I Am NOT the Beastmaster

Last Semester: Comics Across Cultures

I didn't have the time to write about this at the time, but thanks to a last-minute schedule adjustment I had the opportunity to teach a second class on comics and graphic novels last spring. This one fell under the category of a "Fiction Across Cultures" class, giving me the opportunity to teach comics from around the world--even if about half of them aren't fiction. Here's the reading list:

Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics
Alan Moore and David Lloyd, V for Vendetta
Art Spiegelman, Maus I and II
Joe Sacco, Palestine
Rutu Modan, Exit Wounds
Hergé, The Adventures of Tintin vol. 6 (Calculus Affair, Red Sea Sharks, Tibet)
David B, "The Armed Garden" and "The Veiled Prophet"
Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis
Osamu Tezuka, Phoenix vol. 3 (Yamato/Space)
Moto Hagio, "Bianca," "A Drunken Dream," and "Hanshin: Half-God"
Yoshiharu Tsuge, "Screw-Style"
Guy Delisle, Pyongyang

Plus the usual assortment of reserve readings, including comics (Chris Ware's "Thrilling Adventure Stories/I Guess," Richard McGuire's "Here," Alan Moore and Rick Veitch's "How Things Work Out") and comics criticism (Bart Beaty, Jonathan Frome, Dylan Horrocks, Maggie Gray, R.C. Harvey, Joseph Witek, Adam Rosenblatt and Andrea Lunsford, Ariel Kahn, Jean-Marie Apostolides, Hillary Chute, and Paul Gravett).

It's a shame I wasn't able to write about these classes week by week--I thought they were even more successful than the American comics class last year. Then again, with Hergé, Tezuka, Sacco, Rutu Modan, and David B on the syllabus it's hard to go wrong.

No idea when the next comics class will come up, but with two in two years I'm not complaining.

Week 13: Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely, We3

Okay, if you were keeping count it's technically week 17 by now. Or maybe 18? So this post will have to pull double duty as the final review.

I don't have a whole lot of new comments to share about We3, especially considering I first started thinking about it right here back in the day. The close readings are going in the Morrison book and the discussions of grand pedagogical purpose will be necessarily short since there was no grand pedagogical purpose to its inclusion on the syllabus. This was the book I assigned purely for myself, to try out Morrison in the classroom, and as a quick read for a week when I knew the students' attention would more properly be focused on their final papers.

This isn't to say that We3's presence in the class was completely devoid of meaning or design. The defiantly unanthropomorphized animals played off well against the more traditional (but equally unfunny) animal characters of Maus, American Born Chinese, and even the monkey chorus of "Human Diastrophism," and the discussions about language's role in the construction of the animals' identity served me well as a dry run at translating my take on the series into an academic setting. But by its late placement in the semester this was always going to be a week devoted to honing skills, not cutting new teeth.

After spending the semester getting to the point where (Ware excepted) we could largely dispense with the formal close readings in our discussions, Quitely's pages brought us right back to panel layouts and pacing, though with a full semester's experience behind us. Dissecting those scenes of the animals in combat, or identifying the momentary suspension of the panel grid when they first escape the base, or even parsing something as relatively simple as the opening scene to show how Morrison and Quitely convey information with only a few rudimentary written symbols, was the equivalent of a comic book master class. I knew I'd chosen the right book when the first class period ended and I'd barely gotten through a couple of scenes. I had no doubts that We3 could fill a week--if anything, the struggle was to take the remaining discussions beyond pure form.

I did notice that a lot of the final papers tended to attribute the book to Quitely, not Morrison, probably a sign of that close attention to his technique--whereas the exam essays tended to refer to the book as Morrison's work, probably because the particular question most students chose asked them to think about the animal portrayals that were more clearly written into the script. That kind of shift in emphasis didn't come up with any of the single-artist graphic novels, of course, but even Watchmen tended to be "Moore and Gibbons' Watchmen" whereas the division of labor in mainstream American comics seemed to be a lot more evident in the students' writing about We3.

That difference in production methods ended up informing one of the most unexpected pleasures of assigning this book. The first comment on the first day of discussion touched on an area I had absolutely not considered teaching--a student suggested We3 was a good representative of the current production aesthetic of mainstream American comics and that quickly turned into an off-the-cuff lecture on different (industrial vs. artisan) modes of production that ended up providing a framework for thinking about the entire semester's reading list. And right before finals, too! Like the Watchmen discussions of many weeks earlier (held in some strange, half-forgotten, snow-packed wasteland), that moment of unplanned expertise was about as clear an indication as I've ever had on exactly where my specialization lies. It's pretty clear that the "sideline" of comics scholarship took over the main line some time ago, as it would have had to; seven years of grad school and nine years in the profession can't compare to a lifetime of reading comics. It was another welcome sign that I was right where I needed to be, teaching exactly the course I needed to be teaching.

The wonderful thing about this semester was that many of my students apparently felt it was exactly the course they needed to be taking. There's always an advantage in teaching a room full of self-selected students--nobody was gritting their teeth and suffering through a required course--but I began the semester with some worries that I might have students who thought a class on comics would be an easy elective. Those worries were never borne out. The class brought just as much passion to the course as I did, right up to the very end, and I probably didn't need to worry about flagging attentions in the final weeks.

I also took great pleasure in introducing a new group of readers to the contemporary graphic novel. Judging by the evaluations I've created several fans, and even the diehards found new artists to follow. Comics evangelism was never the point of the course but I'd call it a happy accident. The class also included a few nascent comics artists and filmmakers who have told me the readings have influenced their own work. From researching artists who weren't on the syllabus to taking part in conventions, the students are now carrying their passion for comics outside the classroom. No matter what the subject is, teaching doesn't get any better than that.

Week 12: Gene Luen Yang, American Born Chinese

I included American Born Chinese on the syllabus because I admire its construction--on every level, from the compact layouts to the slippery three-part plot--and because I thought my students would find its perspective on racial alienation and assimilation both familiar and enlightening. I've found in the past that works about racial identity by non-black authors can be a great tool for discussing representations of race in a black classroom with a white professor. They open a kind of third space that allows everybody in the room to approach the issue on more or less equal footing, without as much at stake.

All of those things played out exactly as expected, but I ended up looking at American Born Chinese a lot less favorably than my class did. Much as I admire its construction, I'm not sure I care at all for its message. Or the fact that it has a "message," which is surely part of the problem. Accept yourself for who you are is one of the most banal themes in popular culture (rivalled only by Follow your dreams!) but in this particular book it takes on a sinister insinuation. In this book, accepting yourself the way you are sometimes means accepting that your racial and ethnic identity is as immutable and inescapable as your species, your mortality, your very position in a great chain of being that stretches to the heavens.

The book follows three plots, with the story of student Jin Wang coming of age in 1980s California sandwiched between a retelling of the legend of the Monkey King and a horrific sitcom in which all-American white kid Danny is visited by his cousin Chin-Kee, a living embodiment of every Asian stereotype Danny has tried to suppress or flee. The book initially suggests that the Monkey King and Chin-Kee stories are meant to be taken as symbolic commentaries on Jin Wang's desire to assimilate--an interpretation that persists even after we learn they aren't strictly symbolic. 

In the course of condemning internalized racism and self-loathing, Yang analogizes Jin's dilemma to that of the Monkey King, who insists he's a god even after God Himself tells him otherwise and who suffers for his presumption until he learns to accept his simian nature, which sets him on the path to happiness and divine ordination. Working back to Jin, though, the Monkey King's acceptance implies that the ethnic, minority, or immigrant cultural identity is always the foundational one--Jin will always be Chinese, just as the Monkey King will always be a monkey. It's one of those classic comic-book analogies we can only pursue so far before we have to abandon it or accept some pretty unsavory implications, but American Born Chinese never tells us that it's time to bail out.

The best defense I can muster is to say that if you don't like those unsavory implications, you only have to wait a few pages. This is a book of contradictions--of realism and fantasy, cultural isolation and exchange--and every value it holds turns into its opposite. If the use of the Monkey King and Chin-Kee as symbolic commentaries on Jin's story seems trite or predictable, the final chapters will throw you a major curveball. If their essentialism grates, you only have to remember that this is a book in which no identity is stable for long. If you think the finale emphasizes ethnic isolation at the expense of cultural fusion, the book is still filled with characters and stories that cross cultures.

Although that can be a problem too, particularly when Yang takes the Buddha out of the Buddhist epic Journey to the West. Buddha is missing from the Monkey King's story, replaced by a distinctly Christian god (complete with shepherd's crook!) who's served by the animal symbols of the four evangelists. The original journey to the west (to retrieve the Buddha's sutras) is gone too, supplanted by a journey to celebrate the nativity of Christ. Maybe it's supposed to be syncretism, but it sure looks like subordination. Yang spoke about his intentions for the story in a Comics Journal interview, which Ng Suat Tong quotes here: he describes the Christianized myth as a simple combination of stories, but I think the work deviates quite a bit from his stated aims.

That lack of self-consciousness may be the root of the problem. I realized, after my last class on the book, that American Born Chinese didn't rankle because of its analogies or the friendly face they put on their essentialist view of race. This isn't the only book we've read that raises some troubling implications; it's just one of the few that doesn't know what to do with them. Maus has some pretty suspicious metaphors too, and Fun Home trots out its stereotypes in more realistic fashion, but those works invite readers to pick apart their assumptions--Spiegelman pretty much forces us to with all those devices that explode the artificiality and the implicit stereotyping of his animal avatars. American Born Chinese, like Nat Turner, doesn't invite us to question its implications; it may not even know they're there. It's the difference between a book in which the metaphors are supposed to break down and a book you just aren't supposed to think that much about. One can sustain or reward the most rigorous critical analysis, and the other just can't.

None of this rules against teaching American Born Chinese again, by the way; I find these dilemmas a lot more fascinating and productive than the trite messages of self-acceptance that the book advertises as its themes. But I will need to come up with some new ways to problematize this book for classes that have been taught to recognize the expression of racial and ethnic pride as the noblest aims of art--the most unimpeachable way of accepting yourself for who you are.

Week 11: Chris Ware, Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth

I've been reluctant to mention that I have an essay in the newly-published The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing is a Way of Thinking. In my imagination, the collection gathers fourteen paeans to the indisputable brilliance of Ware's comics along with my piece on the middlebrow conservatism of his anthologies for McSweeney's and the Best American Comics series. My essay is a more developed, more thoroughly researched approach to some of the arguments I've made on this blog in the past and I'm very proud of it, but until I actually see the book and its no doubt measured and judicious works of criticism I can't help but feel like the guy who came to the party just so he could drop a turd in the punch bowl.

Teaching Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth for my class was a welcome reminder that I can really enjoy Ware when he's producing his own work instead of curating his tired canon of alternative comics.

Not that his work is exactly divorced from that canon. Jimmy Corrigan begins as a fairly typical example of the sullen, snarky, defensive style that characterized the leading alternative comics of the 1990s. The impotent fantasies that lampoon popular genres, the portrait of Jimmy as comics nerd manchild--these are the relics of an alternative comics culture obsessed with defining itself against the genres that, at the time, still dominated the view of comics in the general public (to say nothing of the shelf space in the direct market). Ware was already outgrowing these elements as he wrote Jimmy Corrigan and it's a relief to see them disappear as his interests turn to the more compelling material of the extended Corrigan family, although Jimmy himself never quite clicks for me. At best he's a cipher to build a fascinating story around, but his interior life is too stunted to fascinate. While Jimmy Corrigan grows into a graphic novel, Jimmy Corrigan stubbornly remains an alt-comics shlub to the end.

But he does have his moments. His richest fantasy, from a classroom point of view, is the one where he notices the price sticker on his father's generic coffee table and imagines him renting and furnishing the equally generic apartment as part of an elaborate scheme to lure unsuspecting fatherless men to their deaths. It's the only fantasy to go beyond the Oedipal dramas of his awkward reunion, diagnosing something deeply wrong not just with Jimmy's life but with his world.

It's a world whose artifacts are devoid of personal craftsmanship, whose makers are even more anonymous than their consumers. Whose buildings have lost the ornamentation and the scale that once indicated they were meant to be viewed and inhabited by humans. Whose postcards, if anyone bothered to make them, would have to show gas stations and stretches of asphalt. Whose logos and brand names fake a lost community, and fake it badly: Food Towne. Burger Kuntry. Pam's Wagon Wheel, "Since 1977." (In a story that has to be set sometime in the early 80s!) It might as well be designed by a serial killer. It would make more sense.

The flashbacks to 1892-1893 and the World's Columbian Exposition offer some respite, but Ware--bravely fighting against every aesthetic proclivity he has ever had--doesn't allow himself to cloak the past in nostalgia. Idyllic visions of a handmade past are compromised not just by the endemic prejudice (our first images are from a racist magic lantern slideshow, followed soon after by William Corrigan's carefully aimed but barely audible racial vulgarity) or by James Corrigan's emotional isolation but by the first stirrings of the depersonalized mass production that Ware deplores in the present. The World's Columbian Exposition might look like the apex of 19th century culture but it carries the beginnings of the 20th--its grand neoclassical buildings are made of cheap staff, its high-minded statues of the Union soldier freeing the slave are lined up in rows in the workshops, and the early motion picture technology in the Zoopraxographical Hall is only going to lead to those movies Jimmy says he watches but can't describe.

The highly personal, semi-autobiographical focus of Jimmy Corrigan never quite edges out the national, historical story that's unfolding in the background and in the maps and diagrams that punctuate the comic so explosively. At its best, in the flashbacks, the personal traumas become a means of accessing the national and historical traumas whose traces are felt, imperceptibly but powerfully, in the Corrigan family. But if the Jimmy scenes in the present seem less connected, less a part of this saga of the building of the nation, that's part of the commentary too.

I've always preferred James to Jimmy, and this rereading confirmed why. His dilemmas seem so much more serious--even when they aren't, initially--than his grandson's, partially because we feel sympathy for a lonely child who suffers in silence but scorn for an adult who reacts the same way. It helps that James is more emotionally open to readers. The narration attached to his story is so much more eloquent, verbally and visually, than the blunt conjunctions that guide us through Jimmy's story that we can't help but get a better sense of his turmoil. It's possible I have recently become a sucker for little wide-eyed bald-headed guys, but this picture always gets to me:

So much more recognizable, more sympathetic than the thirty-six-year-old man who can't work up the courage to speak to his family. Or women. Or anybody.

If I've said very little about the actual teaching of Jimmy Corrigan thus far, that's because most of the classes were exercises in exploring the different areas I've sounded out here. The students followed their standard pattern of initial frustration followed by growing fascination, one I've learned to anticipate in my lectures; I'm glad we didn't tackle this book first. We began with detailed close readings of a few early graphics (the diagram of comics reading on the inside front cover, the diagram tracing the history of the picture in Jimmy's drawer, and of course Superman's plunge, one of the simplest and most important pages in the book), talking about how to read Ware's comics before moving on to the more important and rewarding question of why they're worth reading. Our class found plenty of different ways of reading them--psychoanalytic, formalist, historicist--all of them paying off with insights not just into Ware's work but the worlds he describes. Despite the snow week I was able to preserve an extra day for this book, and not a minute of it was wasted. In fact, I probably could have added another day just to discuss the design and material history of all the different incarnations of this story (although we got a lot of mileage out of looking at the hardcover dustjacket and contrasting the hardcover's ending with the paperback's epilogue). This book will be staying on the syllabus for a long time.

I hope these classes, and this post, have done their own small part to clean out the punch bowl.

Week 10: Gilbert Hernandez, Human Diastrophism

You would think I'd have more to say about teaching "Human Diastrophism," one of my favorite comics in the classroom, but this was my fourth pass at the story and most of the classroom surprises have been played out. The greatest remaining challenge is just the problem of extracting one storyline from Gilbert Hernandez's long-running Palomar setting and fitting it into a single week of class discussion.

My classes' reactions to "Human Diastrophism" have changed over the years, and mostly for the better. Seven or eight years ago a few of my students were awfully interested in branding the women of Palomar as "sluts." (Khamo, Borro, and the other men got a pass, of course; the monogamous Pipo and the celibate-but-naked Tonantzin did not.) I can't say I'm sorry to see that discussion fall by the wayside. I wonder if that's a benefit of the growing awareness of comics as a mature medium. Eight years ago my students had never read a graphic novel in the classroom before, had perhaps never read a graphic novel period, and certainly didn't see them as an adult mode of expression; the mere sight of naked cartoon women was enough to provoke a moral panic. None of those things seem to be true anymore--at least not among the self-selecting group who would sign up for an entire course on comics. (And after Watchmen and Fun Home, sex is no longer a novelty.)

This class did catch me by surprise with some initial hostility to Hernandez's elliptical structure. A few of the more vocal students were turned off enough by the abrupt transitions and the sprawling cast to proclaim their complete mystification, but that didn't last. After a couple of days sifting through the plot and looking at all the elements that link Hernandez's fragments--the encroaching outside forces, the conflicting reactions to modernity, the shifting drawing styles, even the accelerating pace of the transitions--the complaints disappeared and some of the most vocal critics become Hernandez's biggest fans. This pattern seems to play itself out every week as the class adjusts to the new artists, learning that what they see as flaws (Spiegelman's animal metaphors, Bechdel's erudition) can also be some of those artists' greatest assets.

I have some sympathy for the initial frustration, though. This was my first time teaching "Human Diastrophism" in the new paperback collection, a format that does not serve the Palomar story particularly well. The book collects all the post-HD Palomar stories (excepting Poison River) up to the end of the original Love and Rockets in 1996. "Human Diastrophism" reads pretty well in isolation in the old Blood of Palomar trade paperback; if nothing else, that ending retains its original horror when you don't know there's another Palomar story on the next page. (That said, I would kill for just one affordable collection that grouped it with "Duck Feet," its closest companion and most important precursor.)

Following it with the subsequent stories only reminds the novice reader how much they're missing, especially since a lot of them aren't really Palomar stories. Maria and her daughters muscle everyone else out of the spotlight, and that only draws attention to the gaping Poison River-sized hole in the center of the collection. Maria's a fascinating character, but she's a lot more fascinating when you know the history that Hernandez established for her in previous issues. I'm not sure that she works without Poison River; I'm not sure Fritz and Petra work at all until Hernandez starts fleshing them out in the second volume of Love and Rockets.

On the other hand, it was nice to wrap up the class discussion with "Chelo's Burden," to check in on the final evolution of Humberto's art and to see the completion of Palomar's development into a matriarchy. And it was gratifying to see that many of the students read the intervening stories after I'd made them optional. But if you're going to collect "Human Diastrophism" with other long-form Palomar stories, you could at least throw in "Duck Feet"! And "An American in Palomar." And maybe...

Maybe there is no ideal way to read the Palomar stories under the time and monetary constraints of the classroom, but it's a shame that the setup of the new collection makes "Human Diastrophism," a story I could teach in my sleep, a slightly worse fit than it was before. On its own, insofar as it can be read on its own, it's one of the great American graphic novels. With its companions it's still just as great but it's only one piece of a much longer story that's nearly impossible to excerpt.

A comic book, in other words.  A wonderful format, but not one you can easily fit into a classroom.

Week 9: Alison Bechdel, Fun Home

The class is reading a new graphic novel every week now, and this was the first week I had too much material to cover in the allotted time. Not a bad problem to have, and far better than having too little material, but still a slight disappointment. Fortunately, since the students are now seasoned veterans we had the luxury of skipping the once-obligatory discussions on how to read comics, otherwise we wouldn't have covered half of what I wanted to say about Alison Bechdel's work.

Not that Fun Home doesn't reward sustained attention to its art, which tends to get a bad rap from comics fans. (Apparently Ng Suat Tong agrees.) Bechdel's art is subtle and it's focused on telling her story, and neither quality caters to a comics community that currently expects formalist experiments in page design or primitivist exercises in drawing for drawing's sake. Certainly the book's literary aspirations can be overwhelming, even overbearing (has anyone ever really needed to use the word "humectant"?), but they don't negate Bechdel's command of her images.

The only other time I taught Fun Home it came at the end of a class on twentieth-century American literature and we spent a day reading the art, tracing its correspondences and contradictions with the text, its intertextual allusions, its historical markers, and its quiet commentaries on the main action. My favorite example is still the copy of Time magazine somebody is reading on page 181, a post-Watergate cover featuring a head shot of Gerald Ford and the fatuous caption "The Healing Begins." With admirable economy, the cover links the false resolution offered by Ford's pardon of Nixon to Bruce Bechdel's own narrow and equally unearned escape from the law--and it's wedged into the corner of a panel that shows Bruce already eyeing another man while his exhausted wife looks on. There's nothing visually remarkable about that cover but it's the perfectly chosen detail, and its silent relation to the rest of the panel and the rest of the graphic novel is an expert use of the visual narrative track--part of Bechdel's mastery of the nuts and bolts of comics.

We didn't get to talk about that panel this time, or the Wind in the Willows map that Bechdel finds so fascinating. (As yet another comic that bridges the gap between the symbolic and the real, that one probably interests me more than any of my students). That left us more time to mull over the multilayered literary allusions and Bechdel's ambivalent, evolving attitude towards literary criticism (always relevant to my students!); more time for the ethical dilemmas raised by her exhumation of her family's secrets; more time for the stereotypes that Bruce and Alison both appear to endorse and that I cannot in good conscience let any class on Fun Home go by without addressing.

If we didn't address them, I'd worry that it would be too easy for some students to come away from Fun Home believing that all gay men go cruising for underaged boys or that all feminists are lesbians. The former is actually fairly easy to deal with since plenty of evidence in Fun Home, notably Alison's own experience, challenges the idea that gays are recruited and not born. (And since this class already had experience looking at Art Spiegelman's depiction of his father's equally stereotypical, equally real flaws.) But the latter... sometimes I wish Bechdel hadn't included that line she overhears at a college party, where another student says "Feminism is the theory. Lesbianism is the practice." I've already heard enough "I'm not a feminist, but..." comments in the classroom--almost always from female students, invariably followed by some utterly uncontroversial feminist statement--to know that many college students already have some pretty serious misconceptions about what feminism is. I have no desire to throw another log on that fire.

Not that Bechdel sets out to do that, by any means--the line is a great illustration of the second-wave feminism that was au courant when Bechdel was in college, and of the kind of dogmatic pronouncement that still is and always will be all the rage among college students. (Try bringing that up delicately in a college classroom.) It's a good opportunity to talk about the intellectual climate of Bechdel's coming out, but it's ironic that Bechdel's lack of commentary makes such a discussion necessary. Because it isn't often that Fun Home withholds comment.

It's a work that explains itself too well, unpacking its neatly arranged metaphors with such precision that there's nothing left for the reader to do except go along for the ride. Now there's a sloppy metaphor Bechdel would never use--going along for the ride while somebody's unpacking? Unless the ride and the unpacking were separated by at least ten pages about Jean Genet, and followed by a scene in which her father actually did unpack his neatly packed suitcase in the middle of a family road trip, all of it tied up with a recreated photograph and a neat parallel to The Maids.

Bechdel's self-explication would seem to leave little for a class to do, but the metaphors are so exact and layered with such tender care that simply tracing them can fill an hour or two if you're not careful. And a productive hour at that--the dual Joyce and Homer analogies in the final chapter justify the whole project as Bechdel demolishes her teacher's tired New Critical exercise in tracing allusions while erecting a new intertextual framework that's at least twice as ambitious as anything her professors would attempt. And those analogies lead up to the reversals of the final pages, exactly like the reversals of the opening pages but now with a novel's emotional weight behind them. Bechdel might identify her metaphors for us, but that's just the tip of the iceberg compared to understanding how they work and what they tell us about her and her father.

From a distance Fun Home may look like yet another realistic autobiographical comic, distinguished only by its naked literary ambitions. Up close it's one of the most subtly, meticulously constructed comics of the recent boom in graphic novels. So subtle that you have to work to follow Bechdel even as she explains her best tricks.

Week 8: Kyle Baker, Nat Turner

I've been falling behind on these posts--good thing this week is spring break.

I'm still not entirely comfortable teaching a comic that thinks it needs to jazz up slavery with chases and fight scenes and huge Frank Miller heroes who battle dozens of guys in silhouette. I have some problems with a comic that romanticizes any part of slavery, even if it casts rebelling slaves as romantic heroes. But I wanted at least one of the nonfiction comics in our course to be something other than an autobiography, and I certainly got that in Nat Turner.

Some of my students had the same problems I did, and it was fascinating watching our opinions change as we read the book. The biggest hurdle was probably just getting over the fact that Nat Turner is not a history but a romantic fiction, a Frank Miller comic in slave-narrative drag. The book's early scenes, where Baker has the most latitude to invent, are filled with action-movie cliches. These scenes fail as history (or even as realistic historical fiction) but some of them work as a kind of psychological condensation of the horrors of slavery--a series of attempts to compress the experiences of hundreds of years and millions of slaves into a handful of shocking images. (Then again, the worst of them, like one absolutely ridiculous moment where raiders lasso a defiant woman as she dives off a cliff, doesn't seem to express anything about slavery; it's just an attempt to build Nat Turner's mom up into an action hero, to make Turner some sort of genetically pedigreed badass.)

By the three-quarter mark, when the violence is grounded in historical fact and the comic turns into a collage of cropped and severed body parts, the shock turns from a liability into a carefully deployed asset. It's not just that we become glutted with violence at the moment Turner's followers overindulge in their killing spree; it's the way the cameos and insets and photographs and generous amounts of negative space lend a false decorum, an album-like quality, to a story of grotesque and largely pointless bloodshed. That serene and evil domesticity says more about the institution of slavery than all the splash pages of babies dropping neatly into the opened jaws of sharks.

Baker gets great mileage out of using nineteenth-century media and art styles--photography, prints, silhouettes, photo albums--to tell this story of the nineteenth century. He even throws in a couple of anachronistic but still antiquated D.W. Griffith-style cinema close-ups when he needs to let us know, wordlessly, what Turner is thinking at a decisive moment. My students went nuts with the silhouettes, looking for strategically encoded meanings whenever Baker rendered his characters in stark outline (and finding more than were probably ever contemplated). Technically, visually, narratively, the book was a challenge and a reward for students who have already gotten very good at reading comics.

The technical command doesn't lessen the book's troubling ethical positions, though. Kyle Baker graciously spoke on our campus the day after we finished discussing Nat Turner, and he fielded a lot of questions from my students. He told the audience that he deliberately avoided taking a stand on Turner's actions--that to forestall the inevitable criticisms that would come from one camp or another if he did editorialize, he simply depicted Turner's actions and withheld any commentary.

He certainly doesn't editorialize in the actual text of Nat Turner, since the comic uses few words that don't come directly from Turner's confessions. But that leaves a skilled comics artist like Baker plenty of other ways to comment on the action. As my students pointed out, and Baker admitted, he draws those slaves who acted to save white slave owners from Turner's followers--or those followers who undermined the revolt with drinking and fighting--as pop-eyed minstrel caricatures. Turner, on the other hand, gets a handsome face, a heroic physique, and a Christlike sanctity that lasts through his execution. His dignified death and the postmortem transmission of his narrative are presented as unequivocal victories in the struggle against slavery.

When Baker does refrain from comment, that restraint is selective enough to constitute a comment unto itself. The book doesn't shy away from showing the horrors of slavery or the horrors of Turner's revolt, but its judgments onTurner's killing spree are ambiguous at best whereas Baker's revulsion at the more routine tortures of slavery is unmistakable. Even if Turner's murders of children and other noncombatants are presented with cold neutrality, that would itself stake out a position relative to Baker's uncomplicated abhorrence of slavery. Not that I don't expect a modern portrayal to evaluate Turner's actions differently from those of white slaveowners--I'm more worried that it refuses to evaluate them at all, or refuses only when they are at their most appalling.

And there is always the possibility that the book does not regard those murders with evenhanded neutrality or noncomittal ambiguity. The class spent a lot of time consulting this page (cropped, but I think you'll get the gist of it):

Is this an admirable refusal to sugar-coat Turner's rebellion, an insistence on showing the true cost of a futile revolt whose victims were mostly children? Is it a fair and balanced depiction of what really happened in Southampton in 1831? Or does the sheer graphic overkill leaven the image with a perverse undercurrent of joy?

R. Fiore detects something of that undercurrent at the end of this post on "literal" and "freestyle" cartooning:

I think the real impulse behind Nat Turner, revealed in its remorseless depiction of the savagery of the revolt, is to see the slaves take the direct revenge against their oppressors that they were mostly denied.  In this it’s reminiscent of the work of Kara Walker, who seems to despise white abolitionists as much as the slaveholders, for usurping a struggle that ought to have belonged to the slaves themselves.

I don't want to endorse that last statement in any way: I think it oversimplifies Kara Walker, it paints a dangerously romanticized picture of social struggle, and it flirts (however unintentionally, I'm sure, and however much it comes by way of Fiore's effigy of Walker and not from Fiore himself) with the reprehensible idea that whites had no responsibility to end slavery. That said, the rest of this offers a lot to agree with, including the comparison to Walker; I showed some of her silhouettes in class as an example of another artist who fuses nineteenth-century art styles with grotesque violence to capture the horror of slavery. And Fiore may be onto something when he suggests the real impulse behind Nat Turner is not historical documentation or assessment but simply the vicarious pleasure of revenge.

Nat Turner furnished plenty of material for some rich class discussions. Baker's graphic novel and his appearance on campus were both important parts of our course. (If nothing else, it did the students a lot of good to hear that at least one artist's creative decisions are primarily technical and design-oriented, not thematic; sometimes a silhouette is just a silhouette.) But I wish Nat Turner had the courage to judge or condemn its hero as easily as it praises him.

Weeks 6-7: Art Spiegelman, Maus

I resisted assigning Maus in my literature classes for almost a decade, not because I was afraid of the subject matter but because I was afraid students would think I was only teaching it for the subject matter, and might read it the same way. When I first started teaching, Maus was still "the" graphic novel for too many gatekeepers: the exceptional one, the one that rose above its crass peers. The Ursula K. LeGuin of comics. After my second semester of slipping a graphic novel onto the syllabus (V for Vendetta, in that case) a student asked why I didn't teach Maus instead; my silent resentment probably delayed my acceptance of inevitable by another couple of years.

But accept it I did, once I started teaching the American literature readings classes in Howard's graduate program. If I could only justify teaching one graphic novel in that sequence of courses, it was going to be Maus.

Don't ask me what I would've done if Alan Moore had been born in Northampton, Massachussetts.

I've taught Maus in a couple of grad classes now and I thought I'd gotten it down to a science, but teaching it to a room full of undergrads has opened the comic up again; I had a remarkable experience a couple of weeks ago as my opinion of Artie (the character, not the author) changed in the middle of class.

In the grad classes we had to cover Maus in a single session, most of which was devoted to Spiegelman's visual storytelling and his animal metaphors. That left just enough time to consider Spiegelman's deliberately unpleasant self-representation as Artie, discussing it as an authentication strategy that validates everything Spiegelman says by painting him in such an unflattering light that we assume it has to be honesty--but the assumption is always that Artie is a callous, self-involved jerk for most of the novel. I'm always particularly troubled by, and I take particular care to mention, the passage in "Time Flies" when Artie (or is he Art, since this is the only part of the book set after the publication of Maus I?) visits his shrink and the shrink tells him that Vladek took his survivor's guilt out on him, Artie, "the REAL survivor."

I've always thought that was an appalling statement. He is a survivor, certainly, of his mother's suicide and of all the Holocaust traumas that have been projected on him and passed down to him secondhand. But the survivor? The real survivor? Did Pavel really say that? Why did Spiegelman include that? Depicting his own selfishness might authenticate his story, but having another character--a doctor and a Holocaust survivor--validate his self-centeredness appears, at first glance, to justify his own egocentrism.

This time around, though, we had two weeks to sink into the book, and as my students defended Art/Artie it became clear that among all the other traumas Art Spiegelman has had to survive, he's also had to cope with the other characters' implicit or explicit judgments that he doesn't suffer any problems at all. This dilemma has been part of the story since the second page ("...THEN you could see what it is, friends!"), but it really goes back to "Prisoner on the Hell Planet," the wholesale inclusion of which now seems even more brilliant. In that comic, Artie only gets about two panels to mourn his mother's death before he's expected to comfort a devastated Vladek and make the funeral arrangements, and then his father's grief sucks up all the oxygen in the funeral, and when Artie finally gets a chance to cry some asshole friend of the family tells him that he's  too late and he should have cried when Anja was still alive. Maus keeps reminding us that Artie wasn't allowed to express grief and sorrow and anger at his own tragedies; whatever he's endured, Vladek and Anja will always have endured more. His problems might pale in comparison to theirs, sure, but they're still his problems and he's got to live with them. And nobody but Francoise, and Pavel, will even give him credit for that.

That line about "the REAL survivor" still rankles, but the longer time for class discussion and the good efforts of my students were useful for highlighting all the reasons why the egocentric Artie of MAUS is not just a clever strategy for stressing Spiegelman's honesty but a trauma survivor who isn't even allowed to think of himself that way. I'm grateful for the chance to have taught it to a large class of attentive and engaged undergrads. I'm learning as much about these comics as they are.

Other developments were more expected. I doubt that any class dedicated to Maus has ever shied away from discussing those questionable animal metaphors and this one was no exception as the students immediately pounced on the troubling implications of representing religious and ethnic groups as animals. I did find it odd how they would speculate on the reactions of some hypothetical Jewish reader who didn't want to be compared to a mouse--a laudable attempt at identifying with someone else's point of view, I guess, but after a while I had to ask why they weren't simply talking about their own reactions. Those are usually much more fascinating than the responses of that ideal, easily-offended reader, whose only mission is to be offended easily.

I sometimes wonder if this generation of students has been trained to identify stereotypes too easily, and to the exclusion of all else, as if simply finding a stereotype settles everything about the work in question. The brilliance of Maus--one of its brilliances, anyway--lies in the way that it always unsettles us, always forces us to question its own metaphors, always forces us to look at its dramatic and creative dilemmas from a new angle.

Even if we've been teaching it for a couple of years.

Weeks 3-4: Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Watchmen

If Understanding Comics is the book that showed me I could study comics, Watchmen is the book that made me want to.

Like a lot of Moore's best comics, Watchmen is both an adolescent work and an adult one, more beholden to convention than it lets on and determined to provide generic thrills along with more cerebral pleasures. I was lucky enough to hit adolescence just as Watchmen was coming out, when it could satisfy my dual desires to read a superhero comic and grow into something more challenging. It wasn't alone in filling that niche--Frank Miller was there, too, and Moore's other work, and later Grant Morrison's first American comics. But more than any other single comic book, Watchmen held out the promise that comics could grow up with me. Which, thanks to a couple of accidents of history, they did.

I read Watchmen so many times those first couple of years that I didn't read it cover-to-cover again for close to twenty. After a couple of decades of pulling out the greatest hits (the prison break first, then the Rorschach issue and the Citizen Kane wake for the Comedian and the symmetrical issue, then finally Jon's issue, "Watchmaker") and ruminating on them in isolation I decided it was time to dive back in and read it as it was supposed to be read. Not so much because the movie stirred up old memories but because my 1987 trade paperback, loaned to many friends and consulted countless times, was falling to pieces and the recoloring by John Higgins seemed like a great excuse to buy a new copy.

Watchmen was not well served by 1980s printing techniques and those lurid hues always contradicted its claims to subtlety and maturity. Even Tales of the Black Freighter, which was supposed to be lurid, was fatally compromised by a crude palette that gave the mariner's decomposing shipmates the color scheme of a box of Froot Loops. Comics have finally caught up with Moore and Gibbons, in at least this one technical matter, and we can finally see Watchmen as it was meant to be seen. I'm not a huge fan of ironic Benday dots as a shortcut to instant nostalgia, but Higgins' use of the primitive patterns helps to pop the Black Freighter images and captions out of Gibbons' busy panels and distinguishes the comic-within-a-comic from the world around it.

The change is even more profound in scenes like Dr. Manhattan's march through Vietnam--a scene of special power for me because it was the first glimpse of Watchmen I ever had, in one of those "Pow! Zap!" articles that ran in Newsweek circa 1986. A superhero, because a man of that physique and size and unnatural shade of blue could be nothing else, was striding across a burning landscape, creating mushroom clouds with the same casual gesture that might attend the selection of a photograph or the creation of man. Two terse captions promised that this child's fantasy would be directed toward grown-up subjects with their brazenly false history of the war that we weren't supposed to talk about, that we always kept talking about. This was the image that made me want to read Watchmen before I would have been able to handle it, the image that said it was a teenager's book and an adult's. To see it in the new edition, shorn of its pastel pinks and piss yellows, now wrapped in purples that turn a sunlit moment of triumph into a twilight of the gods: I felt like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken.

That was last April. I had no intentions of rereading the book again for the graphic novel class but by the time I hit "Watchmaker" my judicious skimming had turned into complete immersion. I didn't even hold out until my own primal scene; Jon staring at that photograph was enough, or maybe his departure the chapter before. You had me at "At play amidst the Strangeness and the Charm." Truth to tell, you had me at the dog carcass in the alley, tire tread on burst stomach.

Teaching works you love always runs the risk that your own enthusiasm will impair your judgment of what your students need to know, or worse, that you'll get angry at your students because they don't share your enthusiasm. Neither has been a problem for this class. Whether they're coming to the story for the first time or they've also been reading it since they were teenagers, they've been as eager to discuss Watchmen as I am. If I personally have little interest in some of the things they wanted to talk about--we can only debate whether Veidt was "right" or "wrong" because the circumstances of his ethical dilemma are so utterly contrived to begin with, a late-night dorm-lounge bull session brought to life--I was still happy to let them go there as a way of giving them some responsibility over the discussion and as a way of opening up the areas I did want to cover. And they were equally willing to tackle those areas: the formal techniques, the genre criticisms, the clashing ideologies that animate each of the major characters.

That's more or less the order of how we tackled Watchmen, starting with how to read it and what contexts to read it in before building up to the themes and ideas that make it worth reading in a classroom. The capstone of the lectures was a look at the comic's conflicting ideas about meaning and purpose in the universe--Blake's nihilism, Jon's makerless mechanism, Rorschach's morally blank world ordered by our own arbitrary scrawls, and the thermodynamic miracles that only become visible from a more distant perspective or, paradoxically, a more intimate one. That forced us to bring the comic's form and design back into the discussion, tying the lectures together so neatly you'd almost think they were designed that way. When in fact they had about as much advance planning as the smiley face on Mars.

Not too bad considering I worked them up on the fly while I was busy rereading a comic I have been reading for twenty-two years instead of drawing up lesson plans. This is what expertise is, I suppose: the knowledge that you don't have to draw up in lesson plans because you have been absorbing it and processing it your entire life. The knowledge that you pick up while you're doing something else. It's a little embarrassing to discover that I'm better qualified to teach Watchmen than I am to teach the books I wrote about in my dissertation, but I guess that just means I'm in the right place, the right classroom, at long last.

Weeks 1-2: Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics

I had, and still have, some serious reservations about opening the comics class with Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics. As my Making Comics review should tell you, I've gotten pretty tired of McCloud's relentless and, I think, misguided focus on reader identification and immersion as the quality that sets comics apart from all other media, and his icon-heavy presentation style seems to have worn thin as well. Yet from the moment I first designed this course, I knew Understanding Comics would be the first reading. The past two weeks, I've been watching to see if this was sound judgment or just a counterproductive fidelity to some old Platonic conception of a class I'd never actually taught.

I owe a lot to Understanding Comics. This is the book that showed me I could study comics (and sent me off on a formalist path I still haven't quite left behind). On the other hand, it's also a book riddled with so many naive theories, lazy arguments, and internal contradictions as to make it an unsuitable model for academic scholarship. Was this really the first book about comics I wanted my students to read?

Because of these reservations, I found myself alternately apologizing for and disputing McCloud since the second day of class. (Arguably since early in the course design, since I included articles by Bart Beaty, Jonathan Frome, and Dylan Horrocks that take issue with his ideas.) I don't like sending that sort of mixed message so early in the semester--if I have that many problems with McCloud, why am I leading off with him?--but when perceptive students started asking if me they were missing something because they didn't understand some of his claims about icons and identification, I didn't feel like I had much choice but to tell them the problems weren't theirs.

McCloud is an excellent reader of comics but a horrible scholar. (To be fair, Understanding Comics is more a manifesto than a work of scholarship, but I need to identify those bad practices for my students so they don't emulate them.) He invents grand theories of art, language, and psychology that he can't be bothered to support and he extrapolates his subjective reading experiences into universal proclamations of how every reader will respond. He doesn't seem to consider that any other people (with the exception of Will Eisner) might have already pondered some of these areas and developed concepts or terms he might find useful; he extends the academy's general neglect of comics--at the time, in English, and even then not as total as he lets on--onto every other subject he touches on, writing as if he is the only person ever to ask these questions. Did he really think the world needed him to whip up another definition of art?

As I reread Understanding Comics I was appalled by the blithe ignorance that pervaded a book I once loved. But the important question is not how useful I find the book now, but how useful it can be for a group of students who have never studied comics before, and on that account Understanding Comics seems to have done its job. Dylan Horrocks is absolutely right when he criticizes the arbitrary definitions and the rigid separation of form and content in McCloud's first chapter, but that chapter is incredibly helpful in getting students to look beyond genre and think about comics as a form. Getting students to grasp the concept of form can be difficult in any course, and in this respect I have to regard Understanding Comics as a smashing success. My class now has no trouble reading comics for their formal properties (as they showed in class discussions on Chris Ware's "Thrilling Adventure Stories/I Guess" and Moore and Veitch's "How Things Work Out"), and if anything I'll have to get them to change gears when we shift to historicist and genre criticism for Watchmen and superheroes. That alone makes McCloud worth using.

The most valuable parts of Understanding Comics come in the next three chapters, which lay out McCloud's theories about varying representational styles, closure and reader participation, and comics' mapping of time onto space. (In fact, I just cited McCloud on the "polyptych" the other day while working on the Morrison book.) These chapters also contain some of his most problematic claims, especially on iconic art and reader identification, where he commits the unpardonable mistake of assuming the very thing he's trying to prove. The rest of the book gets awfully flabby, with all that space-filler about linework and the six stages and a history of art that manages to get almost every single statement wrong. But the first four chapters (and to some extent the categories of word/image relations in chapter six, although that wheat comes with a lot of chaff) lay the groundwork for viewing comics as an art form and they supply a basic set of tools for reading and analyzing them, exactly what my students need right now.

I know some comics scholars who don't use McCloud in their classrooms--and with good reasons, only some of which I've touched on above. Maybe one of the gentlest criticisms you can make of Understanding Comics is that a lot of it doesn't seem necessary anymore; his defensive tone and status anxiety, his need to separate comics from the popular genres that long defined them in America, feels like a bad '90s flashback, about as contemporary as grunge. In that sense, the book may be a victim of its own success in expanding the public view of comics.

But however flawed the book is, however much it falls short of the most basic standards of scholarship, it provides a foundation for the formal study of comics. By the end of our McCloud unit, the students were actually sticking up for him in the face of the criticism from Beaty and Frome and Horrocks because he'd changed the way they viewed comics. I can empathize; he did the same for me.