What’s New With Grammarman?

By now, most TEFL Logue readers should be familiar with Grammarman, the comic book hero who fights bad grammar (including Sammy Colon and Uncle Uncountable, just two of the villains who like to make trouble for the correction crusader) with his sidekicks Syntax and Alpha-bot. Although only four sample stories are available on the site, Grammarman has now had almost thirty adventures in print.

Grammarman creator, Brian Boyd, noticed how engaged his Thai students seemed to be with comics and graphic novels and channeled his own artistic talent into Grammarman, now a regular feature of four English language periodicals: Student Weekly magazine (Thailand), the New Straights Times (Malaysia), the Buenos Aires Herald (Argentina), and Crazy-English Teens (China – though the website is also in Chinese).

You can read about Brian Boyd’s road to publication here at the TEFL Logue and hear him speak about it on Podcasts in English. As for the Grammarman website, there is a new installment of Dingbat puzzles as well as a new hero: Captain Spectre! Captain Spectre is in fact the creation of Tom Floyd, and Boyd has adapted the comics to a pre-intermediate level and also created a worksheet to be used in class. Boyd has opened the door to potential submissions for publication on his site: if you come up with your own innovative way to use Captain Spectre in class, share it with him and see your ideas or your students’ work online at Grammarmancomic.com.