Last week I discussed in this column the importance of the survival of short stories in the graphic narrative form, citing as one of my reasons how easy they are to use in a classroom setting. Using short stories in the graphic novel course I’m currently teaching has proven to be a fruitful endeavor, but it has been an arduous task as well from the very beginning stages of my planning the course.
The initial problem with using short stories in a class such as mine is of course that many short stories have never been reprinted anywhere other than in the original issue, making it next to impossible to use the story if I myself did not own the issue in question. Those that were reprinted were only done for a brief time, like DC’s recent Millenium editions, and are now difficult to track down.
But if, for the sake of argument, we assumed the individual issues were readily available as reprints, it would not be cost-efficient to ask my students to buy dozens of individual issues. Just in my crime unit alone (which we’re currently working on) we read six single-issue stories. At a conservative $2.50 a piece, that’d be $15 for one unit, plus then the cost of the graphic novel in that unit, another $15 (again conservatively). That’s $30 for ONE unit. Multiply that by the four units total I’m teaching in the class and you’re looking at a serious chunk of change just for textbooks on an elective class, an amount that would be very off-putting to most students.
Even those stories that have been reprinted have been re-released in various forms in various books, yet never all together. No such thing as an anthology devoted to stories told in the graphic medium exists, at least not in the sense of a textbook. Some anthologies do exist, like for example the anthology released each year to coincide with the Small Press Expo. However such anthologies usually only have one type of story in them (like last year’s biography-themed edition) or only stories from one publisher.
On the other hand, the textbook I use in my Introduction to Literature class has stories of many different genres from a vast number of authors. Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Beregeron” is side by side with Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings.” You can read Flannery O’Connor and then flip over to Ursula LeGuin. And the company that owns the publishing rights to each of these stories is never brought into question.
Making something like that happen with comics would be difficult, since company loyalty is unfortunately such a dominant part of our medium’s make-up right down to the fandom. It’s hard to imagine the current regimes of any of the major comic companies (DC, Marvel, CrossGen, Image, etc.) allowing their stories to reside side by side with tales from the competition. Plus there are all kinds of issues in regards to the copyrights of certain characters that would have to be cleared. Even if someone were to undertake such a task as putting together an anthology like this (and believe me, it is something I’ve been dreaming of doing for a while), simply getting all of the legal clearances lined up would be a logistical nightmare.
So because no textbook anthology like this exists, I basically have had to resign myself to breaking numerous copyright laws. I justify it in my mind by saying that it happens constantly in educational settings. That it isn’t really hurting the company, since these things aren’t really available anyway so there’s no loss of revenue. That I’m not earning any money on the endeavor (and in fact am losing it, spending by the end of the class over $300 for copies out of my yearly budget of $1200) so I’d not be liable for damages. But I am still breaking the law unfortunately, and it’s not something I do easily. I suppose I should write to the publishers for permission, but I feel I’d either be ignored, in which case I’d have wasted my time, or told no, in which case I’d not be able to use certain stories. So I just copy them and hope no lawyers ever come calling.
But availability and legality are not the only problems I have run into while starting up this course. There is obviously one more problem that I have had to deal with, one that is quite gargantuan in scope: deciding which stories to use in class.
I have to consider the amount of time available first. For each unit we only have three weeks, and one of those weeks is for the longer graphic novel I have chosen for that genre. Therefore, if my class meets three times a week and we read two stories per day, I only have time to cover about half-a-dozen stories in that remaining time. I now must narrow down the selection of the hundreds of thousands of comics that have been released to six.
I have to consider availability. It’s all well and good to want to use an issue say of Cerebus or Sin City in my class. But if I don’t own, or know someone who owns, that issue, then there’s nothing I can do. Now I have narrowed the field down from hundreds of thousands to around six thousand, yet still more whittling of the options must be done.
I have to consider accessibility. Will a first-time reader be able to jump right into this story without needing lots of background information? So many great stories, such as “24 Hours” from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, come in the middle of an arc and though brilliant are a little difficult for a reader to just jump right into.
And only after all of that do I get to consider literary concerns. Only then do I call to question if these stories might induce those elusive “lightbulb” moments. Only after those other factors have been brought in can I ask myself, “Is the story any good? Does it MEAN anything or is it just a bit of fluff?” Obviously in a classroom setting, I want to lean towards the former.
So how did I do it? I asked anybody who I thought could give me an opinion on various message boards and got a variety of replies. Then I combed through those and picked a handful of ones I agreed upon and actually owned. I reread the issue, trying to look at it from the perspective of someone coming to the story cold to see if it really did stand alone. Those that remained got added to the syllabus.
And it was a pretty short list in the end, to be honest, especially once I got out of the superhero genre (an issue I lamented when I plead for tokenism a few weeks ago). I’m still short on some sci-fi, fantasy, and horror stories, since I don’t read much of those myself, and that unit’s coming up in another week. If I don’t come up with one or two more stories to add in, I don’t know what I’m going to do.
But once those problems have been overcome and the class is underway, it’s all gravy. I’ve gotten great comments regarding the Grant Morrison Doom Patrol story “The Soul of a New Machine” a while back. My students came into it hating the story because it was “too weird,” but by the end of class we’d spent nearly forty minutes talking about questions raised in the story about the nature of the mind.
The Stray Bullets story “Victimology” was also one we recently read that some of the students had an adverse reaction to because “it was sad the girl died in the end.” But we explored the thematic elements of what it means to be a victim and analyzed the character of Virginia Applejack so that by the end the tragedy of her “death” had meaning. (And going back to issues of decompression that I raised last week, I was reluctant to let my students know that little Ginny survived the incident at the end of her story. We didn’t have time to look at Stray Bullets as a whole, and I think the story works better as a stand-alone tale if you read it with her death at the end.)
Are there stories I’d have liked to use and didn’t? Yes. Are there stories I wish now I hadn’t used? Yes. But classes such as these are a learning experience for the teachers as well as the students, and I actually am looking forward to applying the things I’ve learned when I pick all-new material for this course next year. God help me.
