Coming Soon: Guest Bloggers from the Contemporary Graphic Novels Seminar

Over the next several months, the members of my Contemporary Graphic Novels seminar will be on board as guest bloggers on More Than Words. Each of them has to read a monthly comic book for the duration of the class and then post 2 entries on that comic. In addition, each of them will be blogging on one book from the Leddy Library collection of graphic novels (a collection you should definitely check out if you are in Windsor). If you were reading the blog when last year's class guestblogged, you know that the next few months will feature some lively and engaging writing about comics. I'm looking forward to reading their posts and seeing the range of texts they have chosen.

Breaking Radio Silence: What's Been Up With Research and Teaching

It's been a great while since I've posted to this blog, but I'm back and hope to be consistently posting once again. I did manage to get a lot of comics-related work done this summer, both on the Marvel 1976 project and on an essay called "More at Stake: Vampires and the Comics Code." That work and the current work I'm doing on The Electric Company and their partnership with Marvel in the 1970s (remember Spidey Super Stories? Spider-Man's recurring appearances on the television show?) really seem to be swirling around the same ideas regarding multimodal literacy that I've been developing over the last several years. So, over the last few months, the larger project has been becoming more coherently articulated in my head and that's been very exciting. I'll try to spin out some of these ideas and the relationships I see between them over the next few months.

The other pressing issue right now is book orders for next semester's Contemporary Graphic Novels seminar. Here's my mostly finalized list (in no particular order). Any comments would be much appreciated.

Fell: Feral City (Ellis/Templesmith)
Batman: Year One (Miller/Mazzucchelli)
DMZ: On the Ground (Wood/Burchielli)
Fables: Legends in Exile (Willingham/Medina)
Swallow Me Whole (Powell)
The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard (Campbell/Best)
The Sandman: The Dream Hunters (Gaiman/Russell)
Exit Wounds (Modan)
Nat Turner (Baker)

There you have it. I'll likely be having the students in the seminar blogging here about graphic novels in the collection at UW's Leddy Library, so stay tuned for that beginning in January. And I promise not to take six months between posts again. No, really.

Contemporary Graphic Novel Seminar: Over Now, But Back Next Yeat

Here we are at the end of another semester. I want to thank all of the members of my Contemporary Graphic Novel Seminar for all of their great contributions to the blog over the last several months. It proved to be a fascinating class and I'm pleased that readers got to see just a bit of the complex thinking about comics that students did. Again, thanks to all who contributed, both in class and on the blog. And thanks as well to Jeff Lemire for his productive visit to class and for his wonderful reading. It was a great semester.

A lot of the students who are currently in their 3rd year at UW have asked me if I'm going to be teaching this course next year, so I am happy to announce that I will be teaching the Contemporary Graphic Novel Seminar in the Winter 2010 semester. I'm looking forward to more great conversations about comics and comics theory; readers can look forward to a whole new set of guest bloggers for More Than Words.

In the meantime, I'll be back with my regular musings about comics, theory, literacy, and education. As I do so, I plan to use the blog to do some thinking about a larger research project that involves Marvel 1976. More on that in the next couple of days.

Graphic Novels Seminar: Supplementary Readings

As promised to the students in the Graphic Novels Seminar and for anyone else who is interested, here are links to some supplemental readings for the last half of the course. In addition to these four books, we have The Other Side (Aaron and Stewart) and Ghost Stories (Lemire) left to read.

City of Glass (Karasik and Mazzucchelli)
The Poetics of the Page: City of Glass, the graphic novel (Kuhlman)
"Paul Auster's City of Glass: The Graphic Novel" (Coughlan) - MFS Modern Fiction Studies Volume 52, Number 4, Winter 2006, pp. 832-854 (Available through Leddy Library through Literature Online)

The Tale of One Bad Rat (Talbot)
Panel Borders Interview with Bryan Talbot

Funhome (Bechdel)
"An Interview with Alison Bechdel" (Chute) - MFS Modern Fiction Studies Volume 52, Number 4, Winter 2006, pp. 1004-1013 (Available through Leddy Library through Literature Online)

The Fate of the Artist (Campbell)
Tom Spurgeon Interview with Eddie Campbell
Gutter Geek Review of The Fate of the Artist

Comics Autobiography
"Autographics: The Seeing 'I' of Comics" (Whitlock) - MFS Modern Fiction Studies Volume 52, Number 4, Winter 2006, pp. 965-79 (Available through Leddy Library through Literature Online)

Theory and Practice: It's a Bird

We had a very interesting discussion in today's Graphic Novels Seminar about It's a Bird by Steven T. Seagle and Teddy Kristiansen. It's a "semi-autobiograpical" piece that weaves the Superman mythology with the story of a writer who is both dealing with the existence of Huntington's Disease in his family and with the offer to write Superman. It's a story that works because of the intertextual relationships created by the story (in Genette's terms, Superman is the hypo text, while It's a Bird is the hypertext that comments on and extends it, while at the same time deriving much of its meaning from the relationship it has to the original text). In an interview with UGO, Seagle said that

The story is semi-autobiographical because it has elements from my family's story. I wanted to look at why Superman is resilient because I think he still has importance in the world today. I know there is a lot of bashing when it comes to Superman such as people say he is outdated but he's not. If he was outdated he would cease to exist. I thought the right way to do that was to compare him to an average Joe or in my case an average Steve.

That, to me, sounds a lot like Ndalianis's idea that Superman is "a mythology that is both already said and which is in the process of being said" (see previous post).

As we read It's a Bird, then, we extend the mythology of Superman as we participate in its ongoing process of creation (the hypotext can be seen as the entire Superman mythology and the hypertext is any text that extends it by acting as a kind of intertext to the overall mythology). Or, in terms of Design, we make meaning during the reading process by bringing to bear our Available Resources for Design. The intertextual resonances created by the book depend on the Available Resources each person brings to the text, or the extent to which each person has been involved in the process of articulating the mythology of Superman through his or her own reading/viewing experiences. The results of our reading It's a Bird -- the meanings we make -- then loop back into the process and are made available for our next readings. The next time we pick up a Superman comic or see a reference to the Man of Steel, our experience of reading It's a Bird forms part of the context for making meaning. As readers, then, we are part of the fabric of the Superman mythology, a point Ndalianis explicitly makes as she complicates Eco's ideas.

Why do I mention all of these theoretical ideas? Because they can act as lenses through which we can think about how meaning is created within and between the multiple stories that are woven together in It's a Bird. As well, they can help us to think about how and why Superman "still has importance in the world today" and how we as readers are part of the ongoing process of the Myth of Superman.

Superman, Hypertime, Design, and Continuity

In the Graphic Novels Seminar this week, we're reading Angela Ndalianis's excellent essay "Enter the Aleph: Superhero Worlds and Hypertime Realities" from her edited collection The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero (a useful collection that Routledge has, for some reason, only released as an incredibly expensive hardback). In the essay, Ndalianis usefully complicates Eco's ideas about Superman as a mythic figure who must remain static despite the serial nature of the comic book form (see "The Myth of Superman," anthologized in Arguing Comics). That is, in order to be mythic, Superman must remain essentially unchanged and "unconsumable" so that whatever happens to him, his essential characteristics remain intact. That's what accounts for so many dream or "Elseworlds" stories and, though Eco didn't foresee it in 1972, the whole concept of parallel worlds that DC has been both spinning out and trying to control over the years.

In trying to contend with these parallel worlds, DC writers have often had to retroactively change the continuity (or retcon, to use the current term) in order to rationalize the characters and their relationships to each other (which also keeps the essential quality of a character like Superman intact). However, as Ndalianis asks, "how can entire fictional histories and the characters who participated in them be wiped from the memories of readers who had experienced them? (280). The answer: they can't. Superman did die. Superman did marry Lois Lane. The rocket carrying the baby who would become Superman did land in Russia.

Ndalianis addresses this notion of the role of the reader in narrative continuity through reference to Grant Morrison's idea of Hypertime in which "within the diegetic universe, multiple versions of a superhero work together to create the version that eventually becomes the legend" (281). Every character within the serial form of comics is thus always in process in complex ways that are dependent on the experiences of the actual readers (as we discussed last week in class with All-Star Superman). In contrast to what Eco writes, then, for Superman, what is created is "a mythology that is both already said and which is in the process of being said" (Ndalianis 284).

I bring up these ideas to complicate our thinking about Eco, but also to begin to explore this idea of Hypertime in relation to the concept of Design (which also complicates Eco's ideas). Design, as formulated by the New London Group, is a dynamic and recursive process that involves three elements: Available Design, Designing, and the Redesigned. Available Designs are the resources that each of us has for Design. Available Design acts as the array of resources we bring to any text, but they do not determine exactly how we will make meaning from that text; individual agency is also important because each of us makes individual decisions about how to use those resources.

When each of us use our Available Designs we engage in the process of Designing or making meaning (whether through writing or reading). Designing is an active process, both for creators and readers of multimodal texts; when we engage in the process of Designing, we use the resources of Available Designs based on own social situatedness, history, life experiences, and interests and we do so within and as a result of our past experience. Such experiences are part of the ongoing process of Design. These new meanings created in Designing become the Redesigned, new resources, part of our newly configured Available Designs. For example, whenever we read a story about Superman, that experience and those meanings become part of our Available Designs and cannot help but influence our future readings.

There are definite parallels between Hypertime and Design that I want to explore further in the future, especially in relation to the notion of continuity. For now, I think it's enough to point out the way that these two theoretical ideas nicely complicate Eco's ideas about Superman.

Finally, reading Ndalianis provides an interesting perspective on It's a Bird, the text for tomorrow's seminar. It should be a fascinating discussion.

Blog Spotlight: The Graphic Classroom

There are some blogs that I think are essential reading for people interested in the connections between comics, literacy, and education. One of them is The Graphic Classroom, a blog devoted to "Promoting the use of high quality comic literature in the elementary, middle school, and high school classroom." It's run by Chris Wilson, a graduate student in the College of Education at Missouri State University; always with an eye towards literacy and education, Wilson and the blog's 4 staff writers provide a steady stream of insightful reviews of comics and graphic novels. I appreciate getting their take on books I've been reading like the new Shazam, but more importantly, I rely on them to introduce me to the books for kids that I might have missed, such as A Moment of Clarity. All in all, it's an excellent resource.

If you're in New York this weekend, you can hear Wilson and Michael Schofield, one of the staff writers, speak at the Graphica in Education Conference. If I could get away, that's where I would be on Saturday.

Theory and Practice: Fell

Last week in the Contemporary Graphic Novels seminar, we had a very productive discussion of the first three issues of Fell (collected in Fell:Feral City) by Warren Ellis and Ben Templesmith. Having read some introductory comics theory (including material from Scott McCloud's Making Comics and Understanding Comics, Will Eisner's Comics and Sequential Art, and Durwin Talon's Panel Discussions), we spent a long time discussing how Ellis and Templesmith use the comics medium to introduce and develop both Snowtown and Richard Fell in the first issue. The discussion ranged from the connotations and intertexts of the names Snowtown and Fell to the muted colour palette that links specific colours to specific locales within Snowtown to the ubiquitous Snowtown tag. We talked about Fell's physical appearance, including his golden halo of hair, about the sequence in which Fell demonstrates his powers of observation in Mayko's bar, about the panels that map the relationships between locales in Snowtown, and about the way that not even the gutters of the comic are pristine. Finally, we talked at length about how Fell and Snowtown are linked both visually and linguistically in the final panel of the issue and how this issue and this culminating panel set up much of what happens in the subsequent issues. Fell worked well as a text through which students could begin to think about how meaning is created within the comics medium, especially through the lenses of the theories they have begun to read.

This week we're going to be talking more about Fell, but this time we will be using multimodality and Thierry Groensteen's ideas (as developed in The System of Comics) as our theoretical lenses. For Groensteen, the panel is the smallest unit in the system of comics and his theories force us to think about the relations between the panels (arthrology), both in sequence and as they form a network within the page and within the work as a whole. For example, we make sense of panel 4 in the above page both as it occurs in sequence (restrained arthrology), but also in relation to the Snowtown tags we have seen marking the city throughout the first issue of the series (general arthrology). It acts as a transition from the interior of Fell's apartment to the exterior of Snowtown. In this panel, the brown of the apartment becomes the brown of Fell's skin which has been physically marked by the Snowtown brand (courtesy of Mayko). The next panel (panel 5) pulls back to reveal a headshot of Fell as he examines this brand, but the colour (including the hue of Fell's skin) has changed to the grey that has been associated with Snowtown's exteriors throughout the issue (as it will be throughout the series). Panel 5 is, then, linked to the subsequent panels because of the grey colour, to the transitional panel that precedes it because of the Snowtown brand, and to the previous panels in the issue because of both the Snowtown tag and the grey colour associated with Snowtown exteriors.

The final panel, whose meaning in multimodal terms is created through a combination of linguistic, visual, gestural, and spatial elements, derives its impact because of its relation to the panels that precede it on the page and in the issue as a whole. In terms of Groensteen's spatio-topia, the panel stands out from the others on the page because it is different from the other panels on the page in form (a horizontal rather than vertical rectangle) and size (three times the size of the standard panel in Fell), and because it occupies a privileged reading position in the lower right corner of the page. These factors make us pay attention to this panel, linger on it, and consider it in relation to the panels that have preceded it in the issue. In this way, various theories give us a number of ways to consider comics texts as we think about how they create meaning.

Contemporary Graphic Novel Seminar: Reading List

As I mentioned already, starting next Monday, I will be teaching a 4th year seminar called Words and Pictures: The Contemporary Graphic Novel here at the University of Windsor. Before the class gets started, I wanted to post the list of primary texts (which consists of both graphic novels and trades) for the course; in addition to these texts, we'll be reading a lot of comics theory. Anyway, here's the list:

Aaron, Jason and Cameron Stewart. The Other Side.

Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic.

Campbell, Eddie. The Fate of the Artist.

Ellis, Warren and Ben Templesmith. Fell Volume 1: Feral City.

Karasik, Paul and David Mazzacchulli. City of Glass: A Graphic Mystery.

Lemire, Jeff. Essex County Volume 2: Ghost Stories.

Morrison, Grant and Frank Quitely. All Star Superman Volume 1.

Seagle, Steven and Teddy Kristiansen. It’s a Bird.

Sturm, James and Guy Davis. Fantastic Four: Unstable Molecules.

Talbot, Brian. The Tale of One Bad Rat.

Comics, Teaching, and Research

Let me start with some background, just to give you a sense of where I'm coming from as an educator and as a researcher. In other words, let me get the boring stuff out of the way first.

When I was a kid, I loved comics. My friends and I sat around arguing over who the best characters were and who could beat who in a fight. We traded them, haggling over how many Superman comics would be equal to one Spider-Man. We hoarded our allowances for weekly trips to W, a town about 40 miles away that had 2 drugstores, both of which carried comics. If we went together with one set of parents or another, the ride home would be silent, each of us lost in his own paneled world.

You see, when we were kids, the act of reading comics was what was most important. We read our comics and then read them again and again until they fell apart. We collected to read and to share those imagined worlds with each other. We even made our own comics, a line of superhero comics with a burgeoning continuity that escapes me after all these years. Comics were central to both our reading and writing as we grew up in that small town.

I kept reading comics off and on through high school and into the beginning of university. I even worked at a comics store during my first couple of years of undergraduate, but after I left that job, my interest in comics seemed to disappear as well. I finished my BA and, through the subsequent years, both an MA and a PhD. Then a few years ago -- this would be 2003 or so -- a UW student, MW, asked me if I read comics. I told him that I had in the past, but that I hadn't picked one up for years. It turned out that most of the students in that class were reading comics and so he convinced me to borrow a collection from him (the start of the Bendis run on Daredevil). As I read, the pleasure of making meaning through the combination of all the multiple elements on the comics page returned to me. I found myself caught up in the Hell's Kitchen that Bendis and Maleev had created on the page. I asked him to loan me some more comics. I started to explore on my own and began to see how rich in both actuality and possibility the comics medium was. I was hooked (again).

From there, I started to think about my own experiences with comics when I was a kid and the kinds of literacies that resulted from those experiences. I started to think about the multiple literacies we develop as we read comics and the possibilities of comics as a teaching tool. Those musings started to coalesce over the next couple of years, resulting in articles on comics and multimodal literacies in both English Journal and College Composition and Communication. Since then, much of my research and writing has centered around parsing out the connections between comics, what they are used for, how we read them, and why/how they are useful in education. In addition, I've taught a course entitled The Rhetoric of Comics and beginning a week from today, will be teaching a course entitled Words and Pictures: The Contemporary Graphic Novel. In other words, comics are now fairly central to both my teaching and my research.

Of course, all of that is the adult me, the academic me talking. The kid in me still loves stories told through words and pictures arranged in panels on a page. The kid in me likes nothing more than to see how it all unfolds, how the words and pictures come together, and how all the panels come together to tell a story I want to talk about with my friends.