Sophists" out into the world. I think there's great promise in this digital comic. It reminds us that we've always been fretting the quality of education and education policy. It might help somebody teach or learn about the value of classical rhetoric. It offers a case-study in visual rhetorical choices (like what might it mean to represent sophists as clowns, to ape the cover of Amazing Fantasy that introduces Spider-Man, or--in the image above--to make Isocrates Charlie Brown to the Sophist's Lucy). It might serve as a nice way to bridge the classical tradition with a mediated approach to rhetoric. It might represent a mutli-modal form of criticism, where Isocrates isused to send up current academic experts. It certainly performs an argument about aesthetic quality in the democratization of technologies of visual production.

Anyhow, I've made the file available on my academia.edu page. I hope it serves rhetorical studies in some small measure.