I’ll sound like a broken record soon, but time and time again I encourage most people I see to start reading comics and graphic novels. If there’s at least a hint of interest in simply reading, as in prose fiction, the threshold of picking up a comic book, or a closed graphic narrative, is not far away.
And as the dwindling demand of mainstream comic books is seeing its decline, probably the earliest one to go in the slow, steady, inevitable decline of all print media, I’m concerned.
Losing comics is like losing an entire language—no, imagine losing television. Losing cinema. Losing plays. If that was gone from the combined cultural context of a society. The worst case scenario is, in the 5,000+ year history that sequential art has existed on Earth, that it’s going to die out because of the social contexts and mass preconceptions and the pop-culture pothole it can’t seem to get out of.
The cynic in me broods, but I have high hopes. Despite the marginal attention it gets in its actual domain—minus the adapted properties other mediums suck out of it, providing no aid in pushing a potential consumer base into the works that inspired such properties, I have hope that comics may survive—nay, thrive, if it can climb its way out of those social and cultural barriers it’s been trapped in for the last 20 or so years.
I just finished reading Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud, a cartoonist and a comics theorist—yes, I consider it an actual term, like it deserves to be, and the things it taught me about the medium—the artform—is that there’s way more importance to what it has to offer and and what it provides to the literary world than I originally thought, and most likely more than anyone of my peers or elders think.
It’s a great textbook, a great study and a great tool. If you have any doubts picking up a comic, whether for the potential self-ridicule or judgmental peers, this book quells those anxieties. It made me feel privilege to be a fan, a participant, in the medium of graphic storytelling. It’s a special kind of medium. Like no other.
So, in wondering why there’s not more attention to it, I tried searching for any kind of academic presence towards the medium, because I know old professor-types still read comics no matter how sophisticated they want to seem. Hell, some may embrace it.
Like this guy.
Henry Jenkins – “Comics and Graphic Storytelling: A Sample Syllabus”
He teaches at the University of Southern California, and his students are lucky.
There are programs at SCAD that teach sequential art, and may art schools around the world also offer sequential art programs of study or related courses, which is awesome—no matter how small it is, the comics industry and consumer base will always look for, and find, new artists, inkers, pencillers, letterers and the like.
But teach the academic worth of comics and graphic storytelling as a literary medium, as far as I can tell, is a far-off dream. At my school at least, no such courses exist, sure they may be touched upon by professors who want to spice up their syllabi with ‘fun’ comic book topics. Most pop culture courses refer to comics of staples of Western identity, but most of the time it ends there.
Where’s the deconstruction of Alan Moore’s iconography and character symbolism in Watchmen? Art Speigelman’s mastery of storytelling craft with Maus? The superficial beauty and representation of intimacy through line, shape, and panelling in Craig Thompson’s Blankets? The history and source behind the cultural contexts that characters like Superman, Batman, or Archie provide?
Not in textbooks your school makes you buy, that’s for sure. Jenkins in his proposed syllabus provides Understanding Comics as required reading among Will Eisner’s great Graphic Storytelling & Visual Narrative (that inspired McCloud’s book), and a great sort of graphic novel examples: Batman: The Killing Joke, Persepolis, The Unwritten.
If these names are new to you, Google them. Now. Learn. Teach yourself. Indulge in this medium, for the sake of its preservation and cultivation. So you can read comics in a classroom, and no one is allowed to be ashamed, because there’s no reason you should be.
Maybe, put down the Hemingway and the Plath and the Dostoyevsky and pick up some Alan Moore, some Grant Morrison, some Charles Shultz.
Just pick up a damn comic, and be proud you’re reading it.
The schools might follow suit.
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