Critical Thinking is a new column that analyzes academic writing about comics.


Teaching with ComicsTeaching with Comics: Empirical, Analytical, and Professional Experiences
Editors: Robert Aman and Lars Wallner
Writers: Robert Aman, Lars Wallner, Clio Ding, Noran Amin, Dona Pursall, Cathy G Johnson, Ana Pedrazinni, Constanza Zinkgräf, Paola D’Adamo, Lucía Bugallo, Mariana Lozada, Hannah Sackett, Eva Van de Wiele, Michel De Dobbeleer, Mara Santi, Laurence Grove, Ashley K Dellacqua, Dani Kachorsky, Sara Kersten-Parrish, Sylvia Pantaleo, Michael F Scholz, Grace D Gipson, Zane Elward, and Kirby Childress
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
2022

The Problem (with Comics)

There is a problem with comics: they compete with the establishment. This is true of their content, consumption, and creation. Content is a problem, not so much what the stories are about, but because understanding comics takes self-determination. Consumption is a problem, in the sense of it determining how we think about comics as a medium; the expectations we bring end up binding us. Creation is a crux, the choice between making art that’s nascent or predetermined. Comics are how we fix the problem.

Its title misleads, for the textbook Teaching with Comics isn’t meant to instruct you how to teach with comics, but impart the lessons learned by its authors who use comics to teach. Robert Aman and Lars Wallner’s curation focuses on identifying how the artform relates to people so that it can be better understood and performed by them. What did I learn about comics from reading a textbook cover to cover, not as a teacher or student, but as reader and a critic, someone who wanted to know the artform better? Follow me, kids.

Jérôme Ruillier, Für Dich, and AtzeComics are the Problem
Challenging the Status Quo with Content

Start with literacy as an act of questioning authority. Ashley Dallaqua, Dani Kachorsky, and Sara Kersten-Parrish’s essay says it is in the nature of comics to consider the source. No document is objective. We like to think of things like the past as ironclad, but all perspectives are subjective, including historical record. Too often the direct reproduction of the photograph is mistaken for objectivity. Comics on the other hand are fundamentally recognized by their audience as artificial. Every reader is forced to interpret the work rather than accept it at face value. The artifice of comics places the onus on the reader to approach what is being relayed to them as an account, no matter the level of realism to the subject matter, and therefore questionable. This treats the reader as an authority who investigates validity, rather than a passive digester of facts.

Shouldn’t we be reading like that anyway? Stories come from somewhere, and there’s a reason they’re told. It’s a mistake to see a photograph or a documentary as a reproduction of reality. Every lens finds its focus in a context. Need it be said? Judging accounts based on how their source shapes the message is a practice with utility outside of reading comics.

Cathy Johnson’s piece is mostly practices and advice based on the results she’s seen from their use. But part of that is building a classroom where all the students see a place for themselves. So let’s ask. Who is this comic about, and what is it saying about them? What does the absence of inclusion say about the narrative being woven? We look to the medium of comics- the content of the books themselves and the collective creators who make up the art movement that produces them- to see who is present and who isn’t. In this landscape, this scene, where am I? Do these stories respect the value of my identity, or do they use it, is there a place for me or do I have to make one.

This kind of comics reader gives alternate perspectives the same opportunity as stories that adhere to corporate canon and established aesthetics. And so, while some of the major publishers remain locked in stasis, an ever-changing network of art collectives and communities ensure the medium remains creative. Studios and scenes form and disband, making comics a consistent place for outlier storytelling to occur. Their constant rising, dissolving, and reformation means never succumbing to institutional stasis (or unfortunately lasting security for creators).

Also. If multicultural representation is in opposition to the status quo, the status quo needs to change. Who and what comics are about present an opportunity to disrupt the longstanding cultural narratives shaped by industry, colonial wealth, and white supremacy. Comics don’t even have to be about those things to inspire their radical refutation. They just have to be.

That said, what comics are is a headache of contradictory definitions. Comics are objects, traditionally physical publications, but now also a digital medium. Comics are a medium, in the art sense, though when we talk about the character designs, dialog, layouts, lettering, colors- the elements found in comics- we also call that comics. And like film, comics can be a virtual art. Built from something concrete, from words and pictures, yet the story exists not on any page or in any panel but in the mind of the reader. Since the audience is the locus that brings the pieces together and breathes life into the art, it stands to reason that the truth of the work must be reconciled with their personal experience.

Kirby Childress makes the important distinction that this is not a call for universal appeal. We don’t need to all have the same story, we need to recognize the equality of all identities. Making room for conflicting perspectives to exist isn’t the same as integrating them to an all-inclusive experience. The former approach poses a challenge to the reader to reevaluate their views, while the latter, a world without differences, is neither possible nor desirable. To change the meaning of a story to make it suit your understanding of the world is to choose ignorance. Good art, on the other hand, alters your understanding of how you fit into the world.

Negotiating one’s place as an equal in a group where everyone is unique is fundamental to the comic, right down to what they’re called. Comic books as in ha-ha funny. Donna Pursall’s piece addresses the common comics misconception conflating seriousness and maturity. Like Dellacqua et al. Pursall advocates for anti-authoritarian educational models. Humor is critical social literacy. Comedy is the violation of expectations, and the recognition of humor in incompatible elements requires understanding them in their normal context. Otherwise, a joke’s subversion of consequences is meaningless. It takes knowledge to recognize what is and isn’t funny. Living socially means negotiating personal desire and acknowledging different experiences. Comics accept the non-resolution of intent versus result from a place of good humor. Shouldn’t we?

Michael Scholz presents a way of looking at realism in comic books that also speaks to the power of comedy: realism needs silliness to stand in contrast to, or it doesn’t succeed in fulfilling the artistic expectation of seriousness. Yet comics that are comic are still capable of resounding emotional depth and profound meaning. The idea that photorealistic representation is tied to a more dedicated effort on the creator’s part and therefore a more authentic take on its subject matter hinges on being seen aesthetically in opposition to the immaturity of “comics.” Simple comes to mean lacking in substance, a polarized delineation that leaves no room for the egality of humor. Instead of quality being determined by many different perspectives, what’s best conforms to a traditional, institutional measure of achievement. More means better.

Jérôme Ruillier and Ivan BrunettiComics Problems
The Challenging Status Quo of Consumption

Despite comics being a medium that naturally agitates, it has long struggled with breaking free from cultural inertia. There are problems within comics, conflicts that hold the artform back. Clio Ding’s essay puts the naming of comics in perspective. People can’t agree on what constitutes a comic, what to call them, and have massively inconsistent standards for recognizing creators’ contributions. We talk about the structure and history of the industry when we mean to speak about the practice of the art. Editorial categories and layout techniques come to define the medium they were once instruments of. Comics becomes a term trapped in a cage, adhering to preconceived expectations.

If the terms used to identify comics are treated like they are the defining elements of comics themselves, the comics of the future will never be able to grow. Approaches outside the basic, traditional, institutional are treated as revisionist. Outsider comics. Yet when there are so many approaches, where is the center, the inside? What definition of comics doesn’t fall apart? Whose comics are real comics? Philip Troutman said of the medium’s go-to how-to book on sequential art theory, Understanding Comics, “all it takes to turn [author] Scott McCloud’s sweeping truths into contestable claims is to read some comic books.” Noran Amin’s essay also tries to reconcile comics with the arts.

It’s Ding who really drives home the why. Amin and Ding agree comics are an interdisciplinary art, and as such will always have competing definitions. But Ding observes these contradictory definitions in comics only come into conflict in the context of the medium’s cultural competition for legitimacy. Like many other modern artforms! The closer comics come to traditional standards of beauty, the more institutional recognition they attain. The desire to be perceived as a “real” art collides with the question of whether “comics” are for kids or adults (the answer is yes), spinning out an identity crisis so severe we don’t even know what to call the damn things.

Ultimately it’s up to us to decide. The difference between a comic, graphic novel, album, a codex, a picture book, a triptych, and graphica within in the realm of sequential art is subject to the background of the person categorizing. Their makeup of words and pictures means that comics will always have multiple ways to be viewed, resolving conflicting definitions is the essence of multidisciplinary art. Amin discusses art’s honorific aspect, where those who know in the art world decide what is and isn’t art. Bart Beaty said “comics are objects recognized by the comics world as comics.” I think that’s as close to a definition as we’ll ever get. I think there is a distinction between comics that came after the invention of caricature and the various forms of sequential art that share elements with comics but precede them that’s worth making. But whether something is a comic or not is a reflection of cultural consensus, not of content.

Institutional legitimacy takes the decision out of our hands. The division between high art and low culture removes a craft from its social context, so it can be elevated to the status of fine art. High art is universal, work that stands apart from any particular time or place. Art that’s severed from the environment that produced it is no longer defined by community consensus.

Sylvia Pantaleo’s essay on effectively incorporating practices that encourage creativity shed some light on why the distinction between institutional and community definitions of art matter. Creativity can’t exist without community: it’s collaborative. Creative ideas are “statistically infrequent, unique, and unusual” according to Kyung Kim, a concept determined collectively. Morris Stein and JP Guilford put it more poetically, positing the characteristics of creative thought are originality and effectiveness. Creativity is collaborative! But communities are no longer the arbiters of art, institutions are.

Creativity is a social act, one that needs (low) culture to be in conversation with and to be recognized by. Novelty- creative ideas are unexpectedly interesting- sparks thought. Interaction is required. On both ends: art is shaped by the context of the artist’s life, and its power to stand out comes from having a median to be measured against. My personal take is: someone who makes art for themself and it resonates with others, that’s creative.

Jérôme Ruillier and Lynda BarryComics are the Solution
Responding with Creation

In the early 17th century, Joannes David was making text-annotated illustrations about making text-annotated illustrations. David used art to teach religious theory, his parable-as-schematics a means of “contemplation of the invisible through the visible.” If everything we perceive in the physical world is an expression of a divine concept, illustration can be used to give form to the invisible aspects of existence as well as reproduce the physically concrete. The question in the 21st century is about creativity, are comics to be determined by the community that comics are a part of, or a corporation’s financial returns.

Comics offer an opportunity to experience the unknown, so why limit their scope to repeating pre-existing structures? Laurence Grove brings David into the picture because of comics’ power to open doors within the reader to before-unimagined experiences. It’s true that the more you know about comics, the better you’ll be able to articulate your ideas with them. It’s also true that comics don’t need articulation or experience to be effective (or original). Rather than striving for institutional cohesion, comics can obtain authenticity by looking ahead. There has never been a broader range of perspectives making nationally recognized work in the medium than there are today. And, look at all these essays derived from classroom experience, the next generation is already building upon the fuller history that today’s revisionists have been dragging into the light.

Hannah Sackett’s piece focuses on the importance of creating without constraints, subtly dovetailing Pantaleo’s assertions that creativity is communal not individual. When you’re cartooning, are you reproducing the elements of an idea you’ve already had, or are you discovering them through the act of cartooning? It’s probably both, though how much of one or the other depends on the mood of the cartoonist. Making art is giving form to a preconceived idea, but each piece suggests where it should go as it is created; the concept shifting from its initial form is an aspect of its being executed. “The work yields clues that one pursues,” as Elliot Eisner put it.

The unpredictability of the process is what gives art its vitality. Life and storytelling are alike, patterns that are consistently unique. The personality and context of each story’s teller makes it so even adaptation cannot be predicted or repeated. Think about creative teams with a separate writer and artist(s), the bridge that connects the story to the drawn comic is largely absent from its script. It exists as the style the artist has developed, the relationship the creators have as collaborators, the ambitions of their editor, as the priorities of the publisher. You cannot make comics without culture. It connects the idea to the page. Without people, nothing is communicated.

If the problem is how comics are made, the solution is to make more comics.


Arpad Okay has degrees in education and journalism, but also writes in third person on the internet. If there are deductive flaws, they are reflections of my analysis and not the source material.

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