Broken Frontier

For those who haven’t read it yet, last week’s column was the first part of this series, in which I detailed how I went about preparing to teach a class on comics. I’d recommend going back and reading it before starting here, not because it’s necessary, but because I like the attention.

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As I was preparing for my class on comics, I found that choosing material to teach was going to be a much more time-consuming task than I had believed it to be. Basically, this class was another opportunity for me to advocate comics to people, and like any advocacy opportunity, the choices I had to make on what books to teach had to be carefully thought out.

The material I was going to use had to be tailored to the audience that I would be facing. It’s always an important consideration to take into account; that the material you give to a new reader need not be something you even like. What matters most, if you really want them to stick with comics, is what those new readers might like or respond to. Therefore, it is vital to analyze your audience, gauge ahead of time what works they would be most likely to connect with.

Now with a comic’s class, it might be a natural assumption that the people who would sign up for such a class would be established comic geeks, but in my case, at least I knew that would not be the case. The general student body of my school did not contain many current comic collectors, and even the few comic fans I had come across were people that used to read comics but didn’t anymore. Surprisingly, this type of class make-up seems to be typical of those who teach classes on comics, from my correspondence with other teachers who use comics in the classroom.

A bit less typical would be the fact that it was very likely that there would be more women than men in my class. It is an idea that seems to fly in the face of any stereotype of what comics’ fans are. However, women at my school outnumber the men by more than half. In fact, the ratio of my general student body is two to one in favor of the ladies, so I had to imagine the ratio would be similar in my class as well. So I started planning for what to read going under the assumption that mine would be a general audience, one that would have a few fanboys in it but would mostly be made up of new readers.

With this type of uninitiated audience, I knew right away that my role as educator would require me to be argumentative, to play the part of an arbitrator or activist. To do the class at all would involve proving to my students that comics were serious stuff, making my case for their literary worth. Therefore, all material I chose had to have deeper significance; the works we read must involve characterization, symbolism, alternate points of view—something beyond the simple “epic struggle between good and evil.”

Similarly, just as I would have to illustrate that comics were serious, I would have to show that they were not trivial. This class was not going to be an easy A, as some students would undoubtedly surmise. “It’s a class about comic books,” I imagined the students saying. “How hard can it be?” And I must begrudgingly admit that the class would be more time-consuming than difficult. The amount of reading would take a while to get through, but it would not be hard, per se. However, it would require serious exploration and analysis of the books we read. The idea was not to sit around and read fluff all day; I wanted them to think.

To that end, I established some criteria early on in the decision-making process to help narrow my choices somewhat and still leave me with quality work. Most of these criteria I have already alluded to in a previous column about establishing a literary canon for comics, but I will elaborate on them here as well.

The syllabus would have to be comprised of representative authors from the field, and it would include as many famous works as possible. If my audience was going to be made up of primarily new readers, I wanted to hit them with the “classic” material by the best writers and artists that ever worked in the medium. It would also be important to try to draw them in with things they might already recognize or have some familiarity with due to its presence in pop culture.

Establishing a wide variety of genres would similarly be a vital part of the process. I wanted to expand my students’ horizons and show them that comics were more than heroes, as many new readers have a tendency to believe. But to completely throw out heroes would be going too far in the opposite direction. It would in essence be misleading them, allowing them to think that comics could only be serious if they were NOT about superheroes, which we all know is not the case. So I decided to explore several different types of comics, spending four weeks on heroes, four on realism, three on crime, and three on sci-fi, fantasy, and horror all rolled into one unit.

I felt the need to choose material that could be viewed as controversial as well. The class in my mind was going to be discussion-oriented, with less of me lecturing and more of the class bantering back and forth with their responses to the story. For that to happen, I needed some stories that would rattle their cages, break through their preconceived notions, and get them arguing.

By that same token, the stories had to have a certain depth of subject matter. Maybe it would be a story that explored an issue or social problem. Maybe it had a moral that the students could search out. Maybe it had at its heart an exploration of some kind of philosophical truth. Whatever it was, the stories I was going to use had to mean something and thus be thought provoking in some way.

My search was not made any easier by the fact that there are no anthologies that publish the best stories in comics, as in other literary fields. It’s a difficulty that I have previously discussed in a past column, but the heart of the matter is that it’s easier to put a course on poetry together because you can write to textbook companies and have them send you books of poetry for free. You can then choose which of those books contains the poems you want to teach and use it in your class.

Textbook publishers in fact send thousands of complimentary copies of their books to teachers each year. I personally receive dozens of books for free every semester on subjects as varied as composition or molecular biology (seriously, received one such book recently for reasons that are beyond me). The companies engage in this practice so much because they hope that the teachers will look at the book, like it, and then require their students to buy it, thus increasing their sales.

But there are no such books for comics, anthologies that contain many types of stories from many different publishers. Therefore, putting my material together was much more difficult than usual; I could not simply choose the book with the best stories in it. Instead I had to collect those “best stories” myself from ALL of comics, becoming my own textbook editor essentially. Confronted with such a Herculean task, I decided to go to the people for help, asking fans on various message boards (including DC’s boards, Millarworld, and the Bendis boards) for assistance in which stories met my criteria.

Many, many suggestions came in on what stories I should use in the hero genre. When it came time to decide which to keep, it was a simple matter of looking at a very long list of story titles and whittling it down, leaving only the best of the best. Yet when it came time for help on the other types of stories, I received very few suggestions (a fact which says something about the reading habits of most comic fans) and was left mostly on my own. Thus, when the class started, I was still not one hundred percent sure which stories we would use in the final unit.

Also, many of the suggestions given to me were great ideas, but not viable. In order to use a story, I had to have access to it. In case you haven’t noticed, comics are not universally available, and some of the best material out there is very difficult to track down. So, in order to use a story in my class, it either had to be in my collection, readily available in reprint, or something someone would be willing to photocopy and send to me.

The question left to answer then is what eventually was suggested and what I ended up using. But it is a question that readers will have to check back here next week to receive the answer in the “stunning conclusion” of my series on my course on comics.

To be continued…