Graphic Encounters

Comics and the Sponsorship of Multimodal Literacy

Dale Jacobs

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781441132048
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Methods for Reading

With the recent explosion of activity and discussion surrounding comics, it seems timely to examine how we might think about the multiple ways in which comics are read and consumed. Graphic Encounters moves beyond seeing the reading of comics as a debased or simplified word-based literacy. Dale Jacobs argues compellingly that we should consider comics as multimodal texts in which meaning is created through linguistic, visual, audio, gestural, and spatial realms in order to achieve effects and meanings that would not be possible in either a strictly print or strictly visual text. Jacobs advances two key ideas: one, that reading comics involves a complex, multimodal literacy and, two, that by studying how comics are used to sponsor multimodal literacy, we can engage more deeply with the ways students encounter and use these and other multimodal texts. Looking at the history of how comics have been used (by churches, schools, and libraries among others) will help us, as literacy teachers, best use that knowledge within our curricula, even as we act as sponsors ourselves.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

Opening the door to the drugstore, I knew exactly where I was headed. In my pocket was my weekly dollar allowance, given to me by my father before we left our house that morning. We had driven 40 miles from Amisk, the very small town in which we lived, for our weekly trip to Wainwright, a town of about five thousand. In Wainwright, there were two large grocery stores, a department store, two hardware stores, both men’s and women’s clothing stores, a fabric store, a small bookstore, several restaurants, and a movie theatre. More importantly from the perspective of a 10-year-old boy, there were two drugstores, both of which carried comic books. It was 1976 and my dollar would buy me three comics, leaving me a dime for candy later in the week.

The comic books were nestled at the back of the store between the magazines and the paperback westerns and romances. I scanned the selection, giving them a quick once over before I began to make my decisions. Among the brightly colored covers were familiar titles like The Amazing Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four, Superman, Detective Comics (starring Batman), Archie, and Casper the Friendly Ghost, which I, at 10, had recently deemed a little kids’ comic. (Archie was still acceptable because it was about the world of teenagers which, at 10, fascinated me.) I had read and even purchased all of these titles since I began reading comics a few years before, their words and images blending together to tell the stories in which I immersed myself.

Along the racks of familiar and often read titles, there were other titles I had seen many times before, but never read because they seemed to be for older kids, though I couldn’t have put my finger on exactly why—Ghost Rider (“The Most Supernatural Hero of All!”), Dr. Strange (“Master of the Mystic Arts”), and Howard the Duck (“Trapped in a World He Never Made!”). These were, I was sure, the Marvel titles that I would soon be reading when I was old enough. I was, after all, a Marvelite, a True Believer who looked forward to Stan Lee’s Soapbox and his pronouncements about the Marvel Universe as much almost as much as the comics themselves. Sure I read Superman, Detective Comics, and Archie, but only at my friends’ houses, when there were no Marvel comics I hadn’t read. At ten years of age, I only bought Marvel superhero comics, my horded allowance going only for what were, in my eyes, clearly superior comics. Like it said in every one of those comics I bought and read that year, Make Mine Marvel!

Gazing at the brightly colored comics in front of me, my search quickly narrowed to the Marvel titles. As I was reaching for my monthly copy of Spider-Man, I noticed a new title—The Man Called Nova. He had a great costume, the cover showed him fighting an enormous alien, it featured “The Human Rocket’s Power-Packed Origin!” and, most importantly, it promised to be “In The Marvelous Tradition of Spider-Man!” I was hooked without even opening it. When my mother came to get me a few minutes later, I had a new title to buy every month along with Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four, and The Avengers. I handed over my thirty cents and on the way home immersed myself in the world of Rich Rider and his alter-ego Nova.

* * *

Over the past 30 years, comics have become an ever more visible and well-regarded part of mainstream culture. Graphic novels are now reviewed in major newspapers and featured on the shelves of both independent and chain bookstores. Major publishing houses such as Pantheon now publish work in the comics medium, including books such as Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, David B.’s Epileptic, David Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp, and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. Educational publishers such as Scholastic are also getting in on the act; in 2005, Scholastic launched its own graphic novels imprint, Graphix, with the color reissue of the first volume of Jeff Smith’s highly acclaimed Bone series of graphic novels. At the book fairs of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and American Library Association (ALA) conferences, graphic novels and comic books are seen in ever greater numbers every year. School, public, and academic libraries are building graphics novels collections. Comics have, indeed, come out of hiding and into the mainstream.¹

With all this activity and discussion surrounding comics, it seems timely to examine how we might think about the multiple ways comics are and can be encountered by readers and how these practices fit into ongoing debates about both comics and literacy. In examining these practices and the theory that might inform them, I wish to move beyond seeing the reading of comics as a debased or simplified word-based literacy. Instead, I want to advance two ideas: one, that reading comics involves a complex, multimodal literacy and, two, that by thinking about the complex ways comics are used to sponsor multimodal literacy, we can engage more deeply with the ways people encounter, process, and use these and other multimodal texts.

Given my own literate history, such an approach makes sense to me as a way to think about both comics and other multimodal texts. When I was growing up, comics were a major source of entertainment for me and many others of my generation and one of our main access points to imaginative worlds. Whether we read Marvel, DC, Archie, Harvey, or Gold Key, comic books were an important site of literate practice where we learned and practiced not only print literacy, but also, and perhaps more importantly, multimodal literacy—the ability to create meaning with and from texts that operate not only in alphabetic form, but also in some combination of visual, audio, and spatial forms as well. Comics were where I and many others first encountered multimodal texts and literacy, learning how to make meaning from the convergence of text and image; reading comics offered an alternative to the limited versions of literate practice offered in my experience of school during that time. Comic book publishers worked to enable a certain kind of literacy because it was to their advantage to do so; the relationship was reciprocal in that I developed the multimodal literacy needed to read the comics and the comic book companies received the money that I invested in the purchase of their products. In other words, the comic book companies acted as major sponsors of multimodal literacy for me and many other children in the 1970s, just as they had since the advent of comic books in North America in the mid-1930s.

My experience is fairly typical of many people (especially men) who grew up in North America from the 1930s on, especially through the end of the 1970s.² In the mid-1970s, comics were readily available to everyone since the distribution of comic books was primarily through newsagents and drugstores; direct distribution through specialty comic stores would not happen until the 1980s. As well, the price of comic books was not yet prohibitive for children and there was much less competition from other media (such as video games, the internet, and a proliferation of television channels) for the time, money, and attention of children. Today there are certainly greater opportunities for children (and adults) to engage in a variety of multimodal literacies and, in fact, we all do so everyday. In their resurgence, comics represent part of that landscape and, in the way they can act as analogs to other kinds of multimodal texts, comics open up a number of possibilities for thinking about multimodal literacy.

Over the years, comics have been used by many types of institutions, including for-profit companies, not-for-profit educational groups, churches, schools, parents’ groups, and libraries to sponsor particular kinds of multimodal literacies. By examining the multiple ways these sponsorships have operated and the variety of purposes the expected multimodal literacies have served, it is possible to begin to understand the complexities of literacy sponsorship over the history of the comic book. Looking at this history will help us to think more deeply about multimodality and literacy in relation to comics, while also providing a new lens through which the medium of comics can be examined. As well, by focusing specifically on comics and the sponsorship of multimodal literacy, I seek to show the complexities of these concepts in a way that can be applied to other multimodal texts as well. Before I get to specific instances of multimodal literacy sponsorship in the coming chapters, however, I first need to explain some basic ideas about comics, the concepts of multimodal literacy and literacy sponsorship, and how these concepts can be combined to think about the sponsorship of multimodal literacy in comics.

Comics as multimodal texts/reading comics as multimodal literacy

Defining exactly what we mean when we use the term comics is notoriously difficult, especially since, as Charles Hatfield notes, “definitions [of comics] are not merely analytic but also tactical” (“Defining” 19). That is, these definitions are often tacit forms of argumentation. However, whether you subscribe to Scott McCloud’s definition of comics (“Juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer” (9)) or to an expanded definition such as the one proposed by Dylan Horrocks (Comics are: a cultural idiom; a publishing genre; a set of narrative conventions; a kind of writing that uses words and pictures; a literary genre; and texts (34)), the visual is clearly an important part of comics and should not be seen as subservient to the written word. As Robert C. Harvey argues, comics are “a blending of visual and verbal content,” a definition that begins to get at the importance of the presence of both of these semiotic systems (76). To this I would add, comics are a rhetorical genre, comics are multimodal texts, and comics are both an order of discourse and discrete discursive events. As cultural artifacts, sites of literacy, means of communication, discursive events and practices, sites of imaginative interplay, and tools for literacy sponsorship, comics are far more than simply “sequential art.” In other words, comics—comic books, comic strips, and graphic novels—are media that use a combination of sequential art and text in order to create narrative meaning for the audience. This combination of words and images—multimodality—works to create meaning in very particular and distinctive ways; in a multimodal text, meaning is created through words, visuals, and the combination of the two in order to achieve effects and meanings that would not be possible in either a strictly alphabetic or strictly visual text.

If we think about comics as multimodal texts that involve multiple kinds of meaning making, we do not abandon the concept of word-based literacy, but strengthen it through the inclusion of visual and other literacies. This complex view of literacy is one that has begun to be embraced by many educators, including a number who have written about the use of comics in education such as Rocco Versaci in “How Comic Books Can Change the Way Our Students See Literature” (2001), Gretchen Schwarz in “Graphic Novels for Multiple Literacies” (2002) and “Expanding Literacies through Graphic Novels” (2006), and Bonny Norton in “The Motivating Power of Comic Books: Insights from Archie Comic Readers” (2003). While Schwarz is the most specific of the three with regard to literacy, calling comics “a new medium for literacy that acknowledges the impact of visuals” and encouraging teachers “to explore and use the graphic novel to build multiple literacies,” none of these articles go very far in fleshing out what is meant by a more complex view of literacy or how comics might be useful in teaching such literacies (“Graphic Novels” 262; “Expanding Literacies” 58). Meanwhile, texts such as William Kist’s New Literacies in Action: Teaching and Learning in Multiple Media (2005) fully embrace broader definitions of literacy that are consistent with ideas of multimodal literacy, but apply these ideas to a much larger range of media than comics alone. Other texts, such as Stephen Cary’s Going Graphic: Comics at Work in the Multilingual Classroom (2004) and Michael Bitz’s When Commas Meet Kryptonite: Classroom Lessons from the Comic Book Project (2010), are informed to some degree by the idea of multimodal literacy, though this concept is certainly not the focus of either book. Although they agree on the importance of the interaction between words and images in comics and spend a great deal of time on how to use that interaction with students, in the end both see comics as a scaffold for alphabetic reading and writing and a bridge to more conventional literature. Multimodal literacy is certainly acknowledged, but traditional alphabetic literacy is finally still given primacy.

On the other hand, James Bucky Carter, in the introduction to his edited collection Building Literacy Connections with Graphic Novels: Pages by Page, Panel by Panel (2007), explicitly references the NCTE position statement on multimodal literacies, and this concept informs not only his ideas, but his choice of essays in the collection. As can be surmised by the collection title, Teaching Visual Literacy: Using Comic Books, Graphic Novels, Anime, Cartoons, and More to Develop Comprehension and Thinking Skills (2008), editors Nancy Frey and Douglas Fisher go even further in their exploration of visual and multimodal literacy in relation to comics. In the introduction, they write, “We think of visual literacy as describing the complex act of meaning making using still or moving images. . . . Further, these visual literacies are interwoven with textual ones, so that their interaction forms the basis for a more complete understanding” (1). This combination of visual and textual (what I would call alphabetic) literacies comes close to what I will shortly describe as multimodal literacy, a concept that also heavily influences the work of Katie Monnin, especially as seen in her book Teaching Graphic Novels: Practical Strategies for the Secondary ELA Classroom (2010). In a vivid metaphor for this conception of literacy, Monnin asks teachers to visualize two actors, “Print-text,” who “voice[s] his lines in words,” and “Image-text,” who “act[s] out his image visually” (xvi). She continues the metaphor, writing, “Both will communicate meaning, yet they will do so in their own unique formats, sometimes standing alone, sometimes standing together” (xvi). Despite the excellent work by Monnin and the others cited here, the way we think about multimodal literacies in relation to comics still needs to be more fully articulated. By situating our thinking about comics, multimodality, and literacy within a framework that views literacy as occurring in multiple modes, comics can be used to greater effectiveness in teaching at all levels as a way to arm students with the critical literacy skills they need to negotiate diverse systems of meaning making.

Such a shift to regarding comics as multimodal texts, rather than debased written texts, means that it is important to examine the reading of comics as a form of multimodal literacy, rather than as a debased form of print literacy.³ In making this kind of radical shift in our thinking, I draw on ideas from Gunther Kress and the rest of the New London Group and their groundbreaking and influential attempts to reconceive how we approach texts, literacies, and the pedagogies related to both.⁴ Why is such a shift important? In “Design and Transformation: New Theories of Meaning,” a key chapter in the New London Group’s Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures, Kress sets out our contemporary communicative situation:

The semiotic changes which characterise the present and which are likely to characterise the near future cannot be adequately described and understood with currently existing theories of meaning and communication. These are based on language, and so, quite obviously, if language is no longer the only or even the central semiotic mode, then theories of language can at best offer explanations for one part of the communicational landscape only. Theories of language will simply not serve to explain the other semiotic modes, unless one assumes, counterfactually, that they are in every significant way like language. (153)

Kress clearly believes that other semiotic modes do not operate in exactly the same way that language does and that we need to develop “an adequate theory for contemporary multimodal textual forms . . . so as to permit the description both of the specific characteristics of a particular mode and of its more general semiotic properties which allow it to be related plausibly to other semiotic modes” (153–4). The ways in which we communicate have changed, as Kress and the rest of the New London Group see it. Teachers should engage this change in thinking about texts and literacies, rather than to see other modes as either hindrances or intermediate steps to the mastery of print literacy. Such a shift in thinking would acknowledge the multiple sites of literate practice of students, quite the opposite of my school experience in the 1970s when literacy was seen as only alphabetic, a situation that still reflects the experience of many current students at all levels of study.

This changed concept of communication, or “multiliteracies” as it has been christened by the New London Group, “engages with the multiplicity of communications channels and media” and with “the increasing salience of cultural and linguistic diversity” (Cope and Kalantzis 5). Speaking for the rest of the New London Group in the introduction to the collection, Mu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Secret origins of literacy sponsorship
• 3 To blend in or stand out: Publishers’ responses to “A National Disgrace” and the comics panic of the early 1940s
• 4 More at stake: EC, vampires, and the sponsorship of critical literacy
• 5 Oral Roberts discovers comics and Archie goes to church: Sponsoring multimodal literacy through religious comics
• 6 Teaming up for literacy: Spider-Man, The Electric Company, and cross-media literacy sponsorship
• 7 Libraries and the sponsorship of literacy through comics
• Works Cited
• Index