Geo-Ed Teaching physical geography at university with cartoons and comic strips: Motivation, construction and usage Christopher Gomez Department of Geography, College of Sciences, University of Canterbury, Private Bag 4800, Christchurch 8140, New Zealand Abstract: This article presents the cartoons and comic strips that the author draws and has used in his teaching of physical geography at the undergraduate level since 2011. In the context of an image-based culture, this article discusses the pedagogic goals that cartoons and comic strips fulfil: enhancing learning and creativity, associ- ating pleasure with learning, pushing students to think ‘outside the box’ and relating the students’ learning experience to a media framework popular with students. Cartoons and comic strips also answer particular necessities related to the teaching of physical geography. Using characters placed in hypothetical situations, they explain the process of doing geography and being a physical geographer. Key words: cartoon, creativity, geography teaching, manga, physical geography, undergraduate education. Introduction In the internal newspaper of Juniata College (Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, USA), Associate Professor Jay Hossler (2009) presented his six- year journey to create a biology ‘comic-book textbook’ as a long and tedious enterprise. However, he remembered having learnt ‘a lot of new words like “invincible” or “indestruct- ible” ’ (Hossler 2009, p. 43) in comic books when he was a child, and he knew that the ‘comic-book textbook’ was worth the labour as a result. Although such projects are still mar- ginal, if not ignored, in the Anglo-Saxon world (Bouvard 2011), educational comics – or more precisely, educational manga – are an integral part of the teaching landscape in countries such as Japan.This form of manga appeared in Japan towards the end of the 1980s, and the genre has been named gakushu manga. Any Westerner who walks into a Japanese library will be amazed by the plethoric variety of manga, including a wide educational selection ranging from primary-school to university level. Suc- cessful educational mangas have even reached sales volumes comparable with those of entertainment-oriented ones, with the famous Manga Nihon Keizai Nyuumon (Introduction to the Japanese Economy through Manga) having sold more than 2 million copies. The other country with a long tradition of teaching using comics, and the one that con- sumes the second highest number of manga every year just after Japan, is France (Swift 2009; Ratier 2013). As early as 1978, Marsh wrote that ‘in France . . . the instructional use of comics (la bande dessinée or BD) is widely accepted’ (Marsh 1978, p. 777), with most of the Note about author: Christopher Gomez is a geomorphologist working on geomorphometry at various scales to understand the links between processes and landforms. He also relates these processes to environmental issues and hazards, mostly for high-energy events in arc islands of the Pacific, with an emphasis on Indonesia and Japan. A senior lecturer in the Department of Geography at the University of Canterbury. E-mail: christopher.gomez@canterbury.ac.nz New Zealand Geographer (2014) 70, 140–145 doi: 10.1111/nzg.12053 © 2014 New Zealand Geographical Society