REKCAHognizing Comic Cybersecurity

Type of Presentation

Individual paper/presentation

Conference Strand

Critical Literacy

Target Audience

Higher Education

Second Target Audience

K-12

Location

Ballroom B

Proposal

For this year's conference, I prose a presentation that discusses the information literacy approaches of the Black Hills Information Security organization via their comic book publication The Future is ******. The use of the American comic strip and comic book format is, and Han Yu (2016, 2020) argues, a time-tested approach for promoting information literacy. Indeed, as represented in Van Lente and Dunlavey (2017), comics have been used for training and communicating ideas for almost as long as they have existed in their current form. Will Eisner famously transformed the instructional guide Army Motors to use comic storytelling and art techniques from World War II until 1971. Comics have been used to parody technical communication in the form of Sikoryak's 2017 adaptation of Apple's terms and conditions as Terms and Conditions: The Graphic Novel. However, most of these attempts have assumed a kind of vertical power structure involved in communicating and building the information, either in the form of training soldiers and operators or as a rebellious reinterpretation of language to undermine the power dynamics of a notoriously dense and complex corporate EULA. When Black Hills Information Society launched their Kickstarter efforts to create RECKAH Comics ("hacker" backwards) in April of 2024, however, they promoted a different use of comics for information literacy. They presented their comic a call to "the mavericks, the white hat hackers of the new dawn" and presented the launch of their comic, which would be "the never-before-seen convergence of comic books and hacking made by actual hackers" as "a call to arms" to anyone who wanted to understand the type of information literacy they used professionally. The appeal was obviously well received, with the Kickstarter reaching its goal in 46 minutes. Drawing on McCloud's (1993) foundational frameworks for understanding comic structure and Watkins and Lindsley's (2020) understanding of sequential rhetorical, this presentation will provide a close reading of key aspects of the first five issues of The Future Is ****** to illustrate their novel informational literacy approaches.

Short Description

This presentation explores how cybersecurity professionals use comics for peer-to-peer information literacy through "The Future is ******." Unlike traditional vertical instruction models, this hacker-created publication employs sequential art to democratize technical knowledge sharing, offering new frameworks for understanding how professional communities build and transfer specialized literacy skills.

Keywords

cybersecurity, information literacy, comics, sequential art, sequential rhetoric, technical communication

Publication Type and Release Option

Presentation (Open Access)

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Feb 7th, 11:00 AM Feb 7th, 11:45 AM

REKCAHognizing Comic Cybersecurity

Ballroom B

For this year's conference, I prose a presentation that discusses the information literacy approaches of the Black Hills Information Security organization via their comic book publication The Future is ******. The use of the American comic strip and comic book format is, and Han Yu (2016, 2020) argues, a time-tested approach for promoting information literacy. Indeed, as represented in Van Lente and Dunlavey (2017), comics have been used for training and communicating ideas for almost as long as they have existed in their current form. Will Eisner famously transformed the instructional guide Army Motors to use comic storytelling and art techniques from World War II until 1971. Comics have been used to parody technical communication in the form of Sikoryak's 2017 adaptation of Apple's terms and conditions as Terms and Conditions: The Graphic Novel. However, most of these attempts have assumed a kind of vertical power structure involved in communicating and building the information, either in the form of training soldiers and operators or as a rebellious reinterpretation of language to undermine the power dynamics of a notoriously dense and complex corporate EULA. When Black Hills Information Society launched their Kickstarter efforts to create RECKAH Comics ("hacker" backwards) in April of 2024, however, they promoted a different use of comics for information literacy. They presented their comic a call to "the mavericks, the white hat hackers of the new dawn" and presented the launch of their comic, which would be "the never-before-seen convergence of comic books and hacking made by actual hackers" as "a call to arms" to anyone who wanted to understand the type of information literacy they used professionally. The appeal was obviously well received, with the Kickstarter reaching its goal in 46 minutes. Drawing on McCloud's (1993) foundational frameworks for understanding comic structure and Watkins and Lindsley's (2020) understanding of sequential rhetorical, this presentation will provide a close reading of key aspects of the first five issues of The Future Is ****** to illustrate their novel informational literacy approaches.