Broken Frontier

I want to begin my column this week by thanking all those who voted in the recent “Fan Advocate Award” contest. The winner of the award was Chris Zeichman, who received a trade paperback of V for Vendetta in honor of his efforts to support the medium of comics. Kudos also go to Andrew Wheeler and Scott Hinze for their participation in the contest. Sorry guys, that you didn’t win, but you’re both still tops in my book.

It’s worth noting, however, that the contest itself has been over for weeks, yet my column has not appeared in that time. Why the delay? Part of it is, as my editor, Chris Hunter, would gladly tell you on my message boards, I am bad with deadlines just by nature. But mostly I have been absent for a while because of school. As most of my readers probably already know, I teach for a living, and the spring semester started for us just a few weeks ago in the middle of January.

So in the time of my absence, I’ve been getting back into the swing of things with my students, which of course involves a great deal of comics advocacy as well. In my last column, for example, I mentioned the display I created for the library at my college, which exposed every student who went to the library to a number of excellent graphic novels. But despite all the work that project took, it was just a drop in the bucket compared to the major form of comic advocacy I use at my school: the class I teach on comics.

All throughout my educational career, I worked on papers and proposals involving comics. I used a passage from Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud, for example, as part of a teaching demonstration while doing my undergraduate work, and in one class, Young Adult Literature, I did a presentation on how I would teach Marvels to high school students. So at the end of my first year of actual teaching, when it came time for me to decide what classes I wanted to teach the following school year, I discussed the idea of teaching a class on comics with another English teacher at my school. This colleague was very encouraging about the prospect, saying that he felt it would be a class that the students would enjoy, so I decided to start my preparations.

I had already read a lot of the subject matter itself of course, but as exposed as I had been to comics all my life, it still wasn’t nearly enough at that point for me to feel comfortable calling myself an expert. Basically, I was paranoid, afraid of being unable to connect the comics I would teach in the class to a deeper literary significance. For example, I’d read a lot of various comics from the major publishers, but most of it was stereotypical spandex stuff. Also, I’d not read near as many indies as I felt I needed to in order to have a comprehensive knowledge of the medium.

So I started dipping my toes into the waters of the independent publishers, looking at various genres and styles other than hero stories. I focused specifically on searching out realistic dramas in comics, and I quickly became enamored with the works of Chester Brown, Seth, Chris Ware, and many others whose work had heretofore gone unnoticed. Similarly, I went through Oni’s catalog of work and found several different styles of stories that might appeal to me, paying special attention to their works in the crime genre.

I also felt that I needed to read a lot more books about comics themselves to get a leg up on any comics theory that I could apply to the class. I had already read the major critical dissections available in Will Eisner’s Comics and Sequential Art and Graphic Storytelling, as well as, of course, Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics and its follow-up Reinventing Comics. Those books were a good foundation, but I wanted more.

To that end, I started doing searches on Amazon and on eBay for books that analyzed comics. Most of the books I found were long since out-of-print but, through auctions and used booksellers, I was able to find copies of all kinds of works. I found general outlines of the history of the industry such as Comic Book Nation and books that served as a breakdown of the cultural influence on the comics produced during a certain time period, like the way the comics of the ‘50s are explored in Cowboys, Commies and Jungle Queens. I looked at books that focused on individual characters, like Batman: Unmasked, or on certain creators, such as the many different analyses of Alan Moore’s body of work released on his fiftieth birthday.

I spent my entire first school year, from the fall of 2001 to the summer of 2002, digging through these materials in preparation for teaching the course. Reading all of those books was time-consuming, but it was also quite enjoyable. When I started to look into what it would take to create a course from scratch, however, I became disheartened. What most people outside of the educational field don’t know is that, even in college, instructors do not have total freedom over what they teach. The content decisions a teacher makes must fall within certain parameters, usually established by the school in coordination with state and federal guidelines, in order for a course to be approved. Before the class could even be considered, I’d have to decide what works I was going to use during the semester, create my syllabus, write justifications of the literary worth of all my materials, fill out paperwork and the like.

Basically, there was going to be a lot of red tape that I’d have to try to cut my way through, and at that point, the fall semester of 2002, it was going to be too much work to get the course approved for the following spring. Due to the fact that it would have to be reviewed and approved by a number of people above me, from my dean to the state accreditors, it wasn’t going to happen in time. The red tape had become more like a Gordian knot to me at that point.

But luckily, when I went back to my colleague and told him dejectedly about my situation, he revealed to me that the situation was not as bleak as I believed. It seems that my school had a loophole in its course listings that let me avoid having to jump through hoops to get the class on the schedule. Years ago, a course called “Topics in Literature” had gone through all the procedures needed to be approved with the idea that teachers down the line could choose the “topic” they wanted to teach. This course adhered to the rules already, and its content could change drastically from semester to semester. My colleague had used the course to teach detective fiction one year and Japanese literature the next. Therefore, it was easy for me to simply name the course “Topics in Literature: The Graphic Novel”, and it was added to the schedule without any hitches.

Now that the course was on the schedule for the spring, it was all downhill from there, since I already had in my mind how I wanted to go through the semester. We would read works from several different genres, each genre including a few short stories and one graphic novel. The students would then be tested on each genre in an all-essay format. The tests would be open book, because they would not include any questions that simply asked for basic information from the stories like character names or key events. Instead, the students would be required to demonstrate their comprehension of what we had read and show that they could analyze the stories, exploring their deeper meanings that lay beneath the surface.

Because these in-class readings would have to be limited due to the nature of the time constraints we were under, the students would also do two book reports on books they read outside of class. These oral presentations were designed with the intent to have the students summarize and evaluate the works they had read for the benefit of their fellow classmates. Thus, the class would be exposed to other graphic novels that they had not read but that perhaps they might be interested in tracking down on their own. The oral reports were to come at midterm and the end of the semester, and they would each be accompanied by a brief essay in which, instead of a simple plot summary, the students analyzed the content of the works they read.

Finally, in the last month of class, I would have guest speakers come to talk to the class. These lecturers would be people actually working within the industry who could share their knowledge of the inner workings of the medium to my students. We would set up the event as a panel discussion, so that I could moderate discussion and keep the conversation on the subject of comics as literature.

Yet, despite the fact that the course was mostly laid out already, the most important part of the planning stage still lay in front of me, and it would turn out to be the hardest task I had set for myself in regards to the course. The question that remained was deceptively simple: What should we read? But it was a question that was still not completely answered by the time the course began that following spring of 2003.

To be continued…