Why do I teach comics?
I don’t know, why don’t you just ask me? Because apparently
I fool [students] into acquiring a decent approximation of expertise by providing them with source material that they believe they can become expert in. They’ll happily read eight chapters from Understanding Comics and memorize the 70 odd bits of critical vocabulary contained therein, whereas if I asked them to do something similar with Ciceronian rhetoric their anxiety would preclude the possibility of them ever feeling like they could master the material.
Or so I say!
I take it most of you are already familiar with my work on the medium, but for those who aren’t, I’ll throw some links below the fold.
- American Born Chinese - Gene Luen Yang
- Blankets - Craig Thompson
- Fun Home - Alison Bechdel
- Ghost World – Daniel Clowes
- Kick-Ass (I) – Mark Millar
- Kick-Ass (II) – Mark Millar
- Planetary/Batman: Night on Earth - Warren Ellis
- 30 Days of Night - Steve Niles
- The Walking Dead (word-specific panels)
- The Walking Dead (picture-specific panels) – Robert Kirkman
- War is Boring – David Axe
- Watchmen (panel construction) (I) – Alan Moore
- Watchmen (panel construction) (II) – Alan Moore
- Watchmen (responsible film criticism) – Anthony Lane
- Watchmen (unfilmable film filmed) – Zak Snyder vs. Alan Moore
- Watchmen (students as murderers) – Alan Moore
- Watchmen (Dr. Manhattan as a figure of the reader) – Alan Moore
Why would I pay thousands of dollars for my kid to read fucking comic books? What’s next, are they going to have classes on video games too?
No wonder our country is going down the shitter if our idea of “higher education” is reading picture books.
Oh my yawn. Better trolls, please.
I’ll bet SEK even teaches in the vulgar tongue, rather than Greek or Latin like God intended. I told people that teaching Aristotle would lead to this, but did they listen?
Preach it, brother.
+1
Sorry you’re dumb and don’t know things about art.
We have degrees in video games now, because there’s this thing called the video game industry that wants people trained in graphic design, programming, and project management specifically for video games.
Imagine that!
Don’t look now, but a professor at the University of Minnesota has been using comic books to teach physics since 2005. Also, one of the ways I learned French in high school was trying to read untranslated Astérix comics.
It’s okay. I’ll wait here until you think of something else foolish to say.
Yes because you wouldn’t want your children to have access to a medium that dates back to cave paintings in France. Comics have been around, in one form or another, for millenia. Many of the comics of today are richly layered stories with beautiful artwork.
Besides, it’s actually a good way to teach multiple subjects with one text. Art appreciation, theory of mind, critical thought and of course, ethics. So really you’d be getting more for your money teaching comics. (Try reading Watchmen one time. Time Magazine rated it as one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, you know.)
Look up the circulation figures of comics before Frederic Wertham and the Senate got their hands on them (the late thirties to the mid-fifties) versus now, they’ll knock you on your ass.
Next up: video games as a major.
Trillion-dollar industry. Why do conservatives hate capitalism?
I don’t videogame (to speak of) or attend even six movies a year, but judged by their TV ads, videogames seem more thoroughly fleshed out and plotted than movies lately.
I happily confess and take full responsibility for what my mind makes happen to JenBob as (s)he moves between comment boxes through the gutter (here, light yellow, not white). Closure, indeed.
+1
PROSPECTIVE EMPLOYER: So….I see you majored in Women’s Studies and Second-Rate State University. What are your skills, exactly?
SEK’S FORMER STUDENT: I can deconstruct Heterosexist Privilege through the lens of Queer Theory, and analyze the White Male Power Structure.
PROSPECTIVE EMPLOYER: …..
SEK’S FORMER STUDENT:Uh…uh…I learned how to read comics in this one class I took!
PROSPECTIVE EMPLOYER: Have you considered a career as a fry cook instead?
Should be AT Second-Rate State University.
You want to get in a playwright competition with me, JenBob? Do you really think that’s a wise idea?
I think it would be fucking hilarious.
Agreed. Back in my day, we knew what ideas were worthy, and which ones were not. Sure, we had to burn a few of the students, but God will know His own, as the kids are wont to say.
Shit, Anonymous, I figured you’d be glad that so many knucklewits were taking themselves out of the pool of employables. Your kids won’t make any such mistakes, and will waltz into that corner office before they’re twenty-eight.
Well, I’m not Scott, and I sepeak subject to his correction, but it seems to me that Scott is not really teaching comics–he’s using comics as a tool to teach rhetoric. Comics work well for this, becasue they are familiar and accessible. You could teach rhetoric from Joyce or Proust, instead, I suppose, but then you’d have to spend most of your time trying to get your students to grasp the material well enough to see the points you are trying to make about rhetoric.
Algebra is too complicated. Let’s teach them simple counting instead, right? It’s more “accessible”.
The dumbing-down of education continues.
Algebra is too complicated.
You want to use the mathematics of the Mohammedans? What next, zero? Back in my day, we taught the Trivium and Quadrivium, like God intended. God will not be mocked, Jennie.
All your replies are making my day, just fyi.
Agreed. Eventually I want to know which regular gets the credit.
The smart money is on Mal.
Your suggestion that I might ever use a name other than my own wounds me to the core. As exciting as it would be to have been a character in this intriguing Whodunit, I’ve been tied up for the past week reliving the old days on the Grassy Knoll, visiting with colleagues at Area 51, and checking on my dear friend Jimmy Hoffa. Jimmy still can’t believe it’s been 48 years since Paul McCartney died. As the kids nowadays are wont to say, whilst standing on my lawn, not studying the Trivium and Quadrivium, like God intended.
Mal is Prof. Filler?
Or Brian Leiter
Smart money hell, this is one of Mal’s oldest handles. I recall him busting it out in other education threads. It’s just been awhile.
I think Hogan has used it as well. I know that once ʾAbū l-Walīd Muḥammad bin ʾAḥmad bin Rušd and Étienne Tempier had a long debate over who was to blame over JenBob’s stupidity, and I was not Tempier then.
No, that was me. I. Whatever. Grammar is so 1265.
That thread was fun. I wish I could find it again. I can’t for the life of me remember why I decided to be Averroes.
When people teach maths they often take examples (and motivation for actual research) from real life and other disciplines.
Probably you are not aware of it, but probability theory was born to study games of chance…
And student’s t test was invented for measuring beer quality. (Yes, I know, beer production is gainful employment. But don’t tell the troll, who hears “comics” or “video games” or “beer” and reacts just like Homer Simpson.)
The best part of this comment is the way rea dumbed down SEK’s original point for you, yet somehow it still doesn’t seem accessible enough.
“Reading Aristotle is too complicated, we should just teach them to read comics first!”
Doesn’t this actually make sense? Did you learn Calculus before you learned to count?
God rea why are you feeding the troll? He isn’t interested in a discussion of the educational benefits of situated learning, he’s mocking SEK and trying to piss people off. You’ll only get non-responses from him like the stupid “why don’t they teach counting” non-response. I mean the jackass doesn’t even know that 1) counting actually is taught and that 2) it’s even taught at the college level and that 3) the study of counting is required for a number of majors (including computer science, though it goes by the fancy-pants name of “Combinatorics” rather than the “study of counting”).
He’s an ignorant troll who just posts inflammatory crap to get a response. The only responses worth giving to trolls are comedic mockery (I like the responses from “Étienne Tempier” for that, with the added bonus that I suspect the troll doesn’t know who Étienne Tempier was and won’t figure out how thoroughly he’s being mocked by them until he tries the Google).
the troll doesn’t know who Étienne Tempier was
Are you telling me they don’t even teach who I was any more? Has the Holy Mother Church lost dominion?
Heretic! The Church is the body of Christ in the world, and will endure until He rises again.
Did you just reply to yourself …. and call yourself a heretic?
That was an impostor.
Also too, the troll involved probably believes that tax cuts raise revenue. When business schools stop peddling stale Reaganomics then I guess we can have a discussion about appropriate curricula.
I was going to joke about how I’m sure it would be just fine for SEK to teach a comic Atlas Shrugged, but apparently libertarians are like those fundamentalist Mooslims when it comes to images of Hank Rearden.
Actually in the field I ended up in, women’s studies would have been a lot more useful than my actual major.
I almost became a fry cook in Sacramento. Instead I went off to London to get a PhD in history. Then I found myself unemployed for three years before being permanently exiled from the US.
“I could have been a saucier by now.”
Don’t knock it. In the next few weeks, I may turn into a line-cook in Baton Rouge, and that’s a best-case scenario. There’s no shame in working a brigade.
Well I would not have been working in a brigade. I would have been one lone guy cooking breakfast and lunch dishes to put behind the glass at Cafe Melange.
I’ve never run a kitchen by myself — people were probably afraid I’d set it on fire — so I’m not sure which is worse.
They’re using comic books in high schools too:
http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle/197512181.html
The students in a New Literature class at Wayzata High School have been chided for a surprising reason: Not putting their books down.
“I’m telling them not to read ahead,” said teacher Meaghan Decker. “They’re having the hardest time with it because they love these books so much.”
What they’re reading is just as surprising: “The Death of Superman,” “Batman: The Dark Knight Returns” and “Watchmen.”
Long thought of as easy reads with little substance, comic books have entered the public school lexicon. Originally used to help struggling readers and English-language learners, the books are now used in elementary classrooms and college lecture halls.
The recently implemented Minnesota Academic Standards called for the use of new forms of media — including graphic novels — in the curriculum. And educators nationwide are embracing them as an essential genre in a media-dominated society.
“The graphic novel can no longer be ignored as a passing fad,” said Heidi Hammond, a professor at St. Catherine University who studies the graphic novel. “It is here to stay.”
There’s research to bolster that claim. A study by the University of Oklahoma found that graphic novels engage students, encourage reading and increase complex thinking skills. The study, which measured how students retain information, found that students who read material in a comics format, as opposed to text-only, retained more information verbatim. A full 80 percent of the students in the study also said they preferred the comics.
Will Eisner’s M16A1 rifle manual.
Please tell me that’s in print.
More or less, yeah. Not sure how easy it is to get a copy if you’re not in the military, though.
I have one copy that a friend sent me because it had a Joe Kubert cover, and he knew I was a Kubert fan…
we have a copy here, in our library. a complete run of PM, actually, as well as almost all the rest of Eisner’s “educational” comics.
Didn’t ‘Welcome Back Kotter’ try to use soft-core porn to help
struggling readers?
If not, then I invented the idea.
Where’d you pick up the great new troll?
He’s actually the Earth-2 version of SEK himself.
New?
Is that sarcasm? Anonymous is a terrible troll for this board. If this were an education board or a comic book board he’d be passable because that first comment alone would generate a thousand responses in either situation which might allow for some low comedy (or at least he’d be doing his job as a troll and pissing people off).
Here though he’s just lame. He’s certainly no RICK VENEMA, COLONIAL HEIGHTS, VA that’s for sure.
My first thought on reading your list of links was “Kick Ass? Seriously? You’d include THAT in a list that contains otherwise excellent work? But then I clicked through, read how you’re teaching it and remembered that I had the EXACT SAME REACTION when you initially posted about it. And that how you described teaching it made me wish that I had been taking your class. So thanks for the reminder!
Mark Millar and his various pathologies are practically worthy of a course in and of themselves.
Comics scholars need to learn how to say no to McCloud. Groensteen, Gabilliet, even Madden and Able, but McCloud is simply preposterous.
also, I like the reading list, but I would substitute Ice Haven for Ghost World, and add some nonfiction (Sacco) too.
… huh?
He’s been wrong about a number of things, of course, but please to be explaining how both Understanding Comics and Making Comics are preposterous. Especially the second one, which is basically an accessible technical manual.
but he’s not using Making Comics, and his students aren’t comics artists.
UC is simply bad theory. Chapter 4 should be torn out, and then the rest of the book would be acceptable to 7th graders. And as an alum, I can assure you UC Irvine students, freshmen rhet comp or not, are not 7th graders.
There is way too much critical theory on what comics are, how they work, and what’s going on within/between panels to rely on the naive, uncritical, and ahistorical work of Scott McCloud, especially in this day and age.
just one comics studies lecturer’s opinion.
UC is simply bad theory.
Which often makes for the best pedagogical tool: it’s accessible as a starting point, but provides many opportunities for argument. As a UCI alum, presumably of the English and/or critical theory sort, you should know that we don’t teach “good” theory here, but “theory,” and that we start with Plato on the function and purpose of the poet and move forward. Not because Plato is the last word in all things theoretical, but precisely because he isn’t, at least not any more than Joshua Reynolds or Jacques Derrida.
Your opinion isn’t much when it’s stated as a flat fact without specific examples or links.
Could I just say, SEK, that I’m still eagerly awaiting the long-ago promised posts about “Peanuts.” :)
If you could squeeze in anything about “Krazy Kat,” that’d be awesome, too, as I’m currently reading through a bunch of Herriman’s comics…
Thirded.
Where is the love for Calvin and Hobbes?
C&H, while awesome in every way, would never have existed without Peanuts.
and The Flaming Carrot or Reid Fleming: The World’s Toughest Milkman
Yes, yes, yes – the unparalleled humor, pure genius!
I started it over Christmas break then got wrapped up in the quarter. Soon enough … though apparently not soon enough for some people. (Which I like, just so you don’t think I’m being sarcastic, this idea that people want to read my opinion on something.)
SEK:Lucy::Peanuts posts:football
Discuss.
I am become performance art, the destroyer of blogs.
Could I just say, SEK, that I’m still eagerly awaiting the long-ago promised posts about “Peanuts.” :)
AUGH! I mean, same here!