Teaching the Graphic Novel: Comics in the Classroom

A Particularly Stirring graphic novel, Howard Cruse's Stuck Rubber Baby—about life in Birmingham, Alabama, between the Bay of Pigs and the assassination of JFK—proved to be overwhelmingly the most popular book year after year in my lecture course, "The Sixties Without Apology." After I retired, my literal successor (he occupies my old office) in the American Civilization Department at Brown University caps his "Graphic Novels" course at 200 students or enrollment would be much larger. This clearly marks a trend, and there is every reason to believe the enthusiasm is similar from the Ivy League to the community college down to the high school and the Young Adults section of public libraries.

But what does it mean? There's a good question. We are hardly at the beginning of figuring out what comics, now evidently an accepted element of the literary or artistic canon (no one quite seems to know which), may identify or signify for the public or intellectuals. But perhaps we are closer to what it may mean to the classroom, because we have some experience already, and we are destined, like it or not, to have a lot more in the next few years.

In Teaching the Graphic Novel, editor Stephen E. Tabachnick has a problem because the area is so complicated and constantly expanding. But his thirty-three authors touch upon a great number of relevant points. For myself, as an editor of a halfdozen comic art nonfiction volumes and a repeated collaborator with Harvey Pekar, there are nevertheless wide ranges of notable comic art and teaching approaches that do not seem to be perceived (or taught) here. The notion, for instance, that social history or for that matter oral history might be taught through comics is nearly missing entirely and evidently less relevant here than literary studies (and literary exercises) in graphic form; the presence of multiple cultures and cross-culturalism emphasized by the rapidly growing transnationalism of comics receives a nod (readers may wish to go to other scholarly volumes, such as Comics in Translation, edited by Federico Zenetin) but not much more; the sense of historical markers, the "old comics" versus "underground comix" versus "alternative comics" and today's "comic art" remains mostly vague. The teachers represented in this volume are taking on particulars in their own fashion, in their own classrooms—as of course they must.

But this is a strength as well as a weakness. One of the long-distance runners of comic art interpretation, Joseph Witek, weighs in with a challenge, "Seven Ways I Don't Teach Comics," essentially a refusal to force categories upon students, urging that they learn to create those categories with the teacher. Dana A. Heller has a particularly compelling version of teaching practice: doing American studies across the global map through Art Spiegelman's Maus, and utilizing the book as a way to understand American studies, a formerly imperial approach now finding a new sense (Maus is taught alongside Death of a Salesman) of melancholy at the center of the media (as well as military) empire, "the bastard child of art and commerce" (quoting Spiegelman) that reflects the vernacular internationalism of the new century. It's not a happy story, not even for the United States where the Holocaust did not take place. But it's a story that needs telling. So do the assorted stories of women artists, historically scarce, better represented than women comic readers, but now enjoying a somewhat improved situation with a few shining stars (Marjane Satrapi, Alison Bechdel, Lynda Barry) cited here.

Somewhere between the noir worlds of Watchman and the melancholy of artist Chris Ware, anxiety and loneliness become vivid tropes. Do former (or current) readers of superhero comics and manga grasp this higher level of interpolation, or will they grasp it as the teacher leads? More very, very good questions. Perhaps the answers depend to no small extent upon unsubtle issues raised by Chris Matz in "Supporting the Teaching of the Graphic Novel: The...