Teaming Up for Literacy: Spider-Man and The Electric Company

Right now I’m working on some more material related to the idea of multimodal literacy sponsorship. I’m particularly interested in the multiple ways that comics have sponsored multimodal literacy throughout their history. From the critical literacy that the EC horror titles sponsored in the 1950s through their continual re-examinations of contemporary society, to the educational comics that were published in response and that sponsored a more conventional literacy that aligned with the contemporary educational practices and social values. From the religious comics published by Oral Roberts in the 1950s and Spire in the 1970s and the ways multimodal literacy was used to promote Christianity, to the rise of Marvel Comics in the 1960s and the creation of a specific multimodal discourse community centered around the Marvel narrative continuity. I’m interested in the ways in which literacy sponsorship happens outside schools and the complex webs that these multiple sponsors of multimodal literacies create. But I’m also interested in the ways that multimodal literacy sponsorship happens in conjunction with educational programs. Hence my interest in the 1970s partnership between the Children’s Television Workshop (CTW) and Marvel Comics that brought Spider-Man to The Electric Company and The Electric Company to Spidey Super Stories.

The Electric Company, a show produced by the non-profit Children’s Television Workshop (CTW) aimed at teaching reading through the use of television, debuted in 1971. The target audience for the show was poor readers, 7-10 years old, who had, as The Electric Company Final Report put it, “already tasted failure in school reading programs and for whom television could provide a non-threatening and familiar alternative to the classroom experience” (6). In other words, the aim was to use a multimodal medium (i.e. one in which viewers not only made meaning through the linguistic mode, but also through the audio, visual, gestural, and spatial modes) in order to promote linguistic (or print) literacy which students would then presumably be able to transfer to the books they would encounter in school and other settings.

As the show was being aired, researchers connected with CTW pushed for more inclusion of opportunities for sustained reading so that viewers would engage with print that was longer than a single sentence and that was embedded in a narrative. One of the ways that the producers decided to introduce such sequences was through the use of Spider-Man, a character with whom viewers would be familiar. The idea was that in these live-action narrative sequences, Spider-Man would never speak. Rather, his speeches would appear in word balloons above his head, drawing on a familiar convention from comic books in order to promote reading as a way for viewers to follow the simple narratives.

Beginning with Spider-Man’s debut on The Electric Company in 1974, a partnership ensued between Marvel Comics and CTW based around short self-contained narratives that appeared on both the television show and in Spidey Super Stories, a comic introduced by Marvel in the fall of 1974. According to The Electric Company Final Report, the use of Spider-Man in The Electric Company

provided considerable motivation to read and became extremely popular with viewers. Capitalizing on the popularity of these segments, a special Electric Company “Spidey” comic was designed for newsstand distribution as a way of providing additional reading matter of a controlled kind. This comic looked much like any other, but had carefully placed print, short messages, controlled vocabulary and was designed to encourage the poor reader to read rather than to merely rely on pictures. (66)

Though the two groups had different reasons for this cooperation, the partnership clearly benefitted both CTW and Marvel Comics as they reached out to their target audience of poor readers, 7-10 years of age.

In other words, both Marvel and CTW, can be seen as sponsors of literacy, a concept I take from Deborah Brandt. In her article entitled “Sponsors of Literacy,” Brandt defines literacy sponsors in this way: “Sponsors, as I have come to think of them, are any agents, local or distant, concrete or abstract, who enable, support, teach, model, as well as recruit, regulate, suppress, or withhold literacy – and gain advantage by it in some way” (166). Though their reasons differ (as one is a non-profit educational group and the other is a for-profit comic book publisher), both Marvel and CTW sponsor literacy and their cross-media partnership is an excellent example of the ways in which content can be linked across media even at the earliest stages of literacy development.

So, what I’m doing right now is examining this partnership, the ways in which the two groups used their partnership to sponsor both print and multimodal literacies for their target audience, and the benefits each derived from such sponsorship of literacy. I’m having a lot of fun hanging out with Easy Reader, J. Arthur Crank, and Spider-Man, and thinking through how this complex web of multimodal literacy sponsorship happened.

David Finch Signs Exclusive With DC

I don't normally announce industry happenings on this blog, but I wanted to take this opportunity to mention that Newsarama is reporting that Windsor's own David Finch has just signed an exclusive with DC Comics. Not only is Finch an incredibly talented artist, but he has been very generous in giving his time to talk about comics in various settings around Windsor, including on programs like The Comic Book Syndicate and at BookFest Windsor 2009. At the end of the BookFest session he did with fellow Windsor comics creator Tony Gray, Finch was presented with the Schuster Award for the Most Outstanding Canadian Artist of 2008. I was pleased to see him recognized for his work.

I've heard Finch speak a couple of times about his artistic processes and about collaborating with different writers within the confines of working for one of the big companies. Those talks are always informative and I really do appreciate the time that he takes to give some insight into what goes into putting together a commercial comic book. So, here's a big congratulations going out to David Finch. I, for one, am hoping we get to see what he will do with Batman.

New Narrative Conference, Toronto, May 6-7, 2010

Just before the Toronto Comic Arts Festival (May 8-9, 2010), an academic comics conference is being held at the University of Toronto. Both TCAF and the New Narrative conference are great events if you're serious about comics.

Here is the call for papers:

3rd annual New Narrative conference:
Narrative arts and visual media
An interdisciplinary conference at the University of Toronto
6 – 7 May 2010

In keeping with the spirit of sequels, we are again soliciting papers on a wide range of graphic novels, comic art, and related visual media. Comics, whether in the form of novelistic illustrations, newspaper serials, animated films, film adaptations, graphic novels, or sequential art narratives, have been with us since the rise of literature itself, yet until recently such media have never been considered “serious”—or at least, serious enough to be considered novels that might be on university syllabi. But are illustrated novels and live action films really about the pictures and not the narrative? How can the history of the form be reconciled with consumer culture and the ill-defined categories of “high” and “low” culture?

Papers which examine and interpret these narratives in interdisciplinary forms are most welcome. Essays on novelistic illustrations, newspaper serials, animated films, film adaptations, graphic novels, or sequential art narratives may consider the following (incomplete) list:

graphic novels and auto/biography illustrated and multi-media works
web design and on-line comix film adaptations of comics
series; engravings and caricatures the Comics Code Authority
the “invention” of manga geopolitics/war and the graphic novel
bande desinée & European comix early comics & comic history
illustrations in (literary) novels woodcut and “silent” artists

Proposals should be 400-500 words and must clearly indicate significance, the line of argument, principal texts considered, and relation to existing scholarship (or originality). One email copy of the proposal, and a 50 word bio note must be included, as an attachment in MS Word.

Deadline for proposals is 31 March 2010 (responses by 08 April 2010)

Jeff Parker, Assistant Professor, and/or Dr Andrew Lesk
Department of English, University of Toronto
E-mail: andrew.lesk@utoronto.ca

See also http://andrewlesk.com/conferences.html

This Conference will take place just before the Toronto Comics Arts Festival on May 8 and 9. (See Torontocomics.com)

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.

Marvel 1976 Project

As I mentioned in my last post, I am just beginning work on a book-length project that uses Marvel comics circa 1976 as its frame. The natural question, of course, is why this focus? Why 1976? Why Marvel? Why not DC 1985 or Charlton 1968? Or why not Marvel in the 1960s?

Let me explain. In March we taped an episode The Comic Book Syndicate on which I was a guest panelist (the episode will premiere on Wednesday, May 6 at Phog Lounge and will soon be on Cogeco in Windsor). As one segment, Michael Poirier asked us each to talk about the first comic we remember reading. It wasn't one specific comic that came to mind, but a storyline in Marvel Team-Up that involved Spider-Man and the Scarlet Witch traveling back in time to the Salem Witch Trials.The storyline, which featured Cotton Mather as one of the villains, played out over several issues, pulling my ten-year old self into the narrative in ways I had never experienced before in my casual reading of Spider-Man, Batman, or Archie.

That story arc led me to explore the rest of the Marvel universe, or at least the small corner of it that I could afford and that was available to me at the local drugstore. It led me to, among other things, the first issue of Nova, The Fantastic Four, Captain America, The Amazing Spider-Man, and the first issue of Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man. In other words, 1976 was the real beginning of my real interest in comics and the point at which Marvel became an important sponsor of my multimodal literacy, an idea about which I've written in "Marveling at The Man Called Nova: Comics as Sponsors of Multimodal Literacy" (College Composition and Communication 59.2, December 2007). As I thought about those issues of Marvel Team-Up and the other Marvel comics I consumed that year, it dawned on me that by focusing on Marvel comics in 1976, I could productively expand on the ideas I had begun to develop in "Marveling." The frame would allow me to discuss not only multimodal literacy, but related issues such as continuity, materiality, paratextuality, and intertextuality, and the ways in which the literacies I was developing by reading Marvel comics were intimately connected with the literacies I was developing through other sponsors of literacy in my life.

For example, in reading those issues of Marvel Team-Up, not only was I fascinated by the superheroes and their predicaments, I became so curious about Salem, the Witch Trials, and Cotton Mather that I went to the school library to find out more. For the first time history mattered to me as a ten-year old boy in rural Alberta and so, at a very rudimentary level, I began to explore it.

And, of course, the comics drew me into the world of the American bicentennial, leading me to wonder about what that all meant. What were they celebrating? Why? In essence, though I couldn't have named it at the time, I was beginning to ask questions about national identity and about my identity as a Canadian (read not-American). Hard stuff for a kid, but comics made me begin to grapple with these issues and have conversations with my friends about them.

So, why Marvel and why 1976? Short answer: because it helps me to situate my thinking about a variety of questions regarding literacy and comics. That said, I'm planning to read everything Marvel produced that year (I realized the cover date is a couple of months later than when it came out, but using a 1976 cover date simplifies the frame). That's a lot of comics -- just over 500. I'll be tracking them down in multiple forms (back issues, Essential editions, Marvel digital database, Michigan State) and thinking about the experience of reading those multiple formats will form part of the project as well.

Wish me luck as I go back in time and visit my ten-year old self. It should be interesting.

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.

Mother, Come Home -- The Trick of Paratexts

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A post by Melissa Schnarr-Rice, a student in my Winter 2009 Graphic Novels class.

Upon first glance, Paul Hornshemeier’s Mother, Come Home seems pretty straightforward. The muted colour palette, understated drawing style . . . even the powerful (albeit not so uplifting) story is pretty clear-cut. Here, Thomas Tennant narrates his own story of dealing with the loss of his mother, and the resulting mental collapse of his father when he was a little boy. The subject-matter’s heavy, yes, but nothing inside the book is overly-complicated. The page layout is all very orderly; the story’s divided into nice little sections; nothing “experimental” or “weird” is going on.

But that’s the trick, isn’t it?

Like Sturm’s Unstable Molecules (discussed in class earlier this semester), the paratextual elements in Mother, Come Home play with the audience’s sense of what is real and what is not and in doing so, relate the physical make-up of the book to the major themes within the narrative.

In his Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, Gerard Genette defines a paratextual element as “a vestibule that offers the world at large the possibility of either stepping inside or turning back” that “is at the service of a better reception for the text and a more pertinent reading of it”. Mother, Come Home uses what Genette calls official peritexts, which is to say elements originally produced as part of the book (the cover, titles, back matter) that the publisher or author openly accepts or endorses; it is these official peritexts that transform the rather straightforward story into a real-life (but fictional) domestic tragedy that ultimately acts as a promise never to be fulfilled.

If we look at the cover, we’re first presented with a lion’s head door-knocker, effectively inviting us into the book. The lion’s head as a symbol will also later become quite significant – as readers, we will make connections from this first image to the lion mask Thomas is given by his mother shortly before her death. (The mask quickly becomes a shield from the outside world, as Thomas escapes to an imaginary world rather than deal with the harsh reality of his mother’s absence.) Secondly, we read the title and then the credits underneath. Paul Hornschemeier is named, presumably as the author of the book, “With an Introduction by Thomas Tennant”, the main character of the story – implying that Thomas Tennant is a real person. Inside the book, Paul Hornschemeier is further credited as the “designer”, never the “writer” or “creator”, furthering the illusion that Thomas is more than just a character from the story. Within the first few pages of the story, Thomas even describes problems he had “writing this introduction” when first approached to do so. All of these tricks, (for lack of a better word), persuade us to see Thomas as a real person, which – I think – is an attempt to make the story all the more emotionally powerful, because it is perceived as being “real”, not made-up.

The book’s set up and back-matter also work to confuse the line between fiction and reality. We read Thomas’ story as an introduction because we are told that’s what it is – a preface to a much larger work, the first chapter of which is titled “We Are All Released”. So by the end, we expect more. More story, more explanation . . . essentially, there is a lack of closure because of this promise that there is more to come, even if we never actually get to see it, even if it doesn’t actually exist. Thomas’s story is the story but setting it up as an introduction to a larger work makes us read it differently than if it were just given to us as a story.

Why?

Well, I think partially to continue to blur our ideas of reality vs. fiction but also to make us read it as something that needs to be fully understood before moving on – think of it as a step-by-step guide, I guess: You should know and understand step 1 before moving on to step 2. In this way, readers are urged to pay close attention to the story because what they take from it will inform their reading of the rest of the book (that doesn’t and will never actually exist).

It’s a very poignant use of paratexts, and one that I probably wouldn’t have been ready for if we hadn’t already come across something similar. This use of paratexts, of course, is just one of the many great things Hornschemeier does in this book with regards to the comics form and story-telling in general. Highly recommended.