Can a (comics) image take your breath away?

Just an amuse-bouche this week:   more image than text, more pleasure-taking than critique.

Can an image take your breath away? 

Here are a few that have taken mine:

One silent, lovely double-page spread in Mariko Tamiko and Jillian Tamiko’s Skim:  unmoored, unspoken, unassimilated, unpunished.   With it, the narrative flow of the work arrests, and stutters…(S)Kim, the protagonist, has disavowed this romance several pages previously (“Technically nothing has happened”), and yet, here it is, surprising us on pp. 40-41 (hardcover edition) with its candor, its loveliness, and its wildness.  

Luke Pearson scatters these –again, unremarked, unassimilated – two-headed baby skeletons throughout his spare, sunset-colored meditation on loss and obliviousness, Everything we Miss, but it is the lighting that breaks my heart. Here, most likely, car headlights momentarily illuminate the strange creature, but the unbroken Doppler shift of light shows that the driver saw nothing and passed quickly.

 

 

 

Craig Thompson taught me through Blankets that penwork can be suffused with eros.  His lovers are traced with rare compassion, his settings as well.  Ground reaches toward figures; figures reach back.  Being in love with a person becomes—no surprise—an ocular feast, as elements of the world (snow, tree branches in winter) suddenly emerge as radiant, present, conspiratorial:

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Finally, scenes from my beloved Mushi-shi anime, (based on Yuki Urushibara’s equally sensuous black and white manga series).  Ginko (sic), the Mushi master, moves through Japanese history as easily as he passes through its landscapes, and each tree, each breath of the wind, each snow-touched mountain calls to us as insistently as it does to Ginko himself.  With Mushi-shi, it’s not one image that takes my breath away, it’s most of them.  Try this anime on a tablet or phone in bed before going to sleep.  Mesmerizing.

 

 

 

How do comics represent depression?

Following Zainab Cheema’s recent comment that multi-dimensional currents of affect are released by the junctures of image-text and Adrielle Mitchell’s posts, which are always attuned to questions of political feeling, I have been inspired lately to think about the affective dimension of comics. I know that my own affective responses to comics differ from those I might have in response to other art forms: the visceral and the analytic dimensions of feeling are articulated somehow differently, alternating more rapidly and perhaps less distinctly between one another.

I have also been thinking about depression lately since the long-awaited second installment of Hyperbole and a Half‘s depression saga was posted just last week and I recently finished Ann Cvetkovich’s hybrid study/memoir, Depression: A Public Feeling. There is a lot to love about this book but I especially loved its reflections on academic life, which “breeds particular forms of panic and anxiety leading to what gets called depression.” Working against the reductive psychiatric approach depression (which favors swift treatment at the expense of reflection on the broad spectrum of causes) Cvetkovich advocates an understanding of depression as a cultural and political phenomenon. She also calls for new forms of writing about depression that counter the mainstream depression memoir and challenge the status quo medical model. It made me wonder what forms of writing about depression have existed in comics.

Some examples that come to mind are comics oeuvres like those of Daniel Clowes, Julie Doucet, and Adrian Tomine whose works are generally suffused with a depressive/melancholic atmosphere. But I can’t recall depression ever being addressed directly anywhere in their works. (Please correct me if I’m mistaken). Some more personal treatments of depression in comics include Elaine Will’s Look Straight Ahead and Allie Brosh’s (of Hyperbole and a Half) Adventures in Depression, both incidentally web comics. In French there is Gil & Gaston’s Ma Toute petite déprime et moi [My tiny depression and me] and Eléonore Zuber’s Lorsque je suis déprimée [When I'm depressed] both of which approach the subject from a humorous angle. One might reserve a special category for comics that feature depressed but heroic protagonists: Moebius’s Chasseur Déprime [Depressed Hunter, but also a play on the term chasseur de prix, bounty hunter] and Steven Struble’s Li’l Depressed Boy.

Many artists struggle with depression and find ways to reflect their struggle in their art. For some it almost seems to be part of the creative process, a period of being stuck, cocooned, indifferent, asleep, before movement and creation can begin. One apparent difficulty inherent in writing about depression is that a pathologically depressed artist is unable to create, so the artistic representation of depression must always occur after the fact and from a different position, often a position that requires one to forget the depression ever occurred in order to remain functional in the world. However, the creative process involved in representing depression is also often imagined as necessary to the therapeutic process. Allie Brosh’s Adventures in Depression brings this dynamic into relief through its webcomic format; her readers only became aware of the seriousness of her depression in the wake of a six-month period of silence and non-productivity that took place between the first and second installments.

In what ways is the comics medium equipped to represent the experience of depression and what are the comics you’ve read that approach the subject of depression in an interesting way?

How do we approach collaboration in comics?

Artists Joe Orlando and Wally Wood

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This year’s International Comic Arts Forum will include a roundtable discussion on collaboration in comics that considers the way academics and industry professionals approach the dialogic qualities of creation in the industry (look for a panel of original papers addressing this topic at MLA 2014 as well). The discussion grows out of a concern that comics scholars too often privilege the authorship of a lone gifted writer, potentially “ignoring the historical importance and artistic potential of multi-authored comics.”

So I thought I would bring the question to PPP readers as well.  Why don’t we give the collaborative aspects of comics more serious attention? What are the risks and/or advantages that come from talking about these texts as a medley of complementary, diverging, or competing interests rather than a single creative vision?

The issue has become especially important to my own research over the last few years. When I initially ventured into comics studies as a literary critic, I often found myself attributing primary “ownership” of the narrative to the writer with the penciller, inker, colorist, letterer and editorial staff receiving only a mention. Much of the academic comics scholarship that I encountered reinforced this view, as do the prestigious awards and “best of” lists that often champion the single artist/writer. (No wonder Eddie Campbell is under the misconception that “the literaries” ignore the narrative drawings in comics and consider only the plot.) In my work on the 1980s Swamp Thing run, however, I found that this approach did not suit me well and I tried to do my best to be more attentive to the role of collaboration between Alan Moore, Stephen Bissette, and John Totleben in the finished product.

Now in my current research, I am particularly fascinated by the way EC’s comics were developed during the 1950s. It was a frantic, nearly assembly-line construction that nevertheless strived to maintain the individuality of the creative professionals. Bill Gaines and Al Feldstein often described how they worked with a team of freelancers to produce four stories a week, churning out springboards and lettered pages for illustration.  In an interview for The Monster Times in 1972, Gaines and Feldstein commented upon the process:

Al: Now this was something that hadn’t been done too much in the comics either. There was imitation of styles. And books were sterile and really had no character. We encouraged each artist to develop his own style, actually wrote and tailored the stories based on the artist’s ability and style. Graham always did the Old Witch and the kind of gothicy stuff. And a finished neat artist like Jack Kamen did the modern, triangle stories with a husband and wife living in the suburbs behind a picket fence, because his style lent himself to that.

Bill: I thought it was more than that. When we sat down to write a story, we were writing the story for a particular artist. So one day we sat down to write a story I would say to Al: “Today we have a seven page story for Graham Ingels to write.” We would think in that direction…

Regardless of how we might feel about EC taking credit for starting this particular editorial trend, their comics certainly demonstrate a dynamic range of collaborative efforts. A quick glance at the title page and signature of any EC story would give regular readers stylistic clues about what the narrative had in store.

(Indeed, when it comes to EC, it’s the writers – not the artists – who often play second fiddle. Readers forget that the stories were almost all completely written or adapted by Gaines, Feldstein or Kurtzman. Even recent reprints from IDW and Fantagraphics reinforce a view that continues to privilege the single artist as creator.)

So how do you approach collaboration in comics? What other questions about collaboration should I bring to the panel?

And if you live in or near Portland, I hope you’ll join us at this year’s ICAF from May 23-25 in the White Stag Building at 70 NW Couch Street!

Guest Contributor!

This month’s guest contributor, Zainab Cheema, is a PhD candidate at the Program of Comparative Literature at UT Austin. Zainab has worked on intersections of image-text, critical race theory, and gender studies in contemporary graphic novels; and on colonial photography in India. She is currently working in Mediterranean Studies, looking at narrative migrations between Arabic and Spanish literature.

What is the relationship between the graphic novel and war and affect?

[Guest post by Zainab Cheema]

What is the relationship between the graphic novel and war and affect? And how do panels render the tricky dynamic between remembering, feeling, and archiving? These questions were elicited by my encounter with The Photographer, the masterly 1986 illustrated-photographic record of Didier Lefevre’s journey with Doctors with Borders in order to establish a hospital in an Afghanistan torn by war with Soviet Union.

The 2008 edition of The Photographer has an introduction which contextualizes the work with 9/11 and the US’s subsequent War with Afghanistan. As many have noted, the comics-photograph supplementation enables the book to fold together an event (the 1986 war in Afghanistan), experience (Lefevre’s personal and representational struggles adjusting to the warzone), and multi-dimensional currents of affect released by the junctures of image-text. The photos offer an ethnographic look at Afghanistan, presented through peoples, tribes, landscapes. The comic panels shade in affective tenor of situations, interactions, responses.

For instance, there a sequence where Lefevre is stranded in the Kalotac Pass with his horse, as a snowstorm engulfs the dangerous terrain. The snow temporarily alleviates the danger of bombing raids conducted by Soviet planes over the area. As the snow fills the pass, the abject figure of the man and his horse, the figures are slowly shaded into black silhouettes engulfed within a backdrop of grey-olive green. The tight panels constrict around the silhouettes so as to capture the immediacy of Lefevre’s bodily struggles in the snowstorm, blending together human and animal—suddenly, this breaks into a double page spread of a single photograph of the spectacular valley, shaded by snow and storm clouds.

The Photographer is full of such unquiet moments—the unquiet disjuncture between visual testimony to stunning terrains or to interpersonal intimacies across ethnic and national borders, and the taxing act of witnessing with one’s body what its like to live in a warzone. Lefevre documents his painful illnesses, the boils that break over his body, or his physical responses to the wounds suffered by Afghans. And yet, we know that witnessing can be compulsive. When Lefevre in Pakistan prepares for his flight back to France, riding buses while listening to French jazz singer Michel Jonasz and promising to see his friends his Paris, he thinks to himself: “I feel like going back [to Afghanistan]”.

As Sontag and Barthes have noted, the photograph is intimately tied to the act of mourning. So are comics, as Maus so eminently proves. Sontag also establishes the link between the photograph and affect, in its indeterminacy as icon: “They drift between shores of perception, between sign and image, without ever approaching either . . . In this glum desert, suddenly a specific photograph reaches me; it animates me, and I animate it” (On Photography 20). At the end of The Photographer, we are reminded of this yet again, as Lefevre visits a British cemetery in Pakistan before his flight to France. The photo-comic-graphic rendering of the graveyard taps the affective charge of the in-between spaces of representation and experience, pointing backwards to the process of signifying and forwards to prophecy—Lefevre would eventually die in 2007 of complications from health problems he contracted in Afghan warzone. “I find this cemetery very moving,” reads the panel next to his portrait photo, “I come back in the following days.” If iconicity in war is compulsive, it is because it is prolific in the face of foreclosure, where there is no movement except that of returning.

What are the properties of editorial cartoons that heal?

On 23-24 April 2013, I attended a conference called “Images of Terror, Narratives of Insecurity: Literary, Artistic and Cultural Responses.” The conference was held by Project CILM–City and (In)security in Literature and the Media, and the organizers “aim to examine how literature, art and culture have dealt with notions of insecurity and to what extent they have provided significant challenges and responses to hegemonic discourses.” Visit this website for more information about the project and visit this site  for more information about the conference.

The faculty at the University of Lisbon are not alone in their quest to understand how people respond to these crises. After the events of September 11, 2001, Jewel James decided to create a series of healing poles as a gift to the people of the United States. Barbara Robins, a friend and colleague of mine, is a scholar of Native American literature and culture, and she has interviewed James as part of her ongoing research about healing through art. You can get an article by Robins here. When the poles were finished, James, a Lummi artist, had the poles transported as a traveling exhibit across the United States. Visit the website at the National Library of Medicine blog for more information and to see images of the poles.

My question for this blog entry has to do with the way that editorial cartoons, for example after the Boston Marathon bombings, offer readers a way of healing after tragedy. For Boston, some cartoons express rage, some express sorrow, and some express frustration and confusion. This piece, by Jerry Holbert , relies on readers’ knowledge of the figure of Justice. Holbert has retained some of the traditional elements here: the figure’s eyes are covered, and she holds a sword. However, the figure doesn’t hold a balance in her other hand. Instead, she grips the sword with both hands, seemingly ready to strike.

The caption uses the words ‘wounded,’ ‘bruised,’ and ‘bleed,’ words which no doubt will resonate with Boston residents, especially at this time. The last sentence of the caption expresses a kind of resolution to readers, that justice will be done. It assures readers that even though the community has been harmed, something will be done in response to the tragedy. Further, interaction between the image and the language suggests something else: it issues a warning to the people who committed the atrocity, an implied promise that they will not go unpunished.

In light of the Boston bombings and through my participation at the conference, I had time to reflect on 9/11, and I remembered that the image below made a strong impact on me. There’s a short article at Wired.com about it. It takes patriotic symbols, like the Statue of Liberty and the U.S. flag, and repurposes them. The Liberty statue very clearly becomes a mother figure, but instead of holding aloft a torch she holds a gun. The U.S. flag, which is often raised on a flagpole to fly in the wind, is instead wrapped around a baby. These visual discourses of motherhood, safety, and violence coalesce into a statement: a response from the nation. The linguistic caption reinforces the visual message by using the lexemes dangerous, mother, and children all in the same sentence.

I do not wish to claim here that editorial cartoonists have the intent of offering some kind of healing to their readers. I think it’s much more complex than that. After all, artists in this situation might be expressing their own anger and confusion, so they may not be thinking about healing when they create their cartoons. However, some readers may find elements of healing in those cartoons, even when the cartoons are at the same time expressing anger, disgust, frustration, and confusion: an array of reactions to tragedy.

Can readers find healing in these kinds of cartoons? Even if the cartoonist does not intend the message of healing, even if the cartoonist expresses something more akin to anger, perhaps these kinds of cartoons begin to create a space for readers to begin the process of healing.

How Do We Read Comic Book Covers?

At first, comic book cover art seems simple to understand. At a glance, they are marketing tools that inform us of the contents of the story or stories that occur in the interior of the comic. Additionally, they are often used to showcase more artistically ambitious depictions of the protagonists of the comics, since cover art is often painted (or, at the very least, is much more detailed than the pen-and-ink interiors), and cover artists are often given a good bit of (but of course not total!) freedom in terms of what they can depict on the cover.

This tension between the role of cover art as advertising, and the freedom that cover artists are given in what exactly they depict on the cover, however, is what leads to the puzzle I am highlighting today. Given the role that covers play in the marketing of particular issues of comic books, and the role that they play in our purchasing choices, one would expect there to be at least some pressure for the creators of comics to insure that the cover art accurately depicts the actual content of the comic in question. In actual practice, however, this pressure seems to have minimal effect, since there is often little connection between the content of the cover and the content of the comic.

Of course, sometime comic covers are misleading merely to drive sales: the cover will depict some shocking event that doesn’t really happen in the story (see, e.g. the Supergirl issue reproduced here). But often the cover art is just tangential to the actual storyline without being sensational in the sense just described. The question in such cases concerns how we are to understand the content of the cover as a part of the overall story told in the comic.

Comic books, and comic book series, are narratives – they describe fictional events that happen to fictional characters in fictional worlds. Of course, the way that we understand what is (fictionally) true in such narratives is particularly complex in comics (one of the reasons I find them so interesting), given ret-conning, canon/non-canon distinctions, and the complex interaction between pictorial and textual information that takes place when we read comics. But covers add to this complexity: Are we to take the content of covers as providing genuine information with regard to what happens within the fictional worlds described by comics? For example, is it (fictionally) true, in some sense, that Captain Britain wore a clown nose? If not, then why do we take cover art seriously at all (at least, why do we take it seriously as a part of the comic)?

Of course, some comics artists are very aware of the complex role that cover art plays, and the narrative conflicts and tensions that can arise as a result. For example, John Byrne’s cover to The Sensational She-Hulk #37 notes that the Punisher, Spider-man, and Wolverine appear on the comic (but of course not in it). But do they appear on it? Presumably, to say that Spider-man genuinely appears on the cover of this issue of She-Hulk is to say that it is (fictionally) true of Spider-man that he (fictionally) carried out the actions depicted on the cover. But it is not clear that this is, in fact, the case.

So how do comic book covers work narratively?

What is a responsible and responsive method for situating nonfiction comics in their historico-political context(s)?

Do you teach nonfiction comics?  In which discipline(s)?  My biannual comics course—heavy on nonfiction—is offered as a cross-listed literature and communication/rhetoric upper-division elective for majors, and also serves as a recommended elective for art history and art education majors.  The course privileges structural and formal topics: students read comics theory steadily alongside our primary texts (Thierry Groensteen, Gillian Whitlock, WJT Mitchell, Hilary Chute, David Kunzle, Stuart Medley, and others), with some additional forays into visual studies, media and cultural theory and the occasional anomalous but relevant articles/excerpts from other disciplines.  Each time I teach the course, however, I find myself troubled by the simple question of historical/political context:  how much, in what manner, and why?  When teaching graphic works that address political, national and military situations in a Humanities course, what is a responsive and responsible method for selecting the types and quantity of supplemental materials (articles, lectures, documentaries, news footage, photographs, etc.) and the amount of time dedicated to situating the work in its historical, “real world” context?

Nuclear proliferation.  War.  Uprisings.  Regime change.  Territorial disputes.  Graphic narratives have become a vehicle for disseminating critical viewpoints on such matters, and often focus on particular regions, conflicts, peoples.  My students read Joe Sacco’s work (excerpts from various texts focused on different conflict zones); this year, we read from Footnotes in Gaza.  We also read Guy Delisle’s Jerusalem, as well as selections from Jean-Pierre Filieu and David B.’s Best of Enemies:  A History of US and Middle East Relations, Harvey Pekar’s Not the Israel my Parents Promised Me, as well as Jens Harder’s piece on the city of Jerusalem, “Ticket to God,” collected in the Avant-Verlag anthology, Cargo: Comic Journalism Israel/Germany. And those are just our Middle East selections.

How much to contextualize these works is not an abstract question for me.  Each time I teach comics that reference global events (for example, Foumiyo Kouno’s Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms – Hiroshima bombing, Josh Neufeld’s A.D. New Orleans:  After the Deluge- Hurricane Katrina, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis- regime change and revolution in Iran), I struggle with the right approach.  It’s not just a matter of will and preparation, either; I believe that a little knowledge can be more destructive than none, and that my feeble attempts at channeling a history professor for brief moments are inadequate to the circumstance and possibly deleterious.  Over the years, I’ve tried various approaches:  documentary excerpts, mini-lectures (since there is nothing quite like the barely informed lecturing to the ill-informed), cooperative learning activities in which groups of students “adopt” one of our nonfiction works and create a 20-minute “background” presentation for the class.  I am chagrined to admit that the student presentations were generally better—more nuanced and informative—than my mini-lectures, which tended to be fragmented, confusing and rather quirky in their focus.

Other things I’ve tried:  disseminating secondary readings (hoping they were actually read), news footage, guest lectures from knowledgeable colleagues (this, rarely, as it takes mad skills I don’t seem to have to plan for this in advance), and this year, a meta-discussion in which I did not attempt to situate, but rather invited my students into a discussion about what would be the best way to do this, and why (just as I am raising the question with you here).  I told my class about the various methods I have adopted over the years, and how unsatisfying each was.  Asking “what the work asks us to know/understand/research” in order to better apprehend its meaning and effects, I tried to stay text specific, acknowledging that different works beg different amounts and types of background knowledge.   Students noted that their readings were influenced by their relative degrees of ignorance/knowledge and conjectured that the five students who professed significant awareness of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict (vis-à-vis the sixteen who stated they knew little to nothing) surely must be interacting with our Middle East focused comics in a fundamentally different way from that of readers who take the work at face value with little ability to contextualize it.

Needless to say, it is not only with regard to teaching nonfiction comics that this issue has arisen for me as an English professor.  Literary works are never ahistorical, of course, and establishing various contexts in which to read a work (cultural, intellectual, historical, ethnic, etc.) is a natural part of what we do when we involve our students in the study of literature or art.  A postcolonialist colleague of mine, when I engaged her in discussion about this topic, confirmed that this is an integral aspect of her curricular planning.  She mentioned that she likes to ask students (most of whom are literature majors or minors) to think about which works seem to be “allowed” –in their various literature courses, in literary criticism they’ve read–to float untethered to original or other context (so-called “timeless” works, canonical Western European texts, etc.), and which ones (often those by writers of color or authors originating from non-European, non-North American countries) inevitably call up in American readers a problematic urge to historicize (and, thus, perhaps, limit/contain/ “other”) the work.  Implicitly, she was gesturing to the suspect nature of my very anxiety (i.e. why did it take comics on the Middle East situation, or Iran, or Japan to make me raise this issue)?  Why wasn’t it a pressing problem when teaching T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Jon Krakauer, Mary Oliver?

I would be interested to hear from readers who have insight into either aspect of the problem:  1) how do we conceive of a “responsible and responsive” approach to situating nonfiction comics in their historico-political contexts and/or 2) do you find this very impulse problematic?

Can Comics Teach us to How to Cook? (Part 2 of a series)

In this installment of the series on French-language comics food blogs I’d like to think about the food blog as a pop culture intersection or as a kind of mashup, to piggyback on Qiana’s February 24 post on 3bute and expansive vs. immersive reading. It goes without saying that gastronomy, like bande dessinée, is a significant facet of French identity. Perhaps less widely acknowledged is the fact that gastronomy has long been a battleground for France’s ongoing culture wars. In the 1970s, for example, the innovators of la nouvelle cuisine were in part inspired by global flavors, most specifically those of France’s former colonies. Detractors of the movement often used a language of cultural purism and thinly veiled racism, as Heather Mallory explains in her forthcoming A Cuisine in Revolt: Purity vs. Polution in the Construction and Aftermath of Nouvelle Cuisine. To show the degree to which the national understanding of “Frenchness” has shifted in recent decades I like to remind my students of the 2011 poll administered by the magazine Vie Pratique Gourmand wherein couscous ended up being voted the #3 favorite French dish. The poll suggests that French people think of couscous as French just as Americans tend to think of pizza as quintessentially American.

It’s true everywhere but perhaps even more so in France that one’s cooking and style of serving is an index of one’s cultural politics. The dinner table is always the site of multifarious cultural negotiations, always a mashup. This might be why one of the most popular food-oriented reality TV shows in France is focused on dinner parties rather than professional kitchens (with which the US is currently obsessed). Un dîner presque parfait [a nearly perfect dinner] features home cooks (and in the most entertaining season, food bloggers) who judge each other’s dinner parties based on flavor, presentation, and entertainment. The show’s participants are deliciously mean in their judgments and cultural biases frequently play a role in these judgments.

One of the funniest entries in Guillaume Long’s comics food blog, À boire et à manger, playfully imagines one of his meals as a mashup of Un dîner presque parfait and an album from the Titeuf series. He titles the blog post Un dîner à peu près parfait [a more or less perfect dinner] and his guests are the Swiss couple Mélanie and Philippe Chappuis [i.e. Zep], a renowned novelist and comics artist, respectively. Zep is famous in the francophone world for his Titeuf series, featuring an adolescent boy known for his comical misapprehensions of adult institutions and behaviors and for his signature use of the language (most famously expressions like “tchô” and “c’est pô juste”). The dinner becomes a surreal mashup as soon as Zep’s character joins them at the table bringing his characteristic expressions and adolescent sensibility to Guillaume’s very adult meal. The author serves a pink peppercorn salmon tartare accompanied with tagliatelle of lemon-marinated black radish as an appetizer, to which Titeuf responds “j’aime pô le poisson” [I don't like fish]. Throughout the blog post Mélanie is narrating and recording the entire dinner for her radio show and, when Guillaume serves the main course, orecchiette alla Barese, she describes the dish poetically as smelling like a horse’s coat after a brisk run, to which Titeuf responds “La transpi de chevôl. Pourri, ouais!” [Nasty awesome! Horse sweat!] At the end of the blog post Mélanie, Titeuf, and Philippe are all shown voting on the meal with passive-aggressive commentary and numerical ratings, just like the reality TV show. The final drawing is Zep’s, of Guillaume at the stove in front of a steam plume shaped just like Titeuf’s famous hair.

 

I just love how Guillaume’s dinner party becomes a mashup in this blog post. It points to the significance of gastronomy in French culture and to its connectedness to other forms of cultural production, from comics and TV to radio and the blogosphere. In what other ways might we think of the dinner table as a site of intersection or mashup? How else might comics artists use the dinner table to reflect on popular culture?

How do you teach a single comic in a literature class?

Stagger Lee by Derek McCulloch and Shepherd Hendrix (2006)

There’s a graphic novel that I may be teaching in two different courses this fall semester. The first class is devoted solely to comics, while the other is a literature class in which the graphic novel will be the only expression of the form. I’ve been thinking about how my teaching approaches will compare from course to course, so I’ve decided to use my post this week to invite others to share their experiences with these two types of pedagogical situations.

The more obvious differences revolve around time constraints: in a comics course, the students will arrive at the text with a deeper understanding of the history, terminology, and critical theories of comics, along with prior examples to compare. The circumstances change when a comic occupies a single unit in a course dominated by another medium like literatur. The broader history and analytical tools will need to be pared down to accommodate critical dialogue between the comic’s narrative content and the other materials on the syllabus. I’m always excited by the opportunity to devote a full semester to comics studies. But is this second approach really so inferior or less ideal than the first?

Teachers have all sorts of reasons for including just one comic on their required reading list that don’t necessitate a detailed historicization or an in-depth study of debates within the medium. We know colleagues who teach Maus in courses on trauma studies, Jewish literature, or animal studies. Or those use V for Vendetta to generate writing assignments in composition courses. We may worry, of course, that these instructors aren’t taking the study of the form seriously enough. But the single unit approach is one of the most common ways that high school and university students are introduced to the scholarly exploration of comics, with good reason. Do students in these classes need to know about Yellow Kid or the Comics Code? Does it matter whether or not they know where the gutter is?

In the case of Stagger Lee, the graphic novel that I’m assigning in both an African American comics class and a course in postmodern literature, I know the two groups will likely come away from this text with different lessons and reading experiences. I have found, though, that incorporating this graphic novel in a literature class has had a surprising benefit. In past semesters, I noticed that our class discussions are more attentive to cross-disciplinary relationships and students are better prepared to explore how issues such as narrative fragmentation, questions about authenticity, hybrid genres, and other postmodern concepts that we have previously studied in novels and poems are also expressed in the comics form. So perhaps rather than being concerned about the ethics of teaching a lone graphic novel in my literature class, I should try to incorporate more fiction in my courses on comics!

What has been your experience with these two types of teaching approaches when it comes to comics?