It’s the end of the semester for me, a time in which I’m usually so bogged down with grading that I have little time for anything else. But this being my first time teaching a class on comics, I’m unusually reflective about how I’ve spent my time in this class, much more so than with most of my other classes, which I’ve been teaching every semester for the past couple years. Looking back on the beginnings of the class now, I see I made a few mistakes, mistakes which I think we all can learn from in our further attempts at comics advocacy.
For the first week of my course, I inundated the students with information on comic techniques. We looked at bits and pieces of Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics as well as Will Eisner’s Comics and Sequential Art that I had made into transparencies so we could look at them in class and explore the ideas presented there as a group. We looked at McCloud’s examples of closure (also known sometimes as “the blood in the gutters”) and Eisner’s examples of the importance of minimalism in comics. We took a quick glance at each writers’ illustrations regarding both time and motion as well.
Along the way, I also gave the students some comics and asked them to skim through those books for examples of the techniques we were discussing. We talked about the ways words and pictures combine to tell stories, throwing out terms like duo-specific, interdependent, and parallel, in relation to the Superman 10 Cent Adventure. We analyzed the Fantastic Four nine cent comic for its camera angles and the composition of panels, utilizing a handout of film terms I had given them. Also we discussed the various kinds of transitions that occur from panel to panel, and I had the students read through the 25 cent Daredevil issue in search of various panel transition types like scene-to-scene or aspect-to-aspect.
Since this course was literature based, we didn’t really spend too much time on creating comics. We did, however, do two synthesis exercises to further illustrate some of the concepts we were exploring, the first of which I took straight out of Understanding Comics. One half of the class was given a group of panels that had art already but no caption, while the other half was given captions but no art. Each student then had to create what was missing, and the next day we read a few of the examples in class. We didn’t criticize the artistic choices; we simply analyzed the way they chose to combine the words and pictures to tell a story.
Our second exercise took this idea a bit further, as I asked the students to create an entire scene based on very little information. I basically modified an idea usually used in drama classes, an exercise called an “open scene.” In an “open scene” exercise, two actors are given some lines of dialogue and they have to then decide what the circumstances are under which these lines are spoken. Are they between a father and son, two co-workers, roommates? Are they angry, drunk, in love? The choices are up to the actors. In my class, rather than act them out, the students roughly sketched them (or those with no artistic ability simply described each panel). It was their choice if the eight to ten lines took four panels or three pages. They not only decided who the characters were but the angles of each shot, what facial expressions and gestures they used to express their emotions, and so on. We then looked at a few of the examples in class and talked about why the artist had made the choices they did.
That these exercises were fun and entertaining there is no doubt. The students definitely enjoyed doing them, and some of their ideas were very intriguing to say the least. But did they really learn anything from these exercises? Did they get anything out of the lectures I gave on these comic techniques? I don’t know. If I had to guess, I’d say no, because after that first week we never mentioned any of it again. In discussion of the stories we read, the various types of panel transitions never came up, and none of their papers looked at the way authors used certain word-picture combinations. A few times in class we talked about certain facial expressions and certain angles in certain panels, but it was always to service discussion of the story.
If I had it to do all over again (which I hope to come next January), I would probably cut out some of these “basic training” sessions. Sometimes as comics advocates we seem to think that we need to show people how to read comics before we can win them over. Now that I’ve taught this class, I can honestly say I think it’s more useful to just get them reading.
The only other mistake I think I might have made is in giving my students too much to read all at once. Comics can be deceptive; they sometimes seem like something you can plow through in five minutes. But as we all know, to really understand a book, you’ve got to read slowly, give it some thought while you’re in it rather than just voraciously rip into it and be done in a few minutes’ time. You’ll get more out of the reading experience if you savor it, if you analyze the work as you go.
I’m afraid that at times I threw too many stories at my students. As comics advocates we sometimes get the idea in our head that the people we’re trying to convert need to read as much as they can right away. We cram books down their throat that they may not want to read, and all that does is make reading a chore, turning these potential fans away. What we need to do is find their interests and try to pick something tailor-made for them, a story that coincides with the things they’re already interested in. Then we need to leave them alone to read it, give them all the time in the world, before we pester them and try to give them more.
In my class we frequently had two stories to read per class period, and I eventually came to realize that one story per class was really the way to go. It’s not that more than one story is difficult for them to read, that the load overwhelms them or turns them off. It is a class, so they knew what they were signing up for. No really it’s because they didn’t always have the time to savor the works. There were plenty of stories that we only had ten minutes to discuss, because we’d spent the rest of the class period talking about the first one.
But now I’m a bit wiser, having taken my first few steps into comics advocacy. Sometimes I failed, but sometimes I had resounding triumphs. Hopefully you’ve learned from my mistakes in this column that you can apply to your own agenda. Next week we’ll try to figure out what, if anything, I did right.
