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.)

Comics Pedagogy: Albert the Alligator

Yesterday one of my colleagues said jokingly that she thought of her lectures like stand-up comedy routines.

Later in the day I saw this panel in a January 1949 Pogo strip:


Indeed, I feel like this sometimes in front of my classes.

My Panelists Archive: On Adventures in Cartooning, for First Second's Fifth

My final post for the now-defunct Panelists blog was for our series celebrating the fifth anniversary of First Second Books. Before I get to it, let me say that I am genuinely sad that I couldn't contribute more to The Panelists while it was alive. My paying work has made it impossible for me to write much at all lately, and although I had (and have!) ideas for short essays I wanted to write, I never got to them.

The thing that I liked best about The Panelists was the real feeling of camaraderie, of shared purpose, even among scholars and critics whose tastes don't perfectly agree. Probably if you placed all the comics in the world on the table between the six of us, there would be not a single book that we would all want to take home for the top shelf of our personal canon. Things that got Charles and me fired up would leave Derik cold. The Venn diagram of our tastes would be hard to draw. But we worked well as a team, making a whole that, when it was functioning, was greater than the sum of its parts.

Early in the team's history, my image for our collected powers was of a great Voltron of comics criticism. The sad thing was to watch that Voltron try to march into battle with both its legs and one arm totally asleep. (In this image, I would be one of the useless legs.)

I'll miss the Panelists, more for its potential than for its actuality; more for what it represented to me than for what it managed to become.

Our comics culture needs more places for careful and sustained snark-free criticism, where every claim is supported with thoughtful evidence and every quibble is launched in the spirit of arriving together at a better understanding of the medium's inner workings.

Anyway, here's the last squib I managed to scribble.




The first time I taught a course on making comics, the closest thing I had to a textbook or instruction guide for the students was Scott McCloud’s then-new Making Comics. I wound up using parts of the book, skipping other parts, and generally wishing I had something that I could use all the way through the semester.

Thanks to First Second, I now have a serious alternative, in Jessica Abel and Matt Madden’s Drawing Words & Writing Pictures. Organized around lessons and exercises, DWWP moves through a series of skills that build incrementally: composition and drawing basics are followed by more elaborate lessons and work on progressively larger units, from the panel to the strip, from the story to the zine. If I find myself teaching another class on making comics, I’m sure I’ll assign it. In fact, there are patient explanations of the use of things like Pro-White and the Ames Guide in DWWP that I should probably re-examine if I ever make comics seriously again myself: there’s a lot I could learn from this book.

For the moment, however, I want to consider the benefits of a competing textbook, also published by First Second. This other book covers less ground and isn’t as thick, but it also retails for less than half the price. There are reasons I probably shouldn’t assign it, including the fact that it offers no technical instruction at all—there’s not even a mention of inking, let alone brush technique or cross-hatching—but as instruction manuals go, it has definite strengths. In some ways, it might even be more appropriate for the kind of course or the kind of students I’d be likely to teach. (I'm in an English department, not an art department, so I teach comics-making as a kind of creative writing.)

I’m alluding to Adventures in Cartooning, the how-to-make-comics manual for kids that presents itself as a light fantasy romance with a knight, a missing princess, an elf, and a dragon. A collaboration between James Sturm and two Center for Cartoon Studies graduates (Andrew Arnold and Alexis Frederick-Frost), Adventures in Cartooning offers a series of lessons in comics practice while telling a suitably silly quest story with a couple of nice twists in its conclusion. It’s pitched, I think, at precisely that age range where kids either might get into drawing stories other people could read or, without a supportive environment, might give up drawing altogether. And yet I would like to consider, here, some lessons in Adventures that the blooming late-teen college-aged cartoonist would also do well to observe:

1. You don’t have to be able to “draw well” to make a good comic (or a fun one).
This point arises briefly in Drawing Words & Writing Pictures, but so much of that book gathers its examples and its exercises from superlatively competent work that it could still be daunting for a novice or a doodler. (If your handbook is going to have guidance on feathering or drybrush technique, it’s naturally going to move a long way beyond examples of what you can do if you “can’t draw.”)


("You don't have to be able to draw, but we'll assume that you want to learn how.")

The idea that simple drawings can still tell a story is front and center in Adventures in Cartooning, which begins with a princess complaining that she “just can’t draw well enough to make a comic”—and immediately contradicted by the Magic Cartooning Elf, who shows how a few basic shapes can be doodled into the main props and settings of the story that follows.


("Anyone can draw that stuff!")

The design of the characters in Adventures is inspired in part by Ed Emberley’s Make a World: each is built out of a few simple shapes that are easy to repeat. The difference between this simple drawing (which is possible for anyone who can write letters) and bad drawing turns out to be mainly about the difference between gesture and stiffness, not the ability to render a horse that looks like a horse. Here, Adventures in Cartooning teaches by example: little more than a stick figure, the knight is still full of lively and even exaggerated motion.

2. Since words and images can work complementarily in comics, you can use descriptive words to get you out of a drawing jam.
I don’t remember this coming up, at least not in quite this way, in Drawing Words & Writing Pictures, but it’s a great point for novice cartoonists who aren’t feeling secure in their drawing chops. Some things are hard to show, but there’s no reason a character can’t name a thing like that to make its identity clearer. A small closed squiggle can become a bubble-gum wrapper; a few rectangles in the background can become a mile-high stone wall. And let’s remember that even the most painstaking draftsman is still going to rely on language for invisible effects like smell and sound.

3. You don’t have to perform fancy tricks with layout in order to take advantage of “special effects” of panel height, width, and size.
Most of the page layouts in Adventures in Cartooning are straightforward variations on a grid, but each layout is deliberate and directed at a particular effect. (Again the book sets an example for the kid (or student) without much commentary.) A square panel has a different sort of action than a panel with horizontal aspect, because a horizontal panel is better at establishing setting or motion along a surface; a vertical panel is good for ascent, descent, or growth; a row or grid of similar-shaped panels is good for showing progression; and so forth.



4. Leave room at the top of your panel.
One of my favorite moments in the book, which happens before the Magical Cartooning Elf explains the virtues of different-shaped panels, shows the knight and his horse ascending a mountain and, because of the rising ground, seeming to bump against the top of the panel. Maybe this “lesson” isn’t what Sturm and his collaborators had in mind, but I have seen plenty of panels drawn without a thought about speech balloons, then having to crowd dialogue into a tiny attic over the characters’ heads.



5. Drawing is fun, and drawing together is fun.
This might be the most important lesson in Adventures in Cartooning, and again it comes through implicitly, both in the fun of the drawings themselves and in the solution to the knight’s ultimate crisis. (Having fallen in the ocean, several knights are drowning until, working together, they draw a pirate ship they can sail away on.)


("We call this a jam.")

Little kids mostly don’t need to be told this, but the fun of drawing would probably be the hardest of these five lessons for me to convey in a comics class. That’s because the college students who need this lesson aren’t likely to take a course that requires them to draw every week, and teenagers who think they can’t draw aren’t likely to have an Ed Emberley conversion moment when they’re being graded. By the time young people have passed from the Adventures in Cartooning target demographic to that of Drawing Words, they may have been discouraged out of telling stories with pictures. It’s a tragedy Adventures in Cartooning is trying to forestall. For those lost cartoonists, a healthy dose of Lynda Barry might jolt them back to a kid’s pleasure in making worlds and telling stories. Or maybe I should just casually scatter a half-dozen copies of Adventures in Cartooning in the library’s study area.

(This post just had a couple of comments, which I've allowed to evaporate into the ether. Perhaps you'd like to add your own now.)

What my Ph.D. Means to Me: Holiday Edition

I finally got my grades done on "Monday night," a little before 5:00 AM.

The last day of classes was December 7. Over the following twelve days, I graded that entire stack of papers. How much do you think it weighs?

Answer: nine and a half pounds, if we're just talking literally.

Maybe it's not as bad as it looks. I am only returning the ones above the shift, about halfway up. The others were read but not marked. But that top half of the stack has had its grammar marked (every misplaced comma, every confused homophone), along with critiques of the argument or pacing or metaphors.



Now I get to think about the holidays.

For the record, I got my Ph.D. about nine years ago, at one of the most prestigious institutions in my field. You might think that by now I would have felt some sense of professional advancement.

Instead, I have every reason to expect this workload (or more) until I retire, quit, or expire in the saddle.

The next time my students suggest that they are thinking about going to graduate school, I'm going to ask, "Do you like grading papers?"

And if they don't answer, "Like it? I LOVE IT!" ... well, I feel a strong moral obligation to discourage them.

But I shouldn't complain. I am lucky, in fact, in that I even have a job.

Where Have I Been?

Sorry for the long silence. Expect it to continue.



This is what I graded over the Thanksgiving break. A lot of that stuff is printed double-sided, and I wrote on every page.

I have a half again as much to do between now and the end of the semester. Then, I may breathe (and blog) again.

Fun Home, Proximity, and Intimacy

I'm a little too fried from my long week of teaching, grading, and writing to offer any "new" insights tonight, but something interesting occurred to me yesterday when I was preparing for the graphic novel class.

It starts with a few very smart panels from Dylan Horrocks's Hicksville that I've been fascinated with ever since Jeff Seymour forced me to pay attention to them eight and a half years ago.



That's the great cartoonist Emil Kopen speaking in the first panel, explaining how comics can be thought of as maps. (Actually, Kopen asserts that maps and comics are the same thing.) Like maps, comics record or diagram things in space. Because each panel places characters in space, the comic is a record of spatial relationships over time. And aren't these changes in spatial relationships what stories are, to some extent, about?



There's more to narrative and to memory than the movement of people (and objects) relative to each other—biting is not kissing, even if they're both oral intimacies—but Kopen's assertions exaggerate something genuinely true about the way comics represent characters in the worlds they construct.

And this came back to me when I was looking over the middle of Fun Home yesterday.



I've thought a lot already about the way that the dot-for-a-mouth cartoon faces in Fun Home reveal mainly the characters' inexpressiveness—their unwillingness or inability to express openly the sorts of emotions that would broaden the mouth or open it. But until this semester's passage through the book I hadn't thought about the waxing and waning of bodily proximity among these characters.

The panel above depicts a moment of unusual intimacy between Bruce and Helen, and yet there's still enough space between their bodies for a coffee cup. If you click the image to enlarge it, you'll see that their lips aren't even in contact for the "chaste peck" the narration describes.

In the panels below, we see even more extreme interpersonal distance, this time between Bruce and Alison, who begin and end the book in moments of what Bechdel describes as "rare physical contact." Here, they're distant, against the deep perspectival recess of a European airport terminal.



Even their speech balloons are keeping them distant from each other.

There's so little intimacy in the family that Alison's bedroom scenes once she's away at college are really surprising—maybe more because of the sudden intertwining of forms than because of the characters' nudity, which is mostly pretty modest.



I really like the composition of this panel—the way that Joan's legs and feet fill the negative space of the curve of Alison's back as she slouches into her phone call. They're close enough that a single line defines the edge separating their bodies.

I think I first remembered Emil Kopen and his cartography, however, when I read the last page of Bechdel's chapter 3. It's the end of a scene in Bruce Bechdel's library: he's reading while Alison asks him to write a check so she can order some Mad magazine books. There's not a lot of action in the two panels on this page—they'd be easy to glance at briefly while the narration in the captions holds your attention. But they carry a lot of drama in the question of proximity or intimacy.

In the first panel, Alison and Bruce seem close, though they're both focused on their separate tasks. The lamp on the desk and the painting on the wall connect them and make them compositionally interconnected, as if they were touching or overlapping in the panel space.



But then, in the chapter's final panel, our view swings around ninety degrees, and from the perspective of the windows we can see that the proximity in the first panel was only an illusion: father and daughter are distant enough from each other to be framed by separate windows, as if by separate panels in a comic.



If I were going to make this a proper "one-panel critics" post, that might be the panel I'd pick.

The One-Panel Critics: The Peril of Art

That's a little envelope doodle that appeared in my mailbox this week from New Zealand. Dylan Horrocks has a new minicomic!

You can order your copy using this link (and Paypal).

It's a "conversation jam," similar to those Kochalka/Thompson and Kochalka / Brown conversations that Top Shelf published, between Horrocks and the writer Emily Perkins. In their conversation, Horrocks and Perkins start with the question of why we write stories, and the talk drifts pretty quickly to Horrocks's anxieties about whether fiction (or any story) can really tell the truth about living.

"We're still in thrall to narrative unity ... resolution and catharsis," Perkins says. "Maybe the lie is not in metaphor but in structure."

Horrocks replies:



I'd argue that metaphor and structure don't need to be easy or simple, but I can see why Horrocks has some anxiety about this.

It's is actually a topic we've been discussing in my graphic-novel course, relative to Maus and the implicit structures of memoir: from the perspective of Rego Park, it's easy to construe Vladek's survival as a story of resourcefulness, smart decisions, necessary ruthlessness and scrupulous generosity. But while those events are being lived, there's no way to assess their value or their wisdom: Vladek could have made the same decisions, or other decisions on the same principles, and not have survived after all. It's only the post-facto construction of a story (or the opportunity to reflect and construct such a story) that makes Vladek heroic.

And there are elements in the logic of such a story that deceive, in some fundamental way, about lived experience. In the case of Maus, Vladek's story might seem to imply something about the capability of a wily and resourceful person to survive the Holocaust; this would in turn imply that the millions of victims had failed, in some way, to rise to heroic levels of self-preservation. Objectively, we'd never say that about the Holocaust victims, but something about the nature of narrative implies it anyway, contrary to anything we (or Spiegelman) would want to believe.

(Did I just run afoul of Godwin's law?)



It isn't merely that reality has too many details to fit into a comics panel, or that too many events take place for a memoirist to represent them all. The problem isn't simply one of completeness. It's that the structures of literature (and, as some might argue, even the structures of memory) necessarily distort reality, and in ways that we should probably find alarming: not distortions of fact, but distortions of the value of facts; structures and analogies of meaning.

Of course, maybe we could argue that until these distorting structures of narrative, analogy, and value are used on the materials of experience, there's no way to assess meaning at all. "We [tell] [stories] lest we perish from [inconsequentiality]; we [create] [structure] lest we perish from [chaos]."

Or something like that.



Thanks for the thought-provoking mini, Dylan. (And for the envelope doodles!) Everyone else, why not order a copy? It's smart stuff.

The One-Panel Critics: Listening to McCloud?

Yesterday this semester's classes had our first discussion of Understanding Comics. It's a book I teach with reservations, since it seems to have at least as many problematic assumptions and faulty leaps of logic as it has cool and innovative ideas. It's great for getting students to start thinking about the formal aspects of comics, and about the decisions of technique that cartoonists have to make in setting up every single page. But it's also loaded with claims that seem more and more specious the more I read them.

Leaving aside the chapter in which McCloud tries to define art and the artistic process, the shakiest of these claims seems to be his argument about the power of "iconic" cartooning—or what Art Spiegelman would call "diagrammatic" cartooning: spare, undetailed, simple cartooning, where every line indicates a legible, significant aspect of what the thing is rather than what the thing looks like as such. You know the kind of cartooning I'm talking about: Ernie Bushmiller instead of Todd McFarlane; Kevin Huizenga instead of Burne Hogarth; Vanna Vinci instead of Drew Friedman.

McCloud claims that there's something in our psychological hard-wiring about the human face that makes us identify more easily with the spare, "iconic" cartoon face, that we can somehow project our identities or consciousnesses into an undetailed cartoon face.

He claims that's why he draws himself in such an "iconic" way as he presents his argument. After all...



Taking this panel in isolation, I can't help thinking Sure, why not? — I mean, I'd still read a book of interesting comics criticism, even if its narrator was drawn with more lines. I'd even listen to it if it were presented on film, with moving photographs of the author. Why, I'd even pay attention if the presenter were right there in front of me—the ultimate in realism.

Sure, it might take a little longer for the author to draw a more detailed version of the argument — I might have needed to wait until 1994 or 1995 for Understanding Comics. But is there anything less trustworthy about that face?

In its context, in the course of McCloud's argument, the more realized or realistic drawing is jarring, and I think many readers take that momentary disruption in their reading expectations as a confirmation of McCloud's argument: we are unsettled by the less diagrammatic version of our narrator, so we think that he's "wrong" for the project. But let's remember that we've had thirty-six pages to get used to the little icon-McCloud at this point. We've formed a relationship with the little sprite.

And that's really how readerly identification works, isn't it?

I'd argue that we don't actually identify with a character because we confuse him or her for ourselves, or because we project ourselves into his place. I'm not fighting Kraven the Hunter in Spider-Man's suit; I just want Spider-Man to win. The musings of Glenn Ganges might remind me of things I've thought before, but when he's in trouble, I'm worried for him, not in him.

I don't experience the little McCloud sprite as "a little piece of [myself]" or even merely as "a little voice inside my head ... a concept" (UC, p. 37). I experience him as a character. Characters are by definition outside of me, and if I'm incapable of identifying with a character who doesn't resemble me, then I have a psychological problem.

There's much more to say about this, and a lot of it is covered in an excellent essay by Jonathan Frome ("Identification in Comics") that appeared in the Comics Journal roundtable on Understanding Comics (in the April 1999 issue). I've summarized this and other problems with McCloud in an essay that appeared in IJOCA a couple of years ago. If you're keen to read that essay and can't put your hands on the relevant issue of IJOCA, drop me an email, and I can samizdat it to you. You might also want to see Marc Singer's ruminations on teaching with Understanding Comics and this same problem.

For the record, I do think there's a special power in iconic cartooning, but it's less about identification and more about legibility. When we look at the face of Sluggo or Charlie Brown or Glenn Ganges, those facial features tell us less about what the character looks like (or would look like, in the real world) and more about what they're feeling. The line under an eye for fatigue, or the line of an eyebrow indicating surprise or anger: these designate emotions in an almost symbol-like (semiotic? iconic? linguistic?) way. The only disadvantage of the cross-hatched, detailed, more "realist" version of McCloud is that we'd spend more time looking at him, and thinking about what the image looked like.

And, despite McCloud's consistent privileging of image over text in his definition of comics, it's the text that's important in Understanding Comics. He wants us to pay attention to the message, and not the messenger.

(To be fair: that last statement is a paraphrase of McCloud himself, but I think he's imagining that "the messenger" is only an external character if he's drawn realistically, and I'd argue that even the iconic sprite designates a character, just one that we can "read" more easily. He's still distracting sometimes.)

This Is Bugging Me (Eisner v. Swan)

I just finished grading a set of very short papers that contrast A Contract with God with an issue of Superman that was also published in 1978. A couple of my undergraduates' frequent generalizations are really sort of throwing me off.

When they talk about the books' different visual styles, they frequently say that Eisner's drawing ...



... is much more detailed than Curt Swan's.



(This panel is less than half the size of the Eisner panel above.)

I think what they're trying to say is that Eisner generally makes more marks per panel, because he's cross-hatching. But I think we have to agree that cross-hatching isn't the same thing as detail. A vast field of cross-hatching, by itself, reveals no details. And it's true that the background in Superman 331 drops out a lot in favor of a field of solid color, but I don't think the difference with Eisner is really all that distinct, once you account for the cross-hatching.

So, clearly, one of the things I'll have to talk with my students about, in the weeks to come, is the difference between shading and detail.

This other generalization really baffles me, though.

My students keep saying that Curt Swan's characters are much more cartoony...



... and Eisner's are drawn much more realistically.



What do you think they are talking about, here? The best guess I can come up with is that they mean the character designs represent a more realistic variety of body types—pretty much all of Swan's male figures have the same build in this comic, and Lois's face looks a lot like Lana's. But can that really be what they mean when they say Frimme Hersch looks less cartoony?

My other hypothesis is a bit dispiriting: the students had already decided what they thought a superhero comic looked like, or what a "sophisticated" comic would look like, and they didn't really look at what Swan and Eisner had drawn.

Any other theories?

They also keep saying that Eisner's writing is more sophisticated that Marty Pasko's—that it uses more advanced vocabulary (and, presumably, more complex sentence structures?). That's not a note about subject matter, as far as I can tell, but about diction and style. That claim really has me perplexed. Is it merely coming from Yiddishisms like "tsimmis" that the students probably had to look up? I don't think any of the students noticed that most of the individual panels in Superman have more words in them than most of Eisner's pages do.

Help me out here.

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.)

T-Shirts with Charles (the "Silent Critic")

These are the last t-shirts I intend to design this weekend. I've received a couple of requests for a shirt featuring Charles, who appears in Tales from the Classroom, in the story "The Silent Critic." You can read that story in its entirety if you follow the link there.

Here are a couple of classic Charles utterances, which I think you'll agree are worthy to adorn your torso:

This shirt is temporarily offline, until I jigger a couple of things in its design.

Charles: Administrative Processes by SatisfactoryComics

"I really admire your facility with administrative processes," he says.

Charles: A Lot of Effort by SatisfactoryComics

Also, the more multi-purpose backhanded compliment, "I can see that you put a lot of effort into some of this." That's about the best he can muster.

Enjoy the shirts, wear them in good health, and please let me know if you have any other requests.

"No More Bring Bring!"

On the midterm exam I gave to my Honors College freshmen this semester, I offered the option of drawing a cartoon related to the course materials for a few bonus points. One of my students, Phil Morin, drew a cartoon of Fred Rogers, as a sort of elegy, because the exam was happening on the anniversary of Mr. Rogers's death.

It was a nice cartoon, but completely unrelated to the course materials—Phil had misread the instructions. I teased him about it a little bit, and when the final exam got closer, he asked whether there would be a cartoon bonus section this time.

I did include a cartoon option for bonus points, and at first I was dismayed when I saw Phil's final-exam cartoon:



That's Mr. Rogers again, in the Land of Make-Believe. (You can click the image to enlarge it, as usual.) But it turns out that Phil was able to make Mr. Rogers relevant to the course materials this time.

You see, he's scolding the Trolley, saying, "Abandon your private language to develop a public one—no more bring bring!!"

(One of the authors we read this semester was Richard Rodriguez, who advocates against bilingual-education programs on the grounds that they alienate immigrant children from the public language of the country. I don't entirely agree with Rodriguez, and I taught his essay as a text the students could argue against, but that's not relevant to the cartoon.)

Anyway, I was so tickled by the idea that the Trolley had been speaking a private language ("Bring bring!") all this time that I asked Phil if I could post the cartoon here. And I figure if one of my first-year students has learned to draw cartoons that elaborately synthesize disparate ideas, then I must be doing something right.

Doodle Penance: "jimmy corrigan in the classroom"

This week's "Doodle Penance" comes from a pretty reasonable request, posed by an anonymous Google searcher (as usual): "jimmy corrigan in the classroom."

I feel pretty well prepared to talk about lesson plans or whatever on Chris Ware's awesome Jimmy Corrigan.

I've read it carefully nearly a dozen times, and I've taught it to college students six or seven times at least. (I lose track. It hasn't been on all of my comics syllabi, but it has been on most of them.) I feel sort of like I'd be disappointing my colleagues at NACAE if I didn't approach this seriously. On the other hand, after last week's penance, I'm convinced none of our readers need me to take another of these prompts too seriously.

Perhaps our Google searcher was just a schoolteacher looking for a nice graphic to use for an upcoming snow day, in which case, let me recommend this:



Ah, carefree youth!

The nineteenth-century Jimmy (I guess we normally call him James or Granpa) doesn't spend a whole lot of the book in the classroom, but apparently he's a good student. Or maybe his teacher's just sympathetic because James's mother just died. But in this sequence, his teacher taps him to be one of four children participating in a parade-stand display connected to the World's Fair.





... But she might just have picked James because he's one of only a few children enrolled at the school. I mean, his classmates look amazingly middle-aged. The poor little runt really is a fish out of water.



I'd never noticed that before. It seems like I notice something new in this book every dang time I pick it up.

Where was I?

Oh, right. Doodle penance. I'm not supposed to be scanning Chris Ware's work and discussing its nuances. I'm supposed to be drawing something of my own, preferably something stupid, and posting that.

Well, having taught Jimmy Corrigan several times now, I can say that the first hurdle is just getting the students to read the whole thing. It's a "bold experiment in reader tolerance" in more ways than one. (Actually, that's how I often start my lessons on Ware: "In what various ways is this book a test of your tolerance? How is it difficult, and to what ends?")

... But at some point, there's inevitably another moment of awkwardness, when we start asking about the weird semi-Freudian, often-Oedipal imagery of Jimmy's dream sequences. What does the robot mean? Why is Superman acting like such a jerk? What's the allegedly symbolic fascination with peaches? And why is the book so interested in horses?

These questions really aren't difficult because they're obscure; they're difficult because I don't want to be too explicit about the answers.



Hm. That picture didn't turn out so well, though I think swiping some of Ware's colors helps it out a little bit. But using a Rapidograph really killed my pencils this time around: the lines of Jimmy's face need to be finer than I could make them with that pen.

Mike? What have you got?

—Hey, Isaac...Sorry for the slight delay, but I was at an Oscars party. Perhaps you'll accept that as an excuse if I tell you that I came home with a copy of Hellboy: Seed of Destruction AND a Hellboy figurine, thanks to the missus's winning of a prize for her Oscar prognostication?

Perhaps not. Regardless, here's what I got. First, Jimmy Corrigan in "the classroom," which is to say a drawing of young Jimmy made up of the letters in the words "the classroom" (the "E" is turned sideways):
I figured that I wouldn't try to compete with your account (and doodle) of teaching the graphic novel, since I've only done so once, myself. However, I can also fight back with a previously unpublished drawing by Chris Ware, which he sketched for me in November 2007 at the "Graphic Novels in the Classroom" event where I pontificated on a panel with some other DC comics scholar types:

Maybe that'll get me some points in this non-competition!

A glossary for the Abecedarium

At Isaac's encouragement, I wrote the text for my ABC poem (see Isaac's post above) in Chaucer's Middle English, more or less. Most of the text should be intelligible at a glance even to readers unfamiliar with Chaucer, but some of the words have fallen out of the active lexicon of modern English, and a few otherwise familiar words may be hard to recognize in their medieval spellings. So here's a glossary of the trickier terms for those who might want it:

alderbeste: best of all
beraft: bereft, deprived
caitiff: wretch
cracchen: scratch
eres: ears
faren: travel
fer: far
gete: acquire
haunteth: occupies, inhabits
ilk an: each
lesing: losing
list: wishes
mete: food
mot: must
namoore: no more
on-loft: aloft
privetee: secrets
purposeth: intends
spillen: die
swinketh: works
takel: tackle, gear
tapster: woman who serves ale
tell bedes: pray (e.g., with rosary beads)
trimmeth: prepares
tunnes: barrels
venerye: hunting
werre: war
wodewose: wild man of the woods
yarely: readily
yeman: yeoman

For further information about Chaucer's language, life, and poetry, I heartily recommend the Harvard Chaucer web page. Thus endeth the lesson.

Tales from the Classroom

I'm working on inking our "I Saw You" anthology submission, but I thought I'd go ahead and fulfill the promise I made last week and make a post about Tales from the Classroom, the collection of teaching case-studies that we drew for the Graduate Teaching Center at Yale over the summer of 2003. Here's the cover, which is loaded with little gags and fun details you may not be able to make out in this photo (though you can click it, like any of the images in this post, to enlarge it). Notice the way we used the Mike Mignola theory of triangular composition on this one:

Can you spot Zombie Mike and Isaac? If the GTC prints a second edition of the book (and they've been talking about doing that), I'd like to recolor the cover. Now that I know a little more about Photoshop (I don't think I had ever even used it then), I could probably make that color look a lot better.

Tales from the Classroom is a collection of seven stories or scenarios about problem moments in the classroom, drawn from real teaching experiences by graduate students at Yale. Everything in the book was adapted from prose "case studies" written up by the people who experienced the events. (These studies were fictionalized with respect to names and disciplines, but the events remained the same.)

Our idea with Tales from the Classroom was that, if prospective teachers learn well from reading and discussing prose case studies, wouldn't they gain even more from reading comics, where they could observe gestures, facial expressions, spatial relations, and so forth? Judging from the response we've received from this book, that's certainly the case -- though more often than not, people just want to talk to us about Millie and Charles.

Several of the cases lack closure (which is why I think of them more as scenarios than stories) and they often end with questions designed to promote conversation. Often, this takes the form not only of "What should I do next?" but "What did I do wrong?" or "How did I let this happen?" -- and we did our best to load the stories with clues as to the origins of the problems that finally come to a head and drive the teachers to seek help.

Here's an example of a truly awkward moment that the grad student in question probably could have headed off, where one of his freshmen starts to act on the crush she has on him:

(I've rearranged those panels slightly from the way they appeared in the original book, for your convenience.) If you read that story, our hope is that you can see how James could have prevented this situation, or what in his teaching style led to this predicament.

Here's a couple of sequences from the longest story in the book, a scenario that's not only about teaching but about the advice you can give to other teachers. In this one, Carl is an art history T.A. whose section seems to be going really well until he gets to the very end of class. The discussion is very lively, intense and interesting, right up until he asks the question that's supposed to connect the section's activities to what's been happening (on quite a different track) in lecture.

Animated discussion ...

... that leads to awkward silence?

Things actually get a little worse than just awkward silence before the end of this story, since this question and its subsequent discussion manage to offend one of Carl's students in a way he didn't anticipate. The whole thing is being observed by a grad student from the Teaching Center, and the questions at the end of the case aren't just about what Carl should be doing, but about what the observer feels it's fair to tell him.

Strictly in terms of cartooning, doing this much adaptation of "talky," dialogue-heavy narrative gave us plenty of chances to experiment with layout, and we had a lot of fun with that. Here's a sequence with the aforementioned Millie the Mumbler, a case-study from a foreign-language classroom, where one of the students simply will not participate at an audible volume:

(Obviously, I was taking a page out of Chris Ware's playbook for that one; imitation is supposed to be the sincerest flattery.)

Here's a nice little sequence of "scene-to-scene" transitions with very little change, from a piece called "Joe the Dreamer," about a student who sleeps through most of a summer Italian class, and what to say to his classmates when they mock him behind his back (but in front of the instructor). Again, I've rearranged the panels, and again, you really have to click to enlarge:

... And here's another contest! I'll send copies of two Satisfactory or Elm City Jams comics to the first person who correctly identifies (in the comments on this post) all four jokes in all four of Joe's t-shirts!

For those of you who don't win the contest, however, I'm also posting, below, the entirety of the case study called "The Silent Critic," which features Charles, the Creepy Colleague, a fellow T.A. who so gets under the narrator's skin that the narrator starts to doubt his own teaching and his own ideas. You'll want to click these images to enlarge them, naturally -- but the whole thing ought to be readable.





I don't have enough copies of this book to sell them, but if you'd like to get one of your own, I suggest that you follow the "Contact Us" link on the Graduate Teaching Center website and pester Bill Rando or one of the GTC staff about bringing out a second edition. It's high time this book was in the hands of more people, I think.