Comics Pedagogy: Symbolism

Sometimes the obvious and direct meaning of a text goes right over my students' heads.

It can be frustrating.

(Actually, the problem is usually the opposite of what Bechdel is displaying here. My students are pretty good at hallucinating a symbolic reading of a text and, at times, pretty bad at picking up the literal claims the sentences in front of them are making.)

Tom Kaczynski and I Talk Comics Education

This is sort of appropriate material for my first day back in the classroom after the summer "vacation":

Over on his Transatlantis blog, my friend Tom Kaczynski has been posting an interesting series of short essays about the history and condition of comics education in America.



In today's entry in this series, I join Tom for a conversation about comics instruction in English departments. I guess I get to be an authority on this because I've been teaching comics in English departments since 2001, though really I don't know much beyond my own experience.



Still, I think the "interview" will be interesting to some of our regular readers. If nothing else, I've tried to raise a few questions of my own while answering Tom's. Click on over and check it out. Drop a comment onto Tom's blog if I've managed to get anything wrong.

(I should also mention that there are plenty of resources for comics education over at the website of NACAE, the National Association of Comics Art Educators. Why, some of those resources were even contributed by yours truly.)

The Academic Decathlon Team We Root For

As far as central-California high-school Academic Decathlon teams go, there's only one that really stokes my team spirit.

Here are the fightin', thinkin' Grizzlies of Granite Hills High, of Porterville, CA, getting psyched for another round of competition at the recent Academic Decathlon competition in Sacramento:



Those are some sharp kids, with a fine sense of team style, wouldn't you say?



And what's that interesting heraldic device adorning the backs of their team colors?



Doesn't that look familiar? Yes, indeed, they're wearing an enlarged version of one of my Darwin cartoons. No kidding.



Their academic coach, Mark Harriger, found the cartoon a few weeks ago with Google. (In fact, "Darwin cartoons" is one of our most popular search terms these days.) Mark emailed me and asked whether he could use the cartoon on their shirts, and I was only too happy to provide him with a high-res (and slightly improved) version, on one condition: that he let me post a few photos of the team back here on the blog. (Thanks, Mark!)



Go Grizzlies! We salute you!

Isn't the internet awesome?

Something I Hadn't Noticed in Jimmy Corrigan (Until This Week)

This has to be another light post. I still haven't read everything from my last Swansea find (which was back in July!), so I can only present another trivium that has surfaced from my comics-reading this week.

I have been retooling that paper on Chris Ware's diagrams from last year's MLA, for a collection of essays that should be forthcoming from University Press of Mississippi. As I was writing about the last diagram in Jimmy Corrigan—the one that reveals Amy's ancestry, and shows that she's actually a close blood relation to all of the Corrigan men in the book—I noticed something about the diagram that I hadn't seen before. (This surprises me, because I've taught the book several times, and I'd already written about this diagram once.)

You'll remember, probably, the diagram I'm talking about. Toward the end of it it, it looks like this:



That little girl is the half-sister of James Corrigan, the little boy in the nineteenth-century parts of the book and the shriveled old "Granpa" in the twentieth-century parts of the book.

Those panels are all set against a background that shows the William Corrigan house in the foreground.



What I had never noticed is the tiny figure in the background of that background, under this last diagram panel with the little girl. Here's the last image in the diagram's "chain" again.



... and if you look really closely...



Not only is Amy related by blood to her adopted father and grandfather, but her great-grandmother grew up just a few hundred yards away from young James, or so it seems. I've always argued that this diagram is in the book to heighten our sense of the sadness of the failed connection between Jimmy and Amy; I hadn't really taken into account the way that it also adds sadness to the story of little James. (As if that story needed more sadness.)

That's it for now. Stay tuned for an announcement about this year's SPX.

Little Lulu and the Arbitrary Signifier

Another minimal post for me, because I'm still swamped. Weeks go by pretty quickly when the semester's in full force. I'm still learning to tame the constant flow of work.

Discerning bloggers have already picked this up—the original post went up a couple of weeks ago—but I keep being amused by a little story from a 1956 issue of Little Lulu.

In it, Lulu and Alvin discover the arbitrary nature of linguistic signification.

I excerpt just three panels from the story here, but you can read it in full—and with brilliant comic timing—at the link above.



The kids are charmed by the slippage between signifier and signified, you see.



In one of the most joyful panels ever, language is revealed to be a mere construct. Chaos ensues.



By the time the adults get hold of the game, "foot" and "feet" have become so destabilized that they can only be construed in terms of natural (as opposed to arbitrary) signifiers: as a kind of onomatopoeia.



Ever notice how you never see pictures of John Stanley and Ferdinand de Saussure in the same room?

For extra credit: read this and watch:

Vocabulary, Taxonomy, Pigeonholes: Thought Balloonists

If you're not already reading Charles Hatfield and Craig Fischer's Thought Balloonists blog, which features smart criticism and discursive reviews every week, now would be a great time to check it out. In their latest entry, Hatfield and I discuss the shortcomings and merits of taxonomy, especially as it pertains to that gray area between the ordinary and the avant-garde. Though I don't say it over there on that blog, my position owes a lot to an essay by Dylan Horrocks that argues with Scott McCloud. Pop on over to Thought Balloonists and watch the pedantic fur fly!

Last Week at Long Island University

I had meant to say something about this sooner, but as I mentioned last week, April is particularly cruel for those of us on an academic schedule: as the end of the term gets closer, all those postponed and delayed things start coming in... Plus, I've got a move to Vermont to prepare for. But enough excuses: here's what I was going to say.

Last Wednesday, I was pleased to host a comics-related event at my campus of Long Island University, with Matt Madden and Jessica Abel:

It went really well. Matt and Jessica came to my graphic-novel seminar and talked with my students about their recent books (which we had read in the class), the creative process more generally, and their books that are about to come out. In the evening they gave a slideshow presentation for a more general university audience, and I think the students really enjoyed it. The creatively inclined students in my afternoon class really seemed glad to be able to talk with some working writers. One of my students who is interested in writing fiction told me that listening to the presentation made her more interested in making comics, and that she was planning to buy Jessica and Matt's textbook when it comes out later this year.

This brings me to one of the most exciting parts of the visit for me: Matt and Jessica brought in an early copy of their forthcoming Drawing Words and Writing Pictures, which looks like it will be the best book yet released on how to make comics. I had high hopes for Scott McCloud's Making Comics when it came out—despite all my quibbles and arguments with the stuff in Understanding Comics, I think McCloud is a really smart thinker about how comics are put together—but it turned out not to be all that useful in the classroom when I taught my first class on how to make comics.

This book, on the other hand, looks like it will be perfect for that class, if I ever get to teach it again. It has a friendly, open approach:


Not all of the book is narrated in comics format like this—just the introduction and a few other parts—but this moment really does seem exemplary of the book's tone. (I scanned these images from the latest issue of The Comics Journal. The actual book has color in it, but I'm not sure whether these pages are grayscale or color.)

Having taught comics-making once now, I can also see signs all over this book of Matt and Jessica's years of experience teaching at SVA and elsewhere.


Can't draw hands? Have problems with perspective? Sounds like a lot of my students last year. Heck, that sounds like me when I was first teaching myself how to cartoon. (I remember asking Mike to set up the perspective for me in one panel of my first mini. I couldn't figure out how to make it look right. And I was having trouble with hands all the way through our Demonstration mini in 2004.)

To my mind, though, this moment in the introduction hits precisely the right note: being an expert draftsman can sure help you make good-looking comics, but if you learn the way the language of comics works, you can teach yourself to draw more beautifully (or more to your own aesthetic, whatever it is) as you make comics. Almost every cartoonist goes through a learning period, sometimes lasting a decade or more. Someone once told Mike that you have to draw a thousand pages of terrible comics before you can make one good one—so, as I now tell my students, you might as well get started on the bad ones. But I'm guessing that having a guide like Drawing Words and Writing Pictures would help to accelerate the learning curve, maybe trimming off a couple hundred from the count.

I am really excited about the release of this book, and I hope anyone who is interested in making comics will pick up a copy.

One final note about the visit: Jessica and Matt brought their baby daughter Aldara along with them, and she is one amazingly beautiful and sweet-tempered little girl. She charmed both of the students who babysat her while the cartoonists were presenting, and I swore (and will stand behind it, even never having seen Eli and Oliver in person) that Aldara is cuter than both of the Kochalka sons put together.

A Visit to the Center for Cartoon Studies

I'll get back to that pile of crappy comics soon, but I wanted to say a little bit about the visit I made last week to the Center for Cartoon Studies up in White River Junction, Vermont. Overall, I was impressed with the school and the students, and I think it's looking really nice for such a young operation in such a non-lucrative corner of the educational world.

I drove through some heavy snow the day before I went there, and the terrain beside the highways on the day I went to White River Junction was just gorgeous in a sort of gingerbread-house way. I just had to smile, looking out on all the fields covered in pristine snow, and the pine-trees crusted with snow (the spruces rough in the distant glitter, etc.). Because I was driving I didn't get any pictures of it, but here's a little snapshot from the town green in Burlington, the following day, to help you infer what the countryside and mountains looked like:


Anyway, I got off the freeway in White River Junction, drove a mile or so into downtown, turned a corner, and there it was:

The main space of the Center for Cartoon Studies is on the first floor of the old Colodny Surprise department store, and they've kept the awning out front, but the windows facing the street definitely declare cartoon allegiance:


Up until this point, the CCS had felt like sort of an imaginary place to me, like Oz or Avalon or Oxford: a place that I could read about, but probably wouldn't ever see. There was something a little giddy about seeing it in front of my eyes. Much about it seems mythical: a little school in a little post-industrial Vermont town, where each two-year cohort of twenty or so students gets instruction from top-notch literary cartoonists on the way to make a graphic novel. People like Chris Ware and Lynda Barry drop in. Students have their theses advised by Stan Sakai or Chester Brown. This unassuming building in this dingy, snowy town is one of the epicenters of the new movement in literary comics.

In fact, it's an ordinary building, not glamorously equipped or even eye-catching. But what goes on in there is really exciting. I like to imagine that the students at CCS are getting the equivalent of eight or ten years' worth of comics-making experience packed into their two-year sojourns in White River Junction. These folks will be equipped to write and draw some very smart stuff.

Anyway, I'd been invited to drop in by my friend Robyn Chapman...

...(who has a few really fine minicomics and who edits the zine Hey, Four-Eyes, in case you're inclined to do some shopping), and I called her cell phone so she could let me in to the building.

She was beaten to the door, though, by a cheerful Steve Bissette, who gave me a hearty handshake even though he doesn't know me from Adam. He was on his way out of the building as I was on my way in. I guess that's the sort of encounter one has at the epicenter.

Robyn showed me around the facility, including this attractive sign from the old Colodny Surprise store that hangs in the CCS lobby:


Down in the basement is the printing lab, which is open to the students around the clock. They've got a couple of computers, a couple of xerox machines, a wealth of long-arm staplers, a hydraulic paper-cutter, a screen-printing station, and a ping-pong table down there. Also some sofas, for when Steve Bissette hosts a movie night.

I was a little envious of all the printing equipment.

The real "purpose" of my trip to CCS, though, wasn't tourism. I was supposed to give a short talk to Jason Lutes's afternoon second-year workshop, so after lunch Robyn led me over to their studio space. I sat in on a couple of critiques, in which one of the students circulated copies of work in progress and got feedback from Jason and from his classmates. (I chimed in, too, here and there. My old poetry-workshop instincts resurfaced right away.)

...And then I talked for a few minutes about formal constraints and games. I tried to suggest that although there are plenty of constraints that only limit the things you can write or draw, there are also process-oriented "generative constraints," like the ones we used in some of that comic for Elfworld, or the constraint that propels the Mapjam project. These sorts of constraints can help you find your way to ideas you wouldn't otherwise have, and I think that having a few such constraints in your toolkit can help you get clear of any artistic stuck spot.

Anyway, then I taught them how to play Jesse Reklaw's game shuffleupagus. It's a hard game to explain, but we got three pages of shuffleupagus stuff turned out in about 45 minutes, with the second-year students working in three groups.

Here's a little picture of Jason Lutes in his group, with my lame attempt at explanatory doodles on the dry-erase board behind him:


... And here's a result from the session, not quite completely inked. (You can click to enlarge it.)

If any of the CCS students who drew this page happen to read this, please drop a note in the comments so I can give credit to the artists! I didn't get y'all's names while I was there.

All in all, it was a really pleasant day. I got to see a place that I've been wanting to see since before it even existed, and I got to meet a few people whom I'm sure I'll be glad to run into at MoCCA or SPX in the future. I got a really good feeling about CCS as a program of education and as an institution that's having a positive effect on the cartooning world. I hope I'll get to drop in there again some time.

The Chicago MLA Roundtable on Chris Ware

Well, it looks like it has been a while since I posted to the old blog. I've got a good excuse, though, and it starts with the letters MLA. I think I have recovered from the trip now, but I tell you, it was exhausting.

On the Thursday night of the convention, though, I gave a short paper on a round-table panel on Chris Ware. I am not exaggerating when I say this was the best panel I've seen in four MLA conventions: the most tightly conceived, the most interesting, and the most provocative (of subsequent conversation). That has very little to do with my own paper, and lots to do with the other people on the panel, plus the excellent organizing of Dave Ball.

The paper I gave was called "Chris Ware and the Grammar of Diagrams," and it was mostly kind of inspired by some things that Kevin Huizenga said in the "How to Draw Thinking" panel at SPX a couple of years ago. I spent some time in the paper looking closely at the diagrams in Jimmy Corrigan, talking about the way that Ware hides interesting (and, in one case, important) details about the interconnection of the characters' lives in the inscrutable recesses of the diagrams. But the main thing I wanted to claim—and which I only had a couple of minutes to discuss—is the way that the basic reading method of comics seems to be related to the visual grammar of the informational diagram. (I can tell you more about this if you're interested.) Looking at diagrams, as I said toward the end of the paper, can give cartoonists a lot of ideas for innovative ways of connecting information on the comics page.

In case you need reminding, here's one of Ware's diagrams (but not one that has information about the characters: this one just tells you how to read a single-panel cartoon). You can click to enlarge it.


The other four papers on the panel were all really great. Our friend Martha Kuhlman gave a quick talk about Chris Ware's relation to the "Oubapo" movement, and she very generously included us in her list of American "oubapians," based on our interest in formal constraints. Matt Godbey talked about Building Stories and the way that gentrification has been hitting the neighborhood represented in that recent Ware story. Peter Sattler gave a really provocative (I thought) piece about the way that Ware depicts memory—and not only the memory of an event, but the memory of a feeling. (I really wish I could reproduce the Peter's whole argument, because I know there are parts of it that I found really persuasive, and there were other parts I wasn't sure about. I'd like to pick it apart with him.) The fifth paper on the panel was Benj Widiss's paper about Quimby the Mouse as autobiography, focusing in particular on the way that changes to Quimby's head (decapitation, mutation, removal, etc.) are a good symbol for the self-in-formation as Ware develops toward a mature sensibility.

I wish I could present more details about the papers, because they were all really stimulating. There were some really nice moments in the post-papers discussion, too—I remember a moment when one of Matt's slides from Building Stories turned out to be useful in making a point about one of Peter's claims because of the way the image could be read as a diagram. Or something like that. Anyway, the connections between the papers were really stimulating, and I'm hoping I'll get to keep in touch with all of these comics scholars. It's the best academic panel on comics I've been a part of that didn't also include Mike.

(That was another one of my slides.)

One non-comics-related thing about my trip to Chicago: I was totally charmed by the public sculpture named "Cloud Gate," which everyone calls "The Bean." It was just a couple of blocks south of our conference hotel, and on Sunday I developed a little bit of an obsession with it, I think. Here's a cell-phone photo:


It's highly reflective stainless steel. It's thirty-three feet tall. You can walk under it with plenty of headroom, and there are tons of weird reflections-of-reflections-of-reflections in the "omphalos" on its underside. It made me giggle like a four-year-old. I had to go back again and see it at night.

Anyway, it's good to be back. I'll try to post again in less than a week, maybe when I start working on my syllabus for this spring's course on the graphic novel.