Comics and Culture

The Battle over Comics & Education from 1950 to Today

5th April, 2009 - Posted by LK - 4 Comments

“I see no intrinsic reason why a doubly talented artists might not arise
and create a comic-strip novel masterpiece” – John Updike, 1969

As print and digital technologies have become more advanced and complex in our recent history, many scholars have begun to question how we can define “literacy” and how we can even characterize something so seemingly simple as a “text”?

As Ilana Snyder stated in presentation on literacy and technology studies, it is “a new era of literacy research. New technologies have radically altered everyday modes of communication… and transform[ed] literary practices” (Snyder ). Yet, as educators are examining alternative forms of media (such as interactive internet writings and videos) to promote education in classrooms, the comic book continues to be shockingly misunderstood.
Since the late 1940s and throughout the twenty-first century, comic books have been demonized at worst or trivialized at best in the debate over their role in American childhood education. With the occasional exception a few benchmark works, such as Alan Moore’s Watchmen and Art Spiegelman’s Maus, comics have largely been understood by educators as a lighter form of text-based reading—comparable to short stories or novels—with the added interpretive help (or crutch) of pictures. This paper will examine the development in the views of the pedagogical uses and interpretations of comic books, and how we can reframe these interpretations for a new era of comic book reading and understanding in the classroom.

~ Literacy and Comic Books in the 1950s ~

While comic strips in pamphlets and newspapers began their popularity in the late 1800s, the concept of compiling complete stories into one “book” didn’t become popular in America until the 1930s (Hadju 10-12). By 1939, children could pick up stories about detectives, gangsters, scientists, and even the strange new “superheroes” for only five cents at their local magazine stand. By 1940, “most comic book titles sold between 200,000 and 400,000 copies per issue” with the most popular superhero comics selling between 900,000 to 1,300,000 copies a month (Wright 13). The main audience for these comic books were adolescent boys, but many titles, such as Archie and True Love, were also read by and marketed to girls.

The backlash to comic books started as early as May 1940 with an article by Sterling North in The Chicago Daily News. North insisted that comics were harmful to basic childhood education and that “the antidote to the ‘comic’ magazine poison can be found in any library or good bookstore” (qtd. Hadju 41). He even went as far as to insist that parents who let their children read comics and who did “not acquire that antidote” were “guilty of criminal negligence!” (41).

In 1940, when comic books were still a new media, parents were hardly skeptical and North’s cry against comics fell on largely deaf ears. However, as the 1950s launched, educators began new conversations about children’s literacy and what young students should or should not be reading. Throughout American history, literary and educational advocates have often phrased their arguments in terms of the “best reading,” but this message was especially prevalent in the 1950s . According to Literacy in the United States: Readers and Reading Since 1880, educators of the 1950s focused on a clear “Great Books” approach, which focused on reading and literacy being “functional” and by definition opposed to popular media (Kaestle, Damon-Moore, et al. 39-40). Reading in and of itself was not as important as making sure that what students read “aid[ed] materially in the work of educating children” (Stauffer 404).

As comic books became more and more popular daily, “librarians and others proclaimed that this [comic book] reading was not only inferior to reading ‘good books’ but was a corrupting and degrading influence” (Stauffer 408). This viewpoint was popularized by Dr. Fredric Wertham, a practicing New York psychologist, and his notorious 1953 comic book study Seduction of the Innocent. While previous outcries against comic books had typically met a limited audience, Wertham’s book was simple enough that the popular audience understood it and sensational enough that the media covered its launch meticulously. Soon, Wertham’s book was on the bestseller list and well-known in 1950s households nation-wide.

At the core of his argument, Wertham blamed the American comic book for promoting sexism, political fascism, violence, and delinquency to children. However, the content was not the only problem with comics that Wertham saw; he also believed that the format the comic took was itself just as problematic: “comics do specific harm [to] the acquisition of fluent left-to-right eye movements, which is so indispensable for good reading… the comic book reader [instead] acquires the habit of reading irregular bits of printing here and there in balloons instead of complete lines from left to right” (127).

Wertham believed, much like North, that comics were not just casual children’s reading, but instead the cause of several broad social problems, including the increase in learning disabilities. He insisted that reading disabilities in America were notably “on the increase” and that “[a]n important cause of this increase is the comic book” (122). He especially stressed that “[c]omic book readers are handicapped in vocabulary building because in comics all the emphasis is on the visual image and not the proper word. These children often know… about torture, but are unable to read or spell the word” (125). Though he rarely supplied any specific statistical data in his book, he bluntly stated: “How many children suffering from reading disorders are comic book readers? The answer is simple. Most of them are” (128). Wertham insisted that encouraging students to read comics just to “get them reading” was “retooling for illiteracy” and that children who “read” comic books would ignore the words all together and just focus on the pictures (119-20).

Or even worse, he stated, children would be confused over what “proper” words even were, as comics often supplied text clues for sound effects such as “BAM,” “WHAM,” or an expletory “OOF,” which Wertham asserted were not words at all and would thus lead to children’s confusion over what words were “correct” and how to use them appropriately (143). Wertham insisted that many children clung to comics because they found “regular reading too hard” (120). This led him to the blunt and contentious conclusion that “[c]omic books are death on reading” (121).

The national sensation surrounding Wertham’s book helped fuel an intense anti-comic movement. Comic book opposition became so strong in the 50s that some “schools held public burnings of comics” and organizations such as “[t]he East Hartford Board of Education… urged the mayor, John W. Torpey, to advance legislation” to ban comic books from being sold on local newsstands (Hadju 6; 226). The message that the public held was clear: the reading of comic books was detrimental for childhood development and literacy. In an article published in the New Republic on Wertham and his thesis, Marya Mannes agreed that “Comic books… represented the ‘absence of thought,’” and thus caused childhood readers to travel “a perilous course toward cultural bankruptcy” (qtd Wright 91). Parents and educators agreed; by the end of the decade, comic books were nearly universally banned from school campuses and comics were labeled as both inferior and potentially dangerous for years to come.

~ Comics as Tools in 1990s and now~

In the 1970s, “researchers began asking for the first time what motivated children to read at all” (Stauffer 412). There was a new push in education to make reading both fun and relatable for students who were resistant. This philosophy was well-established by the 1990s, as teachers and families tried to encourage students to engage in “free and voluntary reading” of any sort in order to inspire an overall love for books and to encourage development of “cognitive skills, comprehension, writing skills, spelling, and grammar” (414). With this new emphasis on reading for reading’s sake, comic books began to slowly be viewed as a possible tool for engaging “reluctant readers” as opposed to the being the symbolic enemy of literacy. Today, many educators are notably positive on the topic of potentially using comic books in the classroom.

According to Teresa Mendez’s 2004 article “Hamlet Too Hard? Try a Comic Book,” middle-school teacher Diane Roy has experienced great success using comic books in her classroom. She tells Mendez: “For the struggling reader or the reader still learning English, [comic books] offer accessibility—pictures for context, and possibly an alternate path into classroom discussions of higher-level texts. They expand vocabulary, and introduce the ideas of plot, pacing, and sequence” (qtd. Mendez). Roy also encourages students to use comics “as a bridge to more complex material,” and she reports that she saw much of this pattern being fulfilled as the year progressed. For example, after she “assigned Art Spiegelman’s Maus, the story of his parents’ experience in the Holocaust told as a cat and mouse allegory… some students moved to graphic novels about Hitler, and finally made their way to traditional books about the Holocaust” (Mendez).

In another case-study, students from a Chapter 1 Middle School class in New York where allowed to check out comic books and take them home for reading homework. Interviews with both the students and the class’ teachers imply that comic books can “serve as an important bridge from everyday ‘conversational’ language to… ‘academic language’… [and] provide [students] with the linguistic basis for reading more difficult texts” (Ujie and Krashen 51).  [WARNING: link is a PDF]

The students loved the comic books and often read several throughout the read; one student expressed that he enjoyed how fast-paced the comic stories were (53). It is notable that each student was asked by the researchers if reading comic books made them want to read other, traditional books more as well. Their answers were remarkably split (55).

Third-grade teacher Chris Shave reported having similar experiences with comics in the classroom. He insists that “[t]here are short bursts of dialogue, speech, and thought bubbles. Because of that, readers who might feel bogged down by long text and big paragraphs will experience success (reading comic books)” (qtd Lucas 3). As Mendez similarly stresses: “For a certain type of student—particularly those who are visually oriented and bright but may lack the motivation or maturity to succeed in freshman English—the graphic novel can become a ‘bridge to other things’” (Mendez).

In many ways, these perspectives are significantly different from the anti-comic rhetoric and campaigning from the 1950s. It is clear that some teachers view comic books as a useful tool for engaging with students and promoting voluntary reading. However, there are still some deep-rooted prejudices about comics that come through in all of these cases and hark back to the descriptions of comics in the 1950s. As Paul Gravett states in his book Graphic Novel, good comic books “can encourage even the most reluctant readers, but… teachers, librarians, and other ‘cheerleaders for the cause’ [often] impl[y] that comics and graphic novels are useful primers, stepping stones to literacy but not worth reading in their own right” (11).

This perspective is not overly surprising—many educators even today believe that comics books as a “form itself is inferior. For although comics are created from interaction of image and text, it is their drawings which predominate and define the genre” (Millard and Marsh 27). Thus, comic books are “easier” because a student should be able to use the picture in order to give them clues about what is happening in the text-based language part of the story, no matter how difficult or easy the text may be.

Because many educators see comics as essentially text-with-illustrations, descriptions of and worries over comics are often pointed at “adaptation” comics. This idea is underscored by Mendez’s article “Hamlet Too Hard? Try a Comic Book.” As the title implies, Mendez asserts that comics are an acceptable stepping-stone in order to get to the more “difficult” Shakespeare play, but that the “harder” work is clearly more challenging and thus always more desirable for student reading. Third grade teacher Shave states that he encourages and supports the idea of literature adaptation comics: “When a child is reading ‘Treasure Island’ as a graphic novel…while they are not reading the original words, they are reading something they can comprehend. As they become better readers, they are more likely to pick up the original book because of that prior reading” (qtd Lucas 3). However, other teachers “worry that the comics versions of classics like Frankenstein or The Odyssey may come to replace the originals” (Mendez).

Comic books which adapt and retell classic literature stories are often seen as “easier” than the original source material, and thus “most educators hold that the genre is best used as a bridge to more complex material” (Mendez). Take, for example, the comic book adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which is drawn in a Japanese “manga” style.

Fig. 1. Shakespeare’s Hamlet: Manga. Cliffnotes. 2008.

Besides the fact that some of the lines of dialogue have been cut or condensed, choices that are “open” in the source play are made and set down in as static art. When reading Hamlet as a full-text play, readers are left to interpret how Hamlet is feeling or acting when he says, “That it should come to this. But two months dead…” Some productions have the actor playing Hamlet say the line calmly and deliberately. Others emphasize the anger at his mother and turn the line into a bitter shout. When reading is involved, it is up to each reader to interpret the scene for him or herself. However, by showing a tear running down Hamlet’s face in the comic, the emotion that Hamlet feels is dictated for us, along with his exact pose and placement during the scene. In this case, the comic adaptation is a “closed” version of the play and not as open for interpretation.

This is one of the main reason that Douglas Wolk insists that “comics adaptations of prose books are almost uniformly terrible, from the old Classics Illustrated pamphlets to the contemporary versions of Black Beauty and The Hunchback of Notre Dame; they don’t run on the same current, basically, and they end up gutting the original work of a lot of its significant content” (13). Wolk emphasizes that the art of a comic book comes from the interactivity between the words and the pictures—the places where those intersect and contradict—and that, in the case of an “adaptation,” these comics use parts of previously written texts not in order to expand and offer new questions but instead to specifically simplify and abridge. Thus, it is no wonder that this comic version of Hamlet is published by and sold primarily through the company Cliffnotes.

But what about an original, narrative literary comic book? Surely some of these comics can be just as complex, profound, and thought-provoking as traditional works of prose, and surely such a comic would “work” radically differently in a classroom than a prose-literature comic book adaptation. I certainly believe this to be the case, but it may be difficult to find parents and educators who wholly agree. As Elaine Millard and Jackie Marsh state in their article “Sending Minnie the Minx Home: Comics and Reading Choices,”

In many people’s minds there remains a rather simplistic correlation between ‘looking at pictures’ and a deficiency in literacy, as it is frequently assumed that only those who are unable to read the words have a need for illustration. Visual literacy, except in its highest manifestations in the work of designers and classical artists, is rarely granted status within our education system. (27)

It is no wonder, therefore, that many assume that comics have “low readability levels” and are therefore easier for and meant for “less proficient readers” (Snowball 43). [Article via the YALSA] Library scholar Monique Lebrun, for example, insisted as recently as 2005 that comic book reading is nothing more than a temporary stage on the road to more advanced reading, and that “as teenagers get older and their tastes mature, these readers may be drawn to ‘more sophisticated genres’” (qtd. Snowball 44). The fact that many educators who see comic books as “positive” tools still view them as “easier” alternatives, and certainly a less academic medium than traditional books, still seems shockingly similar to the viewpoint of North and Wertham. In the 1990s, educators and families may not demonize comics to the same degree or find them as inherently harmful, but they still assume that comics are inferior to “real” literature and certainly act as an “easier” reading form.

~ Comics/Media: The Nuances and Future of Comic Literacy~

The demonizing or hedged support of comic books in the 1950s and 1990s can in many ways be tied to the standard definition and implications of “literacy” during each period. According to “From ‘Reading’ to ‘New Literary Studies” by Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel, “[d]uring the 1950s, and  again in the 1990s, it became fashionable among developing theorists to associate a countries’ ‘readiness’ for ‘economic take-off’ with attainment of a certain level of adult literacy across the nation” (Lankshear and Knobel 4).

Therefore, in order to achieve said level of adult literacy, children must be taught with those goals in mind. During the 1950s, the emphasis was not only on the physical act of reading but on reading the “right” type of book or text. In the 1990s, the emphasis was first on encouraging children to read at all—now that books were competing with television and video games—before stressing the type of literature that teachers would “ideally” like children to engage in.

Both of these views keep comic books in a limited role in encouraging literacy—they are either a barrier to the goal or a gateway stepping stone into “better” forms of reading. However, in this day and age we have alternative definitions and perceptions about literacy and literary education. Lankshear and Knobel’s argue that literacy is not a “singular phenomenon” based in words and language alone, but instead “a set of skills, or a technology or… some kind of psychological process” involving words, art, culture, and other “texts” which can all be “read” and interpreted (Lankshear and Knobel 24). In the fifties and nineties interpretations of literacy, the fact that a comic book contained pictures made it less of a “literary” text than a standard novel or short story; it didn’t seem to engage literacy to the same level. However, using Lankshear and Knobel’s definition, comic books can be seen as promoting several forms of literacy, including textual, visual, and interpretive.

In her book Reading Comics: Language, Culture, and the Concept of the Superhero in Comic Books, Mila Bongco stresses that, “[r]eading comic books is an intense semiotic process—it involves understanding how the interactions between words and images have been manipulated…The appreciation of comicbooks is not possible without the recognition that its language and grammar consists of not one but two elements: words and images” (46).
Along a similar line, Douglas Wolk emphasizes in Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean that comic books are not strictly a traditional “literary form” (14). Instead, he insists that “[c]omics are not prose… They are not a text-driven medium with added pictures; they’re not the visual equivalent of prose narrative or a static version of film. They are their own thing: a medium with its own devices, its own innovation (14). Wolk especially notes that many educators and authors refer to comics as a “genre” within literature and writing. Instead, he insists that “comics are not a genre, but a medium” and that while genre’s are categories within a previously established form, “media [are] forms of expression that have few or no rules reguarding their content other than the very broad ones imposed on them by their form” (11).

Paul Gravette agrees with Wolk’s definition and expands on it in his book, Graphic Novel, saying that comics do not have to be “the visual equivalent of an extended work of fiction” and that, likewise, “graphic novels are not limited to one genre category, or only a few”—instead, the possibilities of genre are as limitless and full of possibility as any narrative media form (Gravette 8). In comics and graphic novels today, there are science-fiction works, fantasy and superhero works, non-fiction memoirs, works of journalism, coming-of-age stories, noir stories, comic book equivalents of meta-fiction, and many more. Thus, to refer to comic books as a “genre” is erroneous—and once we begin to think of the comic book as a medium in and of itself, strict comparisons with traditional prose fiction is nonsensical.

When applying our new definition of literacy to comics, one must inevitably ask how a comic functions differently than a children’s picture book and how we are thus supposed to read it differently. Paul Gravette explains that, “the words don’t always literally describe or reinforce the pictures; one can clarify and amplify the other, or they can be entirely separate. They can contrast, counterpoint, even contradict each other” (10). One clear example of a text’s images amplifying or changing the language part of a text is Art Spiegelman’s Maus:

Fig. 2. Spiegelman, Art. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale.

In Maus, all characters are presented as anthropomorphic animals, with different animals representing different nationalities. Though Maus is essentially a non-fiction account of Spiegelman’s father’s experience during World War II, Spiegelman felt that he needed ways to show and express what he openly admitted was inexpressible and difficult at best to portray. Thus, the pig’s mask ties over the mouse’s face gives the reader the knowledge that the protagonist is pretending to be Polish even before he says so in written text, but the image is also so symbolic—the mouse literally hides his face, while in “reality” the deception would not have been so plainly physical—that it creates and carries with it new associations and meanings.

Mila Bongco further elaborates on the relation of images and written words in comics: “[t]ext, rendered in concert with the art, shows how the ‘reading’ of it can evoke and influence specific emotions and modify the perception of the image” and often “letters function as an extension of the imagery” (72). Gravette agrees, emphasizing also that, in comics, “[i]mages and text arrive together, work together, and should be read together… in some combination you read words and pictures in tandem and in cross-reference, one informing the other” (11).

Take, for example, a scene from Grant Morrison’s Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on a Serious Earth (art by Dave McKean, 1989). Morrison and McKean set the entire story within the gates of an insane asylum, and twisted both the text and the art to try and create an aesthetic of chaos and insanity. In the pages below, the bits of text weave in and out of collaged images—eyes, pentagrams, snakes, pieces of a clock—in order to become, not the commentary on the scene, but a piece of the scene itself:

Fig. 3. Morrison, Grant and Dave McKean. Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on a Serious Earth. 1989.

(picture originally in full-color)

The snippets of dialogue are as haphazard as the images, ranging from a sentence like “Some say God is an insect” to “NO ROOM! NO ROOM!” to “Daddy, make him stop… the dog is hurting me!” to “I believe God is a man,” all punctuated by the large declaration at the page-spread’s bottom: “Let the feast of fools begin.” The text does not narrate or explicate the visual insanity, but instead together attempt to create the chaotic look and feel of insanity itself.

In the cases of both Maus and Arkham Asylum, we can see in action what Bongco describes when she says: “[t]he interaction between graphic and linguistic elements in comics aids the reader in executing operations relevant to constructing a story out of a sequence’s particular description. Ignoring one medium leads to a misinterpretation of the story” (55). In other words, in order for a comic’s story to fully make sense, graphic image and text must be “perceived together” (55).

Comics also do not need to have text and pictures that coexist at all times. Alan Moore’s Watchmen contains several powerful examples of how a graphic novel can use just text or just images to create the same powerful aesthetic as the most complex text-image interactions.

Fig. 4 and 5. Moore, Alan and Dave Gibbons. Watchmen. 1986.

With these two scenes, Moore and Gibbons create sections of Watchmen which simulate a multimedia experience. While the “excerpt” from the fictional autobiography ads to the storyline as a whole, slows down the pace after the image-heavy previous chapter, and reveals information about the various characters in the comic, the textless page moves the scene along cinematically—the lack of narration or explanation makes the implied killing of the dogs all that more chilling. The fact that both of these “tools” are used in same graphic novel and the work still comes together as one cohesive narrative is just one example of how comics as a medium can use text and image in an almost limitless number of ways in order to convey meaning and emotion.

~ Conclusion: Bridging the Gap~

With new interpretations of literacy now infiltrating conversations of education and pedagogy, hopefully it will only be a matter of time before mass-culture and lower-schools begin to see that the world of comic books offers more than just a bridge to advanced text-based literacy. New graphic novels and comics are being published every day, with new perspectives on narrative and text/graphic relations.

There is still work to be done, though. As of today (2009), the Modern Language Association still does not have an official citation for graphic novels within their MLA Handbook—there is a citation for text-based books, movies, and newspaper/political comic strips, but no citation to officially account for the lengthy interplay of author and artists, text and image.

While voices like Wolk and Bongco are becoming more and more common, many classrooms still view comics as a traditionally lesser medium and thus the potential for what students can learn from some of these new creations is stilted. As we continue to accept that “literacy” does not have to rely on words alone, we can start truly being conscious of what this medium has to offer narrativelly, literarily, and certainly pedagogically.

——-

Further Works Cited

Bongco, Mila. Reading Comics: Language, Culture, and the Concept of the Superhero in Comic Books. New York: Garland, 2000.

Gravette, Paul. Graphic Novels: Stories to Change Your Life. New York: Collins, 2005.

Hajdu, David. The Ten Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How it Changed America. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008.

Kaestle, Carl F., Helen Damon-Moore, et al. Literacy in the United States: Readers and Reading Since 1880. New Haven: Yale UP, 1992.

Lankshear, Colin and Michele Knobel. New Literacies. Philadelphia: Open UP, 2003.

Lucas, Tabitha. “No Laughing Matter: Comic Books Encourage Literacy.” The Voice Ledger. May 08, 2008. February 2009. <http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid= 19671709&BRD=1721&PAG=461&dept_id=72149&rfi=6>

Mendez, Teresa. “Hamlet Too Hard? Try a Comic Book.” The Christian Science Monitor. Learning. October 12 2004. <http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/1012/p11s01-legn.html>

Millard, Elaine and Jackie Marsh. “Sending Minnie the Minx Home: Comics and Reading Choices.” Cambridge Journal of Education. 31.1 (March 2001): 25-38.

Moore, Alan and Dave Gibbons. Watchmen. New York: DC Comics, 1987.

Morrison, Grant and Dave McKean. Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on a Serious Earth. New York: DC Comics, 1989.

Snowball, Clare. “Teenage Reluctant Readers and Graphic Novels.” Young Adult Library Services. 3.4 (Summer 2005): 43-45.

Snyder, Ilana. “Literacy and Technology Studies: Past, Present, and Future.” Australian Educational Researcher. 27.2 (October 1999). <http://eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/ custom/portlets/recordDetails/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=ED440398&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=ED440398>.
Spiegelman, Art. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. New York: Pantheon, 1991.

Ujie, Joanne and Stephen D. Krashen. “Comic Book Reading, Reading Enjoyment, and Pleasure Reading Among Middle Class and Chapter 1 Middle School Students.” Reading Improvement. 33.1 (Spring 2002): 51-54.

Weiner, Stephen. Faster than a Speeding Bullet: The Rise of the Graphic Novel. New York: NBM, 2003.

Wertham, Fredric. Seduction of the Innocent. New York: Clarke, Irwin, & Co, 1953.

Wright, Bradford. Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 2001.