The Canon and the Cutting Edge: On Teaching the Graphic Novel

It has been nineteen years since Art Spiegelman’s Maus won a Pulitzer Prize Special Award. That watershed moment signaled to many that comics and graphic novels had gained the recognition that would allow them entry into academia. While comics did not quickly become a staple in the college catalog, scholarship on comics has flourished, and that has led to another watershed moment—the debut of the Comics and Graphic Narratives discussion group at the 2011 Modern Language Association convention. These days, classes dedicated to comics and graphic novels can be found at colleges and universities across the country, and Norton represents Fantagraphic Books, a private company based near Seattle that has published comics for more than twenty-five years. These developments suggest that the question of whether comics should be taught at colleges and universities is, at last, settled.

However, the acceptance of comics and graphic narratives into the literary canon may leave those of us who wrote dissertations on traditional print literature and are trained to teach text-only narratives at a bit of a loss. How do we teach graphic narratives in a way that acknowledges both the “graphic” and “narrative” in their form? It can be tempting to teach comics and graphic narratives as traditional print narratives that happen to have illustrations, but to do so is to ignore that graphic narratives have their own unique reading protocols and formal issues that make them different from print narratives. To teach graphic narratives as graphic narratives and not as special cases of traditional narratives, instructors must contend with not only the question of what texts they should teach but how they can approach teaching a vital and hybrid medium. Enter Teaching the Graphic Novel, a recent addition to the Modern Language Association of America’s Options for Teaching series edited by Stephen E. Tabachnick. The book—divided into five parts: “Theoretical and Aesthetic Issues,” “Social Issues,” “Individual Creators,” “Courses and Contexts,” and “Resources”—is an immensely practical guide for anyone faced with teaching graphic narratives, whether in classes dedicated to the graphic novel or as additions to other literature courses. Charles Hatfield reminds us in the first essay of the book that “often we’re told that we must learn to walk before we can run,” but the spirit of Teaching the Graphic Novel is one that makes plunging into comics a little less daunting.

Tabachnick begins his introduction with the somewhat provocative claim that “it is rare for a new genre to appear in any form. With the emergence of the graphic or comic book novel, precisely that phenomenon has been happening before the excited gaze of teachers of both literature and the visual arts” (1). Tabachnick is right. There is something exciting about teaching a medium that is still evolving in leaps and bounds. His claim also brings to the fore that because graphic narratives are an emerging genre or form, teaching them is doubly difficult. As Tabachnick makes clear in his survey of the history of comics in America, graphic narratives are not purely a “cutting-edge” medium. Rather, comics and graphic narratives already have an identifiable historical development with roots that go back to at least the 1890s in America, and earlier still in Europe and Japan. At the same time, the publication of really good comics and graphic narratives seems to increase every year, and that rapid proliferation underlines the fact that being emergent is actually an identifying mark of the genre itself. Because graphic novels are relatively new in the scope of literary history and the canon, they are not likely to be represented by more than one course at any given college or university. This means that a course on comics and graphic narratives must somehow negotiate between teaching the already established historically important texts and representing the still-emerging aspects of the genre.

I regularly find myself caught up in this negotiation between representing the history of graphic narratives versus their emergent nature. When...