Broken Frontier

Well it’s that time of year again. The summer is winding down, and the next year of school is looming on the horizon. Soon, kids all across this fair country of ours will be back in classrooms, sitting for hours on end, bored out of their skulls. Similarly, teachers are currently winding down their vacations, getting prepared to go back to work and dreading every minute of it.

What does this return to school have to do with advocating comics? Well for me it means a great deal, for this is the first school year in over twenty years that I am not involved in this process. For many years I would look forward to August with a sense of dread, knowing that this month meant the return of homework. Even after I graduated from college for the last time, August filled me with anxiety, since all my entrance into the working world meant was switching which side of the desk I sat on. Oh, what chaos would erupt in classrooms if students were to realize that their teachers didn’t want to be back in school either?

However, as I said, this year I am neither student nor teacher, and so for the first time that I can recall, the words “back to school” mean nothing to me. It is a change that has had great effect on my comic advocacy, for this time of year always meant a renewal of efforts. When I was in college, I would look for new people in the dorms who might like to walk to the comic shop with me, hoping to invite them into the fold. When I was teaching college, I would pass out freebie comics to the students as they walked to class with feet dragging and shoulders slumped, wanting to provide a moment of escape for them before they had to deal with harsh reality again.

But this year, I am at a loss. This year my advocacy has no outlet. What can I do with the extra fifty copies of Batman: The 12-Cent Adventure that I ordered? I had hoped to give them away to students, but now they sit in a pile next to my computer, unread. They are without purpose, an opportunity for comics advocacy gone unfulfilled.

Or are they? It strikes me that just because I am not in school anymore doesn’t mean that my ability to use school as a place to advocate comics is at an end. Schools are filled with kids of all ages who are ideal candidates for comics advocacy. They desire stimulation of some sort, some kind of escape from the monotony of their days in the classroom, and comics can provide the kind of distraction they are looking for.

So how then can we take advantage of this opportunity if we are not involved in schools ourselves? Sure it’s easy if you’re a student; just bring the comics and read them at recess, passing them along to friends. Or if you’re a teacher, you can incorporate the comics into classroom learning; using them for a reading exercise is sure to engage the students’ interest more than most textbooks would. Even parents of students have valid reasons to give comics to their children’s classmates.

But what if you’re none of those things? How does the average person take advantage of this situation without seeming like a creep standing on the edge of the playground, just outside the fence, trying to lure kids into the back of your van? It’s simple, really. You ask the principal if you can help.

I guess most people don’t realize how drastically underfunded our public schools are, but they could always use a contribution of any kind. If you’re willing to donate time, money, or classroom materials, very few schools would turn away such a gesture. Now perhaps those Batman comics I mentioned above would not be the best thing to offer up to a class full of third graders, but there are plenty of comics out there that you can find, for cheap, that you could donate to one particular class, or perhaps the school library, to try to engage kids in the act of reading.

And perhaps what no one who reads this column has ever realized is that the act of advocating comics is in essence an educational task. You are encouraging someone to read. Sure, they might be reading the adventures of Spider-Man fighting against Dr. Octopus rather than a Shakespearean tragedy, but any kind of reading is better than none at all. Reading engages your imagination, enhances your vocabulary, and makes it easier for you to express yourself. Anyway we can help people to do that, through the medium of comics or through any medium there is, we should try to do so. That’s what this time of year is really all about.

(My apologies to my loyal readers for such a short installment this week, but this column is being written in my hotel room in Chicago, as I prepare to go to Wizard World tomorrow morning. If you’re going to be at the con, keep an eye out for me and stop and say hello. If you’re not going to be there, well you too should keep your eyes open here on the website for daily reports and updates on all the news from the con, and I’ll give you a full convention breakdown this time next week.)