Broken Frontier

This column is the conclusion of a three-part series on the biggest advocacy opportunity in my life: the course I teach on comics. In case you missed it, you can go back and read the previous two parts of this series here and here.

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When it came down to choosing what stories to use for my course on comics, it wasn’t really as difficult to narrow things down as I made it seem in previous columns. I looked at what stories I had come up with on my own and what had been suggested to me by others. Then I picked from them what was available for me to use and what would work best with the other stories I was teaching, and those stories ended up as part of my class.

Surprisingly, I managed to scrape together enough material so that there was plenty of great stuff I had to leave out simply due to time restraints. Long after the course had actually gotten under way, I was still finding stories that I felt would work in the class, as well as receiving more and more suggestions from friends on various message boards. In the end, the variety of outstanding material was much more voluminous than I might have imagined.

It was due to this wealth of subject matter that I made the decision, before my first semester teaching the class had even ended, to teach the class again the following year. At present, I am teaching the class for the second time, and I am using all-new stories completely different from the ones I had used the first time around. It has meant as much prep time involved as there had been the first time I taught the class, but it has kept the class fresh for me. Plus, some of the students who took the class the first time audited the class and are taking it again, thus getting to read new stuff.

So I had enough short stories and graphic novels to teach the class twice, but that wasn’t all. We also had a reading list in the class from which the students had to choose two books from different genres which they would read before summarizing and evaluating them for the class. This assignment would expose the students to even more graphic novels, the ones they read themselves and the ones that the other students in the class presented book reports on. Over the course of the year between when I first taught the class and now, I bought and read enough new books that the list I created for this current semester is mostly made up of new material as well.

In my first semester of the course, the novels I taught were: Marvels by Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross, Road to Perdition by Max Allan Collins and Richard Piers Rayner, Jar of Fools by Jason Lutes, and V for Vendetta by Alan Moore and David Lloyd. These novels adhered somewhat to the qualities of “classic” works I mentioned previously, since you can’t deny that Alan Moore is a big name in comics. Also, the books were ones that the students might have some knowledge of already, Road to Perdition through the film of the same name and Marvels due to the central figures it focused on. Finally, it is undeniable that each of these major works has a lot of depth to it. Marvels explores the historical contexts of the Silver Age, Road to Perdition the nature of father-son relationships. Jar of Fools has great introspective insights into isolation explored through the use of many symbols, and the aspects of terrorism in V for Vendetta have a special significance in our modern society.

I must admit however that the biggest of the big-name stories, the most “classic” works, I had shied from the first time around, simply out of fear I would not be able to do them justice. Feeling more confident after having taught the course once, I was comfortable then using works that required a little more out of me as a teacher and out of my students as readers. The novels I’m presently teaching include Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Sin City by Frank Miller, I Never Liked You by Chester Brown, and Sandman: Season of Mists by Neil Gaiman and Kelly Jones (among others).

As of this writing, we have only made it through Watchmen, which was a quite frightening book to tackle. The novel is gargantuan, the plot labyrinthine, yet I believe we covered it with aplomb. We delved into the narrative structure of the novel, how its rich layers compare to the complexity of the plot. Character motivation was another big factor in our discussions of the book, since the reasons for many of the people to become heroes were quite ignoble.

Last year the short stories we looked at included “Shoot,” “Soul of a New Machine,” “In Dreams,” “The Coyote Gospel,” and “The Anatomy Lesson” among many others. “Shoot” was one of the most controversial stories we analyzed, it being the censored school shooting story from Warren Ellis’s run on Hellblazer. It worked well with another Ellis tale, “Business” from Transmetropolitan, to explore the implications of parenthood in modern society.

Currently, we have read only so far into the hero genre (although by the time you read this, we’ll have covered more of realism as well). “What’s So Funny about Truth, Justice and The American Way?” garnered some good discussion about the subjectivity involved in drawing the line between hero and villain. We also used the stories “Mortal Clay” and “Imaginary Friends” (the latter another sample from Grant Morrison’s brilliant run on Doom Patrol) to explore the possibility that there is no reality other than what we create through our perceptions. I’m hoping to hear more interesting discussion when we get to “Caricature” and “Dylan and Donovan” in the realism unit, something akin to the discussion of adolescence we engaged in last year when reading part of Ghost World. Also I’m sure that “Ramadan” from Gaiman’s Sandman will foster interesting conversations based on the power of storytelling, while “Rite of Spring” will inspire deeper thoughts on the nature of the way love defines as humans. 

The book reports of course are always interesting since the students’ feedback on the book plays such a large part of it. It was odd last year to hear from one student who had an incredibly adverse reaction to The Killing Joke, but one girl’s incredibly positive response to I Never Liked You was what inspired me to make it our realism graphic novel this time around. This year Blankets has been added to the reading list, and I can’t wait to hear what a student thinks of it.

This course on comics has been as much of a learning experience for me as it has been for the students. It has been a crash course in the effectiveness of comics advocacy, and it has educated me a great deal on the fantastic possibilities within comics themselves as well. It is with incredible excitement that I look forward to each day the class meets, wondering what new surprises they will have in store for me as I bring the next story into class. My hope is that next year I’ll be able to teach the class a third time, with yet again new stories to immerse myself in like warm bathwater as I introduce my class to them.

I hope that this series of columns has enlightened my readers somewhat on the nature of how I go about my role as a comics advocate. However, I do realize that this subject matter is not such that it is something everyone can relate to or connect with; therefore, I hope next week to return to more typical topics. Still, I do hope these columns foster some discussion on my section of the message boards here at Broken Frontier. If anyone is reading this now that has similarly put together a course on comics, I would love to hear from you. Just pop by my boards and weigh in on the subject, or feel free to e-mail me as well.

I’ll be back next week with more ideas about advocacy. In the meantime, you can say hello to me at Orlando’s Mega Con on Saturday, March 6th and Sunday, March 7th. Hope to see you there!