Teaching Comics Through Multiple Lenses

Critical Perspectives

Crag Hill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317232582
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Alphabétisation

Building off the argument that comics succeed as literature—rich, complex narratives filled with compelling characters interrogating the thought-provoking issues of our time—this book argues that comics are an expressive medium whose moves (structural and aesthetic) may be shared by literature, the visual arts, and film, but beyond this are a unique art form possessing qualities these other mediums do not. Drawing from a range of current comics scholarship demonstrating this point, this book explores the unique intelligence/s of comics and how they expand the ways readers engage with the world in ways different than prose, or film, or other visual arts. Written by teachers and scholars of comics for instructors, this book bridges research and pedagogy, providing instructors with models of critical readings around a variety of comics.

1 Introduction

The Growing Relevance of Comics

Crag Hill

I can’t pinpoint when I first learned to read. I do remember my school literacy included the infamous “Dick and Jane” and basal series labeled by color, which most students knew indicated ability level (and so the ranking and sorting began). These series likely had all the phonics anyone would ever need, but the stories, if one could call them that, were as forgettable as they could be. Fortunately I was having more authentic reading experiences.

The first reading I remember being passionate about, reading worth fighting over/for, were the “funnies” found in “The Green Sheet” of The Milwaukee Journal. I would rush to retrieve the paper from the front porch when it was delivered in the afternoon, peeling out the four-page insert before handing the paper over to my parents. I remember “The Wizard of Id,” “Hi and Lois,” “The Family Circus,” “L’il Abner,” “Blondie,” “Beetle Bailey,” “Nancy,” “Charlie Brown,” “B.C.,” and a comic I grew to like, “Prince Valiant,” a strip without a punch line, with a narrative that seemed to move at a glacial pace (some days I couldn’t figure out if anything happened at all), with vocabulary and syntax far beyond “Dick and Jane.” I was especially struck by the drawings in “Prince Valiant.” I didn’t know comics—the “funnies” as I knew them—could look like the adults in my life, even if they wore different clothes.

My parents, fortunately, were enablers. To keep me and my siblings civil on our long car trips (a 10,000-mile round trip to Alaska for one), they would buy us comics. I remember once picking out six or eight issues of “Donald Duck,” “Archie,” and “Superman.” I may not be remembering the titles accurately—and I may also be misremembering that my siblings were included in this comics bonanza; the pleasure may have been mine alone—but I’ll never forget the half-cocked smile on my face as I read and re-read these comics, from which I rarely glanced up to look at the passing scenery.

I only recently realized how seminal these early literacy experiences were. I learned to love verbal/visual jokes, serial narratives, the written word, brevity, and expressive, communicative images; I needed them each day, every day, or I felt I empty. These comics were a connective thread between me and the world outside my home and school. Radio and television, of course, also provided those kinds of threads—music, news, and sports—and contributed significantly to many of my formative literacies, but I sought out comics first before engaging in those mediums. While school was dumbing my reading down, limiting my literacy, the comics I was reading set me up for a lifetime of reading and writing words and images.

Many of us can remember the first comics we read, the people we shared them with, the places we read them, where we saved them, losing count of the number of times we read them, with or without the cover. For many of us, that was our first experience of being a part of a community of readers. We have never had a life without comics (though we may have pushed them to the back of the closet, literally or figuratively, as we pursued other literary interests as we got older); we never distinguished between literary fiction and comics, between reading story with text and images and story with print text (though publically, as teachers, we might have taken such a position; I did).

Readers of comics may have been marginalized for decades, but that space is not a negative space; readers were content in their world, satisfied with the aesthetic and intellectual pleasures comics provided them, even in the face of disdain or outright censorship (think of the English teacher or parent snatching a comic away from a student and not returning it). The times though are a-changing. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.” The world is swinging round to stories told in a synergy of words and images. Comics may or may not be mainstream, but they have entered into the mindset, the worldview, of those who may not have grown up with comics. The world of comics is now growing readers, while at the same time the world of readers is growing into comics.

Definitions

Frustrated by how others have defined comics, comics artists and scholars (Cohn, 2005; Eisner, 1985/2008; Groensteen, 2013; Harvey, 1996, 2001; Kunzle, 1973; McCloud, 1993) have spent a great deal of time and energy formulating an airtight definition. For the purposes of this volume, we will forego this exercise. Not only can readers of this book find easy access to such discussions (check out the recent discussion of the definitional project in Hague, 2014, pp. 11–18), we are going to make the assumption that readers have a well-defined grasp of what comics are and what they can do. For the purpose of this volume, comics are narratives comprised of a complex mixture of image and text wherein both images and text coexist and cohere to tell a story. Both image and text contribute to all elements of the story, but images are the primary signifiers (with the exception in Chapter 3, an analysis of two YA novels that includes images as illustrations). Our primary belief is that comics tell stories that could not be told in any other way, or as Chute (2010) puts it, the stories comics authors “both tell and show could not be communicated any other way” (p. 2, emphasis in the original).

For this project we have chosen to use “comics” and/or “graphic novel” rather than the perhaps more accurate but awkward “sequential art narrative,” coined by pioneer of comics Will Eisner (1985/2008). The term “graphic novel,” however, we realize may create as many misunderstandings than it clarifies. First, many readers may associate the term “graphic” with sex or violence, not with the graphic arts, and some of the canonical novels in the field—Maus, Persepolis, Fun Home—are not novels at all, but nonfiction accounts of significant family, national, and international events. The editor a couple years ago was encouraged to use the term “graphic novel” rather than “comics” in his progress toward tenure review because “comics” connoted popular—throwaway—comic books, while “graphic novel” connoted literature, the once despised novel now a staple of literary scholarship in English departments. The term “comics” will be a singular noun, denoting the medium as in “film.” We will confine our exploration to long-form and/or periodical narratives that have appeared in print and not comic strips, editorial cartoons, or digital/multimedia comics, a vibrant, robust body of work deserving of a critical research project of its own.

Mainstream Attention and Integration Into Schools

Comics have been successively adapted into movies (just check the latest blockbuster/s), of course, as they have been for decades. Festivals of comics have sprung up in towns and cities in every state, and the annual Comi-Con in San Diego draws hundreds of thousands and spawns weeks of headlines in the popular press. Comics, once absented from bookstore chains such as Barnes and Noble, now occupy an aisle of shelves (and you will likely find someone browsing them, standing, reading, gazing at just about any time of the day). Comics are being bought and read by men and women, young and old, readers seeking entertainment and readers looking for literary enlightenment (and, increasingly, many looking for both). The names of characters in comics, the details of plot, may not be on the tip of the tongue of every American, but the few people who couldn’t name a comic likely have been living under a rock.

Comics, in other ways, are out of the closet, out from under the bed, for good. Professional journals for English teachers such as English Journal, The ALAN Review, Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, SANE: Sequential Art Narrative in Education (http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/sane/), have published articles that provide pedagogical resources for the secondary classroom, selections of teachable comics, accompanied by teaching strategies ready to implement. Scholarly journals abound outside the English Language Arts context: International Journal of Comic Art, whose issues can contain up to 600 pages of scholarship from around the world; ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies (http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/), dedicated to the interdisciplinary study of comics and related media; and Image and Narrative (http://www.imageandnarrative.be), a peer-reviewed e-journal on visual narratology and word and image studies.

Comics have become a staple in K-20 classrooms and not just for remedial exercises (Abel and Madden, 2008; Bitz, 2004, 2008; Botzakis, 2009; Carter, 2007, 2011; Cary, 2004; Frey and Fisher, 2008; Monin, 2010; Morrison, Bryan, and Chilcoat; 2002; Sabeti, 2011; Syma and Weiner, 2013; Thomas, 2011; Yang, 2008). Secondary teachers and instructors at college and university levels are inserting comics into literature, history, psychology, and in courses in many other disciplines. Duncan and Smith (2009) have developed a textbook for undergraduate courses that offers undergraduate students an overview of the comics medium and its communicative potential. Maus, Persepolis, American Born Chinese, Fun Home, and other comics are studied by K-20 students of all ability levels and interests. But along with comics integrated into the study of history and literature, teacher preparation courses utilizing the study of comics are now being offered in many universities. The chapter authors have utilized comics in many of their undergraduate courses (Literary Responses to War and Peace, World Mythology, Teaching Literature to Adolescents, Children’s Literature, Young Adult Literature, Middle Grades Language Arts Teaching Methods, English Methods, Youth and Adolescent Literacy, First-year Writing Seminar, Women Writers, Intro to English Studies, Graphic Novels for Adolescents, Young Adult Literature and Literary Theory) and in many of their graduate courses (Studies in Graphic Fiction, Special Topics: Graphic Fiction, Diagnosing and Remediating Literacy Problems, Teaching Composition, Sequential Art: Comics as “Ensembles of Productive Mechanisms of Meaning,” and Content Area Literacy).

Outside the circle of chapter authors, many other courses have been offered in different modes. “Comic Books and Graphic Novels” has been offered at University of Colorado in a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). At Ball State, in another MOOC, “Gender Through Comics” drew hundreds of participants, and Emerson College recently offered five online courses for comic book fans. The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, School of Comics (Chicago), the Rhode Island Institute of Design, and other prestigious art schools offer courses on the production of comics. On the academic side, the University of Cincinnati, University of California Irvine, Oregon State University, The Ohio State University, California State University Long Beach, MIT, University of Southern California, Columbia University, and many other colleges and universities in the United Kingdom and Australia offer intensive courses on comics in their English and Comparative World Literature departments. Those seriously interested in the studies of comics can now earn a minor in interdisciplinary Comic Studies at University of Oregon, and University of Florida has created a new discipline, Comics and Visual Rhetoric Studies.

Legitimization of Scholarship

As with young adult literature (Cappella, 2010; Coats, 2011; Gallo, 1992; and Hill, 2014), comics scholarship has struggled with legitimization in academia, in K-20 schools, and in the public at large (Danzinger-Russell, 2013). At the university level, English departments and other academic departments were loath to recognize comics as a legitimate field of scholarship. Comics, branded as a popular medium, possessed neither a long history nor, as it was perceived, any cultural capital worth investing time and energy in (Lent, 2014). In the 1960s, a Ph.D. dissertation on “Li’l Abner” drew outrage from faculty and students and was met with laughter at the graduation ceremony when the topic was announced (Lent, p. 9). Film studies and other media studies faced similar barriers (Lent, p. 10).

The barriers dissolved, but not on their own. To challenge misconceptions of comics, scholarship has been working on many different fronts, from historicizing and theorizing the medium to developing pedagogy for use in schools. To begin the long process toward legitimization in the absence of an established theoretical base, early researchers borrowed theory from other disciplines such as sociology, psychology, philosophy, art history, and art, and employed methodologies common in other fields: semiotic, discourse, literary and content analyses (Lent, 2014, p.10). Rather than building from within, developing methodologies congruent to the medium, early scholarship was predicated on the validity of scholarship in other disciplines.

In the United States, the majority of the commentary on comics was negative and condemnatory for decades (Lopes, 2009). It was easy to take a swipe at a medium whose audience—children—would not speak back. Comics artists themselves, laboring without recognition, paid by piecework, did not have the means or perhaps the motivation to counter the negative press. Is it any wonder that scholars in universities were averse to studying this much-maligned body of work? To complicate research on the history of comics is the dearth of archives for comics (Gabilliet, 2010). As comics has been a throwaway medium for generations, the medium has not drawn the attention of the institutions that collect and make available for scholars more culturally honored materials such as books, paintings and sculpture, and historical artifacts. So though study of the history of comics may have been one of the first fields in comics scholarship, such scholarship was undoubtedly hampered by lack of accessibility to primary documents. Heer and Worcester (2009) argue that comics studies is now booming: “The notion that comics are unworthy of serious investigation has given way to a widening curiosity about comics as artifacts, commodities, codes, devices, mirrors, polemics, puzzles, and pedagogical tools” (xi). Their seminal essay collection breaks down new comics scholarship into four approaches: “the history and geneaology of comics, the inner workings of comics, the social significance of comics, and the close scrutiny and evaluation of comics” (xi). Hatfield, 2005 maintains that following McCloud’s (1993) groundbreaking Understanding Comics, comics scholars embraced a new focus on the form of comics that continues to thrive, spawning dozens of articles and books, among them Varnum and Gibbon’s (2001) The Language of Comics: Word and Image, Groensteen’s The System of Comics (2007) and Comics and Narration (2013), and Neil Cohn’s pioneer...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: The Growing Relevance of Comics
• Section 1 Materiality and the Reading of Comics
• Section 2 Comics and Bodies
• Section 3 Comics and the Mind
• Section 4 Comics and Contemporary Society
• Section 5 End Points
• List of Contributors Additional resources were compiled by Shaina Thomas.
• Index