Last week I began my introspective reflection on what this past semester has wrought, focusing solely on how my class on comics went awry at times. I will be the first to admit that sometimes we teachers don’t know what the heck we’re doing, flying by the seat of our pants from one week to the next. That’s especially true when we’re teaching something we’ve never taught before. Occasionally this free-wheeling attitude makes us fall flat on our faces. However usually things work out for the best, and my class on the graphic narrative has for the most part been a success for a number of reasons.
One of those reasons is the variety of different stories I included in the class. We read stories not only about superheroes but that fit into many genres, including crime, horror, sci-fi, fantasy, and realism. Too often, people turn away from comics because they think of them as only being about the costume crowd (a subject I discussed in a previous column, “A Plea for Affirmative Action”). But by showing my students some books in other genres, I not only tried to appeal to those who can’t stand hero stories, but I also broadened the horizons of those who had only read superheroes to that point.
That’s a lesson that we all need to learn for the people we try to pull into the fold. We need to try to look at their personal preferences and recommend books accordingly, kind of like what Myatt Murphy and Scott Dalrymple did in the last two pages of their Free Comic Book Day offering Christa Shermot’s 100% Guaranteed How-To Manual… (and if you haven’t read this book yet, you should). Basically they ran down which books would work best to win over new readers based on their preferences in other mediums. Like Tom Clancy? Try Queen and Country. Harry Potter fan? Try Leave it to Chance.
My point is that to get people to read comics, we have to tailor our suggestions to their personal likes and dislikes. Too often when we try to get someone to read, we tell them to read books WE like and don’t even consider the person’s own inclinations. So in my class we explored multiple genres not only to expose the students to more material but also so that hopefully each person in the class could find one or two things they liked that they might later try to track down on their own.
I followed through on this idea by making the students do book reports above and beyond what we read in class. They had to read a comic, then come back and tell the class what it was about and what they thought of it. Through this act, each of these students now knows a little something about close to forty graphic novels that they’ve never read. If they should ever want to read more comics and are in search of something to read, those names will spring to mind. The more material they’re familiar with, the more likely they will be to find something they’ll like, and these book reports were a quick and easy way to do that.
People also like to not have to pay for things. I wrote a column weeks ago (“Guerilla Warfare”) about how loaning people things to read feels like an obligation, but if it’s a gift, they accept it graciously. So during my class I gave away tons of books for them to read. I did use the first three books I gave out—the recent cheapie issues of Fantastic Four, Superman and Daredevil—as part of an assignment, but the others—Vertigo X, Namor, Uncanny, and many of the FCBD books—were just for pleasure.
Giving those books out to the general student body as well, and simply by having a class on comics, I increased awareness of the potential comics held to many folks outside of my classroom. For example, attendance at the guest lecture I held was wonderful, and the lecture itself was a rousing success. As I told you back in my previous column “Time Will Tell,” it seems that many students are more interested in comics now than had been before, and I intend to take the guest lecture to the next level the next time I teach the class, possibly distributing stories by the speakers amongst the students so those in attendance have a background in the lecturers’ work next time. Also, because of this class, the head librarian at our school is also now asking me which graphic novels I would recommend she order for circulation, yet another big step forward in getting comics to be seen as serious literature.
Apart from the comics advocacy, though, and apart from all that we read for fun, there were plenty of other books we read for educational purposes. Each one of those stories was purposely chosen to elicit a certain response from the students. We didn’t just read random issues out of my collection; I tried to pick stories that were meaningful. A few stories that we read focused on some issue affecting society today (like handgun violence in “Shoot”), breaking the issue down and analyzing it under a microscope. Others exposed something revealing about the human condition through the plight of its main characters, as in the Ghost World excerpt we read. Still other stories, like “A Dream of a Thousand Cats,” explored philosophical theories, abstract concepts that the students might never have considered.
It’s my duty as an educator to try to expose students to as many different perspectives on life as possible, and if I can do that through comics, then all the better. I think I was successful in that regard, using comics to illuminate some new idea for them that might alter their lives in some way. I HOPE so, anyway. Next week I’ll end this little introspection by opening this column up a little bit to my students, exploring their reflections on the class and trying to see if they did learn anything… beyond the fact that comics are cool, of course.
