Mcfarland: Lan Dong

DONG
Teaching Comics and Graphic Narratives

T
he essays in this collection discuss how comics and
graphic narratives can be useful primary texts and
learning tools in college and university classes
across different disciplines. There are six sections:
American Studies, Ethnic Studies, Women’s and Gender
Studies, Cultural Studies, Genre Studies, and Composition,
Rhetoric and Communication. Combining practical and
theoretical investigations, the book brings together
discussions among teacher-scholars to advance the
scholarship on teaching comics and graphic narratives,
and provides scholars and students with useful references,
critical approaches, and particular case studies.
Lan Dong is associate professor of English at the

University of Illinois Springfield. She is the author or editor
of three books and has written a number of journal articles
and book chapters on Asian American literature, children’s
literature, and popular culture.
McFarland
On the cover: (top)
Drawing of the Yellow Kid
by Richard F. Outcault,
¡896; Mutt and Jeff comic
strip by Bud Fisher, ¡9¡3
(Both images from the
Library of Congress)
Teaching Comics
and Graphic Narratives
ALSO BY LAN DONG
Transnationalism and the Asian American Heroine:

Essays on Literature, Film, Myth and Media
(McFarland, 2010)
Teaching Comics
and Graphic Narratives
Essays on Theory,
Strateg y and Practice
EDITED BY LAN DONG
Foreword by Robert G. Weiner
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers

Jefferson, North Carolina, and London
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Teaching comics and graphic narratives:
essays on theory, strategy and practice /
edited by Lan Dong ; foreword by Robert G. Weiner.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7864-6146-2
softcover : acid free paper
1. Comic books, strips, etc., in education.

2. Graphic novels in education. 3. Comic books,
strips, etc.— Study and teaching. I. Dong, Lan, 1974–
LB1044.9.C59T43 2012 371.33 — dc23 2012022491
BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE
© 2012 Lan Dong. All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form

or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying
or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publisher.
On the cover: (top) Drawing of the Yellow Kid by Richard F.

Outcault, ¡896; Mutt and Jeff comic strip by Bud Fisher,
¡9¡3. (Both images from the Library of Congress)
Manufactured in the United States of America
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers

Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640
www.mcfarlandpub.com
Acknowledgments
I am grateful for the Faculty Scholarship Enhancement grant from the Col-
lege of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois Springfield that
provided financial support for this project. I would like to thank my friends
Enrique Garcia and Beverly Weber for introducing me to Maus and the wonder-
land of manga, comics, and graphic narratives, Rob Weiner for his encourage-
ment and support, Nicole Overcash for her terrific editorial assistance, and my
students who share my interests in comics studies, inspire me, and remind me
of the joy of learning. My gratitude also goes to all the contributors to this col-
lection whose inspirational teaching and engaging scholarship on comics and
graphic narratives in various disciplines and interdisciplinary fields opened my
eyes on many levels.
The contributors and I would like to thank all the artists, writers, and pub-
lishers who granted permissions for reprinting copyrighted materials from their
works in this book: Keith Knight, Jason Lutes, Aaron McGruder, Shirin Neshat,
Chris Ware, DC Comics, Drawn & Quarterly, Rockport Publishers, Universal
Uclick, and Gladstone Gallery in New York, as well as Raylene Knutson, and
Miriam Spies. Parts of Derek Parker Royal’s chapter first appeared in his guest
editor’s introduction, “Coloring America: Multi-Ethnic Engagements with
Graphic Narrative,” in MELUS: Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-
Ethnic Literature of the United States, issue 32.3 (Fall 2007), pages 7–22, and are
reprinted here by permission of the journal.
v
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v
Foreword by Robert G. Weiner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Introduction: Reading and Teaching Graphic Narratives
LAN DONG . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Part I : American Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

1. Art and Commerce in the Classroom: Teaching an American
Studies Course in Comics
EDWARD A. SHANNON . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
2. The Black Politics of Newspaper Comic Strips: Teaching Aaron McGruder’s
The Boondocks and Keith Knight’s The K Chronicles
DANIEL STEIN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
3. Teaching the Comics Anthology: The Readers, Authors, and Media of
McSweeney’s 13
ALEXANDER STARRE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
4. Teaching Visual Literacy Through 9/11 Graphic Narratives
CHRISTINA MEYER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
Part II : Ethnic Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67

5. Drawing Attention: Comics as a Means of Approaching U.S. Cultural
Diversity
DEREK PARKER ROYAL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
6. Teaching Asian American Graphic Narratives in a “Post-Race” Era
ANNE CONG-HUYEN and CAROLINE KYUNGAH HONG . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
7. Graphic Multiculturalism: Miné Okubo’s Citizen 13660 in the Literature
Classroom
JESSICA KNIGHT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94
Part III : Women’s and Gender Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105

8. “The Slippage Between Seeing and Saying”: Getting a Life in Alison
Bechdel’s Fun Home
SUSAN R. VAN DYNE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
vii
viii Table of Contents
9. Our Graphics, Ourselves: Graphic Narratives and the Gender Studies

Classroom
M. CATHERINE JONET . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
10. Performing the Veil: Gender and Resistance in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis
and Shirin Neshat’s Photography
JUDITH RICHARDS and CYNTHIA M. WILLIAMS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130
Part IV : Cultural Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145

11. The Weimar Republic Redux: Multiperspectival History in Jason Lutes’
Berlin City of Stones
JOSHUA KAVALOSKI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
12. Ivorian Bonus: Teaching Abouet and Oubrerie’s Aya
SUSANNA HOENESS-KRUPSAW . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161
13. Digging Up the Dirt? Teaching Graphic Narratives in German Academia
STEFAN HOEPPNER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173
Part V : Genre Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185

14. Making the Unseen and the Unspoken Visible and Audible: Trauma and
the Graphic Novel
EDWARD BRUNNER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185
15. Exposition and Disquisition: Nonfiction Graphic Narratives and Comics
Theory in the Literature Classroom
ADRIELLE ANNA MITCHELL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 198
16. Serial Self-Portraits: Framing Student Conversations About Graphic
Memoir
JONATHAN D’AMORE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 210
Part VI : Composition, Rhetoric, and Communication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221

17. Batman Returns (to Class): Graphic Narratives and the Syncretic
Classroom
KATHARINE POLAK MACDONALD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221
18. 300 Ways to Teach the Epic
MARY ANN TOBIN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 232
19. Comics (as) Journalism: Teaching Joe Sacco’s Palestine to Media Students
ALLA GADASSIK AND SARAH HENSTRA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243
About the Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265
Foreword
BY ROBERT G. WEINER
I can literally say that I learned vocabulary words in comic books.

— Chris Zorich, former NFL Player
To say that the use of graphic novels as a teaching tool is just beginning to be felt across
educational borders would be an understatement. Colleges, universities, and public and
private schools are all beginning to see the value of using graphic novels and comics. Of
course it was not always this way. Despite some pioneering attempts at combining educa-
tional concepts with the graphic narrative format, instruction using comics, graphic novels,
and sequential art has only started to be taken seriously in the last decade. Articles in
scholarly journals related to comics appeared as early as the 1940s (see the Journal of Edu-
cational Sociolog y) and educational graphic novels and comics go back to the 1920s (with
Texas History Movies) and perhaps even earlier.
However, for the longest time many teachers scoffed at the idea of teaching a “funny”
book. Some even thought that reading comics hindered one’s ability to read “higher” forms
of literature. One of the criticisms leveled at educational comics like Classics Illustrated was
that they watered down original classic literature by putting it in the comic form. The pro-
ducers of the Classics Illustrated series always maintained that the comics were not a replace-
ment for the original work but a supplement. The purpose of the series was to foster a love
of reading that would eventually translate into lifelong learning. I have met people who
learned to read by reading the Classic Illustrated comics and others who have told me how
they developed reading skills by reading comics in childhood. Time and time again, I have
had people in my office talking about how comics influenced their life and education.
Today graphic novels and comics are permeating the classroom in truly unique ways.
For example, my former Texas Tech colleague Jeremy Short, a professor of strategic man-
agement, has published a number of graphic novel textbooks in business management and
franchising. Sequential art can be used to teach detailed content to students in ways that
are distinctive but fun. This does not mean its content is watered down. Dr. Short has iden-
tified several reasons to use graphic novels and specifically graphic novel textbooks as teaching
tools, which I have paraphrased below:
1. Graphic novel textbooks are an innovative approach to teaching;
2. The medium engages visual learning styles;
3. Right and left brain are engaged;
4. Social orientation gets students more involved with situations and characters of the
text and fosters a better class discussion;
1
2 Foreword (Weiner)
5. Graphic narratives are a visually interesting storytelling format that is more enjoyable
and appealing;
6. Graphic novels grab and keep students’ attention;
7. Better concept application is achieved via storytelling;
8. Graphic novels as textbooks are usually far less expensive than traditional textbooks;
9. Using graphic novels as textbooks results in greater learning by students (Short “Schol-
arly Communications”).
This brings me to the content of Professor Dong’s much needed volume on teaching
graphic narratives. The essays in this volume provide perspectives from various disciplines
and teaching areas. The authors of these fine essays share practical advice and pedagogical
methodologies for using graphic narratives with some of the following topics: diversity
issues, American studies, gender, literature, history, poetry, composition, and journalism.
This wide range is truly astounding. Teaching Comics and Graphic Narratives brings into
focus the importance of not discounting the medium of sequential art as a teaching tool.
Today’s students enjoy the visual components that graphic novels have. In our digital
and online worlds, graphic novels may be the last vestige of a printed book students might
be willing to read (and even then there are web comics that provide another option for
instructors). Teaching with graphic novels is a useful alternative to the standard and some-
times dry teaching methods of the past. One of the things I always harp on when I talk
about comics and graphic novels is that it truly is an interactive medium. It is difficult not
to be engaged with both the visual and the narrative. The student has to be able to interpret
both components thus using both sides of the brain. One could read a story about Spider-
Man, Batman, or Superman that has as many details and plot twists and turns as any work
by Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Frank Norris, Alice Walker, Wilkie Collins, or John Stein-
beck. Just as the works of those authors can teach something about the times they lived in,
so can comics and graphic novels. Comics and graphic novels are a form of cultural history.
It is possible reading comics can make one more intelligent. Comics legend Stan Lee
confirms this. In the 1960s when he was co-creating the universe of Marvel Comics with
other artists such as Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Roy Thomas, and Don Heck, he often received
letters from parents saying “little Johnny’s reading skills have improved ever since he started
reading Spider-Man” (Delfaco 21). Lee never sacrificed good storytelling and language just
because little kids were reading the books. His writing in the 1960s Marvel Comics always
had little nuggets thrown in for college students and adult readers.
The fact that this volume exists at all is a testament to the influence graphic novels
and comics are gaining in understanding our world and culture. Not bad for a format that
used to be considered the worst form of literary sludge, something to be discarded and
thrown in the trash if read at all and certainly not something that one should admit to read-
ing. Teaching Comics and Graphic Narratives provides a blueprint for those who are interested
in adopting graphic novels for college and university classes.
Use this volume! Do good works! Your students will thank you!
WORKS CITED
Defalco, Tom. Comic Creators on Spider-Man. London: Titan, 2004. Print.
Frank, Josette. “Some Questions and Answers for Teachers and Parents.” Journal of Educational Sociolog y 23.4
(1949): 206–14. Print.
Foreword (Weiner) 3
_____. “What’s in the Comics.” Journal of Educational Sociolog y 18.4 (1944): 214–22. Print.
Ketchen, Dave, et al. Tales of Garcón: The Franchise Players. Nyak, NY: Flat World Knowledge, 2011. Print.
Patten, Jack, and John Rosenfield. Texas History Movies. Dallas: Southwest Press, 1928. Print.
Short, Jeremy. “Scholarly Communications Panel Discussion.” Texas Tech University Library. Lubbox, TX. 21
Oct. 2010. Discussion.
_____, et al. Atlas Black: Management Guru? Nyak, NY: Flat World Knowledge, 2010. Print.
_____, et al. Atlas Black: Managing to Succeed. Nyak, NY: Flat World Knowledge, 2010. Print.
Robert G. Weiner is an associate humanities (visual and performing arts) librarian at Texas Tech University
and the author of Marvel Graphic Novels: An Annotated Guide, editor of Graphic Novels in Libraries and
Archives and Captain America and the Struggle of the Superhero, and co-editor of In the Peanut Gallery with
Mystery Science Theater 3000.
Introduction
Reading and Teaching Graphic Narratives
LAN DONG
The seeds of this collection took root at the special session, “Teaching Graphic Novels
in Literature Classrooms,” at the Modern Language Association’s Annual Convention in
San Francisco. This session received an overwhelming response to its call for proposals and
generated a lively discussion at the convention, demonstrating a strong interest in the growing
field of studies of comics and graphic narratives. Commonly known as book-length comics,
graphic narratives include both fiction and nonfiction.1 The past three decades have seen an
increase in the readership of graphic narratives as well as in scholarly interests in this subject.
A number of college and university professors have integrated this medium into their courses
across different disciplines. This collection brings together scholarly essays that discuss meth-
odologies, strategies, and challenges for using graphic narratives in undergraduate and grad-
uate classes. These works hope to fill in the gap between texts and the classroom by providing
a platform for scholars to explore the intimate connection between graphic narratives and
literary genres, themes, criticism, and theories. Gathering critical essays from various dis-
ciplines as well as interdisciplinary fields, this book hopes to promote discussion not only
on the legitimacy and value of graphic narratives in college and university classrooms but
also on the pedagogical approaches and methodological challenges facing the instructors.
By combining both practical and theoretical investigations, this volume encourages dialogues
and discussions among teacher-scholars to advance a new constellation of scholarship on
the teaching of comics and graphic narratives and to provide students with useful references
and critical approaches to analyzing particular texts as well.
In the past, comic books —“originally an offshoot of the comic strip”— more often
than not were regarded with “considerable suspicion by parents, educators, psychiatrists,
and moral reformers” (Inge xi). In recent years, the proliferation of research on comics and
graphic narratives has endowed this medium with some legitimacy. In particular, several
studies and references for teachers and librarians have argued that comics can be used to
help students acquire reading comprehension and critical thinking skills, become engaged
readers, and understand social, political, and cultural issues (e.g., Thomas 1983; Crawford
2003; Gorman 2003; Cary 2004; Bucher and Manning 2004; Xu 2005; Christensen 2006;
Frey and Fisher 2008; Thompson 2008; Krajewski and Wadsworth-Miller 2009; Rourke
2010; Stafford 2011). These studies, albeit valuable in gathering resources and arguing for
comics’ legitimate place in classrooms and libraries, focus mainly on primary and secondary
5
6 Introduction (Dong)
education. Stephen Tabachnick’s Teaching the Graphic Novel (2009), an edited volume pub-
lished by the Modern Language Association in its Options for Teaching series, examines
the pedagogical, theoretical, aesthetical, social, and cultural issues related to teaching the
graphic novel at the university level. Moreover, Robert Weiner’s Graphic Novels and Comics
in Libraries and Archives (2010) collects librarians and scholars’ ideas related specifically to
the graphic novel in libraries and archives, including those housed in colleges and univer-
sities.2 Gene Luen Yang, author of American Born Chinese (2006) and self-identified as a
high school teacher and cartoonist, created an online version of his Master of Education
project that explores the educational potential of the comics medium (www.humblecomics.
com/comicsedu). Furthermore, the National Association of Comics Art Educators (NACAE),
a collaboration of teachers, librarians, artists, and scholars, has a website that provides resources
for educators in response to the growing influence of comics on education (www.teaching-
comics.org).
This collection seeks to build on these scholarly and pedagogical pursuits while expand-
ing the scope of comics scholarship by bringing together essays on theoretical approaches,
pedagogical strategies, and classroom practice. Hillary Chute and Marianne DeKoven have
proposed that graphic narratives encompass “a range of types of narrative work in comics”
and are viable for serious academic inquiry (767–68). Using graphic narratives as primary
texts for “serious academic inquiry,” the chapters in this book collectively explore how these
works can be useful primary texts and learning tools in classes that range from literary
studies, composition, cultural studies, ethnic studies, gender studies, to other disciplines
and interdisciplinary fields.
In Part I, Edward A. Shannon’s chapter examines a sophomore-level American Studies
course on Comics and American Culture as a case study. He discusses the broad historical
coverage of the reading materials from the 1890s to the present; the parallel reading of
graphic narratives alongside poetry, fiction, and nonfiction; and his teaching strategies to
prompt students to consider not only the aesthetics involved in reading, interpreting, and
evaluating comics but also this medium’s influence on American culture.
Next, Daniel Stein analyzes the ways in which both Aaron McGruder’s The Boondocks
and Keith Knight’s The K Chronicles use comic strips to “blacken” the predominantly “white”
space by presenting African American characters as cultural commentators and to politicize
this space by offering dissenting views on national and international American politics. His
essay also examines the didactic and pedagogical possibilities of McGruder and Knight’s
works and discusses how an analysis of comic strips as a political medium as well as a his-
torical source can help introduce students to some of the most influential political conflicts
and historical narratives that have shaped American culture since the civil rights movement.
Alexander Starre’s essay offers a brief overview of the methodological patterns in current
comics pedagogy. Using McSweeney’s 13, an anthology edited by cartoonist Chris Ware,
Starre interrogates the various levels of artistic communication encoded in graphic narratives.
Christina Meyer’s chapter discusses how graphic narratives narrativize history, in par-
ticular 9/11, and how she utilizes the medium to teach visual literacy in an American Studies
class. Her essay analyzes Art Spiegelman, Will Eisner, Nick Bertozzi, and other artists’ works
that verbally and visually thematize the terrorist attacks in 2001 and points out the artists’
personal yet universal reactions to these attacks. Meyer goes on to explore how the selected
graphic narratives discussed in her class represent not only the intricate mediatization of
the terrorist attacks but also the social and political transformations in the aftermath of
9/11, and how these texts problematize the idea of unity and identity formations in times
Introduction (Dong) 7
of crisis. In critically engaging such selected teaching moments, she examines the pedagogical
value and instructive potential of graphic narratives.
Together these four essays in Part I present multivalent perspectives of adopting graphic
narratives in American Studies classes and examine how comic strips help prompt in-depth
discussions on American history, culture, politics, foreign policies, and the role of the news
media in the political process.
Attending to comics’ connection to racial formation and stereotyping, Part II of this
collection examines graphic narratives as powerful teaching tools in Ethnic Studies. First,
Derek Parker Royal’s chapter highlights the possibilities and potential liabilities of using
graphic narratives when teaching ethnic identification and marginalization and underscores
some of the broader issues surrounding graphic narratives’ abilities to raise questions under-
lying race and ethnicity in America. Royal argues that we cannot overemphasize the signi-
ficance of a critical engagement with multiethnic graphic narratives. His study, to some
degree, responds to what several critics of graphic narratives have seen as a defining mark
of American popular culture: its problematic relationship with ethnic difference and its
responsibilities underlying racial signification.
Using Royal’s observations as a point of departure, Anne Cong-Huyen and Caroline
Kyungah Hong’s essay then discusses strategies and practices for incorporating graphic nar-
ratives into teaching undergraduate courses on Asian American literature and culture in the
so-called “post-race” era. Cong-Huyen and Hong interrogate what counts as literature in
order to actively engage students in canon formation. They argue that the graphic narrative
is an effective medium for promoting literacy and intellectual inquiry both in and out of
the classroom. The form’s interplay of words and images and its negotiation of both the
visible and the invisible are especially significant because of popular depictions of Asian
Americans and their ambiguous socio-historical position as “the national abject” (Shimakawa
3).
Next, focusing on Miné Okubo’s graphic memoir Citizen 13660 as a case study, Jessica
Knight examines her classroom practice of “graphic multiculturalism.” Her essay addresses
how Okubo’s work has broadened the classroom discussion by allowing her students to con-
sider the text not as an isolated aesthetic object or a simple historical, ethnographic docu-
ment, but as a cultural product enmeshed in the fraught economies of cultural production.
Knight’s chapter examines Citizen 13660 as a cultural work in which texts perform in relation
to readers, writers, and the institutions that mediate access to the tools of literacy, and
through which her students explore representational complexities in the multicultural lit-
erature classroom.
The essays in Part III focus on the complex interactions between visual representation
and gender identities. In discussing Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home in the context of a Women’s
and Gender Studies class, Susan R. Van Dyne addresses “the slippage between seeing and
saying.” Positioned at the intersection of life-writing theories and sexual identity formation,
her class “Cultural Work of Memoir” guides students to explore two inquiries: “we do not
have a life until we narrate it” and “sexual identity is not discovered as an innate truth but
is socially constructed.” Van Dyne’s essay goes on to discuss how she uses Bechdel’s graphic
memoir to transform students’ common resistance to both premises and to theorize these
paradoxical statements.
Addressing gender and graphic narratives in a broader scope, M. Catherine Jonet’s
essay discusses her approaches to teaching gender, feminism, and popular culture. She guides
her students to explore such questions as: whether or not the triumph of Persepolis and Fun
Home suggests a limitation in terms of women’s success in graphic narratives; why publishers
and the general public seem to be interested in graphic memoirs by women; whether or not
“true memoirs,” as the subtitle of Laurie Sandell’s The Impostor’s Daughter suggests, can
bridge the gap between a reader’s potential cultural dissonance regarding graphic narratives
and women-produced texts. In the process of raising these inquiries, Jonet illuminates the
complex relationship between gender and comics.
Focusing on the classroom discussion and activities surrounding the portrayal of Muslim
women and the veil as a cultural symbol, Judith Richards and Cynthia M. Williams’ chapter
presents a comparative study of Marjane Satrapi’s Perspesolis and Shirin Neshat’s photography,
both provoking and controversial in their visual representations of women and Islamic tra-
dition. By juxtaposing two different genres featuring the veil and adopting a multilayered
theoretical approach, their essay addresses the artists’ national, cultural, and personal dis-
placement. Richards and Williams argue that the veil, as a politicized symbol, is a critical
site for teaching global controversies as much as gender performance.
Next, teaching graphic narratives as primary texts while emphasizing cultural contex-
tualization, the three essays in Part IV address strategies and pedagogical approaches in
teaching comics in the field of Cultural Studies. Joshua Kavaloski’s chapter examines how
Jason Lutes’ Berlin City of Stones simultaneously employs and subverts single-point perspec-
tival representation in its approach to history, in particular that of the Weimar Republic.
Kavaloski proposes that Lutes’ book ultimately presents the Weimar Republic’s history from
multiple perspectives. He argues that while Lutes uses relatively conventional visual images
generally drawn from a single fixed point to depict people, places, and events, the narratives
by multiple protagonists often depart from a stable, single third-person point of view and
thereby challenge the reader’s presumptions of objectivity.
In teaching Marguerite Abouet and Clément Oubrerie’s Aya in her World Literature
in Translation class, Susanna Hoeness-Krupsaw similarly emphasizes the multiple approaches
of cultural analysis. Her essay discusses how the English edition of Aya has provided critical
reading and thinking exercises for a literature classroom. Its references to race, class, and
gender provide opportunities for students to conduct literary analysis as it is intertwined
with cultural and political issues. Reading selected pages from the French edition side by
side with the English edition, Hoeness-Krupsaw also discusses the difficulties of cultural
and literary translations.
Moreover, Stefan Hoeppner’s chapter discusses his experimental undergraduate class
on graphic narratives in one of the country’s leading German literature departments at the
University of Freiburg in Germany. After providing a brief overview of the cultural specifics
of graphic narratives in Germany, Hoeppner focuses on four main aspects of his class: the-
orizing comics as media, narratological approaches, strategies of intermediality, and autobio-
graphical comics. Drawing on classroom activities as well as students’ responses, Hoeppner
concludes that graphic narratives are a powerful tool for questioning and renegotiating the
traditional boundaries between “high” and “popular” culture in German academia.
The essays in Part V, in their investigation of graphic narratives at the crossroads of
fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, examine how the medium traverses traditional generic bound-
aries. First, Edward Brunner’s chapter discusses how he has used Seth, Chris Ware, Alicia
Torres, and Kim Deitch’s works alongside other genres to help students conceptualize trauma.
Brunner argues that the visual and verbal combination allows juxtaposed panels to represent
different times, which in turn prompts the reader to examine the differences between showing
and telling.
Introduction (Dong) 9
Next Adrielle Anna Mitchell’s essay focuses on nonfictional graphic narratives, ranging
from memoirs, war reportage, political treatise, historical account, to travelogue. She dis-
cusses different strategies in using nonfictional graphic narratives: as single stand-alone texts,
as paired texts with other text-only pieces of literature, or as a group studied together in a
dedicated course on the subject of graphic narrative. Through these analyses, Mitchell
addresses specific critical approaches to teaching the visually-dominant nature of the medium
and to studying hybrid texts that challenge the reader’s notions of the linear, the literary,
and the semiotic.
Jonathan D’Amore’s chapter adopts Sidonie Smith’s theory on the multiplicity of selves
in autobiographical narratives to analyze the celebrated graphic memoirs by Alison Bechdel,
Marjane Satrapi, Art Spiegelman, and Harvey Pekar. He proposes that the authors’ self por-
traits in these texts demonstrate the process by which memoirists make their lives the subject
of their works. Referring to specific examples in his teaching practice, D’Amore discusses
how he introduced the notion of serial self-portraiture in class by means of visual components
to emphasize that a written self is simultaneously fractured and constant in the autobio-
graphical narrative genre.
Besides teaching graphic narratives as literature, college and university professors also
have explored the medium’s potential in teaching composition, rhetoric, and communication,
as the three essays in Part VI demonstrate. Katharine Polak MacDonald explores how the
use of graphic narratives such as Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, Alan Moore’s V
for Vendetta, Charles Burns’ Black Hole and others in the composition classroom provides
an excellent starting point for students to examine multilayered discourses and to develop
their own multimodal texts. By incorporating visual analysis with rhetorical analysis, students
become more engaged with the textual material as it is connected to current events and
examples of cultural production. Polak MacDonald goes on to argue that students are able
to better understand not only the primary texts as a medium of culture through the relation
between written language and visual representation, but also the concepts of audience, pur-
pose, as well as voice and how rhetoric operates on numerous levels.
Next, Mary Ann Tobin’s chapter focuses on a parallel case study of Frank Miller’s
graphic novel 300 and Zack Snyder’s film adaptation 300, integrated into her Freshman
Composition and Rhetoric class. Both versions portray the Battle of Thermopylae (480
B.C.E.) and rely on the conventions of the epic to depict Spartan concepts of honor, duty,
glory, combat, and victory. Tobin discusses how these texts offer a practical, engaging, and
entertaining way to teach the form and function of epic poetry while demonstrating its
influence on Western cultural norms and ethoi to students of the YouTube generation.
Lastly, Alla Gadassik and Sarah Henstra’s essay discusses their practice of teaching Joe
Sacco’s Palestine in an English class comprised of Journalism, Radio, and Television majors.
They argue that Sacco’s comic-journalistic work offers students an opportunity to learn
about political controversy as well as to wrestle with narrative self-reflexivity. Combining
a reading of Palestine as literary journalism with a critical account of classroom interactions,
Gadassik and Henstra’s work demonstrates the political salience and pedagogical potential
of the graphic narrative.
In 2005, Peter Schjeldahl wrote for The New Yorker: “if the major discoveries of the
graphic novel’s new world of the imagination have already been accomplished, its colonizing
of the territory, like its threat to foot traffic in bookstore aisles, has only just begun.” This
collection of stimulating essays is thus part of such budding efforts to map out the graphic
narrative’s “territorial” expansion into the realm of colleges and universities.
NOTES
1. In the emerging field of comics studies, such terms as comic book, graphic novel, graphic narrative,
sequential art, and comics often are used interchangeably and elude precise definitions. Charles Hatfield and
Joseph Witek, for example, have suggested that the issue of terminology cannot be easily solved (Hatfield 19–
27, Witek 219–20). In this collection, the term “graphic narrative” is used to refer to comics in general.
2. For a historical overview of the comic art scholarship, please see Lent.
WORKS CITED
Bucher, Katherine T., and M. Lee Manning. “Bringing Graphic Novels into a School’s Curriculum.” The Clearing
House 78.2 (2004): 67–72. Print.
Cary, Stephen. Going Graphic: Comics at Work in the Multilingual Classroom. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann,
2004. Print.
Christensen, Lila L. “Graphic Global Conflict: Graphic Novels in the High School Social Studies Classroom.”
The Social Studies 97.6 (2006): 227–30. Print.
Chute, Hilary, and Marianne DeKoven. “Introduction: Graphic Narrative.” Modern Fiction Studies 52.4 (2006):
767–82. Print.
Crawford, Philip Charles. Graphic Novels 101: Selecting and Using Graphic Novels to Promote Literacy for Children
and Young Adults. Salt Lake City, UT: Hi Willow Research and Publishing, 2003. Print.
Frey, Nancy, and Douglas Fisher. “Introduction.” Teaching Visual Literacy: Using Comic Books, Graphic Novels,
Anime, Cartoons, and More to Develop Comprehension and Thinking Skills. Eds. Nancy Frey and Douglas
Fisher. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press, 2008. 1–4. Print.
Gorman, Michele. Getting Graphic: Using Graphic Novels to Promote Literacy with Preteens and Teens. Worthington,
OH: Linworth Publishing, 2003. Print.
Hatfield, Charles. “Defining Comics in the Classroom; or, The Pros and Cons of Unfixability.” Teaching the
Graphic Novel. Ed. Stephen E. Tabachnick. New York: Modern Language Association, 2009. 19–27. Print.
Inge, M. Thomas. Comics as Culture. Jackson, MS, and London: University Press of Mississippi, 1990. Print.
Krajewski, Sarah, and Melissa Wadsworth-Miller. “Graphic Novels + Teacher Research = Student Success.” The
English Record 50.1 (2009): 9–16. Print.
Lent, John A. “The Winding, Pot-Holed Road of Comic Art Scholarship.” Studies in Comics 1.1 (2010): 7–33.
Print.
Rourke, James. The Comic Book Curriculum: Using Comics to Enhance Learning and Life. Santa Barbara, CA:
Libraries Unlimited/ABC-CLIO, 2010. Print.
Schjeldahl, Peter. “Words and Pictures: Graphic Novels Come of Age.” The New Yorker. 17 Oct. 2005. Web. 16
Dec. 2011. <http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/10/17/051017crbo_books1>.
Shimakawa, Karen. National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage. Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2002. Print.
Stafford, Tim. Teaching Visual Literacy in the Primary Classroom: Comic Books, Film, Television and Picture Nar-
ratives. London and New York: Routledge, 2011. Print.
Thomas, James L., ed. Cartoons and Comics in the Classroom: A Reference for Teachers and Librarians. Littleton,
CO: Libraries Unlimited, 1983. Print.
Thompson, Terry. Adventures in Graphica: Using Comics and Graphic Novels to Teaching Comprehension, 2 –6.
Portland, ME: Stenhouse, 2008. Print.
Witek, Joseph. “Seven Ways I Don’t Teach Comics.” Tabachnick 217–22. Print.
Xu, Shelley Hong. Trading Cards to Comic Strips: Popular Culture Texts and Literacy Learning in Grades K–8.
Newark, DE: International Reading Association, 2005. Print.
PART I
AMERICAN STUDIES
1. Art and Commerce in the Classroom

Teaching an American Studies Course in Comics
EDWARD A. SHANNON
Hillary Chute, in her article “Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative,”

answers the question by focusing on the formal qualities of comics. She argues that comics,
or graphic narratives, are indeed a form of literature. Comics’ unique form contains “double
vision,” she writes, “in their structural hybridity, their double (but nonsynthesized) narratives
of words and images” (Chute 459). Chute ends her essay suggesting that scholars “direct
more sustained attention to this developing form” (462). Renaming comics “graphic nar-
ratives” is formally sound, as the term neatly describes the texts in ways that “comics” does
not. It also allows Chute to include some works in her discussion that others would not
consider comics, for example Lynd Ward’s woodcut “wordless novels” of the 1920s and
1930s. However, while the term “comics” carries lowbrow connotations many in and out
of academia would like to eschew, those very connotations can offer the foundations of a
rewarding, intellectually rich course.
I teach a sophomore-level American Studies course called “Comics and American Cul-
ture” at Ramapo College of New Jersey. The American Studies approach has proven useful
in opening the door to a consideration of a broad swath of texts, from comics with literary
pretensions to the lowest lowbrow strips, as well as primary and secondary sources that I
might not include in a traditional literature course. “Comics and American Culture” asks
students to consider the aesthetics involved in reading, interpreting, and evaluating comics.
They study how comics’ two symbol systems — images and language — create meaning. We
also look at comics as both cause and effect of movements in American culture. Since the
last decade of the nineteenth century, American comics’ growth has paralleled the “American
Century,” intersecting historical, cultural, political, and legal issues such as imperialism,
immigration, the Cold War, youth and drug culture, intellectual property rights, and copy-
right law. The course stimulates conversations about art and commerce, meaning and mate-
rial culture, and allows an investigation of the ideologies of high and low culture.
My course covers American comics from the 1890s to contemporary graphic novels;
students read early newspaper strips as well as comic books that have dominated the form
since the 1950s. At the same time, we read poetry, fiction, and nonfiction that parallel the
concerns of the comics. Class readings include canonical poetry and fiction as well as lowbrow
genre fiction, popular songs, and films. The broad historical scope allows students to cover
the development of comics, read a variety of genres, sample the work of diverse cartoonists,
11
12 Part I : American Studies
and choose from a wide selection of inexpensive, accessible texts. This chapter presents an
amalgam of various paths my course has taken over the years. While it would be difficult
to fit all of the readings and exercises I suggest here into one semester, I hope to offer a
menu of choices to those considering teaching such a course.
Required Texts and Educational Technolog y

Among my regularly assigned texts are Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics (1993),
Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in the Palace of Ice and Further Adventures (1976), Alan Moore
and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen (1986), and Art Spiegelman’s Maus I (1986) and Maus II
(1991). From semester to semester, I make changes to the reading list. Recently I have
assigned Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006) and Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers
(2004), for instance. Supplementing this list are course packets, library reserve readings,
comics images scanned onto my webpage, and links to various websites. Using a secured
link ensures my webpage is available only to my students, making these materials legally
available through fair use. Often, one can accomplish much with a single panel or page
from a comics story. This is the case with most of the superhero comics we deal with in the
course.
In addition, I include critical and historical sources, for example: Umberto Eco’s “The
Myth of Superman,” excerpts from Amy Kiste Nyberg’s Seal of Approval: The History of the
Comics Code (1998), and essays in cultural criticism. We consider non-comics primary
sources as well, for instance: a chapter from Seduction of the Innocent (1954) and Frederic
Wertham’s exposé of the supposed danger comics posed to impressionable young minds.
Students read fiction and poetry, including pulp fiction by Dashiell Hammett, modernist
poetry by e. e. cummings, and confessional poetry by Sylvia Plath and John Berryman. We
also watch films. Some of them are about comics, for example: Crumb (1995) and Comic
Book Confidential (1988); others illustrate both the ideology of a given era and the relationship
between comics and mainstream media, for instance: the science fiction film, Invasion of
the Bodysnatchers (1956).
Comics’ visual nature necessitates frequent use of educational technology. Among the
most useful tools is the visualizer, which projects still images onto an overhead screen. Since
my personal library features thousands of black and white and color comics, I can bring in
an image if its usefulness suddenly occurs to me. An Internet connection in the classroom
is also necessary. With a few links added to my webpage, we can contextualize the “low”
art of comics with parallel examples in “high” art, for example: the Ash Can School, the
1913 Armory Show, and Pop Art. Scheduling regular intersections between the worlds of
“high” and “low” art allows a continuing conversation about the ideology of “high” and
“low” culture, and reinforces concepts borrowed from Marxist and cultural criticism, which
I sometimes introduce through short excerpts from critical works.
Class Schedule
On the first day of class, I stage a debate: “resolved: a course called ‘Comics and Amer-
ican Culture’ has no place in a liberal arts college.” I arm students with familiar arguments:
comics are for children; comic books are “low art” or not art at all; and comic books are a
1. Art and Commerce in the Classroom (Shannon) 13
consumer commodity and therefore not worthy of study. This exercise galvanizes students
who articulate and defeat previously unspoken objections to what seems an intellectually
“light” course. The course tends to attract comics fans whom I place in the “anti-comics”
groups for this exercise to avoid purely fannish defenses. The debate creates a community,
sets an agenda for the semester, defends our subject matter, and communicates the serious-
ness of our academic purpose. As a result of such early exercises, students eager to work
would stay while those less motivated would usually drop the course.
In the first week, we analyze Art Spiegelman’s Lead Pipe Sunday (1991) from Raw Mag-
azine. This parodic lithograph depicts early comics strip characters Ignatz Mouse and Dick
Tracy swarming the corpses of iconic representations of Art (a woman wearing a laurel
wreath crown) and Commerce (a Thomas Nast–inspired businessman with a moneybag
head). A text box reads: “The bastard offspring of art and commerce murder their parents
and go off on a Sunday outing” (Spiegelman, Raw 2). This wry characterization of comics’
ability to negotiate the space between art and commerce offers a major theme for the course.
The phrase “bastard offspring of art and commerce” becomes a touchstone for the rest of
the semester, informing paper assignments and class discussion (Figure 1.1).
Also in the first week of the course, I ask students to consider another piece from Raw:
Chris Ware’s “Thrilling Adventure Stories.” Ware’s strip, a study in comics form, offers a
crash course in reading comics to students who have little experience with the form. At the
Figure 1.1. Spiegelman’s ironic work introduces students to the concerns of high and low culture that
serve as a focus of the course. Art Spiegelman. Lead Pipe Sunday. Raw. Vol. 2 no. 3. 1991. 2. © Art
Spiegelman.
same time, it reminds more rabid fans that images and texts that make up comics develop
a symbolic relationship of real complexity. Visually, the strip seems to tell a rather conven-
tional superhero adventure from the 1940s. All the standard icons of the genre are present:
superhero, secret headquarters, milquetoast secret identity, pesky girl reporter, and evil sci-
entist. However, the narrative related in the text balloons, narration boxes, and sound effects
seems to have no logical relationship with the images. The story here is a reminiscence of
a boyhood in a dysfunctional family. Students tend to be perplexed upon first reading, but
through class discussion, the story helps them comprehend the importance of close reading
of images, words, icons, panel borders, and typography, all of which place special demands
on the reader (Figure 1.2).
Covering a century of American comics necessitates prioritizing. The availability of
inexpensive comics collections influences my decisions, as does my desire to present a coher-
ent historical narrative. I seek recurring images and themes to tie comics history together
Figure 1.2. Ware’s postmodern dismantling of comics grammar offers students a unique insight into
how comics create meaning. Chris Ware. “Thrilling Adventure Stories.” Raw. Vol. 2 no. 3. 1991. 76.
© Chris Ware.
while allowing students to see how comics infuses American culture. A key visual theme is
the ethnic other, a figure found in abundance in both “disposable” comics and those aspiring
to social and artistic value. From outright racism of early comics to the taboo-breaking
experiments of underground comix, the other is a constant in American comics. R. F. Out-
cault’s Irish immigrants (Figure 1.3) and Winsor McCay’s Minstrel and Vaudeville characters
(Figure 1.4) early in the semester strike most students as pure racism. Sadly, many students
are oblivious to these characters; their sanguine response offers a teaching moment on the
ubiquity and continuity of racist imagery in popular culture. Later, students see how artists
like Robert Crumb, Alex Ross, and Aaron McGruder subvert these disturbing images by
placing them in new, ironic contexts, playing on the history of racism in the comics and
American life.
My course is composed of several Units. Unit One features McCloud’s Understanding
Comics, an introduction to the rhetoric of comics. McCloud reminds superhero fans that
Figure 1.3. Outcault’s The Yellow Kid is an early example of the ethnic other, a recurring image in
American comics and my course. Blackbeard. The Yellow Kid, n. pag.
Figure 1.4. McCay’s use of racist images is underscored here, where his ape-like jungle imp character
appears beside an actual ape. McCay. Palace of Ice. 20.
comics represents a form, not a science fiction subgenre. Using comics form, McCloud
easily demonstrates that comics readers need a sophisticated understanding of image and
icon. Of special interest in McCloud’s book is his definition of comics in chapter one:
“plural in form, used with a singular verb.... Juxtaposed pictorial and other images in delib-
erate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in
the viewer” (9). Also essential is the second chapter, “The Vocabulary of Comics,” with its
discussion of the role of icons in comics. Finally, the third chapter, “Blood in the Gutter”
demonstrates how comics’ illusion of movement is created with the use of the blank space
between panels. While it is ideal to have students read the entire book, these three chapters
are key to getting students familiar with a form they may feel they already know.
Understanding Comics becomes a touchstone for later discussions of narrative strategies.
Next, we turn to the origins of American comics as we know them today in the New York
newspapers of the 1890s. Excerpts from Bill Blackbeard’s R. F. Outcault’s The Yellow Kid
and Nicholson Baker and Margaret Brentano’s The World on Sunday introduce students to
the yellow journalism that helped create American comics. I ask students to read Mary
Wood’s essay “The Yellow Kid on the Paper Stage,” available online. Wood supplies several
wonderful examples of the strip. We read “The Street Arab,” a chapter from Jacob Riis’ How
the Other Half Lives. Learning about Riis’ social muckraking allows further consideration
of early comics newspaper strip form and “street kid” subject matter. At this point I introduce
students to images from the Ash Can School artists and discuss the relationship between
the Yellow Kid and George Luks, the Ash Can School painter who worked on the strip after
Outcault moved over to Hearst’s papers. If we have time, we also look at the work of Lyonel
Feininger, a Cubist painter whose strip The Kin-der-Kids paralleled both Cubist and Ash
Can concerns.
Unit Two presents visual experiments of masters of the newspaper strip, Winsor McCay,
George Herriman, and Frank King. Students respond warmly to McCay; we read Nemo
and watch McCay’s films, focusing on his narrative skill, psychological insight, experiments
in creating the illusion of motion, and attitudes toward race and class. Unfortunately, stu-
dents seldom enjoy Herriman whom I present as a modernist. We look at images associated
with the 1913 Armory Show alongside Krazy Kat strips. At this point, we also consider the
paintings and poetry of e. e. cummings who wrote favorably about Herriman. I have alter-
nately assigned Patrick McDonnell’s Krazy Kat: The Comic Art of George Herriman, and at
other times made do with excerpted strips, but I still have not effectively showcased Her-
riman’s talents to students. It may be that students need to be exposed to a longer sequence
of his strips to fully understand the surreal lunacy of Krazy Kat. However, what is effective
is taking the time to focus on McCay’s premodern sensibilities while presenting selected
strips from Herriman and King as modernistic counterpoints.
The focus on McCay’s Little Nemo in the Palace of Ice and Further Adventures offers
not only a self-contained case study of a classic strip, but it also presents a theme to which
the class will return in another context: psychology. Today’s readers of Little Nemo, the
adventures of a little boy lost in a fantastic world of dreams, cannot help but apply some
Freudian analysis to the work. While McCay was not a Freudian (Marschall 76), his strips
echo some of the ideas Freud would publish in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899). I share
with the students “A French Nurse’s Dream,” a comic strip that Freud included in his book.
The strip eerily echoes Little Nemo in content and form (Figure 1.5).
Most likely, McCay never read Freud’s book, which was not translated into English
until 1913, after Nemo’s 1905–1911 heyday, but the complex world of dreams had fascinated
many artists, “among them Goya, Fuseli, Redon, and Burne-Jones” (Canemaker 69). Stu-
dents immediately pick up the parallels between the Freud strip and McCay’s work. Later
in the semester, when we consider the aims of psychologist William Moulton Marston in
creating Wonder Woman, the writing of the popular psychologist Frederic Wertham, the
psycholoanalytic dimensions of the comics of Robert Crumb, and the role of psychology
in Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, students see a pattern in both the content and the reception
of comics.
Unit Three focuses on comic books. Here, as in later units, I use Ron Mann’s 1988
film Comic Book Confidential. While the film is now some twenty years old, it offers a jaunty
and concise history of comic books. Rather than showing the whole film at once, I introduce
each era of comic book history with a twenty-minute clip, slowly walking students through
the history of American comics. Students complete note-taking exercises for each section
of the film, which helps them collect data for their papers. This unit covers comic books
from the late 1930s to the 1950s.
While students tend not to enjoy Krazy Kat, they come to appreciate Herriman’s talent
after reading a lackluster early Jerry Siegel/Joe Shuster Superman story, “Superman Versus
Luthor” (1940). Most agree that this tale, like many early comic book stories, is more com-
merce than art. We also read a Batman story (“Batman Versus The Monk” from 1939) in
conjunction with Dashiell Hammett’s 1925 Continental Op adventure, “The Scorched
Face.” Both works not only demonstrate conventions of Gothic and hardboiled fiction, but
they feature remarkably similar plot points and thematic concerns. The Hammett story fea-
tures a brothel where high society women are blackmailed into sexual slavery by a monk-
like Svengali. The Batman story features a similarly Gothic villain, a vampire named “The
Monk” who preys on rich women, including Bruce Wayne’s fiancé, Julie Madison.
Artistically, the story is less remarkable than Little Nemo, yet it offers unique insights
into the culture of its time. Specifically, I ask students to consider the panels where a half-
dressed, delicate looking woman reduces an apparently healthy and powerful man to quaking
Figure 1.5. The strip, “A French Nurse’s Dream,” shows remarkable similarities to McCay’s Little
Nemo. Freud, n. pag.
Figure 1.7. In these two panels from the same Batman story, we see the same anxiety over women’s
freedom to make their own life choices that animates the hardboiled fiction of Hammett and Chandler.
Kane, et al. 44. © DC Comics.
fear merely by approaching him on the street at night (Figure 1.7). The story, like Nemo,
dramatizes Freudian repression of desire. However, unlike Nemo, both “Batman Versus The
Monk” and “The Scorched Face” focus on male anxiety over empowered women. Critics
have long recognized that the hyper-masculine heroes of hard-boiled fiction enact social
anxiety over the increasingly prominent public role of women; here students see that Batman
is cut from very similar cloth. Commenting on Batman’s Gothic roots also allows me the
opportunity to discuss comics’ relationship to the pulps of the 1920s. A valuable resource
for this discussion is Gerard Jones’ Men of Tomorrow (2004), which offers a history of the
evolution of the comic book from its ancestor, the pulps. Jones also details the anxieties
many expressed over comics supposed influence on children, a topic David Hajdu explores
in more detail in The Ten Cent Plague (2008).
We then read more sophisticated comics fare: for instance, Bernie Krigstein’s “Master
Race” and a Harvey Kurtzman/Will Elder Mad parody, “Howdy Dooit.” These stories intro-
duce E. C. Comics, the publisher most affected by the comics censorship that swept the
nation in the early 1950s (and Hajdu’s book is an excellent resource here). The stories (espe-
cially the Mad story) also allow us to discuss the era’s emerging youth culture. Moreover,
both stories represent the best work of masters of the form. The story of E. C. Comics’ col-
lapse under social, political, and economic pressures reinforces themes of comics as both
material culture and mode of artistic expression. Students watch another section of Mann’s
film (including archival film clips of senate subcommittee meetings on comics and juvenile
delinquency). Amy Nyberg’s history of the comics code includes the 1948 and 1954 Comics
Codes, which are essential primary sources. These industry-imposed censorship codes starkly
reveal the ideologies of the era. Krigstein, Kurtzman, and Elder’s imaginative, provocative
stories — unacceptable under the codes’ puritanical guidelines — expose their repressive, cen-
sorious nature.
Students also read a chapter from Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent. This book is
very difficult to come across, but I have managed to track down a copy via interlibrary loan.
We end our discussion of the 1950s with a consideration of the 1956 science fiction film
Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, about seedpods from outer space that develop into soulless
doppelgangers of “real” human beings. Screening the film offers a counterpoint to the images
of paranoia and Cold War anxiety that students have encountered in “Master Race,” as well
as in Wertham’s book. Katrina Mann, in “‘You’re Next!’: Postwar Hegemony Besieged in
Invasion of the Bodysnatchers,” succinctly summarizes traditional readings of the film: that
it either allegorizes American anxiety of communism or conversely decries the over-reaching
of anti-communist hysteria. Mann offers an original interpretation: that the film reflects a
racial and ethnic xenophobia mirrored in the popular press of the mid–1950s. Equally sig-
nificant for our class are the Freudian imagery of the film and the remarkable prominence
of psychiatrists. Two significant characters are psychiatrists who are able to command a dis-
proportionate loyalty from other characters. A fascinating artifact of the 1950s, Bodysnatchers
allows us to look back at Wertham, McCay, and Freud and forward to the overt psychosexual
work of Robert Crumb.
Unit Four brings us to significant works of the 1960s, notably Marvel Comics and
underground comix; in class discussion we focus on the latter. Ron Mann’s film notes Mar-
vel’s impact on the culture and the relative emotional sophistication of Marvel’s superhero
comics. We pause to observe the relationship between Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s work and
the Pop Art and Psychedelic art movements, but reserve our time for Crumb, who is also
profiled by Mann.
One of my goals for this course is to minimize the presence of superhero comics and
maximize exposure of other genres. Some students are already familiar with superhero
comics: while many of the early superhero books are significant cultural touchstones, few
rise to the level of achievement students see in McCay, Herriman, or King. However, the
work of Jack Kirby is so singular that I make an effort to slow down and let students spend
time with his art. We pair Roy Lichtenstein’s Image Duplicator and the comics panel upon
which it is based: Kirby’s depiction of Magneto from the first X-Men story in 1963. I also
ask students to read “Street Code,” an autobiographical piece that Kirby produced in 1983
and that was published in 2000. The story has all of the dramatic scope of a Kirby superhero
piece, as well as a setting in the depression era. Between the discussion of Lichtenstein and
pop art, the Mann film, and Kirby’s work, we manage to cover Marvel Comics in a signifi-
cant, thoughtful way without being bogged down in superhero trivia.
More significant for the latter part of the semester and more challenging is our discus-
sion of underground comix and Robert Crumb. Our focus on Crumb and the undergrounds
allows students to see that books like Maus and Fun Home are indebted to the autobio-
graphical and iconoclastic impulses of the underground comix of the 1960s. Introducing
the material demands some care. In fact, after a student complained that the film Crumb
offended her, I included the following note in my syllabus:
Comics and American Culture is a course about visual imagery. Some of the images we will consider
this semester may be shocking, disturbing, and offensive. Some of the comics we will read —
especially those by Robert Crumb — contain offensive racial stereotypes, as well as misogynist
and sexist images. Sometimes these images are used ironically and satirically. Other times, their
use is more ambiguous and troubling. Alison Bechdel’s book deals with sexual identity and con-
tains some graphic illustrations of a sexual nature. If you worry that you may find this imagery
too offensive to discuss in a scholarly setting, please speak to the professor.
I have asked students to sign this statement and hand it in during the first week of the
semester. Perhaps I am being too cautious, but I feel it is only fair to prepare students for
the material and to protect myself against potential complaints.
Joseph Witek’s definition of underground comix, which I share with students, explains
the ominous warning above:
“underground” ... comix set themselves up in opposition to the dominant culture of the 1960s
and 1970s, and much of their energy comes from their persistent efforts to offend the sensibilities
of bourgeois America. The comics of the 1950s, with their gory horror and crime extravaganza,
are as nothing, mere innocuous yarns of genteel taste and impeccable morality, compared with
such underground classics as S. Clay Wilson’s gross and hilarious “Captain Pissgums and His
Pervert Pirates,” Jim Osbourne’s tale of drug-induced murder and disembowelment, “Kid Kill!”
... and Robert Crumb’s nightmare/fantasy of castration in “The Adventures of R. Crumb Himself ”
from Tales of the Leather Nun [52].
Once again, Comic Book Confidential is useful, as it discusses the comix themselves as well
as the distribution networks of “head shops” (drug paraphernalia shops) through which the
comix were distributed. Since the course considers comics as works of art, cultural artifacts,
and material culture, we discuss the various methods of distribution comics publishers have
used to distribute their publications and how those distribution networks have affected the
comics. So, when discussing superhero comics of the 1940s, we discuss Gerard Jones’ descrip-
tion of the origins of mainstream comics, when we read the undergrounds, we talk about
the head shops, and when we discuss graphic novels, we consider chain bookstores. In fact,
this avenue into the discussion of comics is very attractive to the business majors in my
course.
However, my main interest in comics is their value as art and literature. Therefore, we
read Crumb’s comix alongside Sylvia Plath and John Berryman’s confessional poetry, which
parallels Crumb’s disturbingly autobiographical work. We note that Crumb’s Freudian
obsessions and racial imagery perversely echo themes introduced by McCay. Like confessional
poetry, Crumb’s comix focus on his own “anguish and madness” and ask “[t]o what extent
can madness in an individual be taken for the derangement, the meaninglessness of society
as a whole?” (Ruland and Bradbury 411).
Trying to avoid shock for its own sake, I choose somewhat less provocative Crumb
stories, featuring minimal sexual and racial imagery, like “A Short History of America”
(1979) and “Footsy” (1987). I also screen Terry Zwigoff ’s film, Crumb (1995), which intro-
duces Crumb’s more disturbing work, like “Let’s Have Nigger Hearts for Lunch” (1968)
(Figure 1.8). This is one of Crumb’s more shocking works that we discuss as a class. In the
film, Crumb ironically says the strip reveals “something black” deep inside the American
psyche (Zwigoff ). Although Crumb remains a contentious figure, Zwigoff offers students a
rounded portrait of a serious artist and a comprehensive understanding of his impact. Com-
paring Crumb to the Berryman’s Dream Songs, “Let’s Have Nigger Hearts for Lunch” stu-
dents look back to McCay’s racist imagery and consider the complex history of racism in
American visual culture. In the past, I have had students write essays on these images, dis-
cussing such mainstream icons as Aunt Jemima in comparison to Crumb’s comics.
Unit Five concludes the course with alternative comics and graphic novels Watchmen
and Maus. Watchmen looks back at the superhero fare we have encountered (Siegel and
Figure 1.8. Crumb’s 1968 “Let’s Have Nigger Hearts for Lunch,” like much of his work, requires
close reading and contextualization in class. Crumb. The Complete Crumb Comics. Vol. 5. 10. ©
Robert Crumb.
Shuster’s Superman, Kirby’s work, and the Batman story). Also, I sometimes bring in reprint
collections of DC or Marvel Comics for class discussion; students break into groups and
leaf through the books looking for imagery to discuss. Most of my students are familiar
with superheroes, and Ron Mann’s film provides historical background. More importantly,
Umberto Eco’s “The Myth of Superman” and Ian Gordon’s “Comics as an Independent
Commodity: 1939–1945” (from his Comic Strips and Consumer Culture [2002]) both critique
the genre (specifically Superman) for ignoring social issues. In this context, Watchmen is a
revelation. Eco faults Superman (and superhero comics in general) for their static quality
and argues conventional superhero stories reify capitalist ideology. Eco argues that in the
Superman stories “the only visible form that evil assumes is an attempt on private property”
(123). These stories suggest “authority is fundamentally pure and good” (Eco 123). Because
students in my course have read the 1954 Comics Code and Ian Gordon’s work, they under-
stand mainstream comics’ ideological views had been prescribed and all variations from the
norm had been proscribed.
Eco’s analysis of Superman seems to have informed the work of Alan Moore, author
of Watchmen. Here, as in much of his superhero work, Moore imagines superheroes whose
actions directly and indirectly affect society and who often hold views contrary to the pre-
vailing capitalist values of the culture in which they exist. The work of two British artists,
Watchmen offers an “outsider’s view” to my American Studies class; it also presents a case
study in the superhero, a pure product of American culture. Moore and Gibbons’ mixture
of art and commerce creates a unique work of art. Watchmen often seems more consumer
product than artistic achievement. Named one of the Twentieth century’s greatest novels
by Time Magazine, Watchmen is owned by Warner Brothers, an American corporation that
also happens to own Time. Furthermore, its characters are thinly veiled reinterpretations of
superheroes acquired from another defunct American comics publisher. We observe with
irony that Moore, after revising the products of someone else’s imagination, now objects to
Time-Warner’s exploitation of his work in films like V for Vendetta (Itzkoff n. pag.), The
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and Watchmen. After reading Wertham, Nyberg, Eco,
and Gordon, students see Watchmen as a parable of the ironic space comics has negotiated
for itself between art and commerce. Not insignificantly, students also enjoy Watchmen
immensely; after Nemo, it is perhaps their favorite work.
Students also respond well to Art Spiegelman’s Maus. Besides its artistic value, Maus
speaks to two of our major themes. Its imagery uniquely addresses the ethnic other, and its
publishing history — part underground production and part mass-market paperback — again
speaks to art and commerce. Comic Book Confidential prominently features Spiegelman,
Maus, and Raw Magazine. Essential for teaching Maus is Spiegelman’s 1993 CD-ROM, The
Complete Maus; it is filled with preliminary sketches, source materials, audio and video
clips, and commentary by the artist. The CD-ROM, once cutting-edge, has in recent years
become almost impossible to use on contemporary computers. Fortunately, Spiegelman has
made this elusive material available once again in his MetaMaus (2011), which includes a
DVD of the data previously available on the CD-ROM.
Incorporating Popular Music

To place comics and their creators in various contexts (historical, cultural, thematic,
and biographical), I try to accompany discussion of individual works with appropriate
pieces of music. Once a week or so, I begin class by playing a song; lyrics are posted on my
website. Some songs allow me to place comics work into general historical contexts. For
instance, pairing Ziegfeld Follies star Bert Williams’ 1906 recording of “Nobody” with Win-
sor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland and McCay’s films allows me to introduce vaudeville
as a cultural phenomenon. At the same time, the ironic nature of the African American
Williams’ engagement of racism in “Nobody” neatly counters McCay’s unselfconscious
racism in Nemo. “Nemo” means “no one,” after all.
Other songs do not present the comics work in their original historical contexts, but
allow us to see how comics concepts are perpetuated in the culture. When discussing Super-
man, we listen to the Kinks’ 1977 “(I Wish I Could Fly Like) Superman” which presents
Superman as an unattainable model of perfection, set against very real social problems like
gas shortages and labor strikes. I sometimes play the Kinks’ “Catch Me Now, I’m Falling,”
also from 1977, for its ironic reference to Captain America. Both songs present American
superheroes (and by extension, American power) in decline. These post–Watergate, post–
Vietnam observations by British songwriter Ray Davies spur spirited discussion. 1939’s
“[Batman Versus The Monk]” and Hammett’s 1925 “The Scorched Face” are paired with
Elvis Costello’s 1977 “Watching the Detectives” or the Clash’s 1982 “Death Is a Star.” Both
songs are replete with images skimmed from noir fiction and film, demonstrating the per-
vasiveness of these forms. As both songs come out of the British punk movement of the
1970s, we also remark on how American cultural products have influenced the rest of the
world. We return to this theme when we discuss the neo-noir British import Watchmen.
Folk music is equally useful. I have used Woody Guthrie’s 1935 songs “Pretty Boy
Floyd” and “Jesus Christ” (or his 1941 “Tom Joad”) to spur discussion on ideologies of law,
order, and heroism. Guthrie’s socialist, outlaw heroes bear little resemblance to the Superman
most students know but strike a cord with the early, more populist Superman described in
Ian Gordon’s “Comics as an Independent Commodity.” A useful song for any discussion of
1960s rebellion against conformity is Pete Seeger’s rendition of Malvina Reynolds’ satire of
suburbia, “Little Boxes.” This song works wonderfully with Crumb’s 1979 “A Short History
of America.” The song is familiar to students because it is the theme to the television
program Weeds.
To introduce the youth culture of the 1950s and 1960s, I use Bill Haley’s “Rock Around
the Clock” (1954), Bob Dylan’s “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues” (1962), and Dylan’s
“Mr. Tambourine Man” (1965). “Rock Around the Clock,” an early rock and roll hit, was
used in the sensationalistic film Blackboard Jungle (1955), which bespoke the dangers of
juvenile delinquency, a major concern of any reading of American comics in the 1950s.
Dylan’s “John Birch” likewise contextualizes the Cold War paranoia we encounter in E. C.
Comics’ violent and controversial stories and Frederic Wertham’s angry rejoinder to the
same. “Mr. Tambourine Man” acts as segue to the psychedelic era of mainstream American
comics (as in Marvel Comics’ “Pop Art” phase) and the LSD-influenced underground comix
of Robert Crumb. We also listen to R. Crumb and His Cheap Suit Serenaders’ rendition
of the 1929 song “Singing in the Bathtub.” Crumb himself fronts this jazz band, specializing
in tunes of the 1920s. Topical songs from the 1960s and 1970s, like Marvin Gaye’s 1971
“Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)” also allow students to see underground comix in a political
context.
Writing Assignments
I require a fair amount of writing to encourage students to take the course seriously.
Besides some in-class writing, I assign short research reports and at least two analytical
essays. The short research assignment requires students to complete one- to two-page reports
on pertinent art and literary terms or historical events and post them on the web (using
Luminis, an online program used at my college for creating online communities) for their
classmates. For instance, students might be asked to define “Ash Can School,” “Pop Art,”
or “Modernism” and share their definitions with the class.
The first sustained essay is an analysis of Little Nemo. Students may approach Nemo
as visual art, focusing on McCay’s page composition, his use of “gutters” between panels to
create the illusion of motion, or another visual theme. Others discuss the strip’s Freudian
aspects, its Progressive Era politics, or the Jungle Imp’s Minstrel characteristics. All students
include images in their analyses and I offer strategies for discussing illustrations. Students
enjoy McCay and tend to write strong essays, quickly getting into the strip’s subtexts. This
paper persuades students that comics hold literary and artistic possibilities.
Our American Studies major is relatively small, and its courses draw more non-majors
than majors. The final essay, “Comics across the Curriculum,” approaches comics from the
perspective of each student’s major; this paper requires library research. I encourage explo-
rations of how comics — as art, industry, or material culture — interact with American cul-
ture. Business and communications students research marketing and copyright issues,
especially concerning adaptations of comics for other media. Pre-law and political science
students investigate comics censorship or the role of political satire and propaganda in the
comics. Education students research comics and pedagogy. Art and Literature majors apply
the methodologies of their majors to comics images and narratives. Again, students include
and discuss illustrations in their essays.
Conclusion
Teaching “Comics and American Culture” is rewarding, but is not without its chal-
lenges. Low expectations (or the inverse: blindly enthusiastic comics fans), scarce resources,
and lack of respect for the medium are all noteworthy issues. While several students’ low
expectations gave me initial pause, I was ultimately encouraged by the work some of them
produced, especially after repeated offerings of the course. The variety of approaches imag-
inable, the wealth of material available, the many sophisticated comics rich with cultural
and historical subtext all combine to make an American Studies course in comics a potent
educational experience. Of course, the choices outlined here represent only one possible
path, drawn from my experience. Given the ubiquity of comics imagery in American culture
and the many talented artists who have worked in the field, the variations on this class are
virtually limitless.
WORKS CITED
Barrier, Michael, and Martin Williams, eds. The Smithsonian Book of Comic Book Comics. New York: Smithsonian
Institution Press and Harry N. Abrams, 1981. Print.
Blackbeard, Bill. R. F. Outcault’s The Yellow Kid: A Centennial Celebration of the Kid Who Started the Comics.
Northampton, MA: Kitchen Sink, 1995. Print.
Canemaker, John. Winsor McCay: His Life and Art. New York: Abbeville. 1987. Print.
Chute, Hillary. “Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative.” PMLA 123.2 (2008): 452–65. Print.
Crumb. Dir. Terry Zwigoff. Sony Pictures Classics, 1995. Film.
Crumb, Robert. “Let’s Have Nigger Hearts for Lunch.” The Complete Crumb Comics Volume 5: Happy Hippy
Comix. Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics Books, 1990. 10. Print.
Eco, Umberto. “The Myth of Superman.” The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts. Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 1979. 107–24. Print.
Freud, Sigmund. Interpretation of Dreams. Ed. and Trans. James Strachey. New York: Avon Books, 1965. Print.
Itzkoff, Dave. “The Vendetta Behind V for Vendetta.” The New York Times. 12 Mar. 2005. Web. 27 Nov. 2011.
Kane, Bob, et al. “Batman Versus The Monk.” Batman Archives. Vol. 1. The DC Archives Editions. New York:
DC Comics, 1990. Print.
Mann, Katrina. “‘You’re Next!’: Postwar Hegemony Besieged in Invasion of the Bodysnatchers.” Cinema Journal
44.1 (2004): 49–68. Print.
Marschall, Richard. America’s Great Comic Strips. New York: Abbeville Press, 1989. Print.
McCay, Winsor. Little Nemo in the Palace of Ice and Further Adventures. New York: Dover, 1976. Print.
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. New York: HarperCollins, 1993. Print.
Ruland, Richard, and Malcolm Bradbury. From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature.
New York: Penguin. 1992. Print.
Spiegelman, Art. Lead Pipe Sunday. Raw. Vol. 2 no. 3. New York: Penguin, 1991. 2. Print.
_____. MetaMaus. New York: Pantheon, 2011. Print.
Ware, Chris. “Thrilling Adventure Stories.” Vol. 2 no. 3. New York: Penguin, 1991. 76–81. Print.
Witek, Joseph. Comic Books as History: The Narrative Art of Jack Jackson, Art Spiegelman, and Harvey Pekar. Jack-
son: University Press of Mississippi. 1989. Print.
2. The Black Politics
of Newspaper Comic Strips
Teaching Aaron McGruder’s The Boondocks
1
and Keith Knight’s The K Chronicles
DANIEL STEIN
Due to their serial mode of production and wide distribution, comic strips are an ideal
medium for political commentary. If commercially successful, they are syndicated in news-
papers across the United States and reach a large number of readers on a daily basis. In the
history of the comic strip, however, the potential for political commentary has rarely been
realized, mainly because its primary function has traditionally been to entertain the largest
possible readership. American comic strips emerged in the 1890s when cartoonists such as
Richard Felton Outcault, Rudolph Dirks, and Frederick Burr Opper developed a graphic
humor and serial narrative different from the more serious and high-minded political car-
icatures and editorial cartoons printed in the weekly magazines Puck, Life, and Judge. The
purpose of these early comic strips was to provide an accessible graphic humor in the form
of short funny narratives based on recurring characters with whom a mass of readers —
including segments of the population that had been largely unacknowledged by humor
magazines and newspapers, such as workers, immigrants, and children — could identify.2
Exceptions to the relatively rigorous separation of “funny” comic strip and “serious”
political cartoon are Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury (1970–), Jeff MacNelly’s Shoe (1977–2000),
and Berkeley Breathed’s Bloom County (1980–1989), three strips that have frequently com-
mented on the major political events of the past four decades.3 In recent years, two African
American artists have joined the ranks of influential political commentators: Aaron
McGruder, whose The Boondocks ran nationally from 1999 to 2006 and has been turned
into an animated television series, and Keith Knight, whose autobiographical strip The K
Chronicles started in 1993 and is still running in alternative newspapers (both in print and
online) such as Salon.com, Tonic.com, Buzzle.com, Salt Lake City Weekly, Seven Days (Bur-
lington, VT), Anti-Gravity (New Orleans, LA), and Funny Times.4 As Greg Braxton wrote
in 2004, “[u]nlike his heroes, Garry Trudeau — whose once-radical Doonesbury lefties have
lost their edge to middle age — and Berkeley Breathed — whose Bloom County has a playful,
absurdist tinge — McGruder’s The Boondocks is transparently cynical rage, filtered through
an African American prism” (178). Less explicitly “black” and less cynical than The Boondocks,
Knight’s The K Chronicles has tended to privilege the personal over the political, suggesting
26
2. Black Politics: McGruder’s Boondocks and Knight’s K Chronicles (Stein) 27
that African American cartoonists speak with multiple voices and offer heterogeneous per-
spectives on black culture and American politics.5
This chapter analyzes the ways in which McGruder and Knight have used newspaper
comic strips to attain a double objective: to “blacken” this predominantly “white” space by
presenting African American characters as cultural commentators, and to politicize this
space by offering dissenting views on national and international American politics. The
process of “blackening” the space of the newspaper comic strip is significant because of the
complicated history that has determined the presentation of black characters in graphic nar-
rative. The visual aesthetics of racial caricature in antebellum minstrel shows and the “coon”
era of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries carried over into comics by way of
Richard Outcault’s lone black “coon” figure in many of his single-panel Sunday pages as
well as through his short-lived “Poor Lil’ Mose” strip for the New York Herald (1901–02),
which is filled with thick-lipped, bug-eyed, and bandana-wearing mammies as well as racist
stock figures including the pickaninny, the “coon” soldier, the chicken-eating matron, the
banjo-playing lover, and the old uncle in his rocking chair.6 Moreover, black newspaper
cartoonists such as Jackie Ormes (Torchy Brown, 1937–38, 1950–54) and Morrie Turner
(Wee Pals, 1965–) had been the absolute exception until the 1990s. If black characters were
depicted at all, it was usually as token, and often stereotypically rendered, figures in a
“white” environment: Charles Schulz’s Peanuts (1950–2000) featured a lone black character,
Franklin, who was introduced in 1968; Will Eisner’s The Spirit included the controversial
Ebony White; Robert Crumb drew the “lovable darkie” Angelfood McSpade (cf. Royal 8). 7
Moreover, this chapter also examines the didactic and pedagogical possibilities of
McGruder’s and Knight’s strips. It discusses how an analysis of the comic strip as political
medium and historical source can help introduce high school and college students to some
of the most influential political conflicts and historical narratives that have shaped American
culture since the civil rights movement and especially since 9/11.8 Following Janice Radway,
Kevin Gaines, Barry Shank, and Penny Von Eschen, who write in their introduction to
American Studies: An Antholog y (2009) that one central objective of American studies is “to
challenge the semi-official narratives familiarly inscribed in high school and college history
textbooks” (3), I want to look at how the comic strips’ depiction of the most decisive political
ruptures of the new millennium — 9/11, the so-called “war on terror,” the war in Afghanistan,
and the invasion of Iraq — can be used as “teachable moments” (to use Gaines’ term) that
allow educators to raise fundamental questions about American democracy and the role of
the news media in the political process.
The Boondocks is one of the few successful African American newspaper comic strips.9
At its high point, it ran in three-hundred newspapers, including The Los Angeles Times, The
Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Dallas Morning News, and The Philadelphia
Inquirer. As McGruder pointed out in an interview, “[w]hat makes ‘The Boondocks’ special
is that it really is like an alternative strip in the mainstream press” (Rall, “Aaron McGruder”
61). A brief list of some of its most prominent topics underscores this assessment: racial
identity, in-group diversity, ethnic and racial stereotyping, media representations of minori-
ties, the failures of black role models (sports figures, rappers, actors, and politicians), racial
bias in the education system, racial profiling, and bigotry, all of which could be used to
teach lessons and courses on issues such as “African American culture in conflict” (Rockler
404) and “African-American life in the suburbs” (Cornwell and Orbe 27).
Yet while many of these topics generated controversy early in the strip’s history, it was
McGruder’s dissent to the way in which the United States reacted to the terrorist attacks
on 9/11 and his vocal critique of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that constituted his most
radical step into the political arena. Unlike other comic strip writers or the majority of
political cartoonists, McGruder used his strip to vent his anger at the Bush Administration’s
neoconservative policies and to bash the mainstream press for neglecting its watchdog
duties.10 As a result, the strip was occasionally pulled from a number of newspapers, but it
contributed substantially to the formation of a national discourse of dissenting citizenship.
I realize that the radical politics and the explicitly racial perspective of The Boondocks make
it a highly sensitive teaching tool. I also realize that my suggestion to confront students with
the more incendiary installments of the strip may go against a general hesitation among
high school teachers and, perhaps to a lesser degree, college professors, to discuss material
that is bound to create controversy and perhaps even parental censure. Nonetheless, I argue
that the very radicalism of the strip and its willingness to hit hard at political leaders and
the media can spawn fruitful discussions about the value of political dissent and the need
for political engagement in high school and college classrooms in the United States. For
those wary of McGruder’s brand of political commentary, my analysis of Keith Knight’s K
Chronicles will turn to a less radical but no less evocative example of black politics in news-
paper comics.
The central characters of The Boondocks are the ten-year-old self-declared “radical
scholar and future voice of Black America” Huey Freeman, who is named after Black Panther
activist Huey Newton; his eight-year-old brother Riley, who aspires to being a gangster
rapper; and their grumpy grandfather Robert Jebediah Freeman, who is always ready to
whoop the kids’ behinds (September 12, 1999).11 The basic narrative setup of The Boondocks
updates Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959) for a readership versed in the highly
mediated hip hop culture of the late 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, a culture with which many
of today’s students will be more or less familiar.12 What had been a fear-fraught experience
for the Younger family in Hansberry’s play becomes the stuff of social satire in The Boondocks:
Granddad’s dream of moving from the predominantly black inner city to Woodcrest, a
white suburb of Chicago, turns into a nightmare for Huey and Riley, who feel alienated in
their new environment and compensate by watching Black Entertainment Television (Riley
imitates the “thugs” he sees on TV, while Huey is disgusted by their blatant commercialism
and misogyny), listening to hip hop (Riley renames streets like Timid Deer Lane as Noto-
rious B.I.G. Ave. on October 19, 1999), and embracing Afrocentric notions of identity
(Huey calls himself a “proud African” on August 15, 1999). In literature or social history
classes, McGruder’s post–civil rights perspective could be compared to Hansberry’s depiction
of the struggle to integrate the suburbs after World War II.
Two examples of The Boondocks are significant in this context. The first example presents
Huey’s initial resistance to the family’s suburban relocation. He tells his grandfather that
he “was perfectly happy in Chicago.” When he is told to shut up, he yells: “Look, it’s Bull
Connor with a firehose!!! Duck!!!.” In order to grasp the humor of this strip, students must
have basic knowledge of the civil rights movement: marches through Southern segregated
neighborhoods, the philosophy of non-violent civil disobedience, and the brutality of police
commissioners like Bull Connor and his forces (including the use of water hoses). Martin
Luther King, Jr.’s famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (1963) could be a useful supple-
mentary source text for classroom analysis, as could be the many photographs and video
footage that dominated the news at the time. Granddad’s final comment combines a moment
of comic relief with a (humorous) reference to a television documentary that could be
utilized as teaching material in class: “Huey, that’s our neighbor washing his car. Should
have never let that boy watch ‘Eyes on the Prize.’”13 The second example depicts Huey in
the classroom. The many situations in which readers of the strip find Huey talking back to
his teacher at the tellingly named J. Edgar Hoover Elementary School offer an indication
of the role that political engagement can play in an educational context — as is readily appar-
ent, Huey’s argumentative abilities resemble those of a dedicated high school student rather
than those of an elementary school kid.14
In two consecutive strips, we see Huey’s opposition to what he considers a biased cur-
riculum. When the teacher, Mr. Petto, calls on him to “start reading at the top of page 46,”
Huey recites: “so once you comprehend the threat an educated black man poses to the global
system of white supremacy, you can understand why the educational system as an institution
is designed to suppress and even annihilate the mental elevation of the Afrikan child.” Obvi-
ously, Huey is not reading from his textbook, but from the radical Black Nationalist literature
he devours in order to make sense of his experience as a minority student in a white suburban
school. Like Malcolm X and Angela Davis, two African American intellectuals and activists
to whom both McGruder and Knight refer, he wears his Afro as a visual indicator of his
political outlook.
The text from which Huey is citing is How to Tell if Your Teacher Is Brainwashing You
with Eurocentrism by a Shabazz K. Jenkins. It is certainly true that the essentialist rhetoric
and revolutionary zeal of Jenkins’ fictitious treatise fail to address the educational and cur-
ricular problems of the late 1990s — in fact, the pedagogical debate has already moved
towards more differentiated and multifaceted perspectives. But for Huey, they offer a nar-
rative through which he can make sense of his position as a member of a racial minority
and carve out a niche in the social structure of his school community. What is more, his
embrace of 1960s-style black radicalism challenges the “semi-official narratives” that Amer-
ican Studies scholarship seeks to address: “Given your stirring tribute to Christopher Colum-
bus last month, I believe I made the right call,” Huey justifies his choice of reading. In
addition to putting pressure on the historical narrative that interprets Columbus’ landing
at Hispaniola as the beginning of an exceptional nation (rather than the starting point for
centuries of state-sponsored disenfranchisement and oppression, for instance of Native
Americans and African slaves), Huey’s remarks indicate that the narrative of African Amer-
ican history taught in school has not really progressed past the advances of the civil rights
movement. In a later strip, McGruder depicts Huey’s thoughts about Black History Month,
which raise important questions about the public enshrinement of black history at the
expense of more current racial conflicts. When the teacher announces that “today we wrap
up our chapter on George Washington Carver,” Huey thinks: “Finally!!! ... Every black his-
tory month it’s the same thing — the Underground Railroad and George Washington Carver.
Like nothing else ever happened to black people! Maybe now we can learn something new.”
His hopes are disappointed when the teacher continues his announcement: “let’s look at
Martin Luther King Jr.” (February 18, 2000).
From a pedagogical perspective, the point of these strips is not that black students are
brainwashed and that they must demand an Afrocentric curriculum, but rather that Huey
and his teacher must debate their educational choices in a public forum: the classroom. In
other words, the Boondocks strips that focus on educational issues advocate a recalibrated
student-teacher relationship. They call on teachers to rethink their teaching methodologies
and their selection of subjects, and they argue for the empowerment of students to have a
say in what they are being taught and how. Thus, it is important to note that Huey does
not directly present McGruder’s political views. While he is the strip’s focal character and
does serve as McGruder’s mouthpiece on occasion, the overall message relayed by The Boon-
docks emerges from the “combination of all the characters’ voices,” as McGruder acknowl-
edged to Jennifer A. Carbin: “I don’t think the importance of the strip is about my own
personal political agenda. I think the strip [challenges] people to think differently, and that
to me is far more important than to have people thinking like me —[I want] to have people
questioning what they’re told on a daily basis” (143). The overall message of The Boondocks
is that students (as well as readers of newspaper comic strips) should become involved in
their education and that they should ask questions about what they are taught as well as
why.
In these and other strips that depict Huey in school, speaking up and talking back are
presented as important steps towards forming a political consciousness. Huey frequently
writes research reports on topics that tick him off, and in order to disseminate his views,
he publishes an alternative online newspaper, the Free Huey World Report, which tackles
issues ranging from racial stereotypes in popular culture to the history of United States
involvement in the Middle East. His reports include a fifteen-page paper (with footnotes!)
on the history of Christmas (March 24–April 1, 2000) that is reminiscent of Ishmael Reed’s
novel The Terrible Twos (1982). Reed uses this novel to reveal the secret history of the black
St. Nick and deconstruct the story of white Santa Claus, while McGruder mainly pokes fun
at the fruitless attempts to establish Kwanzaa as a broadly accepted “black” alternative to
“white” Christmas.15 For Huey, publishing his own newspaper is the only way to make his
opinions public, even though his efforts are hardly rewarded: “We still have virtually no
readers,” he tells his friend Michael Caesar, a fellow black student who has moved to Wood-
crest from Brooklyn; “‘The Free Huey World Report’ is not having the desired societal
impact. I’ve been trying to think of an alternative way to spread revolutionary ideology to
the masses. Like maybe a syndicated column in the major papers.” Caesar responds: “Since
when are millions of Americans ready to wake up to the rantings of an angry black kid?”
(November 1, 2000).
Caesar’s statement is, of course, ironic. Huey’s angry ranting was, in fact, read by about
twenty million readers every day across the country. But it is Huey’s struggle to become an
investigative reporter and to find a constructive outlet for his anger that makes him a valuable
comics character for classroom discussion. Whether students agree or disagree with his opin-
ions, the notion that it is okay, and sometimes even necessary, to have strong political con-
victions, that it is vital to back up one’s convictions through research, and that these
convictions can be voiced in a public medium such as an alternative newspaper is significant.
It should be relatively easy for teachers to motivate students to find social and political issues
that make them angry, to conduct research, and to formulate suggestions for solutions. Ide-
ally, the recursivity that Thomas DeVere Wolsey envisions for teaching political cartoons
will also apply to teaching political comic strips: “[S]tudents need to be aware of current
events in order to make sense of political cartoons,” while they might, in turn, “be encour-
aged to read the news in order to make sense of the political cartoons” (119). Or, as Huey
puts it to his little brother, “Instead of watching videos all day, why don’t you watch the
news?” To Riley’s “Why?” Huey replies: “Because I know you don’t read the newspaper”
(March 20, 2000).16
In the wake of 9/11, The Boondocks turned sharply political, and it shifted its focus
from “tell[ing] narrative stories” such as the suburban migration narrative “to the weekly
politics of the country” (McGruder, Introduction 9, 10). Not unlike Martin Luther King,
Jr., who connected the goals of the civil rights movement with his opposition to the Vietnam
War in speeches such as “Beyond Vietnam” (1967), McGruder began to amend his com-
mentary on race with a critical perspective on American foreign policy after 9/11. “It was
then I became a political cartoonist,” McGruder told Greg Braxton, and “[t]he grand exper-
iment ... was to take on radical politics and make it cute” (179, 184). Cute, one should note
here, includes using a graphic style reminiscent of Japanese manga in order to represent
black characters that stand apart from the long history of racist illustrations.17 The combi-
nation of political radicalism and cute characters is put into play when Huey makes a
political prank call to the FBI’s terrorism hotline on October 4, 2001. Claiming to “know
of several Americans who have helped train and finance Osama bin Laden,” Huey makes a
controversial suggestion. When asked by the FBI official to provide names, he says: “The
first one is Reagan, that’s R-E-A-G.” Several lessons can be learned from this strip: Rather
than being the work of “evil” terrorists who hate America because of the freedoms it awards
to its citizens, McGruder suggests that the attacks must be seen in a geopolitical context in
which the United States cannot deny its financial and logistical support of the Taliban.
Moreover, while the Administration and law enforcement agencies like the FBI were unwill-
ing to publicly acknowledge their actions, a ten-year-old kid like Huey can easily dig up
enough information to discredit the official story. Finally, Huey exercises his basic political
rights and fulfills his duties as an American citizen by holding those who are supposed to
serve and protect him accountable for their actions, even though a prank call to the FBI is
obviously not an appropriate means through which such accounting should be demanded
in real life (an imaginary letter to the FBI, composed in class in order to sharpen the students’
argumentative and rhetorical skills and thus prepare them for political debate, would, how-
ever, be a viable exercise).
It is significant that Huey spreads his convictions through his alternative newspaper:
“We have to put out our paper,” he tells Michael on October 9, 2001: “Hasn’t the President
said over and over that we have to get back to normal? And what do I normally do?” he
asks. “Criticize Bush,” Michael responds; “so not criticizing Bush would kinda be like —
letting the terrorists win,” as Huey is quick to add.18 This is a very pertinent statement
about the need for a free and open debate about the appropriate actions to 9/11. Voiced in
a political climate in which criticism of national leaders was frequently — and often with
eerily fascist overtones — labeled an act of treason, Huey’s thoughts were so incredible because
they went against the grain: “In the whole of American media that day,” John Nichols wrote
in The Nation, “Huey’s was certainly the most pointed and, no doubt, the most effective
dissent from the patriotism that dare not speak its mind” (153). The day to which Nichols
refers is Thanksgiving 2001, when Huey offered the following prayer: “In this time of war
against Osama bin Laden and the oppressive Taliban Regime ... we are thankful that our
leader isn’t the spoiled son of a powerful politician from a wealthy oil family who is supported
by religious fundamentalists, operates through clandestine organizations, has no respect for
the democratic electoral process, bombs innocents, and uses war to deny their civil liberties.
Amen” (Figure 2.1).
It is not surprising that some newspapers, among them the Washington Post, dropped
this strip. After all, it associates George W. Bush with Osama bin Laden and the American
political system with the Taliban regime. One could make a good case against using such
material in a teaching situation, especially in high school, where students (and their parents)
might be easily offended by controversial political statements. Yet I believe that the very
controversy of these remarks, plus the fact that Huey never actually mentions George W.
Bush, provide ample material for research and debate, including the family ties between
Figure 2.1. Aaron McGruder. The Boondocks (Nov. 22, 2001). The Boondocks © 2001 Aaron
McGruder. Used by permission of Universal Uclick. All rights reserved.
the Bushes and Saudi business interests, the role of the religious right in the 2000 election,
the disenfranchisement of African American voters in Florida in 2000, the clandestine oper-
ations of the CIA, and the cost of human lives in the war in Afghanistan. Moreover, the
strip foregrounds the potential significance of comic strips as a forum for critical dissent
presented in a medium that has traditionally been associated with serialized popular enter-
tainment and safe family fun.19
By way of concluding my discussion of The Boondocks, I want to turn to what may be
the most controversial of the strips. Rather than choose “safe” examples of political humor,
I believe that provocative claims and radical ideas must be part of the educational dis-
course — the point is to “teach the conflicts,” in Gerald Graff ’s memorable phrase. This
two-panel strip reacts to a statement made by a German politician, Herta Däubler-Gmelin
of the Social Democratic Party, concerning the motivation for the Iraq war: “Bush wants
to [use the war to] distract from his domestic problems,” Däubler-Gmelin said on September
18, 2002. “This is a popular method. Hitler did this as well” (Spiegel Online; my translation).
While this statement was widely discredited in Germany and rigorously rejected by the
Bush Administration, McGruder uses it to express disdain for the circumstances that decided
the presidential election in 2000 and for the Administration’s excessive lobbying for war:
“Whoa, some people in other countries are comparing Bush to Adolf Hitler because of his
warmongering,” Michael remarks, while Huey maintains: “That’s preposterous. Even I
would never compare Bush to Hitler ... I mean, Hitler was democratically elected, wasn’t
he?” This type of political humor is probably better suited to a college-level setting than
the high school classroom — the Washington Post, for one, decided not to run it. For German
students, it raises questions about their own history (Hitler was democratically elected). For
American students, issues worth investigating include the use of war propaganda after 9/11
and the failure of the American mainstream news media, even highly respected newspapers
such as the New York Times, to escape the war fever. To reiterate a point I have made earlier,
the idea is not to use The Boondocks to teach students a particular view of American politics,
but rather to investigate the strip’s controversial propositions and reconstruct the racial and
political discourses and debates in which it intervened.20
In Keith Knight’s The K Chronicles, political commentary is less frequent as well as less
confrontational than in The Boondocks. Knight reserves his more aggressive and more topical
political humor for his (Th)ink cartoons, which could be studied in addition to The K
Chronicles. In terms of racial commentary, The K Chronicles is more subdued than The Boon-
docks. The strip foregrounds a personal and autobiographical perspective that is especially
suited for teaching situations in which teachers expect students to be wary of, or even
opposed to, discussing issues of race. When Ted Rall suggested in an interview that “[b]eing
black isn’t the subject of the strip,” Knight answered: “Right. But the character being black
might add an extra dimension to certain strips.... The added dimension of my being black
is that white people can relate to the strip 95 percent of the time, but the five percent of
strips they don’t get really makes them think about this different experience in a way that
doesn’t make them feel they’re being preached to” (Rall, “Knight” 13–14). The following
example illustrates the power of this extra racial dimension by combining universal truths
(“magic tricks are just illusions”) with a culture — specific refrain: “Racism still exists”21
(Figure 2.2).
Cast as a coming-of-age narrative in nine panels, the strip repeatedly presents “hard
truths” learned variously as a child, a teenager, and an adult, some of which are funny
(“Baseballs hurt;” “Pabst Blue Ribbon, Wild Irish Rose & Kentucky Sam’s Discount Whiskey
don’t mix”), others of which are serious (“Even the strongest people in your family die”).
The strip is made up of three triple-panel segments, each of which climaxes in the conclusion
that “racism still exists”: Panel three evokes the “separate but equal” doctrine established by
the United States Supreme Court in its Plessy v. Ferguson ruling (1896) and the Southern
resistance against racial integration as demanded by the Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board
of Education of Topeka (1954); panel six alludes to the Rodney King beatings and the sub-
sequent acquittal of the white policemen that sparked the Los Angeles race riots on April
29, 1992; and the final panel provides the ultimate climax of the sequential narrative by
revealing the motivation for the strip by documenting the author’s “last KKK sighting.”
Decoding these references may be a challenge, but the visual humor of the strip and its con-
densed autobiographical narrative should offer sufficient motivation for students to dig into
the socio-political and historical contexts that inform its argument. Teachers should therefore
provide enough information for students to explore these contexts, such as newspaper articles,
television and movie documentaries, or Internet sources.
Like McGruder, Knight was politicized by 9/11 and the Bush Administration’s so-called
“war on terrorism”—“September 11th really kicked up the politics,” he told cartoonist Ted
Rall (13), himself one of the few outspoken critics of the Bush Administration. But unlike
McGruder, Knight did not radically alter his narrative approach; The K Chronicles did not
turn into a political cartoon geared to expose those in power but remained an autobio-
graphical comic strip.22 Nonetheless, it presented political narratives worth discussing in
various educational contexts. Compare the ways in which both artists comment on 9/11.
McGruder relates a conversation between Michael and Huey. Michael notes: “Man, it’s
depressing,” to which Huey adds: “It’s so hard to laugh, or smile, or be funny.” In the news-
paper space of the funny page, this exchange suggests, humor no longer makes sense. The
funnies must turn to politics: They can no longer offer moments of distraction and humorous
respite, even though Michael suggests that Huey has never been a typical cartoon character:
“Wait ... you never laugh, or smile, or say anything funny” (September 24, 2001).23 This
mostly somber response does not mention 9/11 directly. In the following days and weeks,
however, the strip turns openly political, castigating the news media’s hyperbolic and largely
uncritical coverage of the events and their aftermath and the attempts of the Bush Admin-
istration to deny the significance of past American involvement in the Middle East as part
of the terrorists’ motivation.
Knight’s first response to 9/11 is a splash page devoid of splashy images; on the upper
Figure 2.2. Keith Knight. The Complete K Chronicles. 141 © 1998 Keith Knight. Reprinted with per-
mission.
half of the page, he simply writes “Sept. 11th, 2001 (The only time I’ve ever missed a dead-
line)” (The Complete K Chronicles 331). These words explain the otherwise empty page —
it is as if the horror of the carnage has left Knight speechless; he is unable to translate his
feelings into a visual narrative. This is a very effective way of expressing the personal and
emotional impact of the events while granting every reader the right to his or her own
response. Knight creates a counterpoint to the immediate mediatization of the attacks on

television and the Internet, leaving a blank space that suggests that one needs time to think
through the implications of what has happened before one publicly offers an interpretation.
He also implies that traumatic experiences cannot easily be represented, especially not imme-
diately after they have happened. It might be a good idea to introduce this strip alongside
a series of other graphic responses to 9/11, for instance Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No
Towers, which is very explicit about, and highly critical of, the role of television as a screen
through which most Americans encountered the catastrophe and uses comics-specific means
(unusual panel frames, intertextual references to early newspaper comics) to make its point.24
Skip forward to the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq, a time in which Knight
deals repeatedly with political issues. Especially interesting is a strip from late 2002. It
depicts a sequence of eight panels, the first seven of which show a caricatured George W.
Bush repeating the same rallying cry over and over again: “We must invade Iraq!!” (The
Complete K Chronicles 412). The Bush figure never offers any justification; it merely repeats
the announcement until every person in the audience has fallen in line. At first, people
respond with questions and demands such as “Where’s Osama?” or “End our addiction to
oil,” “End racism,” “Protect civil liberties,” “End election fraud,” and so forth. Slowly, how-
ever, public discourse erodes; people change from being critical of the Administration and
vigilant against political abuses of power to being blind followers of official doctrine. It is
significant, too, that the first person to fall for the propaganda is the only black character;
in panel 6, it is he who yells “We must invade Iraq” for the first time. It seems that nobody
is safe from political manipulation, not even those whose own history of oppression should
make them wary of ideologically driven calls for military action abroad.
That the public discourse had not fully eroded and that not everybody was willing to
fall in line becomes clear in Knight’s depiction of the anti-war demonstration that took
place in San Francisco on January 18, 2003 (The Complete K Chronicles 418). Knight uses
the strip to present a single-image narrative filled with anti-war arguments printed on signs
held up by the demonstrators. These arguments range from historical references to comments
about contemporary politics as well as from serious critique to ad hominem attacks: “The
only thing we have to fear is Bush himself ” picks up on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “belief that
the only thing we have to fear is fear itself ” (First Inauguration Address, March 4, 1933);
“Drop Bush not bombs” rephrases the hippie slogan “Make love not war”; “How many lives
per gallon?” harks back to the first Gulf War; while “Draft the Bush twins,” “There is a
village in Texas missing an idiot,” and “Bombs shouldn’t be smarter than politicians” attack
the President personally. This single image is particularly useful as a historical source because
it confronts students with a variety of anti-war positions that can be discussed in terms of
their political validity and argumentative power. One may ask, for instance, how the claim
that “War is so last century” holds up today, when the United States is still fighting in
Afghanistan and has left behind a war-torn Iraq. Moreover, issues such as the national draft,
the treatment of veterans, and the role of religion in the freedom movement are as relevant
today as they were a few years ago. McGruder’s Boondocks, even though it was discontinued
in 2006, raises a similar set of issues, albeit from a different narrative perspective and with
a more radical bent, as my earlier discussion has suggested. Comparing the arguments and
rhetoric of the anti-war demonstrations of 2003 with those of the Tea Party demonstrations
of 2009 would be one way to introduce a historical dimension to present-day conflicts; it
would certainly allow teachers and students to ask pertinent questions about American his-
tory and politics. Contrasting the anti-war arguments of the Bush era with the perverse
logic that allowed Fox News propagandist Glenn Beck to hold his “Restoring Honor” rally
(2010) on the same day (August 28) and the same place (the Lincoln Memorial) as Martin
Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech (1963) and sell it as a continuation of the civil
rights struggle, would be another way to create historical and political awareness. That
teachers can use the works of two African American comic strip artists to confront students
with these questions is remarkable, especially since McGruder and Knight work in a medium
that traditionally disavows overtly political commentary.
NOTES
1. This chapter is a revised and extended version of a paper delivered at the American Studies Association
conference in Washington, D.C., on November 8, 2009. I thank Alfred Hornung, Micha Edlich, Christina
Meyer, and Alexander Starre for their suggestions and feedback.
2. This is not to say that early newspaper strips did not make political references. Outcault’s Hogan’s Alley
in the New York World repeatedly offered political criticism, for instance on May 17, 1986, when the inhabitants
of Hogan’s Alley lampoon the Republican Party, whose efforts to win the presidential election are said to have
resulted in a “movable platform [on which] de planks is all loose and reversable.” Rpt. in Blackbeard, 180–81.
3. An earlier strip with strong political overtones was Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie (1924–68). The
distinction between political cartoons and comic strips rests on two principal differences: a) political cartoons
are most often single-panel drawings that take on a different issue every day, whereas comic strips are generally
multi-panel narratives with recurring characters; b) political cartoons appear on a newspaper’s op-ed page, whereas
comic strips are printed in the comics section.
4. For collections of the strips, see McGruder, A Right to Be Hostile (which includes the strips from 19
Apr. 1999, to 11 Mar. 2003); Public Enemy #2 (12 Mar. 2003, to 13 Nov. 2004); All the Rage (which includes
selections from the strip up to the end of 2005 as well as interviews and articles on McGruder); Keith Knight,
The Complete K Chronicles. See also McGruder, Hudlin, and Baker’s “comic novel” Birth of a Nation (2004).
Knight’s (Th)ink cartoons are more explicitly political than The K Chronicles, but since multi-panel and serially
narrated comic strips are capable of creating more intimate levels of reader engagement than single-panel cartoons,
I will focus on the didactic potential of The K Chronicles. Many (Th)ink cartoons are reprinted in Red, White,
Black & Blue and Are We Feeling Safer Yet? See also The Knight Life, a nationally syndicated newspaper daily strip
that shares The K Chronicles’ autobiographical perspective and was launched in 2008. A first collection, The
Knight Life: “Chivalry Ain’t Dead”, was published in 2010. For new material, see also www.kchronicles.com.
5. Cf. Knight: “One thing that The K Chronicles is known for is that it’s indirectly political. It’s political,
but on a personal level” (Lanier 74).
6. For analysis of Outcault’s strip, see Gordon 59–79; Havig.
7. On the history of black characters in comics, see Strömberg; on Jackie Ormes, see Goldstein. For mul-
ticultural perspectives, see the essays in Aldama.
8. On teaching graphic narratives, see Frey and Fisher; Tabachnick; Vanderbeke. On reading comics as
graphic narratives and on changes in the teaching profession, see Chute, “Comics as Literature?”
9. Other African American newspaper strips of the past and present are Torchy Brown ( Jackie Ormes), Wee
Pals (Morrie Turner), Jump Start (Robb Armstrong), Candorville (Darrin Bell), Herb and Jamaal (Stephen Bentley),
Curtis (Ray Billingsley), Mama’s Boyz ( Jerry Craft), Cafe con Leche (Charlos Gary), Watch Your Head (Cory
Thomas), and Housebroken (Steve Watkins). Scholarship on African American comic strips remains scarce; for
essays on The Boondocks, see Cornwell and Orbe; Jordan; Rambsy II, “The Vengeance of Black Boys” and “Shine
2.0”; Rockler. For an overview of contemporary African American comics artists, see Duffy and Jennings.
10. On the response of editorial cartoonists to 9/11, see Harvey, “Editoonery”; Harvey, “Self-Criticism.”
On teaching political cartoons, see Wolsey.
11. The fact that Huey’s and Riley’s parents are absent is never explained; having students speculate about
why this is the case may be a productive exercise geared toward fostering creative engagement with the narrative.
One should be aware that these speculations could result in uncritical reproductions of racial stereotypes, for
instance drug abuse, incarceration, parental irresponsibility, etc. Once these stereotypes have been verbalized,
however, they can be addressed and discussed.
12. Cf. Kang: “The Boondocks crosses the conservative and even reactionary pages of the comics section
and plants a flag where issue of racial identity, politics, and hip-hop music meet” (138).
13. Eyes on the Prize is a fourteen-hour documentary about the civil rights movement; the first season covers
the years between 1954 and 1965 and was aired on PBS in 1987; the second season covers the time up to 1985
and was aired in 1990.
14. In his interview with Dick Gordon, Keith Knight comments on the significance of teachers and their
ability to foster political thinking in their students. He mentions that he never had a black teacher in high school
except for a substitute teacher who was also a struggling cartoonist and served as an early inspiration. He also
relates how he was encouraged by his English teacher to pursue a career in syndicated newspaper comics and
recalls a black college professor who assigned exclusively African American texts in an American literature class:
“It really made me think of using whatever position you’re in to touch on ideas and make people think [in]
different ways. So that’s when I think I first started thinking about incorporating race issues and political issues.”
See also Knight’s remarks in Stein.
15. Cf. Huey’s remarks on January 8, 2000: “Riley, I need your honest opinion on something. Well, even
though I’m more a radical socialist than cultural nationalist, I still feel awful that I completely overlooked Kwanzaa
this year. I mean, between the millennium madness and the Santa conspiracy, I just forgot. Am I a poor excuse
for a revolutionary, honestly?” Discussing the religious histories and political implications of Kwanzaa, the Jewish
Hanukkah, and the Christian Christmas traditions could produce suggestive insights about the separation of
church and state, the discursive power of the political correctness debates, and the role of religion in American
public life.
16. If the strip sometimes comes across as “a little soapboxy” (McGruder, Introduction 10), its self-ironic
strain provides humorous balance. To Huey’s statement that Riley is not an informed citizen (“I know you don’t
read the newspaper”), Riley responds: “No, I meant, why do you think I’ll ever be a goofy nerd like you?” (20
Mar. 2000). This self-ironic strain makes the strip both politically relevant and entertaining for students who
might initially not be drawn to political analysis.
17. The strip does, however, signal an awareness of this history; the character Uncle Ruckus, whom Huey
describes as “a fat, old, self-hating black man” (18 Dec. 2004), is a “coon” character whose features, language,
and behavior keep older visual representations of African Americans in the reader’s mind. The turn from comic
strip narrative to political cartoon was also reflected on the level of drawing style; McGruder increasingly scaled
back on the visual complexity of the strip in order to concentrate on his political message. On Knight’s more
fluid drawing style, see Knight’s interview with Chris Lanier, where he details the creative process from which
his strips emerge. The K Chronicles collection also features a series of sketches on its final pages. Teachers could
use this material to encourage students to draw their own political cartoons or comic strips.
18. The Boondocks tended to be more critical than most mainstream media, especially television. Only
weeks after 9/11, McGruder drew a strip in which Huey and Michael question the ways in which American news
channels participated in the clamoring for violent retribution. “Isn’t it interesting how all the different news
channels have cool titles and logos for their coverage?” Michael asks. “It’s almost like watching a miniseries. Let’s
see. Channel 2 is ‘America’s Vengeance,’ Channel 12 is ‘America at War,’ and Channel 33 is ‘America Strikes Back.’”
Huey then notes: “How About ‘America Stops and Thinks About Why Some People Hate Us?’” (27 Sept. 2001).
19. The Boondocks was often moved from the comics section to the editorial page when particular strips
seemed too political. McGruder frequently pretended that the strip was being censored because of its political
radicalism; the installment from March 21, 2000, for instance, includes a fake editor’s note: “The heavy-handed
and not at all balanced political opinions presented in this cartoon may be offensive to some readers. Therefore,
we are replacing the remainder of this strip with an earlier installment. We apologize for any inconvenience ...
(This kid is no Garry Trudeau).”
20. I agree with Butler that this type of “politics in the classroom” can obviously not mean to “recruit
students to a point of view” but that “political judgment that exposes itself to critical scrutiny can surely serve
the pedagogical function of teaching modes of analysis, which would have to include conditions of validity and
justification” (90).
21. Knight’s strips are not dated. This strip appears in a section of The Complete K Chronicles subtitled
“Cartoons from 1996–1999”; the date of the last KKK sighting suggests 1998 as the date of origin.
22. I cannot do justice here to the significance of Knight’s use of an autobiographical perspective. A more
thorough investigation would have to assess Knight’s connection with the autobiographical underground comix
of Robert Crumb and Harvey Pekar as well as his position in the history of African American life narratives. On
the intersections of autobiography and graphic narrative, see the essays in Chaney.
23. That this installment of the strip appeared two weeks after 9/11 is due to the way in which newspaper
comic strips are produced. They are created about two weeks in advance, which means that there is a delay
between events and commentary.
24. Quite a few useful articles on Spiegelman’s depiction of 9/11 in In the Shadow of No Towers have appeared
over the last few years. See Chute, “Temporality and Seriality”; Kuhlman; Meyer, “‘After all, disaster is my
muse’”; Meyer, “‘Putting it into Boxes’”; Versluys. For a pedagogical perspective, see Espiritu. Another productive
exercise would be to compare and contrast the ways in which newspaper comics and superhero comic books
reacted to 9/11.
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_____. A Right to Be Hostile: The Boondocks Treasury. New York: Three Rivers, 2003. Print.
McGruder, Aaron, Reginald Hudlin, and Kyle Baker. Birth of a Nation: A Comic Novel. New York: Crown, 2004.
Print.
Meyer, Christina. “‘After all, disaster is my muse’: Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers.” American Studies
as Media Studies. Eds. Frank Kelleter and Daniel Stein. Heidelberg, Germany: Winter, 2008. 107–17. Print.
_____. “‘Putting it into Boxes’: Framing Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers.” Trauma’s Continuum:
September 11th Re-Considered. Eds. MaryAnn Snyder-Körber and Andrew Gross. Spec. issue of Amerikastu-
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Antholog y. Eds. Radway, Gaines, Shank, and Von Eschen. Chichester, United Kingdom: Wiley-Blackwell,
2009. 1–6. Print.
Rambsy, Howard II. “Shine 2.0: Aaron McGruder’s Huey Freeman as Contemporary Folk Hero.” The Funk Era
and Beyond: New Perspectives on Black Popular Culture. Ed. Tony Bolden. New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
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_____. “The Vengeance of Black Boys: How Richard Wright, Paul Beatty, and Aaron McGruder Strike Back.”
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3. Teaching the Comics Anthology
The Readers, Authors, and Media
of McSweeney’s 13
ALEXANDER STARRE
Check it out!— Comics are now, like, a respected language, with an esthetic
grounding all their own. See? They address topics like the Holocaust, spirituality,
notions of identity, and sex! Plus they win Pulitzer Prizes ... and Harvey Awards!
— Chris Ware “High Score,” 12
At first sight teaching comics might seem a very simple undertaking. Given that comics
are a prime example of a popular medium, educators hardly need to worry about student
interest in the subject material. The recent establishing of the label “graphic novel” as a sta-
ble marker for higher-brow aesthetic values has furthermore led to a significant surge in
scholarly interest and commercial success. Accordingly, the increased willingness to think of
comics as literature has left its mark on college curricula, which are exemplary indicators for
the intellectual climate in the American cultural sphere. This chapter first provides a brief
outline of methodological patterns that appear with considerable regularity in current com-
ics pedagogy. A reading of a recent comics anthology edited by cartoonist Chris Ware then
forms the main part of this chapter. In the process, I will introduce an analytical framework
that interrogates the various levels of artistic communication encoded in graphic narratives.
A survey of syllabi of courses on comics at various universities across the United States
reveals some stable tendencies in course designs particularly in the fields of literature, popular
culture, and media studies.1 Introductory courses often provide a historical overview of
American comics with a reading list of five to ten graphic novels and comic strip collections
by increasingly canonized authors such as George Herriman, Will Eisner, Frank Miller,
Robert Crumb, or Art Spiegelman. The standard analytical textbook in these courses — and
simultaneously the most-cited book in comics scholarship — is Scott McCloud’s Under-
standing Comics. Instructors often assign chapters of McCloud’s book for individual sessions
across the whole semester, each chapter connected with primary readings. In contrast to
this expansive format, which helps to cover large corpora of texts, I want to propose a course
format based on just one primary text: the comics issue (no.13) of Timothy McSweeney’s
Quarterly Concern from 2004. Within a seminar format, this cultural artifact can be used
to foster close reading proficiency and guide a contextualized study of American comics cul-
ture including readers, authors, and the medium.
40
3. Teaching the Antholog y: McSweeney’s 13 (Starre) 41
Before we discuss the benefits of this approach, the primary text deserves a few words
of introduction. Novelist Dave Eggers founded the literary journal Timothy McSweeney’s
Quarterly Concern, along with the publishing house McSweeney’s, in New York City in 1998.
The enterprise received growing attention after Eggers published his bestselling autobiog-
raphy, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, to a warm critical and commercial recep-
tion in 2000. During the initial handful of issues, the editorial policy of McSweeney’s explicitly
presented the magazine as a space for fiction that had been rejected by established literary
journals, often due to its experimental, non-literary, or eccentric nature. Through the inevit-
able transformation that derives from modest commercial success, the quarterly became a
prime outlet for new fiction by established authors such as T. C. Boyle, Michael Chabon,
Lydia Davis, Denis Johnson, Jonathan Lethem, and David Foster Wallace. In their sixth
year of publication, McSweeney’s invited Chris Ware to guest-edit an entire volume devoted
to comics resulting in, as the title page declares, “An Assorted Sampler of North American
Comic Drawings, Strips, and Illustrated Stories, &c. [sic] by many of the most dignified
and skilled practitioners of the cartooning art, presented on over 250 lithographic plates and
in approximately 3,732 individual pictures” (Ware 1). Ware put together a 270-page hard-
cover book with golden en-
grav ings, which is covered
in a dust jacket that folds
out to a newspaper-sized
full color poster (Figure
3.1). Two small booklets
with individual graphic
narratives are tucked into
the sleeves of the jacket.
The book collects comics
by Ware, Daniel Clowes,
Robert Crumb, Gilbert
Hernandez, Joe Sacco, Art
Spiegelman, and other car-
toonists. Interspersed with
the art are essays by Glen
David Gold, John Updike,
and Michael Chabon.
Despite its flashy ap-
pearance and its tendency
to belittle and ridicule its
artistic finesse, McSweeney’s
13 constitutes one of the
first attempts to giving a
fixed anthology form to
North American comics
history. Apart from merely
collecting texts, antholo-
gies have often served the Figure 3.1 The three parts of McSweeney’s 13: a hardcover book, two
.double function of reflect- small booklets, and a fold-out newspaper. Photograph by Alexander
ing certain traditions of Starre, 2010.
writing while at the same time creating or reinforcing those categories. As Seth Lerer put
it in a recent PMLA essay, “The mark of any culture’s literary sense of self lies in the way
in which it makes anthologies” (1263). In hindsight, it appears to be a small wonder that
the canon wars of the 1980s and 1990s to a large extent revolved around the Norton literature
anthologies and their younger competitors Heath and Longman.2 The common pedagogic
tendency to teach individual texts within a framework of “movements” or “currents” echoes
the tendency to classify and valorize in the literature classroom. The underlying question
“where does this text belong?” has shaped curricula and leads to constant renegotiations of
the position of specific authors. Furthermore, practitioners of a certain genre or artistic pro-
gram often use anthologies in order to establish their field and raise its artistic status (like
Amy Lowell in her anthologies Some Imagist Poets in the 1910s). Thus, any attempt to collect
worthy material for an anthology sets off processes of inclusion and exclusion that are the
necessary precursors of canon formation.
Within such a framework of cultural production, the stakes of studying comics at the
college level appear much higher. The current flurry of comics scholarship and pedagogy
along with ongoing processes of canon formation need to gain more prominence in our
teaching.3 Consequently, a productive inquiry into the cultural field of graphic narratives
necessarily complicates the divide between (artistic) aesthetics and (social) practices. How-
ever, educators should not shrink from the task of explicating comics as culture — to borrow
from M. Thomas Inge’s catchy book title — by reverting to narrow formalist interpretations
of individual oeuvres. The analytical toolbox of literary studies in fact holds the appropriate
instruments to explore context through text.4
The following is therefore an addendum to formalist approaches to teaching comics.
Chris Ware’s anthology holds a wealth of individual graphic narratives that merit historical
and semiotic analysis, for which McCloud’s Understanding Comics is an excellent educational
resource. Beyond this, however, the volume is also a materialized action within a cultural
field — a “position-taking” as Pierre Bourdieu calls it (30). To avoid the pitfalls of simplistic
classroom sociology, educators might want to structure the analysis of the social practices
encoded in graphic narratives along the received narrative communication model by Seymour
Chatman. This model structures the communicative process into the six separate entities
of real author, implied author, narrator, narratee, implied reader, and real reader (Chatman
151). With regard to comics, the intradiegetic components of this model (narrator, narratee)
are inadequate labels for the fictive author- and reader-characters in the image-text of
graphic narration. Instead, I will use the terms “author persona” and “reader persona” for
these elements. Another necessary addition to this model is the level of the medium. While
the medial aspects of literature have recently come under increased scholarly scrutiny, an
interest in the material aspects of the medium is almost vital for the study of such a shifting
form as comics.5 The following three sections contain a concise framework of teaching the
cultural aspects of McSweeney’s 13 with regard to its readers, authors, and medium.
The Comics Reader: Antisocial Nerd or Art Aficionado?

In one of the few scholarly essays on Chris Ware’s anthology, Daniel Worden theorized
the social function of comics as follows: “The public imagined in comics is ... a specific
social entity, delineated not only by reading material but also by particular forms of affective
relations. In resisting a separation between the artist and the audience through an embrace
of everyday life, the artist and the reader form a counterpublic explicitly interested in cul-
tivating a unique aesthetic and lifestyle” (894). Indeed, the affective component of comics
plays an important role in Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. As a first gesture towards
the reader, McCloud depicts his eighth-grade self in a very emotional engagement with
comic books. Young McCloud is “hooked” by and “obsessed” with comics but cannot seem
to share his emotional commitment with his peers (2–3). In essence, Understanding Comics
presents the author’s personal quest to set the record straight in order to reduce the emotional
anxiety that comes with comics fandom. McCloud calls up his youthful fascination with
comic books in the multiple passages in which he revels in the “limitless and exciting”
potential and the “endless” possibilities of graphic narration (3, 212). In any introductory
textbook for literary studies, such high-flown rhetoric would seem displaced. Within the
field of comics, however, the affective tie to the reader is a necessary prerequisite for successful
communication. In courses on the subject, instructors and their students can profit from
closely interrogating the relationship between graphic narratives and their readers.
Starting at the very margins of the book, McSweeney’s 13 constructs a particular reader
persona. The frontpapers — designed by Ivan Brunetti — feature an old-fashioned name tag
in which the owner can sign his or her name. Generally found in expensive keepsake editions,
this name tag underscores the commodity status of the book and invites the reader to
instantly claim it as his or her own. Below the line, the minuscule print reads: “Your name
here. (Or, perhaps, the name of someone you’d like to insult by suggesting they actually
own a comic book.)” From the start, the anthology triggers reflection on the contested status
of comics as popular culture. Ware hereby attempts to foresee the initial reactions of readers
and subscribers of McSweeney’s Quarterly. With obvious self-conscious humor, the volume
presents itself to be aware of a readership that subscribes to the literary quarterly to amass
cultural capital.
The illustrated table of contents follows up on these direct reader addresses by presenting
the stories in little frames as mail-order items, mimicking “the ubiquitous comic book ad
for childish magic tricks and gadgets” (Worden 893). The heading of the page gives detailed
instructions for the usage of the book, spelling out that readers must first match the title
of the story to the accompanying page number before using their thumb to open the respec-
tive page.6 Further advice follows: “As well, you should try to ignore the nagging feeling
that there’s something else you should be doing at the moment, like planning dinner, or
setting ‘goals’ for your life, or calling that person you’ve been avoiding for over a week now”
(Ware 4). A clearer picture of the reader persona emerges: He or she is assumed to be anxious
about life in general and interpersonal relationships in particular. Larger questions connected
to the adult world appear daunting, which is why he or she decides to drown them out by
reading comics.
On the bottom of the page the reader finds a faux tear-out order form. On closer
inspection, this little form contains more tongue-in-cheek information about the reader
persona: “I understand that if I look through this book and actually like any of its pictures,
comic anecdotes, or illustrated stories, I may be considered by those who are generally
smarter and more cultured than myself to be: illiterate, childish, or, even worse, a virgin”
(Ware 4). This passage, which also references the “Bo Derek Playboy issue,” introduces the
aspect of gender and firmly ties the image of the reader persona to the male domain.
Apart from this direct commentary, the short essays by Ira Glass, John Updike, and
others supply more clues about the comics readership in their memoir-style childhood rem-
iniscences. Glass describes his youthful self in the following way: “I was a sulky little kid,
easily upset, didn’t play sports, didn’t like playing outside at all.... I thought of myself as a
loser and Peanuts helped me take comfort in that” (7). John Updike also attests to a juvenile
phase during which he frantically collected comics: “At a certain votive stage I cut out
favorite strips and made little long cardboard books of them.... I cut cartoons out of mag-
azines and pasted them in large scrapbooks, agonizing over which to choose when two were
back to back” (40). Larger parts of these supplementary essays take on a confessional tone
in which the respective authors indulge in reconstructing their younger selves who were
obsessed with comics, yet severely challenged by social life.
Throughout the pages of McSweeney’s 13 students will easily find more explicit and
implicit reader addresses. With the reader so firmly anchored in its aesthetic core, part of
the pedagogic strategy for teaching comics should rely on a thorough consideration of reader
roles. I argue that Chris Ware chooses to endow comics with more cultural capital because
he is aware of the common clichés and stereotypes: the reader persona of the anthology is
male, has never outgrown puberty, and has always regarded comics as the ultimate expression
of feeling. To him, sexual relationships pose a significant problem. In fact, male anxieties
concerning sexuality feature strongly in various narratives of the book, such as Joe Matt’s
“Toronto, Ontario. Canada” and Robert Crumb’s “The Unbearable Tediousness of Being.”
Daniel Worden has criticized the gendered subtext that, as he claims, dominates the whole
volume: “Men are impotent, powerless, yet full of deep feeling, while women are aggressive,
critical, and unloving” (901). With recourse to Nina Baym, Worden describes these works
as “comics of beset manhood” which echo the inherent machismo of certain strands of high
modernism (910).
While the supplementary reading for the proposed course should certainly include
Worden’s essay, his thesis needs to be expounded in light of the numerous direct reader-
addresses. Earlier attempts to sanctify masculine high art by drawing an artificial boundary
that separates it from feminine mass culture usually did so implicitly. The gendering of
high art was rhetorically shrouded behind a façade of connoisseurship, skill, and laborious
isolation, for example in Ernest Hemingway’s works. McSweeney’s 13 sets a different tone
from the very beginning. By tackling the preconception of comics as a masculine medium
right from the start and with a fair dose of humor, it pre-empts criticism of the Worden-
sort.
Other recent efforts at cultivated comics appreciation, such as large art exhibitions,
seek to circumvent prejudice against comics readers by providing sanitized, wall-mounted
displays of classical cartooning.7 In opposition to this, Ware’s comics issue abounds with
losers, nerds, and a lot of literal dirty laundry. As the editor states in the introduction: “All
of this flouncy nattering, however, doesn’t change the fact that comics are also wonderfully
vulgar and coarse, resistant to too much fluffing up or romanticization” (Ware Introduction,
12). With the help of Chatman’s notion of the “implied reader,” “the audience presupposed
by the narrative itself ” (150), we can account for the rift between the awkward and embar-
rassing reader persona and the ideal readership that may value this artifact. The anthology’s
implied reader is of course far removed from the awkward, nerdy reader persona sketched
above; rather, multiple intertextual references, the demanding storylines, and the experi-
mental visual styles of the individual comics cater to a well-educated, high-brow reader-
ship.8
In its self-reflexive gestures towards the reader, McSweeney’s 13 furthermore attempts
to create a sense of community. In order to fully understand each and every reference to
comics history within the contemporary pieces one needs a fair amount of in-group knowl-
edge about the history of the art form. Ware chooses to include the tools to gain this expertise
within the bounds of this very same book: his introduction and the short essays strike an
almost academic tone in their treatment of the subject material, yet they address their audi-
ence without any rhetorical posture of superiority. Instead, the volume carefully guides stu-
dents into a world of avant-garde graphic narration that does not belie its vulgar origins.
The Pains of Production: Authorial Presence in Comics

As with the reader persona, the anthology provides a large array of material on the
author’s role. Again, the paratexts deserve a close look since they visually reflect on the role
of the author.9 A point in case is the emblematic sketch of Chris Ware’s fictive author
persona. In their introductions to the visual art of graphic narration, both Scott McCloud
and Will Eisner outline how comics can rely on a high level of reader activity to fill in the
missing information of iconic line drawings.10 Accordingly, circles of varying size and a few
thin lines suffice to construct a complete human being in Ware’s minimalist visual vocabulary.
The specimen shown in Figure 3.2 seems to have little pleasure in what he is doing. His
bent posture in front of the drawing table, the head resting on the stylized hand, and the
barely recognizable stroke of his raised eyebrows emit a desperate atmosphere. In an ironic
counter-narration to the accompanying text, which describes the comics author as “dignified
and skilled,” the stick figure exposes the sham: the reader is led to doubt the pathos of
sitting in front of an empty paper while trying to come up with a witty punch line.
The first page of the broadsheet-sized dust jacket is devoted entirely to the paradox of
being a comics author during a time in which comics undergo a strong shift in cultural val-
orization. The author persona, an “artistically ambitious cartoonist,” is utterly surprised
when a general audience, consisting of “normal people,” suddenly loves his comics. He
muses: “Who woulda thought that in less than one week comic strips would supplant paint-
ing, sculpture, and movies as the world’s dominant art form?” (Ware, dust jacket). Even
after having secured an artistic reputation, however, the cartoonist cannot find satisfaction.
He still has to meet deadlines, his novel stardom intimidates him, and creative ideas are
hard to come by. In the end, his prime wish turns out to be drawing “a little watercolor of
a vase of flowers now and again.”
The general anxiety and the doubts about the
taxing everyday lifestyle of the cartoonist dominate
many of the pieces Ware selected, most promi-
nently the short excerpts by Linda Barry, Jeffrey
Brown, and Ivan Brunetti — the former two being
autobiographical narratives. Linda Barry’s piece
“Two Questions” deals with her authorial appre-
hensions. Her doubts take on the pictorial form
of a giant octopus and threaten to overcome the
author, who is pictured both as a grown woman
and as a child while struggling with “pictures and
stories” (60). Jeffrey Brown’s fictive persona pres-
ents himself to the reader as a “needy, passive Figure 3.2. Small illustration by Chris
aggressive, controlling, and jealous” (195) cartoon- Ware from the title page of McSweeney’s 13.
ist with a boyish complexion. A different strip © Chris Ware. Reprinted with permission.
shows him working on cartoons in a streetside café when a young woman asks him about
the purpose of the drawings in his large sketchbook (Figure 3.3). In a conspicuously self-
reflexive moment, she learns about his autobiographical cartoons and asks the simple yet
fundamental question: “What do you do with them?” (197). Barry and Brown clearly share
the basic sentiment that their life and their art are inextricably linked. They portray the
creative work as a demanding exercise that has the author fluctuating between self-loathing
and reassurance.
Ivan Brunetti’s three pieces are once removed from this direct level of autobiographical
composition. His short sketches portray the abstract artist Piet Mondrian, the modernist
composer Erik Satie, and Sören Kierkegaard, the existentialist avant la lettre.11 Aside from
his exceptional graphic rendering of each protagonist’s artistic and philosophical styles,
Brunetti is mostly concerned with the problems of being an artist. His fictional Piet Mon-
drian attempts to achieve “the purity of form” by completely eradicating his personal feelings
from his art, resulting in his signature paintings which feature perpendicular lines that sep-
arate rectangular fields of colors. Instead of basking in his abstract artistic triumph, however,
Brunetti’s Mondrian in the end weeps bitterly at the sight of an artificial flower, which
makes him aware of his desperate loneliness. Satie and Kierkegaard appear as similarly
conflicted characters who pay for their intellectual achievements with cold hard solitude.12
These fictional author personae once more indicate the inclination to imbue comics
with an artistic aura: by actively promoting creator-characters that withdraw from the
spheres of capitalistic production inherent in the mass-produced comics of popular culture,
McSweeney’s 13 manages to create a meaningful group identity for its contributors as well.
Within the bounds of this volume, these individual loners appear like a congregation of
believers in the true qualities of graphic narration. Even though one can read most of the
fictional author constructions described above as purely autobiographical, I believe that
within the contextual framework of Ware’s editorial cartoons the reader can also decode the
individual occurrences of this motif along a more general line. In other words, the arrange-
ment of individual autobiographical cartoons into the anthology format strongly curbs the
reading process: McSweeney’s does not
present stories of individual authors; it
asks us to consider its component parts as
archetypal representations of the larger
issue of comics authorship.
In their differing degree of explicit-
ness concerning questions of authorship,
the individual parts of Ware’s anthology
give students a wealth of possibilities to
resurrect an “implied author” (Wayne C.
Booth) from the iconic narratives or to
speculate on various “author functions”
(Michel Foucault). Simplistic biographical
readings of comics still abound within
criticism and scholarship. A renewed inter-
est in the multiple layers of literary com-
munication and sensemaking therefore
Figure 3.3. Panel from an untitled strip by Jeffrey needs to become part of the pedagogic
Brown, included in McSweeney’s 13. Brown 197. objectives in teaching comics.
The Stuff That Comics Are Made Of

Building on the communicative components of the reader and the author, the last
main aspect that I want to highlight for an instructional analysis of McSweeney’s 13 is the
medial level. For that purpose, I will use the term “medial” in the sense that Mark Hansen
has suggested in a different context, namely as referring to “the specificity of analyses con-
cerned with the materiality of the medium and of media generally” (598). While the medial
properties of printed products in general deserve more critical attention because of current
trends towards digitization and the disembodiment of information, we also need to be aware
that materiality is one of the defining characteristics of comic art per se. We might even
hypothesize that serious interest in comics as an art form relies heavily on a young reading
public with a definitive longing for non-digital, haptic objects. Today, Charles McGrath
holds, “there is something like a critical mass of artists, young and old, uncovering new pos-
sibilities in this once-marginal form, and a new generation of readers, perhaps, who have
grown up staring at cartoon images on their computer screens and in their video games,
not to mention the savvy librarians and teachers who now cater to their interests and short
attention spans” (n. pag.). The tendency towards pictorial forms of storytelling in new
media environments might indeed have contributed to the naissance of the graphic novel.
However, within this transitory period, the fetishization of the printed object in the hands
of both artists and readers speaks to a renewed interest in the medial aspects of communi-
cation. This development should direct our gaze backwards to the material evolution of
graphic narration.
Historically, the two dominant medial forms of comics were cheap, mass-produced,
and disposable. The funnies page in the daily newspaper, the earliest American examples
of which stem from the 1890s, is usually recycled with the rest of the paper. It thus provides
the appropriate space for comic strips such as Garfield or Dilbert which essentially rely on
the serial variation of the same punchline day after day.13 On the other hand, the comics
magazine — often also called comic book — has mostly been devoted to longer, more elaborate
superhero stories. It brought a slight shift to graphic narration since it imposes less formal
and spatial restrictions on the story. Also, its material half-life tends to be longer than that
of the daily newspaper, thereby fostering narratives that reward rereading.14 However, the
comics magazine is still cheaply produced and held together by staples. It tends to crumble
and tear after a few readings. Interestingly, this ephemeral nature of the magazine begets
the comics collectors’ obsession with material perfection. The supply and demand scale
within the market for older DC or Marvel comic books would be crooked if it were easier
to maintain them in “mint condition,” as the collector’s lingo terms it. A large portion of
the time and money put into the collection of comics has to be invested in the preservation
of their material integrity.
In recent years, the graphic novel arrived as the latest addition to the medial repertoire
of comics. While scholars still haggle over a specific definition of the term, it appears obvious
that the medial qualities are central to this new form. The OED calls the graphic novel “a
full-length ... story published as a book in comic-strip format” (“Graphic Novel,” OED),
while the contributors to Wikipedia agree that graphic novels “are typically bound in longer
and more durable formats than familiar comic magazines, using the same materials and
methods as printed books, and are generally sold in bookstores and specialty comic book
shops rather than at newsstands” (“Graphic Novel,” Wikipedia). Durability instead of dis-
posability thus appears to be one of the most basic features of the ambitious graphic novel.15
We have already seen the self-reflexivity of McSweeney’s 13 with regard to reader and
author roles. This attitude also occurs in connection to its material features, resulting in a
mode of self-scrutiny that can be termed “metamedial.”16 As mentioned above, the issue
incorporates all three medial forms I just outlined: the illustrated dust jacket mimics the
newspaper funnies, the two booklets reflect the comics magazine, and the hardcover book
has the high-brow aura of the graphic novel (Figure 3.1). The tactile experience led renowned
design critic Michael Bierut to reminisce about his childhood: “[The dust jacket] took me
right back to the way the Sunday paper used to arrive on my childhood doorstep, and it
conjured up the same sense of excitement” (94). The intricate link between the content of
graphic narratives and their papery form obviously encourages an emotional, almost archaic
affective relationship between reader and medium. While other media have started to (re)dis-
cover their own material status due to increased inter-media competition in the wake of
the digital revolution (cf. Starre), comics have never lost their material footing. The comic
book page has always been a imaginative space creatively shaped by the individual artist.
The format of the page (horizontal or vertical, narrow or broad) as well as the quality of
the paper (thin and glossy for magazines, thick and matte for books) are essential, though
often disregarded, aspects of graphic narratives. If we attune our eyes to the material aspects
of the book, we can for example perceive that the cream-colored finish of pages 216–31 of
McSweeney’s 13 is by no means a coincidence. These pages contain stories with an essentially
nostalgic subject matter. On a subtle material level, the slight shift in the whiteness of the
page underscores this theme.
While the look of the volume indicates painstaking copy-editing and meticulous page
design, frequent irony counteracts the impression of splendor. The newspaper foldout for
example proclaims: “Included with this paper: a free 264 page hardcover featuring stories
by many of North America’s more obscure cartoonists about death, sex, suicide — and more!”
The presumably cultivated artifact is further ridiculed on the title page that states that the
“comic drawings” in the book are “presented on over 250 lithographic plates” (Ware 1). In
a similar ironic gesture, the serious-looking title page is followed by a sensationalist magazine
cover designed by Charles Burns, which depicts a degraded creature about to kiss a beautiful
blond woman while a nuclear mushroom cloud stands in for the romantic sunset (Ware 3).
McSweeney’s 13 obviously attempts to forestall any possible snobbery by framing profundity
with silliness. By juxtaposing a “literary” title page and a second one reminiscent of the
excessive visual style of superhero comic book covers, Ware shows the anthology as an
uneasy hybrid.
Furthermore, the visual presentation of older cartoons in this anthology is remarkably
full of metamedial implications. It is obvious that Charles Schulz and George Herriman
are both included to construct a usable past for contemporary sophisticated comics. Chris
Ware includes drafts of both of their works and infuses them with a craftier aura. Charles
Schulz’s “preliminary drawings” are reproduced so that one can easily see how the cartoonist
scribbled these sketches onto cheap, yellow ruled paper. The reproductions give the impres-
sion that the original papers were culled from Schulz’s trashcan. Ware, however, presents
them like collected pieces of art with individual small captions. This fixation on material
becomes even more prominent in the section on Herriman. The depicted Krazy Kat strips
were found in Herriman’s apartment after he died in his sleep in 1944. The panels are repro-
duced as two-page spreads with curatorial labels that read as follows: “Ink and pencil on
Bristol board, approximately 13" ¥ 16 3 ⁄ 4", April, 1944” (Ware 81). In this anthology, durability
of form is obviously a prime catalyst of canonization. Mass-produced, fleeting comics need
to be fixed to a specific carrier medium to enter the comics canon. Throughout the book,
the reader encounters a careful awareness of the printed page as a creative space, which
bespeaks the remarkable editorial care for the materiality of this anthology.
This metamedial mode can be profitably integrated into the academic context, allowing
students and educators alike to interrogate comics as narratives with a strong bond to a
material medium. Through teaching comics as medially contingent narratives, we would
inch closer to the type of pedagogy that Seth Lerer demands: “we should teach our texts
with an awareness of the material contexts in which they originally appeared. But we should
also recognize that those material contexts are constantly in flux, as texts get copied into
new collections [and] printed books get bound together” (1263). En route from daily strips
to graphic novels, comics have come to occupy shifting positions within the cultural practices
that surround them. Thus, the meaning of Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers
might undergo considerable alterations when being transformed from the broadsheet format
of the German newspaper Die Zeit— in which it originally appeared in 2002 — into a smaller-
sized excerpt within the bounds of McSweeney’s 13 in 2004 and finally into a lush hardcover
book published by Pantheon later that year.
A Cultural Perspective on Graphic Narratives

To conclude, let me reiterate my main contention concerning the goals of teaching
comics in college courses. The prevalent direction of current comics pedagogy is appreciative
and historical: Through the instructional mirror of textbooks such as Eisner’s Comics and
Sequential Art or McCloud’s Understanding Comics students learn to value and analyze
image-text narratives; by surveying larger corpora of contemporary and historical comics,
instructors teach the history of the art form. However, as I have demonstrated above, the
skills of structured narratological analysis and contextualized cultural, historical study deserve
equal weight in comics teaching. Reading American comics as an art form that currently
undergoes considerable shifts in cultural valorization and group identity formation opens
up valuable perspectives for American Studies courses.
Teaching from anthologies, a common practice in English programs, gives educators
the chance to easily provide students with pre-selected material. Yet, students also need to
direct their critical analysis towards the practices of selection and evaluation which bring
about such anthologies. In the same vein, the textbooks by McCloud and Eisner as well as
any recent comics scholarship are worthy subjects of meta-critical analysis. In many ways,
this perspective follows a methodological path set by the holistic understanding of the field
of cultural production as outlined by Pierre Bourdieu who tried to overcome “the correlative
dilemma of the charismatic image of artistic activity as pure, disinterested creation by an
isolated artist” versus the “reductionist vision which claims to explain the act of production
and its product in terms of their conscious or unconscious external functions” (Bourdieu
34). With the McSweeney’s comics issue, readers receive a dense collection of material, based
on which they can investigate both intrinsic aesthetics and extrinsic social connections simul-
taneously.
Even without expertise in Bourdieu’s theories, students will be able to grasp the impor-
tance of current processes of canonization by applying some basic concepts of literary com-
munication. Through the use of analytical categories like the implied reader and author,
fictive personae, and metamediality, instructors can open ways for a more complete under-
standing of cultural valorization. With other recent attempts at anthologizing comics, such
as Ivan Brunetti’s An Antholog y of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, & True Stories, Houghton Mif-
flin’s The Best American Comics series, or the lush Kramer’s Ergot anthologies by Buenaventura
Press, a number of collections for the comics classroom are now available. The anthology
format appears poised to emerge as a crucial site of negotiation concerning the future of
American comics and graphic novels in the years to come.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
An earlier version of this chapter was delivered at the American Studies Association conference on November
8, 2009, in Washington, D.C. I want to thank my co-panelists Micha Edlich, Christina Meyer, and Daniel Stein
for their suggestions. I am also grateful to Philipp Schweighauser, Birte Otten, and Kathleen Loock for their
comments. Many thanks to Laura Howard at McSweeney’s for helping me with permissions and to Chris Ware
for granting permission to reprint his work.
NOTES
1. I reviewed a sample of about twenty online course syllabi of introductory classes on comics and/or
graphic novels. To ensure that these syllabi stem from literature departments, documents were obtained by using
the search operators “comics literature syllabus” and “graphic novel syllabus” through Google. Syllabi were
retrieved from course websites at MIT, Cal State Northridge, Yale, Palomar College, University of Michigan,
and other universities. A burgeoning resource for lesson materials and full syllabi connected to comics pedagogy
can be found on the Website of the National Association of Comics Art Educators (NACAE), which is operated
under the auspices of The Center for Cartoon Studies in Vermont.
2. Inquiries into the social dynamics and the individual persons behind the creation of the Norton canon
are extremely rare. Recently, Sean Shesgreen has created a stir within the literary establishment with his essay
“Canonizing the Canonizer: A Short History of the Norton Antholog y of English Literature.” It heavily emphasizes
the role of money and interpersonal animosities through the 40-odd-year print run of its subsequent editions.
Fiercely attacked by a good number of Norton executives and English professors, his essay might at last bring
the much needed critical attention to the mundane basics of cultural valorization that form the foundation of
the standard text collections of literary and cultural studies.
3. A good sample of recent work in the field is provided by Heer and Worcester.
4. My analysis thus moves toward the issue from the opposite perspective of sociologist Paul Lopes, who
firmly grounds his recent historical study of American comic books in contextual data such as sales numbers,
biographical information, legal texts etc.
5. For a stimulating introduction that connects literature with its medium see Hayles.
6. Such paratextual gimmickry is a stable feature within the repertoire of McSweeney’s publishing. In fact,
even Dave Eggers’ autobiography contains a full page of “Rules and Suggestions for Enjoyment of this Book”
(xiii), in which readers are told which passages are worth reading and which ones they may safely skip.
7. Fora critical take on such comics exhibitions see Nadel, who claims that the exhibition form cannot
accommodate comics in a worthy manner: “The great irony is that this art was never meant to be shown on walls
at all. The intended form of a comic is the printed object itself, which is meant to be consumed in private” (26).
I share with Nadel the general sense that the material form matters a great deal in the consumption of comics.
8. In conjunction with this section, students may be asked to locate reviews of this anthology and other
recent high-brow graphic narratives. Such pieces hold valuable information on the reception of these comics.
Through analysis of the critic’s and the publication’s position within the American public sphere, clearer patterns
of socio-economic implications and cultural evaluation will emerge. Great starting points are the articles by
McGrath and Schjeldahl.
9. The notion of the paratext as sketched by Gerard Genette appears not altogether fitting for an artifact
like the McSweeney’s anthology. Its sprawling and entirely self-reflexive use of paratexts subverts classical notions
of these supplementary materials, such as their stabilizing and categorizing function.
10. McCloud references Marshall McLuhan’s “hot and cool”–classification of media according to audience
involvement: “hot” media demand little attention, while “cool” media like comics need a cognitively active recip-
ient to work. Their condensed degree of abstraction, I would argue, qualifies comics just as much as literary texts
for the development of close reading skills.
11. McCloud also dwells on the art of Piet Mondrian when explaining the “abstract vertex” on his chart of
pictorial styles (147).
12. The depiction of author personae is as old as American comics themselves. In a broad survey of authorial
self-portraits in American comics history, Daniel Stein has recently argued that the conspicuous presence of an
author persona has not come about through the ‘underground comics’ of the 1960s and 70s or the burgeoning
field of autobiographical comics in the 1990s (233). Rather, authorial self-portrayals have existed since the earliest
newspaper comics strips, e.g. by German immigrant Lyonel Feininger (Stein 228–30).
13. In issue 33 of December 2009, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern returned to comics. The issue is a pro-
totype newspaper titled San Francisco Panorama, which includes sections on news, entertainment, and books, as
well as a large comics section. The editors of this issue stress its programmatic nature in a small insert: “The
Panorama was created to demonstrate the unique possibilities and appeal of the American newspaper” (“Infor-
mation Pamphlet,” n. pag.). They argue that comics are an essential part of the printed newspaper’s allure, espe-
cially since they are rarely read on the internet. Instead of small strips, however, the comics section of the Panorama
contains full-page artwork by essentially the same ensemble of cartoonists responsible for issue 13.
14. Cf. Eisner, Graphic 8. Eisner hints at the importance of the link between the “content” and its “package.”
However, he does not devote any more attention to the material form of comics, which will become crucial with
the advent of the graphic novel. McCloud dodges this issue altogether.
15. Even the artists themselves lay heavy emphasis on the physical artifact when trying to define key attributes
of graphic novels, as McGrath reports in The New York Times: “Alan Moore, creator of The League of Extraordinary
Gentlemen, likes ‘big expensive comic book’; [Art] Spiegelman is partial to ‘comic book that needs a bookmark’”
(n. pag.). The word “bookmark” can here be taken literally: it marks the graphic novel as a “real” book by trans-
ferring a helpful device from the practices of reading literature to the domain of comics.
16. See Starre for a longer consideration of medial self-reflexivity as opposed to other forms of narrative
self-consciousness, such as metafiction.
WORKS CITED
Barry, Linda. “Two Questions.” McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern 13 (2004): 60–65. Print.
Bierut, Michael. “McSweeney’s 13 and the Revenge of the Nerds.” Seventy-Nine Short Essays on Design. New York:
Princeton Architectural, 2007. 93–95. Print.
Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic World Reversed.” The Field of Cultural
Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Ed. Randal Johnson. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Polity, 1993.
29–73. Print.
Brown, Jeffrey. “Excerpts from Sulk.” McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern 13 (2004): 192–99. Print.
Brunetti, Ivan. An Antholog y of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons and True Stories. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2006. Print.
_____. “P. Mondrian.” McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern 13 (2004): 13. Print.
Chatman, Seymour. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1978. Print.
Eggers, Dave. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. New York: Simon, 2000. Print.
Eisner, Will. Comics and Sequential Art. 1985. New York: Norton, 2008. Print.
_____. Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative. 1996. New York: Norton, 2008. Print.
Genette, Gerard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press,
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Glass, Ira. “Preface.” McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern 13 (2004): 7. Print.
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Print.
“Information Pamphlet.” McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern 33. San Francisco Panorama (2009): Insert. Print.
Inge, M. Thomas. Comics as Culture. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990. Print.
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Lopes, Paul. Demanding Respect: The Evolution of the American Comic Book. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University
Press, 2009. Print.
Lowell, Amy, ed. Some Imagist Poets: An Antholog y. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1915. Print.
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: HarperCollins, 1994. Print.
McGrath, Charles. “Not Funnies.” New York Times. New York Times. 11 Jul. 2004. Web. 14 Dec. 2011.
Nadel, Dan. “Fine Art Funnies: Why Comics are Going on the Walls of Museums These Days — and What the
Museums Are Getting Wrong.” Print 58.2 (2004): 26, 170–71. Print.
Schjeldahl, Peter. “Words and Pictures: Graphic Novels Come of Age.” The New Yorker. The New Yorker 17 Oct.
2005. Web. 14 Dec. 2011.
Shesgreen, Sean. “Canonizing the Canonizer: A Short History of The Norton Antholog y of English Literature.”
Critical Inquiry 35 (2009): 293–318. Print.
Starre, Alexander. “The Materiality of Books and TV: House of Leaves and The Sopranos in a World of Formless
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tions, and Attempts at Explanation. Ed. Werner Wolf. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011. 195–215. Print.
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Comics: Zur Geschichte und Theorie eines populärkulturellen Mediums. Ed. Stephan Ditschke, Katerina
Kroucheva, and Daniel Stein. Bielefeld: transcript, 2009. 201–37. Print.
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Ware, Chris. “High Score.” Comic Strip. McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern 13 (2004): 12. Print.
_____. “Introduction.” McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern 13 (2004): 8–12. Print.
_____, ed. McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern 13 (2004). Print.
Worden, Daniel. “The Shameful Art: McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Comics, and the Politics of Affect.” Modern
Fiction Studies 52.4 (2006): 891–917. Print.
4. Teaching Visual Literacy
Through 9/11 Graphic Narratives
CHRISTINA MEYER
In a recent article, Hillary Chute argues that the graphic narrative “has become central
to the ways in which contemporary forms narrativize history” and that “it is through the
flexible architecture of their pages ... that graphic narratives comment powerfully on the
efficacy and the limitations of narrativizing history” (271). A cursory look into the records
of recent publications confirms Chute’s argument. In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks
in 2001, comic book publishing houses have started to collect artistic responses to the events.
Volume one of 9-11: Artists Respond (2002), for example, was published by Dark Horse
Comics, Chaos! Comics, and Image Comics. Volume two, September 11th, 2001: The World’s
Finest Comic Book Writers & Artists Tell Stories to Remember (2002), was published by DC
Comics. Alternative Comics, aided by the Red Cross, released 9-11: Emergency Relief in
2002. Marvel, likewise, published artistic responses to the terrorist attacks, among them
issue 36 of The Amazing Spider-Man 2, or A Moment of Silence.1 Scholarly interest in these
texts manifests itself in the growing number of articles, conference panels, and courses in
college curricula. “By implication, the attack on the World Trade Center was the ultimate
Kodak moment” (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 14). The 9/11 terrorist attacks are well-documented
events, captured in photographic images, video images, TV reportage, and various kinds of
digitalized pictures. Escape from the mediatized images was hardly possible.
Against the backdrop of these reflections this chapter analyzes four graphic narratives
that verbally and visually thematize the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center: one
particular page from Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers (2004), Will Eisner’s one-
page response “Reality 9/11,” the collaborative project “9 A.M. EST,” and the work “T” by
Nick Bertozzi.2 These artists show very personal yet still universal reactions to the terrorist
attacks in differing ways. For example, recurrent themes in many of the pages are loss, dis-
belief, shock, anger, and trauma; they often tell stories about “ordinary” hero(es) or renewed
patriotism. A prominent example is the cover page of the second volume of Artists Respond.3
The all–American superhero Superman, accompanied by his “super-dog” Krypto, stands in
front of a billboard-size image with his back to the reader and looks up at the firefighters,
policemen, nurses, medical doctors, pilots, construction worker, and other “real” people.
“Wow,” says Superman, expressing his admiration. The dog sitting next to him looks up
to these people as well. The cover is a rewriting and reimaging of The Big All-American
Comic Book from December 1944 whose cover shows a boy standing and a dog sitting look-
ing with admiration at the group of superheroes in front of them.4 On this cover page it is
53
the “ordinary” people that show the “superpower” in view of the attacks. Such discourse of
the “ordinary” and “true” heroes have appeared in other media as well.5 The comic superhero,
habitually the figure that uses his power to restore order and prevent disasters, is inscribed
here as a marginal spectator. Ultimately, the cover page mediates the superhero’s power-
lessness in view of the attacks — a theme emerging in other graphic texts as well. Neither
Superman, Spider-Man, or other superhero figures could prevent or minimize the force of
destruction. “We didn’t know,” says the collective superhero voice in Marvel’s The Amazing
Spider-Man #36, “We couldn’t know. We couldn’t imagine. We could not see it coming.
We could not be here before it happened. We could not stop it” (n. pag.). In the end, the
narrative voice in Spider-Man explains: “Some things are beyond words. Beyond compre-
hension” (n. pag.). Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers (2004) also addresses such
issues of incomprehensibility, powerlessness and shock. Spiegelman’s text uses the autobi-
ographical mode of expression to grasp the world that seems to have turned upside down
on September 11, 2001. Fictionalized versions of his personal struggle are presented in the
mosaic of disconnected impressions in conjunction with critical and political remarks on
the Bush administration, intertextual references to his previous works6 and to famous Amer-
ican comic figures, metafictional comments on the act of writing and creating, and self-
reflexive and often satirical notes on the post–9/11 paranoia.7
This chapter discusses how Spiegelman and the other comic artists represent not only
the intricate mediatization of the terrorist attacks but also the social and political transfor-
mations in the aftermath of 9/11, and how their works problematize the idea of unity and
identity formations in times of crisis. These interrelated aspects suggest the pedagogical
value and didactic potential of graphic narratives and indicate the importance to include
these cultural products into the academic context.8 After discussing how to approach and
interpret graphic narratives with a focus on the structuring and meaning-generating frames
and framings in and of graphic narratives, this chapter addresses how to teach visual literacy
as well as inter-cultural competence by means of graphic narratives, and a critical engagement
with practices of looking that are central to our understanding of cultural differences. 9
Frames and Framings

Frame and framing carry different meanings and connotations in different fields: anthro-
pology, film studies, literary studies, linguistics, art, to name but a few.10 Frames refer to
“borders”— the lines or margins surrounding a page, an object, a figure, an image, or a die-
getic text passage — in the form of wavy, dotted, or bold lines. Frames are considered the
spatio-visual devices, the techniques to present sequence in comics and graphic narratives.
As Thierry Groensteen has pointed out, “[i]t is the frame that makes the panel” (27). Accord-
ing him “[T]he entirety of the formal parameters that organize the image are indexed by
the form and the dimension of the frame, as much as by its localization on the page, its
site” (Groensteen 47). Frames serve as perspectival and directional coordinates as well as
guiding lines in the reading process; in other words, frames set the parameters of looking
and guide the interpretation of a graphic narrative.11
Yet, the reader’s gaze, evoked through frames, is already culturally determined and
enframed upon the entering of the reading process. This brings us to the second concept:
framings, both textual and contextual. As I have argued elsewhere, textual framings describe
all the framings in a work such as the position of figures in relation to one another and to
4. Teaching Visual Literacy Through 9/11 Graphics (Meyer) 55
the overall arrangement of a page and intra- and inter-textual references in a text; that is,
cues prompted by the text and actualized in the reading process.12 Textual framings also
point to the structuring guides such as captions and subtitles, footnotes, the artist’s signature,
and frame-numbers and dates accompanying a graphic narrative. Contextual framings refer
to the “orientational aids that help us to navigate through our experiential universe, inform
our cognitive activities and generally function as preconditions of interpretation” (Wolf and
Bernhart 5). This notion applies to literary texts as well as other forms of artistic expression.
Contextual framings are the “principles of organization” we learn and bring into the reading
process (Goffman 2). These two modes of framings in and of graphic narratives — textual
and contextual — are discursive in the sense that they help us “in the production and recep-
tion of literature and other media” (Wolf and Bernhart 2). The framing activity is a signifying
process; in other words, it is the combing of cues given in a text to a meaningful and coherent
unit in the reader’s mind. Frames and framings serve as stabilizers and codifiers, and function
as constituents in the text as well as for the reader and the artist (cf. Wolf 12). As MacLachlan
and Reid have stated, however, framing “imposes constraints on the way we interpret what
we read” (2). Analyzing the functions of frames13 and textual framings in post–9/11 graphic
narratives the section below demonstrates how these texts “narrativize” the terrorist attacks
on the World Trade Center and their political, social, and cultural impact.
Graphic Narratives and 9/11

On the first vertically arranged page in Spiegelman’s often-cited and well-researched
text, In the Shadow of No Towers, the reader is confronted with a colorful, seemingly chaotic
collage of images and texts.14 Different styles, different sizes of panels, and different narrative
situations make this page (as well as most of the other pages in the book) complex and mul-
tilayered. Adopting such a strategy Spiegelman offers a visual and verbal collection of impres-
sions of the terrorist attacks: there is no single story or single truth but a conglomeration
of many different stories and many different impressions. In the Shadow is a complex and
challenging narrative not only because it combines different modes of representation and
narration to unsettle conventional reading habits, but also because it engages the reader in
a critical reflection on his or her own position when approaching the pages. In class discus-
sion, I suggest that students compartmentalize the pages and start with a description of the
general outline of each page, the “mise-en-page,” to borrow Groensteen’s term. In order to
find out how the different “semantic channels” or modalities interact and relate to one
another, it seems advisable to start with smaller units.
Frames and framings function as an organizing principle in the collage-like structure
of In the Shadow, and serve as cues that aid the reader in interpreting the text. Groensteen
argues that “[t]he ‘text’ of comics obeys a rhythm that is imposed on it by the succession
of frames” (45). Following our Western reading habits — from top to bottom and from left
to right — the analysis of the frame structure could start with the first narrative sequence.
The top of the opening page of In the Shadow shows a row of three rectangular panels and
a small white gap, followed by what looks like an appendix to this series: a framed copy of
the American flag, positioned in the same height and width and in the same style as the
previous three image-panels.
Formal features such as color are used to promote cohesion, the “iconic solidarity” in
Groensteen’s words; the panels and the repetition of the décor and the figures allow the
reader to create a sequential continuum.15 The title, “The New Normal,” stretching on top
of and enclosing the panels is another framing and structuring device: the primary means
by which the image-panels are formed to a coherent and “contained” syntagm.16 The décor
of “The New Normal” shows the interior of a room; the textual framings include a man
holding a cup in his hand and the circled lines suggesting a drink inside, a woman with a
cat on her lap, and a child sucking her thumb. They are sitting on a sofa, opposite their
electronic hearth.17 The perspective in the panels (provided by the outer frame lines as well
as by the lines inside the boxes) is always the same and allows the reader to look into the
faces of the figures.18 The greenish color establishes an atmosphere of dullness and boredom;
the pale faces and pastel colors of their clothes add to this “colorless” life.19 The sequence
includes no speech or thought balloons — there is no action. The only written “enunciations”
are the calendar dates in the background: in the first panel, the calendar shows the date
September 10, followed by September 11 (no year given) in the second panel; the textual
framings — that is, the date and the representation of the faces in the second panel — suffice
to conjure up the (media) images of the terrorist attacks in the reader’s mind. Though we
do not see what is shown on the television screen, we know, or rather, we can imagine what
they see (because of our knowledge formed by the repetitive media images of that day). In
the third panel, the American flag has replaced the calendar.
At this point, a possible conclusion may occur: the figures in the panels are function-
alized synecdochically, standing for any American watching the events on television that
day. Linked together these framed images visualize a universal reaction to the events shown
on the television screen: shock and disbelief, which are represented here by means of the
figures’ reddish eyes and disheveled hair as well as by their upright sitting position. Yet what
does this sequence mediate and what does it signify? How does Spiegelman frame the
terrorist attacks? What defines this “new normal” in the aftermath of September 11, 2001?
The last panel gives an answer to these questions. The figures and their cat are still in the
same world, are still “glued” to their couch and doze away in front of the television; the
only aspect that has changed is the “electrified” hair. Spiegelman problematizes two things
in this narrative sequence: he critically engages with the mediatization of the attacks, just
as he shows how the events have become critical time markers. Secondly, he comments on
a new patriotism in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. Spiegelman offers a visual critique
of the media images shown on television and the “hypnotic”20 effects that the repetitive
showing had on the viewing public, just as he parodies the behavior of many Americans.21
On almost every page of In the Shadow Spiegelman verbalizes and visualizes this entering
of media image into our systems. With this and other narrative sequences in the text he
critically engages with the endless loops of the images of the cascading towers lured the
viewer into hypnotic sleep, diverting the gaze away from important issues. Yet there is
another aspect that Spiegelman points out here. The privatized act of buying bric-a-bracs
and other kitsch artifacts or the hanging up of an American flag might evoke the feeling of
unity, comfort, and the illusion of security, but it does not change anything. This narrative
sequence thus implicates that the “patriotic act” of buying national collectibles to show
empathy and to pay homage to the dead is a rather superficial act, and an all-too-easily-
bought catharsis. In brief, the new in the “new normal” is, literally, only a new haircut and
a new calendar in the living room.
On page 7 of In the Shadow Spiegelman verbally addresses this issue again through the
narrating figure’s question: “Why did those provincial American flags have to sprout out
of the embers of Ground Zero?” Spiegelman critically engages with what Fiore has called
“the flag [as] talisman against evil” (Fiore 46), and visually and verbally points out the use-
lessness of hanging it up in one’s home — or, for that matter, of tattooing it onto one’s
body.22 In one of the thought balloons we read the mocking comment, “I should feel safer
under here, but — Damn it!— I can’t see a thing!”
Similarly, the mediatization of September 11, 2001, and the concomitant effects on the
memorization of the terrorist attacks are also key issues negotiated in Dan Abnett and Andy
Lanning’s “9 A.M. EST.”23 This one-page text is located in the section “Unity” of volume
two of the 9-11 collections (Figure 4.1). Printed on a white background, three rows of equally-
sized rectangular panels arranged in triptych-image-sections, which also build vertical trip-
tychs, show people staring at their television. Within each framed “container,” there is
another black frame-line holding a text passage, which informs the reader about the cities
and implicitly about the countries these people live in. The city names are clear textual
framings and reading instructions. The city names are followed by the respective local times
that would match New York local time after the first plane had crashed into the World
Trade Center. The use of the identical lexeme “local time” in the text boxes has the effect
of metaphorically “freezing” the reader’s gaze. The framing lines of the respective panels
and the gutters in between the panels thus serve to capture “a moment in time” around the
globe; the reader is invited to take the position of a witness, in different settings, and to
look at the image on the television screen from different perspectives. This appears a one-
page mosaic of snapshots or “Kodak moments,” a visualization of witness reports of the day
from across the Earth. The attacks are not only a global media event — uniting the viewers
around the world it seems — but also a time marker. None of the figures talks — a global
silence governs the page; there are no speech or thought balloons. Communication is made
visible and thus readable by means of the diegetic commentary boxes as well as by means
of the figures’ facial expressions — their staring to the television. A single iconic image of
the burning tower of the World Trade Center is framed in rows of equally sized boxes. The
page functions as a report, documenting what people did at 9 o’clock in the morning on
September 11, 2001.
The artists use a quite simple “architecture” in their one-page graphic narrative and
frame the terrorist attacks as a shared experience that affects and supposedly unites everybody
around the globe. 24 Though one reads the panels in sequential order according to our
Western reading habits, there is no motion in time, no action, no chronological development.
The artists seem to imply time stands still at the moment of trauma. At 9 o’clock on Sep-
tember 11, 2001, time seemed to have stopped. The attacks on the World Trade Center are
all-consuming events, leaving no space for other activities. Whereas frames and gutters in
comics usually function to suggest motion in time, here the frames and gutters serve as a
means of juxtaposition to suggest simultaneity.25 The perspective and coloring of this page
warrant a close look.26 The first panel is set in New York City. The perspective offered to
the reader is a “peeping”— close view out of what seems to be a window on the north and
south towers of the World Trade Center. The representation of the north tower ablaze
resembles those images that many readers are familiar with. This eye-witness-like repre-
sentation “frames” the reading process of the following panels. A media(tized) image is
implanted in the reader’s mind. From then on a silhouette suffices to evoke the memory of
the buildings on fire. All the following representations of the burning tower, framed inside
a television, only refer back to the first image. At this point I would like to mention that
this could be another point to discuss in class: news and the media as discourse players, and
how knowledge is constructed and disseminated by means of repetition. Using cover page
Figure 4.1. Abnett, Dan and Andy Lanning. “9 A.M. EST.” Art by Yanick Paquette and Jim Royal.
9-11. Vol. 2 “September 11th 2001. The World’s Finest Comic Book Writers & Artists Tell Stories to
Remember.” Ed. Paul Levitz. New York: DC Comics, 2002. 119. © DC Comics. All rights reserved.
Reprinted with permission.
images from a selection of American newspapers following September 11, 2001, might help
instigate classroom discussion.27
However, this page overtly encodes ethnic stereotypes and clichés of cultural traits. In
the London panel, for example, we see a group of men in a public space: a bar at 2 P.M.—
beer and cigarettes close by. The television in the background shows the iconic image of
the burning tower. The reader follows the gazes of the men staring upward at the television.
In the Rome panel, the two men in a garage interrupt their work as auto mechanics. The
background shows a poster with a soccer ball. Thus, the average English male drinks beer
in the early afternoon, and Italian men spend time watching soccer games. In the last panel
of the second row, titled “Moscow,” the perspective changes — we are inside a room with
five people gathered around a television. We do not follow the gaze to the television but
rather look into the faces of the figures to see their reactions: a boy sitting in the front holds
both of his hands to his mouth, expressing his disbelief and shock; the man sitting on the
sofa has stopped eating his food, hollow eyes staring at the television. Clearly, the reddish
color in one of the bowls refers to the eating of Borscht soup; the representation of the culi-
nary specialty is culturally specific. What I highlighted in class discussion is that the frag-
mentary and stereotypical representations of eating and drinking “habits” as well as leisure
time activities function to characterize different national identities, which I find highly
problematic. This page is particularly useful in a classroom setting not only to analyze how
the artists “frame” the terrorist attacks but also, and more importantly, to critically engage
with stereotypical encodings in graphic narratives. An analysis of these separate panels
should thus help students to avoid the uncritical acceptance, even adaptation, of a framed
gaze offered in a text.28 In other words, by means of such interpretative work students learn
to ponder questions of visual-verbal self-imaginings, or self-definition, and to critically
reflect on representations of “the other” in graphic narratives.29
Eisner’s graphic narrative “Reality 9/11” (page 45 in 9-11: Emergency Relief ) is likewise
printed on a single page. Whereas “9 A.M. EST.” uses a representation of the iconic image
of the towers in flames, Eisner frames the terrorist attacks of 2001 in a different way. The
outer frames, one might say, are the borders of the pre-given page size; inside these outer
margins,30 a black frame-line “holds” the actual image; similar to a photographic image that
presents a limited view to the observer, this frame-line narrows the reader’s field of vision
to a clearly demarcated space. The elements and their positions on the page create the
illusion of a three-dimensional space — the interior of a room. In the foreground Eisner’s
“Reality 9/11” shows a man sitting on a couch in front of a television; his head is slightly
bent down. Parts of the glassy surface screen of the television opposite him lie in scattered
pieces on the floor. The lamp at the far corner of the page seems to disappear behind some
kind of fog — suggested by blurry white lines that transgress the borders of the television.
These white lines embrace the man and the chair he is sitting in. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett
points out, “the event was — and still is — everywhere. It is ambient. The disaster suffuses
the life space. Smoke and dust, carried by the wind, coated the surfaces of the city. New
York wore the disaster like a garment” (26). Here, the figure wears the attacks like a heavy
garment, which makes it impossible for the person to move.
The page is monochromatic except for the red color dripping from the television onto
the floor. Contextual framing brought into the reading process helps the reader identify this
as symbolizing blood. This red color is the eye-catcher of Eisner’s page. The “frozen” image
on the television screen shows another iconic image of the terrorist attacks: similar to the
repetitive images of the burning towers that were shown on television, the images of the
collapsed towers in ruins have become framed and mediatized images. Sketchy lines suffice
to conjure up memories in the reader’s mind. Eisner’s work, one might argue, is wordless
and represents the tragedy of September 11, 2001, through a snapshot of paralysis.
One may easily read “Reality 9/11” as an autobiographical and therapeutic trauma nar-
rative, in other words, Eisner’s attempt to get his impressions out of his system and put
them on paper.31 The date given at the bottom of the page indicates the supposed day of
its creation: September 11, 2001. By dint of this and other textual framings, “Reality 9/11”
can be considered an immediate reaction, a personal visual response to the terrorist attacks.
Yet, since there are no textual “clues” on the page that would allow for a clear geographic
or national classification, this man functions synecdochically and represents a person some-
where in a room in front of a television. The old man is, I would argue, also used here to
represent an “old,” worn out “Uncle Sam.” 32 What this text addresses is that the terrorist
attacks of September 11 were not only media(tized) events, they were traumatizing events
that had an impact on everybody who was watching television. The bleeding television
epitomized the trauma. There is a crack on the surface of the television screen — a “wound.”
The borders of the television can no longer hold the picture of the World Trade Center’s
collapse and the debris enters the living room. The crack is at once a “real” hole in the tel-
evision, as if the plane hit and entered the apparatus, as well as a psychological one. Whereas
the television screen usually functions as a filter between the media images and illusions,
here the “traumatic real” of the terrorist attacks enters real life and affects this man.
My final example is the graphic narrative by Nick Bertozzi titled “T,” included in 9-11
Emergency Relief. His text implicitly points to the mediatization of the terrorist attacks in
2001. Rather than postulating a media critique in the style of Spiegelman or drawing 9/11
in terms of a globally uniting event, Bertozzi focuses on malleable processes of memorization
instead. In brief, the pages depict a person whose head is hit by a plane while eating. This
person ends up in an emergency room, where s/he encounters other people with the same
kind of wound. The images on the pages are formed like an iris — small black holes through
which the reader looks.33 Each image reveals a limited view of this person in medium shot,
close-up, or extreme close-up. Bertozzi’s graphic narrative is comprised of five pages, each
of which shows two black-and-white images. The design of the black lines that form the
encircled images is quite interesting: the fairly small spaces between these sketchy strokes
of a pencil make all the circle images quite dark. The reader is reminded of a photographic
image with a long exposure time. Numbers at the lower right side of each image suggest
the reading direction. No text, speech, or thought balloons accompany the pages.
In contrast to the graphic narratives mentioned above, these five pages do not include
television. There is no representation of the towers or depiction of the iconic media images
or mention of the date of the terrorist attacks. In fact, there is no element pointing to Sep-
tember 11, 2001, except for a plane in the panels. Even though the north and south towers
are absent or, materially speaking, outside the frame of the page and beyond the spatial
frame, the attacks are virtually still there, in the interpretative act of the reader. The plane
functions as a frame-transgressing cue. Bertozzi thereby creates a dialectic of visual/non-
visual, seen/unseen, or present/absent. His pages, then, tell more about imposed frameworks
of reading and encoding-decoding strategies than the attacks themselves. Bertozzi’s text
illustrates the proliferation of signs. The plane has become a metonym to stand for the
attacks. Bertozzi visualizes the fact that it has been integrated as a cognitive frame into our
knowledge. His text may be used in classroom settings not only to analyze how the artist
frames the attacks but also to reflect on the processes of codification and memorization,
thereby familiarizing students with the production and dissemination of signs including
images. After all, images equip us to make meanings of new images by relating them to
previously stored knowledge.
The aircraft literally enters the figure’s head, hits it hard on the side, and surprises the
person while s/he is eating. “The disaster profoundly disrupted even the most banal routines
of daily life” (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 15). In one of the frayed images the extreme close-up
shows the fingers touching the left temple with the plane inside. There is a wound in the
head.34 Similar to Eisner’s work, Bertozzi visualizes 9/11 in terms of a wound. In more precise
terms he represents the terrorist attacks as an attack on the consciousness: “our consciousness
... was the target of the attack. It has become an indelible part of us” (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett
15). September 11 has been “implanted” in everybody’s head. Upon the arrival at the emer-
gency room, this figure meets other people in the waiting area with exactly the same wound.35
Bertozzi frames 9/11 as a collective physical-psychological wound. The final image depicts
a group of people, all of whom have planes sticking out of their heads. A healing seems
impossible. This reading of a wound is sustained throughout the frames and the circle
images on the respective pages. The architecture and the frames have an expressive function
in his text. Each page shows two isolated yet adjacent spots; the shape and style of the un-
framed circle images invite the reader to decode them as blood spots, specks, or stains on
the white canvas. Form and visual content intertwine in this graphic narrative to show how
the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, have been “implanted” into everybody’s head.
The plane cannot be removed; the attacks, Bertozzi shows, have become indelible moments.
They have destroyed and forever changed the city skyline and have left their marks on the
people.
Concluding Remarks
September 11 graphic narratives are a means of communication just as they are popular
cultural forms of representation. Graphic narratives are not only discursive products of what
might be called the enframing and deframing processes but also cultural and culture-specific
statements of different historical periods. They are contemporary verbal-visual texts that
contribute to the imagination and production of culture and are texts in need of close
scrutiny. They may stimulate new intellectual energies in particular in a younger generation
of students and as a matter of fact teachers as well. Gallo and Weiner view “the format and
its potential as a lure for reluctant readers” (117). Mikkonen points out one aspect of this
luring potential, which I find interesting for further research. In his analysis of “mind-pre-
sentation in graphic storytelling,” he claims: what makes graphic narratives especially inter-
esting is that “the medium stimulates the viewer’s engagement with the minds of characters
by recourse to a wide range of verbal modes of narration in a dynamic relation with images
that show minds in action” (Mikkonen 302). I agree with Mikkonen and further argue that
analyses of “mind presentation” in graphic narratives may help students learn more about
the “dynamic relations” of these texts and the “engagement with the minds of characters”
may give students an opportunity to develop their emphatic competence. By discussing
visual-verbal techniques of representing consciousness and thoughts, students may also
develop their competence to analyze the concept of stereotypes, as I have shown in the
examples above. In addition, close readings of “mind-presentation” in graphic narratives
may foster students’ literacy and broaden their interpretative skills.36
In more general terms of pedagogical effectiveness, the 9/11 texts analyzed in this chapter
and other graphic narratives offer stimuli for reflection and analytical, critical, and creative
skills. September 11 graphic narratives may serve as a means to teach visual literacy and as
popular productions to analyze and understand American culture.37 An analysis of graphic
narratives may help students disentangle the representation and mediation of myths and
beliefs of various cultures via visual-verbal texts and reflect on “the way subjectivities are
constituted through images and imagining” (Tavin 198, 210). This decoding of myths
includes an examination of stereotypical and America-centric views of different cultures
and international politics. September 11 graphic narratives also inspire questions about the
status of knowledge as well as the constructedness of knowledge just as they invite students
to critically engage with questions about memory, identity, and citizenship in times of
crisis.38 Finally, since these texts may also be considered political commentaries on the
project of representation, they can generate discussion about their potential to destabilize
a normative and simplistic narrative and consensus around the terrorist attacks.39
NOTES
1. On these matters see also Paul. For further information on what might be called “9-11 comics,” see
Dean and Fiore.
2. See works cited for reference details.
3. September 11, 2001: The World’s Finest Comic Book Writers & Artists Tell Stories to Remember is thematically
divided into six parts, beginning with comic pages summarized under “Nightmares,” followed by “Heroes,” “Rec-
ollections,” “Unity,” “Dreams,” and “Reflections.”
4. September 11, 2001 includes a copy of this cover page, which is available online: http://goldenagecomics.
org/wordpress/2008/12/20/big-all-american-comic-book/.
5. Cf. for example the 9/11 documentary film by Jules and Gideon Naudet.
6. On these matters see, for example, Erin McGlothlin’s “Art Spiegelman and AutobioGRAPHICal Re-
Vision,” which appeared in Michael Chaney’s Graphic Subjects — Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic
Novels (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011), 45–50.
7. See my discussion in “‘Putting It into Boxes.” Cf. Heller 158–59.
8. In the past few years I have regularly taught classes on comics and graphic narratives; the class discussions
and the short in-class presentations that students have proved inspiring and highly valuable for my research activ-
ities and my teaching. The results and ideas developed in these courses are included in this essay.
9. I borrow this term from Sturken and Cartwright.
10. On the concept of the frame in film see Braudy and Kolokitha.
11. Cf. Groensteen 49–50. Michael Neumann’s Anblick/Augenblick contains a wonderful collection of essays
on the question of how perception is guided by different modalities in art, literature, film, and comics.
12. Some of the arguments put forward here have been discussed in my article “Putting.”
13. Cf. Groensteen who proposes a categorization of six different yet interdependent functions of frames
in comics (39–57).
14. See Meyer “After,” Versluys, Chute “Temporality.”
15. See Groensteen 26.
16. Elsewhere I have proposed a distinction between image-panels and diegetic-panels to emphasize the
predominant content of a panel (Meyer 480–81).
17. I borrowed this term from Cecelia Tichi.
18. On the “spatially determined point-of-view” in graphic narratives see Mikkonen 309.
19. Color as a mode of representation and communication plays an important role in Spiegelman’s text.
On the “communicative function” of color see Kress and van Leeuwen 228n.
20. Both Dori Laub and Slavoj Ž iž ek have dealt with the “hypnotic fascination of the endlessly repeated
television images” and Ž iž ek states that an “image entered and shattered out reality.” See Laub 210. Slavoj Ž iž ek
also analyzes the effect of ubiquitous media images in his essay “Passions of the Real, Passions of Semblance,”
especially 16, 19.
21. An interesting topic for discussion or a research project could be the negotiations of “class” in Spiegel-
man’s In the Shadow. Ryan has discussed representations of class in comics and graphic narratives (924n). Cf.
Lott.
22. On these matters see Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 15.
23. I have discussed some of these arguments in a presentation, “Framing 9/11: Frames in Graphic narratives,”
at the international conference Academic Perspectives on Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels as Intercultural and
Intermedial Phenomena in Sweden in 2009.
24. Students could work in small groups to discuss the “architecture” of this page (the overall page layout,
the use of colors, the frames, and the interrelation of words and images). As a second step, students should engage
with the question of how cultural clichés and stereotypes are negotiated in this page. The answer to this question
is aligned within the larger framework of intercultural competence and communication. On these matters see,
for example, Jandt.
25. Cf. Eisner 25–37; Groensteen 112n.
26. On effects of verbal and visual focalization in graphic narratives see Mikkonen 310–11, 318.
27. Andrew Hoskins and Ben O’Loughlin’s Television and Terror, Nuria Lorenzo-Dus’ Television Discourse,
and Teun A. van Dijk’s News as Discourse are useful references on this matter.
28. As a background reading I suggest chapter 3 titled “Spectatorship, Power, and Knowledge” in Sturken
and Cartwright.
29. Stuart Hall’s study on representation and Charles Stangor’s Stereotypes and Prejudice are useful background
reading on these issues.
30. Cf. Groensteen 30–31n.
31. On trauma narratives see, for example, Kalí Tal’s Worlds of Hurt. Laurie Vickroy’s Trauma and Survival
in Contemporary Fiction discusses processes of mourning and catharsis and the way they are represented in fiction.
32. Cf. Ann Telnaes and her cover page cartoon for Humor’s Edge, which shows a ‘carbonized,’ pop-corn
eating Uncle Sam on a chair (hat blown down), staring at a television tube; papers, dust and smoke transgress
the borders of the television set and enter the room he is sitting in. Television reality enters his daily life. In an
interview Telnaes adds “I was shocked. That’s really me sitting in the chair” (48).
33. Francis Lacassin ponders on the proximity between film and comics (11–23). To use the visual “code”
of film studies for the analysis of graphic narratives is helpful but does not suffice. In terms of methodological
challenges Kukkonen and Haberkorn suggest a “toolbox” approach to studying comics (239).
34. Cf. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 14–16.
35. This is falsely represented by the emblem showing the double-helix Caduceus — a sign that is often
appropriated in texts to symbolize the healing in medical science.
36. The question of how to teach visual literacy is the focus in a special issue of Der fremdsprachliche Unter-
richt Englisch. Monika Seidl offers a valuable introduction to methods and theories of visual literacy. Frey and
Fisher’s book collects a number of essays that focus on different forms of graphic narratives and media and the
question of how to teach visual literacy.
37. On these issues see Heller’s discussion on Spiegelman’s graphic narratives and their “value” in American
Studies (160–61).
38. On “the role of popular culture in relation to knowledge construction, social desire, and student agency”
see Tavin 198. David Perkins reflects on the potential of art to cultivate thinking disposition in The Intelligent
Eye. Graphic narratives allow us to make connections to other contexts of human experience, such as literature,
history, geography, philosophy, morality, other cultures and art itself (Perkins 5–6, 83–86). For further discussions
see Frey and Fisher.
39. And this includes, as Tavin rightly states, the “problematizing [of one’s] own relationship to popular
culture” (200).
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PART II
ETHNIC STUDIES
5. Drawing Attention
Comics as a Means of Approaching
U.S. Cultural Diversity
DEREK PARKER ROYAL
Comics are a composite text made up of words and images that, taken together, can
have an impact far different from that produced by more traditional modes of narrative such
as the short story or the novel. Much like films, comics rely on a visual language that encour-
ages a more immediate processing time within the reader and, on the level of interpretation,
a more “efficient” exchange between author(s) and audience — at least when compared to
purely language-based mediums. This is not to suggest that comics are a more passive means
of narrative (as many of its detractors have historically argued), nor does it assume any lack
of ambiguity of intent or indeterminacy of meaning in graphic narratives. The images that
serve as referential icons fall prey to the same kind of semantic slippage found in linguistic
codes, which themselves, in the form of letters and words, also function as icons of meaning.
Nonetheless, there is something relatively “direct” about an image in its ability to affect
reader response. The figures that make up the comics rub up against reality in ways that
words cannot, revealing the various assumptions, predispositions, and prejudices that authors
and illustrators may hold.
This power underlying the comic image becomes all the more evident when placed
within the context of race and ethnicity and the ways in which authors represent their sub-
jects. As legendary writer and illustrator Will Eisner points out, comics is a heavily coded
medium that relies on stereotyping as a way to concentrate narrative effectiveness. He argues
that unlike film, where characters have more time to develop, the graphic narrative, with
its relatively limited temporal space, must condense identity along commonly accepted par-
adigms. Typing characters along physical, gestural, and even occupational assumptions
“speeds the reader into the plot and gives the teller reader-acceptance for the action of his
characters” (Eisner 20). However, the “accursed necessity,” as Eisner puts it, of narrating
through stereotypes takes on critical resonance when filtered through an ideological prism
(17). Authors may expose, either overtly or through tacit implication, certain recognized or
even unconscious prejudices held by them and their readers. Such art should not be taken
lightly, for as history literally illustrates, the attitudes and prejudices of a culture can be
greatly shaped by its caricatures, cartoons, and other forms of manipulated iconography.
This is especially the case when it comes to the representations of minority populations,
groups and individuals who live on — or who have been relegated to — the fringes of a society
67
68 Part II : Ethnic Studies
and whose place has historically been dictated by a more dominant culture. In comics and
other forms of visual art there is always the all-too-real danger of negative stereotype and
caricature, the kind of illustrative strategy that strips others of any unique identity and
dehumanizes by means of reductive iconography — the big noses, the bug eyes, the buck
teeth, and the generally deformed features that have historically composed our visual dis-
course on the other. Witness, for example, the depiction of Africans in Tintin in the Congo
(1931), the second Tintin adventure story from Belgian writer Hergé; supportive figures such
as Mandrake the Magician’s Lothar, Red Ryder’s Little Beaver, and Wonder Woman’s Egg Fu;
Angelfood McSpade, the “lovable darkie” created by Robert Crumb for Zap Comix in 1968;
the racially-tinged violence of Barry Blair’s comic book mini-series, Ripper (1989–1990);
and, more recently, the twelve editorial cartoon depictions of Muhammad published in the
Danish paper, Jyllands-Posten, in 2005 and the 2009 controversy surrounding Sean Delonas’
cartooned allusions to President Barack Obama in the New York Post.
To put it bluntly, comics — by necessity — employs stereotypes as a kind of shorthand
to communicate quickly and succinctly. This being the case, it is up to the comics artist to
tell her or his story as effectively as possible without slipping into the trap, even inadvertently,
of inaccurate and even harmful representations. To paraphrase Stan Lee, with great visual
power there must also come great responsibility.
This being the case, the focus of this essay is to highlight the possibilities and even the
potential liabilities of using comics when teaching on matters of minority subjectivity and
marginalization. It will underscore some of the broader, more general issues surrounding
comics’ abilities to highlight important questions underlying race and ethnicity in America,
and then move in more closely to look at a few of the comic books and graphic novels that
effectively, and literally, illustrate these questions. In many ways, this study is a response to
what several critics of graphic narrative have seen as a defining mark of American popular
culture: its problematic relationship with ethnic difference and its responsibilities underlying
racial signification. For example, in her review of the growing body of scholarship on comics,
Rebecca Zurier implies that scholars should focus less on the impact made by a few “excep-
tional talents” or “major figures,” and more on the ways in which comics have excluded a
number of marginalized voices (102). Scott McCloud has argued that in order to fulfill its
creative potential — that is, be taken seriously as a creative art form and stand alongside
more traditional forms of literary narrative — contemporary comics should not only directly
address the current state of race relations in the United States, but also reclaim the history
of minority participation in the comic book industry (Reinventing Comics 109). Similarly,
Matthew J. Pustz sees comics as a potential medium to take on issues of diversity and oth-
erness. “America would be a better place,” he asserts, “if [alternative] voices could be heard
in forums that were more accepting of outsiders.... The truth is, we as a country need both
a common (although diverse) cultural language that is used in a public forum in which
everyone can participate and specific cultural sites where quirky, nonmainstream tastes and
views can be allowed to grow and develop” (Pustz 24–25).
An appropriate forum for this kind of cultural discussion, especially as it can reveal
itself in the classroom, is the terrain of comics. There are many contemporary artists who
have taken up this cause and have used their comics as a way to discuss ethnic diversity and
the political issues generated by difference. In this way, they follow up on a promise made
in the silver age of American comic books (roughly between the late–1950s and 1970), artic-
ulated most famously in an issue of Denny O’Neil’s Green Lantern/Green Arrow (no. 76,
April 1970). In it, an elderly African American man admonishes the Green Lantern for his
5. Drawing Attention to Cultural Diversity (Royal) 69
selective heroism: “I been readin’ about you.... How you work for the blue skins.... And how
on a planet someplace you helped out the orange skins.... And you done considerable for
the purple skins! Only there’s skins you never bothered with...! The black skins! I want to
know.... How come?!” And to this, the superhero shyly responds, “I ... can’t....” In the
shadow of such sentiments, it becomes important to understand how various artists and
writers use their comics to map out the cultural and historical contexts of multiethnic sub-
jectivity(and similarly, how educators can use those illustrated contexts to teach about the
ever-evolving ethno-racial dynamics of America.
In other words, despite the risks of exposing our grossest forms of objectification, based
largely in caricature and stereotype, comics as a medium has the enormous potential to
visualize, literally as well as figuratively, the stakes involved in ethnoracial discourse. Because
of its foundational reliance on character iconography, graphic narrative is well suited to dis-
mantle those very assumptions that problematize ethnic representation, especially as they
find form in visual language. They can do this by particularizing the general, thereby under-
mining any attempts at subjective erasure through universalization. As Art Spiegelman
makes clear, “Cartoons personalize; they give specific form to stereotypes,” an aesthetic move
aptly illustrated in his Pulitzer Prize–winning Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (1986, 1991), where
the mouse heads become masks, “a white screen the reader can project on” (46). Indeed,
McCloud points out this almost counterintuitive ability of comics to specify, and personalize,
through the indeterminate. He notes that the broader or more abstract a cartoon figure is
depicted — that is, the more iconic its features are drawn — the closer we come to identifying
with that subject. As a result, nonrepresentational illustrations invite readers to “mask them-
selves” in a character and identity with his or her (or its) world. Conversely, a more photo-
realistic style, which should theoretically emphasize the particularity of its subject matter,
has the tendency to objectify identity by creating a distance between reader and character,
and in doing so it emphasizes the “otherness” of the subject (Understanding Comics 43–44).
What both McCloud and Spiegelman are describing here, in essence, could rightly be called
the paradoxical effect of ethnic identification in comics. Graphic narrative, in allowing the
reader to “mask” him- or herself in its non-mimetic figuration, invites empathy with the
nondescript “other” on the comic page, thereby encouraging the reader to connect to other
experiences and other communities that might otherwise have been unfamiliar. In what,
on the surface, may be interpreted as an exercise in passively and safely assuming a generalized
or more universal (i.e., non-ethnic) perspective can actually invite(paradoxically enough
(identification with a more particularized marginalized figure. Similar to the way that Gilbert
Hernandez, one of the creators of the comic book Love and Rockets, puts it in a recent inter-
view, “the more ethnic a piece is ... the more universal it is” (229).
The significance of this phenomenon to multiethnic graphic narrative cannot be
overemphasized. There are many contemporary examples that bear this out, with some of
the most successful comics relating to ethnic difference depicting their protagonists in the
broadest of stokes. In addition to Spiegleman’s Jewish mice (playing upon the long tradition
of “masking” the human in animal form) there is the minimalist style of Marjane Satrapi’s
Persepolis books (2003, 2004), the broadly stylized and Dan DeCarlo– and Charles Schultz–
inspired work of Jaime Hernandez, the simplicity underlying Aaron McGruder’s Boondock
strips, the whimsical and large-eyed moé style found in the works of Osamu Tezuka and
other manga artists, the expressive and almost “cartoony” exaggerations of Kyle Baker’s
comics, and the abstracted collage technique found in the works of Ho Che Anderson and
Wilfred Santiago. And of course there is the ubiquitous superhero, whose “masked” identity
and abilities, and their links to American race and ethnicity, have been used in a variety of
recent cases — for example, the Black Panther, Storm, Blue Beetle, Firestorm, the Atom,
Luke Cage, Echo, Wolverine, the Escapist — not merely to give voice to minorities in a trite
affirmative action manner, but to present a textual canvas onto which ethnic identity can
be projected, debated, and even taught.
However, the significance of ethnic identity in comics is by no means limited to iconog-
raphy or static imagery. The way figures are contextualized within a panel or laid out upon
the page, and the manner of their physical or speech behaviors, can tell us much about how
the ethnic subject is constructed. Because time is spatialized in graphic narrative, where
readers see the process of character development across panels, comics can underscore the
fluidity and sheer variability of ethnic identity. The breakdown of space into continuous
images — that is, the paneled framing of the comics narrative — suggests the changeability
of the subject, that an individual can be represented from multiple perspectives and that
“the self ” is less stable that we normally imagine. In this way, the formal system of comics
can help reveal the dynamics of ethnoracial discourse. The very spaces of graphic story-
telling — such as the word balloons, the frame of the individual panels, the gutter (that
“blank” space between panels), the strip (the horizontal ban of panel arrangement), and the
entire page layout itself— can foreground relational perspective between and among indi-
vidual subjects. Such visual strategies are an essential component of multiethnic narrative,
writing that by its very nature relies upon themes of cultural context and contingency to
generate meaning. In the classroom, the visual contexts of comics, the way that meaning is
contingent upon proximity and surroundings, can be analogized with our understanding
of ethno-racial identity and its reliance on perspective and environment.
The examples that follow should not only introduce readers to a facet of ethnic and
racial discourse with which they might not otherwise be familiar, that of comics, but also
encourage teachers of multiethnic writing to consider using comics in the classroom and in
all of its forms. The graphic narrative is a varied medium. As such, scholars would be well
served by expanding their understanding of ethnic American writing, as well as the devel-
oping “canon” of comics itself, to include a wide range of graphic narratives — from its most
pedestrian expressions in the popular media, to its fanboy base in mainstream comics, to
its most obscure manifestations in the niches of art culture.
One way in which we can approach comics and the way they can open up the classroom
experience is by looking at how they focus on our understandings of the ethnic self. Gene
Luen Yang’s 2006 graphic novel, American Born Chinese, is a good example of this. It is the
story of Jin Wang, a native-born American who grapples with his Chinese heritage and the
way he is seen by his non–Asian classmates. His story is interspersed with that of the Monkey
King, a figure from the classical Chinese epic Journey to the West, and the story of Danny,
whose Chinese cousin Chin-kee is a constant source of embarrassment. Chin-kee, in fact,
is the epitome of about every Asian stereotype imaginable, and Yang uses this figure to
point out how racial difference is projected onto others and the discomforts it brings.
Throughout the course of the novel, Jin Wang desperately tries to whitewash his identity,
to rid himself of ethnic signifiers that marginalize him in the eyes of others. In a way, he is
temporarily able to do so, but by the end of the graphic novel, the various storylines come
together in a telling manner. When Jin Wang, who is fantastically transformed into the white
Danny, fights Chin-kee and is made to confront his Chinese heritage — represented not
only by the blatant stereotype of Chin-kee but also the legend of the Monkey King — he
comes to a better understanding of himself and his relationship to his ethnic community.
Adrian Tomine focuses on some similar issues of ethnic identity in his 2007 graphic
novel, Shortcomings. This is the story of Ben Tanaka, a young American of Japanese descent
who is uncomfortable with being pigeonholed as an Asian. His girlfriend, Miko, is very
race-conscious and vehemently supports the arts created within the Asian American com-
munity. Ben is suspicious of the emphasis on hyphenated America, and both Miko and his
friends accuse him of ethnic self-hatred and of being ashamed of who he is. In a telling
conversation he has with Alice Kim, a close friend whom he constantly uses as a sounding
board and confidante, he reveals some of the underlying anxieties he harbors about being
Asian. His relationships with women, he feels, are always compromised by the various prej-
udices imposed on him by others. In this particular instance, he is self-conscious about his
own abilities to satisfy his lovers and wonders if there may be something to a particular
stereotype, one embedded in the very title of Tomine’s graphic novel that causes him not
to “measure up” (Figure 5.1).
Figure 5.1. Adrian Tomine. Shortcomings. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly, 2007. 57.
Indeed, racial prejudice and the struggles for equality are the defining themes in several
other recent comics. In a graphic novel published in 2009, writer Robert Morales and artist
Kyle Baker transform the legend of Captain America — who, along with Superman is most
closely linked to the American ideal — not only to bring attention to the history of race in
our country, but also to draw connections between the forms of marginalization and dis-
enfranchisement experienced by various ethnic communities. In Captain America: Truth,
Morales and Baker reveal the untold story of Isaiah Bradley, the black version of Captain
America whose powers were the result of secret government tests on African Americans dur-
ing the Second World War. In this way, the authors are able to bring into their narrative
the historical facts surrounding the Tuskegee syphilis experiments conducted on black Amer-
icans between 1932 and 1972, as well as reference the more recent rumors of nefarious gov-
ernment involvement in the cocaine and AIDS epidemics within the African American
community. Morales and Baker also use their superhero comic to draw parallels between
the plight of black Americans and the various horrors experienced by European Jews during
the 1930s and 1940s. Such comparisons are not intended as a way to “one up” the Jews or
show that some ethnic communities have it worse than others. Far from it. The way that
the authors present their version of Captain America has everything to do with the solidarity
experienced by certain marginalized communities where a discussion of the tragedies expe-
riences by one draws much-needed attention to the injustices experienced by the other (Fig-
ure 5.2).
Other recent authors also use African American history as the gist of their comics.
James Sturm and Rich Tommaso tap into the biography of the famous black baseball player,
Satchel Paige, as a way of discussing the Jim Crow laws in the first half of the twentieth
century. Their graphic novel is told from the perspective of Emmet Wilson, a black Alabama
sharecropper who at one time
dreamed of making it big in the
Negro Leagues. Due to a knee injury
he suffers early in his career, he is
now relegated to the sidelines where
he can only observe the game from a
distance. We see the dynamics of
southern race relations, and its ex-
pression on the baseball diamond,
through Emmet’s eyes, and through
him we witness the prejudice that the
historic Paige was up against (Figure
5.3). Canadian author Ho Che An-
derson is also concerned with history
and comics in his graphic biography
of Martin Luther King. His is not a
mere fawning admiration of King,
but one that attempts to illustrate
the many facets of the civil rights
leader. Anderson’s version begins, in
fact, with an account of Martin Lu-
Figure 5.3. James Sturm and Rich Tommaso. Satchel Paige: ther King as told through the words
Striking Out Jim Crow. New York: Hyperion, 2007. 74. of witnesses. The many narrating
Figure 5.2. Robert Morales and Kyle Baker. Captain America: Truth. New York: Marvel, 2009, n.
pag.
voices that populate the first part of this graphic biography emphasize the many dimensions
of the man, the admirable as well as the suspect. These varying perspectives of King are
given added credence through the very style that Anderson employs. Throughout his text
Anderson presents the civil rights leader though a collage format, overlapping his draw-
ings — many of them revealing strikingly different artistic styles — with photographs from
historical archives as well as illustrated versions of historical documents. Much like the
cubist artist, Anderson uses the collage technique to present his subject from different angles
and through a variety of perspective, demonstrating a more fluid (and human) understanding
of King that resists any attempts to definitively pin down or monumentalize the man as
mere legend. These kinds of cartooning strategies emphasize the sheer magnitude of Martin
Luther King, not only the actual man, but a figure whose significance is based on the very
way we tell our narratives and what they say about the history of race in this country.
The examples mentioned above highlight a wide variety of comics, briefly touching
upon some of the historical themes and race-related issues raised in their composition. Next
we turn to two different graphic novels and provide a closer reading of how they construct
the ethnic other and how those constructions are anchored both to our own subject positions
and to geographic space. In this way, we can see how comic artists can use their medium
as a way to — literally —draw attention to the problems faced by minority cultures, bringing
critical focus not only to the process of ethnic identification, but to the very limitations
faced when representing the other. In Jessica Abel’s La Perdida, we have a text that illustrates
how we represent individuals from ethnic communities other than our own, and how we
may attempt to “place” ourselves within certain marginal contexts. In this 2006 graphic
novel, Abel demonstrates the limits of ethnic representation and does so through the prob-
lematic desires that her protagonist embodies. La Perdida is the story of Carla Olivares, a
young twenty-something woman who, as the title suggests, is a lost girl, estranged from her
Mexican father yet uncomfortable with her privileged American upbringing, which is linked
to her mother. She travels south of the border to discover the Mexican half of her family
roots, filled with idealistic and even distorted notions about what she might find. In an
effort to escape the label of “tourist,” she takes a teaching job in Mexico City and becomes
deeply involved in the lives of several working-class locals who live on the edge of the law.
This form of dialectical engagement with Mexican culture is underscored throughout La
Perdida. There are several occasions where Carla is forced to confront the true nature of her
stay in Mexico City. In one scene, for example, she meets her former boyfriend, Harry, and
his expatriate friends at a local bar, and there they have a violent argument. She accuses
him of exploiting the culture for his own artistic purposes — he is a journalist who wants
to be a writer like Jack Kerouac — and he condemns her as a simple-minded tourist. He
asks her at one point, “You think because you go to art galleries and the fucking pyramids
you know what’s going on in this country? You ... poseur. You tourist. You don’t even speak
the language” (57). And he’s right. At this point in the narrative Carla doesn’t even know
the language of the culture she wishes to embrace. This irony is brought home later in the
novel during a conversation with Memo, an older native of Mexico City who subscribes to
an antiquated, albeit incisive, Marxist ideology. Although Memo stands as the polar opposite
of the journalist Harry — each despises the other — he, too, sees the precariousness of Carla’s
situation and even frames her as a cultural colonizer, using language similar to that of Carla’s
condemnation of Harry. “You come in here bringing your cultural assumptions,” he accuses
her, “and then you think you can pick and choose nice bits of our messy culture! ... You
make judgments and you take what you want!” (104). In these scenes, Carla comes face to
face with the reality underlying her Mexico experiences and her desires to adopt a Chicana
identity. What Carla is slow to realize, but what we as readers see through Abel’s critical
presentation, is that she has more in common with Harry and consumer culture than she
cares to admit (Figure 5.5).
She discovers through the course of the graphic novel that instead of finding herself
through an acquisition of ethnic signifiers — of picking and choosing the “nice bits of our
messy culture,” as Memo puts it — she actually loses sight of the person she once was. Abel
presents this effectively in the visual contexts that frame her text. The story of Carla’s expe-
riences in Mexico City is narrated through flashbacks. When the novel begins, we find that
Carla lives in Chicago, having once resided south of the border and returned to reflect upon
her past. The memories of her Mexican experiences are triggered during a visit to Chicano
neighborhood. In the first part of the narrative frame, Abel intersperses representations of
Carla having lunch at a Chicago taqueria with images from her time spent in Mexico —
actual paneled images that we will encounter later in the novel — setting up the textual
space where Carla as a figure in her own narrative visually exists in both the present and
the past. However, she closes out her narrative frame at the very end of the book by having
her protagonist fade from sight. After telling her story, Carla’s face becomes lost in the
crowd, leaving us with only her voice presented in subjective narration boxes, the comics
Figure 5.5. Jessica Abel. La Perdida. New York: Pantheon, 2006. 217.
equivalent of a cinematic voiceover. We see her in the upper two panels of the closing pages,
but as the focalizing “eye” of the cartoonist pulls back, we find it difficult to locate her, so
that by the close of the novel, she has completely exited the narrative space — and has literally
been exiled from the text’s visual narrative. Her attempts to embrace her Mexican heritage
are aborted, leaving her subjectively with nowhere to go. In these closing scenes, at least
visually, Carla literally becomes a “lost girl” (Figure 5.6).
The risks of ethnic representation is also one of the central themes in Ben Katchor’s
1998 graphic novel, The Jew of New York, a sprawling narrative that is set in 1830s New
York City and deals with a host of eccentric characters. In it, Katchor critiques various acts
of racial objectification and argues against an essentialized ethnic identity. He does so by
linking qualities that have traditionally been used to define the Jewish subject, such as those
surrounding the physical body to those of geography. Indeed, as we notice from the very
beginning of Katchor’s text, in an extended spread that consumes both the inside front
cover and its facing page, physiological and geographic space are inextricably linked when
defining his version of New York — a city that has historically been linked to Jews in America.
What we see in the opening pages is a schematic drawing of the Lake Erie Soda-Water
Company, the brainchild of Francis Oriole, one of the many unconventional characters in
Katchor’s novel, whose dream is to carbonate all of Lake Erie and then pipe the seltzer
directly into the homes and businesses of New York City. The proposed pipelines are repro-
Figure 5.6. Jessica Abel. La Perdida. New York: Pantheon, 2006. 5.

duced as arterial passages, pumping the “healthful” soda water that will aid the digestion
(and benefit the body politic) of all city residents.
The Jew of New York is a meandering and heteroglossic narrative, comprised of several
storylines that weave to and fro and interlink in ways reminiscent of a Robert Altman film.
In the graphic novel, Ben Katchor brings together all of his diverse voices to address the
question: what does it mean to be a Jew? In answering that question, Katchor metaphorically
connects the body of the Jew and the “body” of nineteenth-century New York in order to
map out the possibilities of Jewish identity in late twentieth-century America. Indeed,
throughout The Jew of New York Katchor presents a series of characters who refuse to be
pinned down to any one place or who seem to carry their “home space” with them, turtle-
like, in their many wanderings. For example, Enoch Letushim, the Palestinian Jew and
recent immigrant to the city, takes his homeland with him. He appears sorely out-of-place
when he first arrives, wearing apparel that not only draws attention to his status as “other,”
but also leads some to question his authenticity as a Jew, a “professional imposter,” as one
of the city dwellers calls him (42). He carries with him a bag of soil from the Holy Land,
selling it to place in burial sites, assuming that New York Jews will want to be laid to rest
within proximity to the real Jewish homeland. Not only does Enuch’s modest occupation
foreground the problem of a centered Jewish space — his “Holy Land in a bag” is more or
less a “portable” homeland — but his uncertain status as a Jew, at least to those in New York
City, raises questions about ethnic authenticity and how we define it.
Another philosopher of ethnic difference is Vervel Kunzo, the Jewish Berliner working
for the German organization, the Society for Culture and Science of the Jews of New York
City. At one point in the narrative he explains to Nathan Kishon — once a kosher butcher,
but now a man known for his near-naked form — that the fleshing has helped accelerate
Jewish assimilation. The silk full-body stocking, worn by those in the dramatic arts, gives
the illusion of nakedness, thereby enticing Jews to leave their ghettos and enjoy the titillation
of urban culture. What is important here, especially as it relates to the ethnic body and space,
is not only that Jews are being drawn out of their geographic enclosures, but that physical
distinctions, through the use of fleshings, are being erased. If we consider a Jewish body clad
in these theatric garments, where differences of appearance are under erasure, it leads us
right back to a question raised in the case of Enoch Letushim: is or isn’t this person a Jew?
And it is Vervel Kunzo, the philosophic Berliner visiting the United States, who sheds
light on the significance of all of this, bringing together references to space and Jewishness
as well as the themes of assimilation and authenticity. He tells Nathan Kishon toward the
end of the book that the Jew is not like a museum piece, fixed and preserved in space, but
ever-changing and subject to ongoing metamorphosis, depending on where he or she might
be at the moment. Such an observation is significant coming from Kunzo, a man who is
miles from his native land of Berlin and who himself is clothed in an Indian rubber suit.
As is the case with the theatric fleshings; Kunzo’s rubber suit completely erases any bodily
distinctions of difference, and this, along with his separation from his native land, makes
him in many ways a wandering or unanchored Jew. What is more, Kunzo literally has the
last word in the graphic novel, and he does so reading from a pamphlet concerning the
Jewish origins in America (Figure 5.7).
This brings us back to the issue of ethnic identity as a function of geographic space.
As the last half of the novel unfolds, and there are more frequent ruminations on Jewish
links to the New World, Katchor forces us to question not only the foundations of Jewish-
ness, but our conceptions of American origins in a larger sense. These speculations are
Figure 5.7. Ben Katchor. The Jew of New York. New York: Pantheon, 1998. 85.
brought to a head, appropriately enough, with the American Hotel, a location where most
of the action in the novel takes place and the nexus for almost all of the book’s characters.
Enoch Letushim asks a porter about the history of the hotel. (And it’s not insignificant here
that we have a recent immigrant asking an African American porter about the origins, and
the ownership, of a hotel bearing the name of the nation.) The hotel employee describes
the property’s history, taking Enoch back to the times of Dutch settlers, when it was nothing
more than a “ropewalk on the outskirts of the city.” But he doesn’t stop there, for in the
last panel on that page, looking up at a Native American comes down the hotel staircase,
the porter says to Enoch, “and before that ... you’ll have to ask an Indian” (48). By linking
Jews and Native Americans in this way, Ben Katchor is “legitimizing” the American cre-
dentials of the Jews. What is more, given the sheer fluidity of identity throughout this
graphic narrative, especially as it applies to space and the ethnic subject, Katchor is also
expanding our understanding of Jewish identity in America, and spatializing it within the
context of other marginal groups. There are few images more powerful in The Jew of New
York than the last panel of the history of the American hotel: the Native American is descend-
ing from his hotel space, the Jewish immigrant is asking about the space, and the African
American porter is situated in-between carrying someone’s bags. Here, as throughout The
Jew of New York, Ben Katchor uses the space of the comics panel to map out the ever-chang-
ing arrangement of the ethnic, specifically Jewish, subject in America (Figure 5.8).
These are just some of the ways in which comics and graphic novels raise ethno-racial
awareness and illustrate, literally, how we represent various ethnic communities, the process
of racial marginalization, the dynamics underlying class and minority status, and the links
between physical space and the multicultural community. For the educator, these comics
can become engaging points of debate for how we have come to frame our understanding
Figure 5.8. Ben Katchor. The Jew of New York. New York: Pantheon, 1998. 48.
of “the ethnic” and “otherness.” The graphic narratives mentioned in this essay, those used
as illustrative examples, are just the tip of the iceberg. There are many, many other examples
of comics that highlight, either intentionally or unintentionally, the ways in which race and
ethnicity(and along that those, class, gender, and sexual orientation(have informed our
understandings and definitions of Americanness. For both the scholar and the teacher,
comics can be an invaluable resource in exploring cultural diversity and how it has historically
defined our nation. Given the visual nature of the medium, and given the sheer volume of
genres and styles to choose from, comics can effectively draw our attention to some of the
most pressing cultural issues facing us today. They are for many educators an untapped
resource of boundless classroom potential.
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Anderson, Ho Che. King: A Comics Biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2005. Print.
Eisner, Will. Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative. Tamarac, FL: Poorhouse Press, 1996. Print.
Hernandez, Gilbert. “Palomar and Beyond: An Interview with Gilbert Hernandez.” Interview with Derek Parker
Royal. MELUS 32.3 (2007): 221–46. Print.
Katchor, Ben. The Jew of New York. New York: Pantheon, 1998. Print.
McCloud, Scott. Reinventing Comics: How Imagination and Technolog y Are Revolutionizing an Art Form. New
York: Perennial-Harper, 2000. Print.
_____. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: Perennial-Harper, 1993. Print.
Morales, Robert, and Kyle Baker. Captain America: Truth. New York: Marvel, 2009. Print.
O’Neil, Denny, and Neal Adams. “No Evil Shall Escape My Sight!” Green Lantern/Green Arrow #76 (Apr. 1970),
National Comics Publications, DC Comics. Print.
Pustz, Matthew J. Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Believers. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi,
1999. Print.
Spiegelman, Art. Complete Maus. New York: Pantheon, 1996. Print.
_____. “Mightier Than the Sorehead.” Nation 17 Jan. 1994: 45+. Print.
Sturm, James, and Rich Tommaso. Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow. New York: Hyperion, 2007. Print.
Tomine, Adrian. Shortcomings. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly, 2007. Print.
Yang, Gene Luen. American Born Chinese. New York: First Second, 2006. Print.
Zurier, Rebecca. “Classy Comics.” Rev of The History of the Comic Strip: The Nineteenth Century, by David Kun-
zle, America’s Great Comic-Strip Artists, by Richard Marschall, Comics as Culture, by M. Thomas Inge, The
Great American Comic Strip: One Hundred Years of Cartoon Art, by Judith O’Sullivan, Batman: Arkham Asy-
lum, A Serious House on Serious Earth, by Grant Morrison and Dave McKean, and Raw: Vol. 2, No. 2:
Required Reading for the Post-Literate, by Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly. Art Journal 50.3 (1991): 98–
103. Print.
6. Teaching Asian American
Graphic Narratives in a
“Post-Race” Era
ANNE CONG-HUYEN and
CAROLINE KYUNGAH HONG
In contemporary time popular and intellectual figures as disparate as Oprah Winfrey

and Paul Gilroy have sought to herald a post-race era and a post-race critical paradigm.
The 2008 presidential race, in particular, prompted journalists and political pundits across
the nation and the world to claim that the election of Barack Obama as the first black Pres-
ident would not only be a landmark victory in United States history and racial politics, but
would prove that the nation had transcended — indeed was beyond — race. These celebratory
and problematic statements now appear naïve and idealistic, especially in light of recent
incidents, such as the arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., at his home in July 2009 and the
revelation of racially offensive comments made by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in
January 2010. The ensuing discussions of these events have underscored how far we have
not come in terms of race and racism.
It is in this context that this chapter examines Asian American graphic narratives,
which have had to contend with a long legacy of visual imagery that has reified stereotypes
of Asian Americans as the yellow peril, the perpetual foreigner, and the model minority.
Traces of figures like the “heathen Chinee,” widely popular in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, persist in contemporary United States visual media. In addition to the
aforementioned incidents, recent episodes in United States popular culture — such as con-
troversies over racist cartoons published in newspapers at Dartmouth College and the Uni-
versity of California at Berkeley, and outrage over decisions to cast white actors in Asian
roles in the live-action film adaptations of the animated Nickelodeon series Avatar: The Last
Airbender and Platinum Studio’s comic book series The Weapon— further challenge assump-
tions that we now live in a “post-racial” world.1 Events like these nearly overshadow an
emergent tradition of Asian American graphic narrative that is garnering critical attention
and gaining popularity with diverse audiences — evident, for example, in the success of the
first Asian American ComiCon held in New York City in July 2009.
This chapter discusses strategies and practices for incorporating graphic narratives into
undergraduate Asian American literature courses. Rather than differentiating between these
texts and more traditionally “literary” material, we aim to interrogate what counts as liter-
80
6 . Teaching Asian American Graphic Narratives (Cong-Huyen / Hong) 81
ature in order to actively engage our students in the work of canon formation. Because of
the form’s accessibility, intimacy, and universality, as well as its facilitation of heightened
identification and the integral role of the reader (McCloud 36, 68), the graphic narrative
is an effective medium for promoting literacy and intellectual inquiry both in and out of
the classroom. Furthermore, as Derek Parker Royal observes, graphic narratives “are well
suited to dismantle those very assumptions that problematize ethnic representation, especially
as they find form in visual language. They can do this by particularizing the general, thereby
undermining any attempts at subjective erasure through universalization” (9). The form’s
interplay of words and images and its negotiation of both the visible and the invisible are
especially significant because of popular depictions of Asian Americans and their ambiguous
socio-historical position as “the national abject” (Shimakawa 3).
Graphic memoirs such as Henry Yoshitaka Kiyama’s The Four Immigrants Manga, Miné
Okubo’s Citizen 13660, and GB Tran’s Vietnamerica contribute to discussions of distinct
Asian American histories such as immigration, exclusion, and internment, and graphic
novels such as Jason Shiga’s Double Happiness, Derek Kirk Kim’s Good As Lily, and Adrian
Tomine’s Shortcomings illuminate recurring themes of citizenship and belonging, gender
and sexuality, coming of age, hyphenated and hybrid identities, and the complex nature of
stereotypes. This chapter focuses specifically on American Born Chinese and Secret Identities:
The Asian American Superhero Antholog y, two particularly productive texts for Asian Amer-
ican and literary studies classrooms. Despite the differences in their use of the form — the
former is an award-winning graphic novel, while the latter is a topsy-turvy collection of
short pieces — together these two works enable instructors to use diverse methodologies and
tools to facilitate student learning and engagement with course materials and themes,
whether through more traditional literary analysis or larger historical and cultural critique.
The following two sections demonstrate two different approaches to teaching Asian American
graphic narratives and include discussion questions and sample assignments that can be
implemented in the classroom. Though Asian American artists have long been important
contributors to comics in the United States, there has been, till recently, an absence of Asian
American protagonists and stories. Asian American graphic narratives offer alternative rep-
resentations to dominant stereotypical images and demonstrate the diversity of Asian Amer-
ican cultural productions and their potential impact on the future of graphic narrative and
the larger United States cultural landscape.
Teaching American Born Chinese: A Close Reading Approach

Published in 2006, Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese was the first graphic
novel to be nominated for a National Book Award and the first graphic novel to win the
American Library Association’s Michael L. Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Lit-
erature. With roots in both Asian and American popular culture, and touching on familiar
themes of Asian American literature, the graphic novel’s critical acclaim and commercial
success make it arguably one of the most important Asian American works of the past decade
and an exemplary text for literary analysis.
American Born Chinese is comprised of three seemingly separate yet parallel plotlines
that are intertwined. The first story is a retelling of the immensely popular legend of the
Monkey King, one of the protagonists in the classical Chinese novel, Journey to the West
and a beloved and ubiquitous heroic figure in Asian and Asian American popular culture.2
Yang is not the first — nor will he likely be the last — Asian American to rewrite this particular
legend. As Binbin Fu notes, “The legendary trickster figure has been repeatedly reimagined
by Chinese American writers as a source of cultural strength, a symbol of subversion and
resistance, and a metaphor for cross-cultural and interracial negotiation” (275). In reworking
the tale of this mythic hero in the form of a graphic narrative, Yang also offers the Monkey
King as “a powerful alternative image to the likes of Superman, Batman, and Spider-Man,”
along with the other white superheroes who dominate the world of comics (Fu 275).
Despite being an ultimately heroic figure, the prideful and immature Monkey King in
American Born Chinese is in desperate need of “his own journey of transformation to enlight-
enment” (Chen 27). The arc of his bildungsroman is aptly illustrated through the recurring
symbol of shoes. The graphic novel begins with the Monkey King being denied entry into
a heavenly dinner party for not wearing shoes, and this lack is a sign of his simian difference.
As the bouncer at the door insists, “You may be a king — you may even be a deity — but
you are still a monkey” (15). Humiliated and full of self-loathing, the Monkey King returns
to his kingdom of Flower-Fruit Mountain and issues a decree to his subjects: “All monkeys
must wear shoes” (55). In this panel, several monkeys are depicted wearing shoes and hanging
from trees, and the majority of them have confused and even horrified looks on their faces.
Yang suggests here that the Monkey King’s decree is a misguided and harmful attempt to
suppress their nature as monkeys.
The culmination of the Monkey King’s bildung is likewise marked with shoes. With
the help of the monk Wong Lai-Tsao, the Monkey King gains self-acceptance and redemp-
tion, and the monk urges his new disciple, “On this journey ... we have no need ... for
shoes” (159). The Monkey King is able to cast aside his shoes, along with the self-hatred
that they represent. The final panel of this scene shows the Monkey King and Wong Lai-
Tsao leaning on each other and walking side by side into the distance toward a bright star,
trailing their bare footprints in the sand, with the shoes discarded in the foreground (160).
This image not only signals the Monkey King’s transformation but also alludes to the popular
Christian poem “Footprints.” This allusion speaks to one of the most controversial aspects
of American Born Chinese, namely the Christianization of an originally Buddhist narrative.
In his adaptation of Journey to the West, Yang refigures the Buddha as a Christian god — the
omniscient and omnipotent Tze-Yo-Tzuh, or “He Who Is” (67), the creator of “all of exis-
tence” (70). It is Tze-Yo-Tzuh who intervenes to teach the Monkey King humility, trapping
him under a mountain of rock for five hundred years, a revision that omits the role of the
bodhisattva Guanyin, the goddess of mercy. Yang has stated in interviews, “the two biggest
pieces of my identity are my ethnicity and my religion,” and his changes to the original
narrative reflect that identification. Yang is especially drawn to “an idea within Christianity
of intention behind your identity, that there is this outside agency that actually intended
you to be who you are. Asian Americans tend to be caught in a place where we don’t fit
into our culture of origin and we don’t fit into the culture we find ourselves in. Thus, this
idea of intention is very powerful” (Woan). Yang’s choice to Christianize this Buddhist nar-
rative is inextricably tied to his articulation of the cultural conflicts experienced by many
Asian Americans and is a crucial component of his uniquely “Asian American take” on an
already widely retold story (Woan).
Yang’s reimagining of the Monkey King legend as an Asian American story provides
a neat parallel to the second plotline of American Born Chinese, which revolves around Jin
Wang, a second-generation Chinese American boy grappling with his ethnic identity. Jin’s
racial and subject formation is at the heart of the graphic novel, and his struggles for self-
acceptance and belonging tie all three stories together. His bildung is a familiar tale about
growing up Asian American and negotiating a hyphenated identity and the isolating feelings
of shame and self-hatred that often accompany those experiences (cf. Frank Chin’s Donald
Duk and Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake). When Jin’s family moves from the ethnic enclave
of San Francisco’s Chinatown to a predominately white suburban neighborhood, he encoun-
ters racial prejudice for the first time. On his first day of third grade at his new school, the
ironically named “Mayflower Elementary,” Jin is mistakenly introduced by his teacher as
“Jing Jang,” a recent immigrant from China, and subjected to racist comments and rumors
from his classmates (30–31). Yang represents these seemingly innocuous racist remarks, like
the stereotype that “Chinese people eat dogs” (31), as funny and sad — funny because the
teacher’s and students’ ignorant assumptions are ridiculous, and sad because these instances
are so recognizable in their banality. Yang reminds us that these and other subtle manifes-
tations of racism persist — in the home, at school, in popular culture — and have deep con-
sequences for their victims, who are traumatized and alienated, even from each other, as is
the case with Jin and Suzy Nakamura, the only other Asian in his class.
This early and formative scene for Jin is echoed in word and image a few pages later,
when Wei-Chen Sun, a Taiwanese immigrant, arrives at the school and is introduced by
the teacher, who ironically stands in front of a large map of the United States, as “Chei-
Chen Chun” (36). Looking at these two pages side by side, and their repetition with a cru-
cial difference, emphasizes the prevalence of racism, both from outside and also within
Asian American communities. This second scene suggests the profound impact of the first
scene — the speed and ease with which such racism is internalized. Jin now sits in the very
spot in the panel previously occupied by the racist boy Timmy, and rather than feeling sym-
pathy for or solidarity with Wei-Chen, he thinks to himself, “Something made me want
to beat him up” (36). This violent impulse, along with Jin’s insistence that Wei-Chen “speak
English” (37), allows Jin to assert his difference, exposing his anxieties about being perceived
as similarly foreign and strange. Though Jin and Wei-Chen do quickly become friends, Jin’s
racial anxieties continue to seethe beneath the surface. Years later, when Suzy Nakamura,
now Wei-Chen’s girlfriend, tearfully confesses to Jin, “Today, when Timmy called me a ...
a chink, I realized ... deep down inside ... I kind of feel like that all the time” (187), something
stirs in Jin. The bottom-right panel of that page shows Jin getting zapped by lightning,
perhaps a sign of a revelation that unfortunately never comes, as he is unable to articulate
to Suzy that he feels the same and instead betrays his friendships with Suzy and Wei-Chen
by kissing her. Jin later declares to Wei-Chen, “she can do better than an F.O.B. like you”
(191), revealing yet again his destructive internalized racism and almost irrevocably damaging
his bond with Wei-Chen.
Jin, like the Monkey King, is in need of transformation, and “transformers” and trans-
formations are a central motif in American Born Chinese, whether good or bad, literal or
metaphorical. Jin and Wei-Chen’s friendship is sparked by their mutual love of transforming
toy robots. Wei-Chen’s robot monkey is later revealed to have been a gift from the Monkey
King as a reminder of who he truly is — a monkey and the Monkey King’s son. Wei-Chen,
who is sent to live among humans “while remaining free of human vice” as a “test of virtue”
(217), is transformed for the worse and set on a path of failure as a result of Jin’s betrayal.
When Jin is reunited with his former friend at the end of the graphic novel, a single grayscale
panel reveals that, despite Wei-Chen’s transformed appearance — sunglasses, jewelry, ciga-
rettes, and a souped-up car, all of which indicate his embrace of human vice — Wei-Chen
is still a monkey boy inside (229).
There are other superficial transformations, such as Jin changing his hair to look more
like his white classmate, Greg (97–98). But even this minor alteration speaks to a larger
transformation. Jin’s new hairdo signals his secret racial fantasy of becoming white and fore-
shadows his overnight transformation into the blond-haired, blue-eyed Danny. Early in the
graphic novel, Jin tells the Chinese herbalist’s wife that he wants to be a Transformer when
he grows up, indicative of his desire to be something and someone else, to which she
responds, “It’s easy to become anything you wish ... so long as you’re willing to forfeit your
soul” (28–29). Though Jin does not initially heed this warning, Yang repeatedly insists that
there are deep costs that result from such false transformations. The moral of the story is
that each of us are “more than meets the eye” (28) and that true transformation has to do
with embracing who you really are, whatever that means — a simplistic message but appro-
priate for the graphic novel’s intended young audience.
Through the graphic novel’s third story, which centers on Danny and his cousin Chin-
Kee, Jin ultimately discovers that this false transformation into Danny does not solve his
problems or reconcile his severely conflicted sense of identity. Chin-Kee is the ultimate
composite of the most offensive stereotypes of Chinese American (and more broadly Asian
American) men. From the panel that first introduces Chin-Kee, there are an overwhelming
number of visual markers that signify his racial difference — his slit eyes, buck teeth, pigtail,
vaguely Chinese dress, improbable accent, the Chinese takeout containers he apparently
uses for luggage, and of course his name, a homonym for a popular racial epithet for Asian
Americans (Figure 6.1). This image bears more than a trace of “the predominant image of
the slit-eyed, pig-tailed, and buck-toothed ‘Heathen Chinee’ that originated from the nine-
teenth-century cartoon culture [that] has apparently left a lasting imprint on the popular
American imagination” (Fu 274). These widely circulated images were originally derived
from Bret Harte’s “Plain Language from Truthful James” (1870), one of the most popular
American poems of the nineteenth century. The poem tells the story of an Irish laborer,
Bill Nye, and a Chinese immigrant, Ah Sin, the “heathen Chinee,” both of whom are cheat-
ing at a game of cards. The eponymous “truthful James,” however, only criticizes Ah Sin
and stands idly by as Nye attacks him. Intended to satirize the pervasive anti–Chinese sen-
timent of the time, the poem was misinterpreted and misappropriated as condemning and
mocking the Chinese and was even read aloud at anti–Chinese rallies. Harte himself did
not disabuse the public of these misreadings. This historical failure of satire speaks to the
complex nature of humor, particularly its dependence on the audience to shape its mean-
ing.
Yang’s revival of the “heathen Chinee” image risks reifying this disturbing yet familiar
set of stereotypes. However, Yang uses the exaggeration of caricature to turn these stereotypes
on their heads, and the absurd, over-the-top manner in which he portrays Chin-Kee allows
us to laugh despite ourselves. Yang suggests, in that first panel with Chin-Kee mentioned
above, in which the character looms large, filling the frame, that Chin-Kee (and the visual
legacy that he stands in for) is monstrous. This grotesque appearance is later reinforced by
his outrageous behavior: Chin-Kee foams at the mouth at the prospect of wreaking havoc
in Danny’s school, comments repeatedly on his excessive libido and his desire “to find Amel-
lican girl to bind feet and bear Chin-Kee’s children” (12), and literalizes a racist childhood
rhyme by peeing in Danny’s friend’s soda. When Danny finally has had enough and attacks
Chin-Kee, Chin-Kee’s final act is the unleashing of a special brand of kung fu with ridiculous
moves like “Mongorian foot in face” and “Mooshu fist!” (207–08). These and other scenes
provide an opportunity to discuss the function of stereotypes in comics and graphic nar-
Figure 6.1. Chin-Kee comes to visit Danny. Gene Luen Yang. American Born Chinese. New York:
First Second, 2006. 48.
ratives. As acclaimed comics writer and artist Will Eisner has noted, “the stereotype is a fact
of life in the comics medium. It is an accursed necessity — a tool of communication that is
an inescapable ingredient in most cartoons” (11).
The most obvious sign that Chin-Kee’s character is meant as a satire of Asian American
stereotypes is the framing of his plotline as a television sitcom entitled “Everyone Ruvs
Chin-Kee” (43). Most of the panels featuring Chin-Kee are lined at the bottom with “ha’s”
and “clap’s,” a visual applause and laugh track that alludes to the canned laughter and
applause that is a staple of TV comedies and indicates we are not to take Chin-Kee seriously.
The sitcom frame makes Chin-Kee a representation within a representation, allowing Yang
to create distance between the critical message of the graphic novel for his young readers
and the stereotypes that Chin-Kee potentially perpetuates. The most shocking and climactic
transformations of the novel are when Danny turns out to be Jin and Chin-Kee is revealed
to be the Monkey King in disguise. The Monkey King purposefully chooses to come to Jin
in the form of Chin-Kee in order to “serve as [Jin’s/Danny’s] conscience — as a signpost to
[his] soul” (221), to manifest and mirror for Jin/Danny his deepest, darkest anxieties about
his racial difference. The fact that Chin-Kee is a performance enables Yang to effectively
destabilize the stereotype and to preclude the failure of satire, as was the case with Harte’s
poem.
Each of the main characters of American Born Chinese— Jin/Danny, the Monkey King,
and Wei-Chen — are transformed by embracing their “true” selves. Moreover, the work as
a whole attempts to transform the limited field of Asian American representation in United
States popular culture. Historically, the mediums of cartoons, comics, and comedy have
been used to make fun of Asian Americans and to perpetuate stereotypes of corporeal, cul-
tural, and social difference. Yang gestures toward this fact by having Danny attend Oliphant
High School, an allusion to political cartoonist Pat Oliphant, who was occasionally accused
of drawing racist caricatures, particularly of Asian Americans. Perhaps no one in recent pop
culture history illuminates the ambiguous relationship between Asian Americans and humor
more persuasively than 2004 American Idol contestant William Hung, who Yang parodies
when he depicts Chin-Kee performing Ricky Martin’s pop song “She Bangs” atop a table
in the school library, much to the humiliation of Jin/Danny (202–03). William Hung, who
became famous for embodying stereotypes of Asian Americans as both perpetual foreigners
and the model minority, is just one figure in “a racially biased, dehumanizing comic gallery
of Asian Americans” (Fu 274), which includes Charlie Chan, Hop Sing from the popular
television series Bonanza (1959–1973), and Long Duk Dong from John Hughes’ popular
teen-comedy film Sixteen Candles (1984), to name a few. What makes William Hung such
a complicated figure is that he is not, like Chin-Kee, a fictional character, but a person who
managed to capitalize on his social position as the butt of the joke and catapult himself into
international celebrity. The way his image has been manipulated in the mainstream media
certainly perpetuates Asian American stereotypes, but he is troubling precisely because he
is simultaneously an object and an agent of humor.3 Chin-Kee is troubling in similar ways
and thus embodies and destabilizes not only historical images like the “heathen Chinee,”
but also a range of contemporary stereotypes.
Yang tackles head-on complex questions of humor and satire for Asian Americans, as
both objects and agents of humor, with the final image of the graphic novel, which is found
inside the back cover, outside the main narrative structure. The image is an illusion to the
Back Dorm Boys, two Chinese art school students, Wei Wei and Huang Yixin, who became
international YouTube sensations in 2005 with their hilarious lip-synced performances of
the Backstreet Boys’ pop ballads “As Long as You Love Me” and “I Want It That Way.”
Yang has argued that there is a profound difference in the ways that William Hung and the
Back Dorm Boys are funny: “In Backdorm Boys, the funniness comes out of them, but in
William Hung, the funniness comes from outside, from his context, from the way American
culture perceives him” (Woan). By having Jin and Wei-Chen stand in for the Back Dorm
Boys in this final image, Yang offers a meta-comedic alternative to William Hung and
implicitly critiques any humor and laughter at the expense of Asian Americans.
Teaching Secret Identities: A Cultural Historical Approach

While Yang’s groundbreaking graphic novel is well suited for in-depth literary analysis,
it is not necessarily indicative of most popular graphic narratives. In a cultural climate del-
uged with multimillion-dollar movies, action figures, cartoons, and inexpensive comic books
depicting superheroes, social and cultural critique is often veiled in the guise of almost
inhuman heroes of mythic proportions. These particular comic books and their adaptations
resonate with and parallel the “outsider/alien” positions of immigrants and racialized subjects.
For Asian Americans, however, there is a disconnect that prevents true identification with
these characters. Readers often desire to see themselves in the heroes, as the editors of Secret
Identities express in their preface, rather than identifying with a super-powered mutant or
a chemically enhanced brute. Though the comics industry has had (and currently has) many
prominent and successful Asian American artists (such as Jim Lee, Jae Lee, Greg Pak, Sean
Chen, and many others), there has been an absence of significant Asian or Asian American
heroes. In this context, Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Antholog y offers its
readers just that: Asian American heroes. Countless Asian American comic-book fans, who
never saw themselves in their favorite reading material, can now find superheroes, anti-
heroes, and extraordinary everyday men and women who are clearly of Chinese, Vietnamese,
Japanese, Korean, South Asian, Pacific Islander descent, and yet also American.
Published in April 2009, Secret Identities is comprised of forty-eight comic strips, short
graphic narratives, concept sketches, and critical pieces, by over fifty Asian American artists,
writers, filmmakers, and entertainers. Though not always cohesive or consistent, the collec-
tion is an ambitious attempt to present a collective yet diverse Asian American voice that
directly addresses, critiques, and counters stereotypes of Asian Americans, many of which
are also addressed at length in Yang’s American Born Chinese, and their otherwise invisibility
in popular graphic media. Organized into six sections, the collection attempts to address
different facets of Asian American representation and experience in the context of comic
books and the comics industry: “Section One: War and Remembrance” addresses the history
of Asian Americans from the railroad workers to internment, to the typecasting of Bruce
Lee in The Green Hornet; “Section Two: When Worlds Collide” deals with multiculturalism
and the immigrant or minority experience in the United States; “Section Three: Girl Power”
presents alternative female heroes that resist the hypersexualized dragon lady and submissive
“oriental” woman stereotypes; “Section Four: Many Masks” offers a collection of various
conceptual Asian American superheroes; “Section Five: Ordinary Heroes” addresses issues
of hyphenate identity and family/social units; and “Section Six: From Headline to Hero”
portrays real-life heroes, victims, and “traitors” from United States history (including rein-
terpretations of the tragic Vincent Chin murder and the 1999 Wen Ho Lee scandal). Using
humor, historical narratives, and action stories among their repertoire of narrative techniques,
the collection serves as sharp social critique — at times overt, and at others subtle — of many
of the issues and images that have plagued Asian Americans, going beyond visible concerns
of representation.
This brief description of the collection makes it clear that Secret Identities falls far from
a traditional literary canon, yet despite a lack of so-called “literariness,” the anthology serves
as an incredibly useful pedagogical tool, especially when read and examined alongside other
texts. Excerpts from Secret Identities not only complement works widely taught in Asian
American studies classrooms, but also are effective as standalone texts that work in dialectic
with traditional print texts and in dialogue with the popular media that is so pervasive and
influential in United States culture. What makes this collection valuable is that this inter-
action occurs in a volume that is deceivingly easy to read and accessible for the undergraduate
student who may have no experience with critical race, Asian American, or literary studies.
Here, we focus on a few pieces from the anthology and offer context, reasoning, and sample
tools to demonstrate how these short texts can be used in an Asian American literature
course.
To start, “The Y-Men” cover, a recognizable parody of the iconic cover to Marvel’s
X-Men #1 in 1963, is a satirical piece that serves to introduce the collection, can be used
early on in the class to provoke discussion of changing notions of Asian American in the
United States (Yang et al., 7).4 Instructors can encourage students to comment, discuss, and
explore the images depicted here, which may or may not reflect how they have observed
Asian Americans depicted in United States media and popular culture. “The Y-Men” page
exclaims that the protagonists of this imaginary text are the “The Lamest Stupor-Zeroes of
All!,” which is a direct parody of “The Strangest Super-Heroes of All,” that graces the cover
of The X-Men #1 (Yang et al. 7). This startling statement can serve to initiate a conversation
on major stereotypes of Asian Americans, like the hypersexualized dragon lady Madam X,
the beastly Chinese coolie or “heathen Chinee,” or the contemporary bespectacled Asian
nerd (7). Though only a page in length and with few words, this single page speaks volumes
about the history of Asian Americans in the United States and in the industry by directly
paralleling an existing canonical comic book series that deals specifically with a fictional
marginal population. Rather than laser eyes or telekinetic powers, however, the Asian Amer-
ican characters in this piece are depicted as the boorish, faceless railway worker of the nine-
teenth century, to the Japanese enemy of World War II, to the sexless and boring model
minority in the twentieth century. These figures highlight the prominent representations
of Asian Americans in United States history and cultures, but it also critiques the comics
industry, and other cultural institutions, that allowed this type of gross characterization to
proliferate, through the subtle use of the Comics Code Authority seal in the upper-right-
hand corner. More than just a funny critique of Asian stereotypes, this is a veiled attack of
the damaging politics and policies that have harmed and continue to harm Asian Ameri-
cans.
“The Y-Men” is especially valuable as a way to introduce students to Asian American
literary and cultural criticism. Used as the first text to expose students to the subject matter
of the class, it is a quick read yet rich for discussion. The images and text of the piece can
intrigue students to question the history of Asian Americans in the United States, their rep-
resentations in the media, the power dynamics involved in representing and being repre-
sented, the significance of humor in undermining hegemonic beliefs, and the institutions
that perpetuate these caricatures while excluding Asian Americans. Asking students to ver-
balize an argument being made by the author and artist, and identifying the tools that are
used to do so, helps them to develop skills for critical analysis using a text that is seemingly
“easy” but is actually quite complex and sophisticated in its explicit and subtle critiques of
the cultural hegemony of American comics and the orientalist practices that made Asian
American men sexless villains or sidekicks, and the women sex objects.
Following “The Y-Men,” another productive and short piece is “9066” by Jonathan
Tsuei and Jerry Ma. Named after Executive Order 9066 signed by President Franklin Roo-
sevelt in 1942, this policy opened the door for the internment camps and resulted in the
dislocation of and outright discrimination against 120,000 Japanese Americans, over half
of whom were Nisei and Sansei (second- and third-generation Japanese Americans born in
the United States), and many of whom had never been to Japan (25–28). “9066” depicts
a young Nisei man, a flying superhero, who thought he had been accepted among his Amer-
ican hero peers prior to World War II, only to discover that, when suspicions are high in a
time of war, he ultimately loses any individual identity he had struggled to cultivate for
himself. Instead, he becomes “just another Jap” and a victim of collective guilt imposed
upon him by the dominant society.
Though brief, this piece is highly imaginative in its representation of Japanese American
experiences in World War II, and it deftly points to the tensions, fears, and injustices expe-
rienced by this ethnic community. Read alongside texts like John Okada’s novel No-No Boy,
Jeanne Wakatsuki and James Houston’s memoir Farewell to Manzanar, and Miné Okubo’s
graphic memoir Citizen 13660, “9066” can serve as a starting point to analyze themes present
throughout twentieth-century Japanese American literature. Though very different in form,
length, and content, these texts all explore similar issues, such as questions of nationality
and citizenship, gender and sexuality, and heroism and duty. For example, a single lecture
or discussion can center on how these texts deal with the question of national allegiance
and citizenship in relation to the subject positions of Japanese Americans as outsiders, poten-
tial traitors, and perpetual foreigners. “9066,” for instance, offers a sentimental critique of
the “American dream” through the protagonist’s defeated acceptance of the belief that Asians
can never really be “American” as he abandons his democratic heroic ideals. This resolution,
made in the aftermath of Japanese American internment and World War II, varies with the
suggestions and outcomes present or absent in No-No Boy and Citizen 13660, and can make
a significant impact on those undergraduates unfamiliar with looking comparatively at dif-
ferent texts or critically engaging with fictional accounts of historical events. This type of
lesson would encourage students to engage in analysis of multiple texts and forms and to
look critically at the representations and interpretations of a single historical period as it is
depicted over time.
In contrast to the overt critiques present in “The Y-Men” or “9066” are the more subtle
ones in the stand-out piece, “The Blue Scorpion & Chung” by Gene Luen Yang and Sonny
Liew (63–74). Less specific in its historical context and more engaging with larger cultural
occurrences, “Blue Scorpion” is a not-so-veiled critique and reimagining of the short-lived,
but influential, 1960s television series The Green Hornet, in which Bruce Lee played the
valet, driver, martial arts expert, and sidekick, Kato, to the white newspaper publisher Britt
Reid. Addressing this depiction of Asian Americans as effeminate sidekicks, Gene Yang and
Michael Kang, in their introductory graphic critique to the comic, “Sidekicks,” break down
the problematic recurrence of such phenomena in the original Green Hornet, arguing that
the casting of the “charismatic, good looking, articulate” Bruce Lee as a sidekick “at a time
when sidekicks were kids in shorts who followed the hero around” was “emasculating” and
stereotypical (62). Ultimately, this kind of typecasting led Lee to abandon Hollywood for
Hong Kong and to produce films where he was the hero. As Kang writes, “it’s important
to do what Bruce did. Tell our own stories, on our own terms. The more of us there are
out there telling our stories, the more multifaceted, complex Asian characters we’ll see” (62).
This exchange (depicted as a martial-arts comic strip) articulates the goals of the Secret
Identities collection as a whole and is embedded among graphic narratives that do just that —
present diverse representations of Asian American heroism that resist dominant stereotypes.
Following the piece by Yang and Kang is one such narrative, the story of the brilliant
but underappreciated “sidekick,” Chung, and his drunken, belligerent hero/boss, the Blue
Scorpion. Depicted as a loud-mouthed fool, the Blue Scorpion, rather than being the arche-
typal hero, is more a spoiled child with a hero complex who is constantly being watched
and repeatedly rescued by Chung, who is the real hero in the story. Unlike the Blue Scorpion,
Chung is a hero not only because he is fighting bad guys but also because he is self-sacrific-
ing — putting his own desires to live a “normal” life with his girlfriend on hold in order to
fight injustice. He ultimately sacrifices his love and his own identity when he comes to the
realization that “The Blue Scorpion is bigger than just him. Or me. The Blue Scorpion is
Justice. Sometimes Justice requires sacrifice” (74).
With the new major motion picture adaptation of The Green Hornet released in January
2011, this text is timely and important in addressing the numerous concerns of Asian Amer-
icans in the contemporary moment, when so many argue that we no longer have a “race
problem” in the United States. As Yang and the contributors to Secret Identities have demon-
strated, there is indeed a “race problem”— or more accurately, problems — and one is the
invisibility and dismissal of Asian Americans as subjects in popular culture. In “Blue Scor-
pion,” we see Yang and Liew intentionally co-opting a familiar image of privileged, white
male heroism and reinterpreting him as a flawed racist disgrace. Their reimagining of The
Green Hornet is powerful in a different way than the insidious co-opting and orientalizing
of “Asian” images for American pop culture because of its intent. Rather than lampooning
the white hero for the sake of amusement, they undermine the notion that heroes are white
and Asian Americans are other. Chung is the complex, tortured, and multifaceted hero, and
the Blue Scorpion, the white hero, is the one who needs to be propped up by a superior
man.
Though this initial discussion of Secret Identities has dealt primarily with narrative and
representation, interrogation of the collection’s diverse use of form, style, and space (among
countless other characteristics) can provide even more critical analyses of graphic narrative
as a particularly productive form to undermine and counter accepted histories and images.
Like American Born Chinese, this anthology is another example of the complexities that can
be depicted in the graphic form and how the form engages with other media, especially
compared to The Green Hornet, which has been broadcast in every form, from radio and
television to comic books and films. The historical moment in which this was published
and the purposefulness of the text’s editors and contributors are crucial to this discussion
of Asian Americans as subjects, as opposed to objects, and to the importance of agency in
media. Yang and Kang address the question tangentially, but it is fruitful to ask students
more explicitly why it is important that Asian American readers have Asian American heroes,
and that Asian American artists create them.
The superhero theme that binds the entire collection serves as an important point of
departure that can be applied to any Asian American text. It can be used to encourage stu-
dents, over the course of the term, to look for varying definitions of “heroism” and agency
in different texts. For example, how is Wei-Chen or Suzy Nakamura heroic in American
Born Chinese? What are the conventions of the superhero that are challenged? And how
might the superhero be more or less significant or relevant than an everyday man or woman?
These questions can be applied to texts, audiences, and heroes of any number of underrep-
resented communities and are significant considering the prominence of hero narratives in
American culture. All of these texts, regardless of form, make important statements about
Asian American artists as agents in the construction of a collective yet heterogeneous Asian
American identity, and engage with numerous topics in distinct, productive ways that are
important to the study of Asian American literature and culture.
Sample Discussion Questions on American Born Chinese

1. Why is the graphic narrative an effective way to tell this particular story? How is the
form inseparable from the content of American Born Chinese?
2. Read a summary of Journey to the West. How does Yang adapt and change the legend
of the Monkey King? Why does he make these changes?
3. In an interview, Yang states: “There is an idea within Christianity of intention behind

your identity, that there is this outside agency that actually attended you to be who
you are. Asian Americans tend to be caught in a place where we don’t fit into our
culture of origin and we don’t fit into the culture we find ourselves in. Thus, this
idea of intention is very powerful and that was what I wanted to explore” (Woan).
To what extent is Yang’s retelling of the legend of the Monkey King a Christian alle-
gory?
4. Read Bret Harte’s “Plain Language from Truthful James” (1870), one of the most
popular American poems of the nineteenth century and one of the origins of the
“heathen Chinee” image. Compare and contrast Harte’s use of satire and represen-
tation of Ah Sin with Yang’s use of satire and representation of Chin-Kee.
5. Do you find Yang’s representation of Chin-Kee offensive, funny, or both? Does the
figure of Chin-Kee challenge stereotypes about Asian Americans or perpetuate them?
6. Why do you think Yang framed Chin-Kee’s story as a sitcom? What are the effects
of this framing?
7. Why does the Monkey King choose to visit Jin/Danny in the form of Chin-Kee?
8. What different kinds of transformations happen throughout the text? Who or what
is “more than meets the eye”?
9. How does Yang use humor and satire in American Born Chinese, and for what pur-
poses?
10. Watch YouTube clips of William Hung and the Back Dorm Boys. In an interview,
Yang talks about the difference between William Hung and the Back Dorm Boys in
their relationships to humor:
These are both Asians that are singing American pop songs and they’re both funny, but I
think the reason why they’re funny is really, really different. For the Backdorm Boys, they
mean to be funny and I think they are actually in a sense lampooning American culture
and making fun of Backstreet Boys and boy-bands. On the other hand, William Hung is
almost like a victim. He doesn’t mean to be funny. In Backdorm Boys, the funniness comes
out of them, but in William Hung, the funniness comes from outside, from his context,
from the way American culture perceives him. (Woan)
Do you agree with Yang? Why of why not? What is the significance of that final
image of Jin and Wei-Chen?
Sample Discussion Questions on “The Y-Men”

1. What stereotypes of Asian Americans are represented here? What do they refer to?
How do the authors address those stereotypes? What visual and rhetorical devices do
they use for critical purposes?
2. What specific text does this panel reference and why is that of particular importance?
3. How do the authors contextualize each character? How do they represent historical
specificity?
4. In the upper-right-hand corner, it reads “Approved by the Comics Code Authority”
with the official CCA seal of approval. The CCA, formed in 1954, is known for acting
as the American comic book industry’s de facto censor. What does the use of this seal
suggest here?
5. What argument are Jeff Yang and Jef Castro trying to make in this text?
Sample Discussion Questions on “9066”

1. How does “9066” deal with the Japanese American experience in World War II dif-
ferently or similarly to Farewell to Manzanar and No-No Boy?
2. How does the graphic medium of this superhero alternative history make this text
more or less effective than the novel or memoir form? What is the significance of using
a character that is a superhero as opposed to a war hero or a no-no boy?
3. How is Japanese American gender, masculinity in particular, depicted in this text?
How does this relate to masculinity and sexuality in No-No Boy and Citizen 13660?
4. Discuss the graphic narrative form in both “9066” and Citizen 13660. How are different
visual techniques utilized in each text? What figures emerge? What are the resulting
effects and significance for each text?
Sample Discussion Questions on “The Blue Scorpion & Chung”

1. Compare the narrative of the “The Blue Scorpion” with that of The Green Hornet.
How are the original story and characters adapted or critiqued by Yang and Liew?
2. Where do we see race and racism intersect with gender and sexuality in this text? How
does it address concerns of Asian American masculinity? What specific stereotypes are
they countering and where do you see this occurring in the text?
3. What is significant in the relationship between the Blue Scorpion and Chung?
4. How does the text treat white characters? Is this problematic?
Sample Assignments
1. Do a series of close reading exercises — one panel, then one page or one scene, and so
on — that build up to a longer literary analysis.
2. Choose one panel to analyze closely. What is the relationship between the text and
the image? Are they redundant? Contrasting? Complementary? Or unrelated? (For
definitions of these terms, see Hill.) What is the significance of this panel in relation
to the themes and issues of the work as a whole?
3. Choose one important scene. Take the scene’s images and rewrite the text, or take the
scene’s text and redraw the images.
4. Write and illustrate your own graphic narrative. Include a brief analysis that explicates
the techniques you use.
5. Compare an excerpt from American Born Chinese or Secret Identities with a more “canon-
ical” text from the course (e.g., a novel, play, short story, or poem). Examine the use
of form, both visual and literary, and how each author utilizes it and why. What do
the different forms each accomplish? Is one form more effective than the other?
NOTES
1. For more on the racist cartoons published in newspapers at Dartmouth College and the University of
California at Berkeley, see Yu; “Letters”; and “More Letters.” For more on the controversy over casting for Avatar:
The Last Airbender and The Weapon, see “Last Airbender Primer”; and “Protest the Whitewashing.”
2. For more on the Monkey King, see Chen, Lai, Pearson.

3. For more on the complex figure of William Hung, as well as the mixed reception of Hung by Asian and
Asian American communities, see Guillermo; and Izrael.
4. The Secret Identities website (http://www.secretidentities.org) has a link to a video with close-ups of the
Y-Men comic. The video is titled “In the Beginning” and can also be found on YouTube: http://www.youtube.
com/user/SecretIdentAnthology#p/u/16/zXKIfdBt0Vw.
WORKS CITED
Chen, Irene. “Monkey King’s Journey to the West: Transmission of a Chinese Folktale to Anglophone Children.”
Bookbird 47.1 (2009): 26–33. Print.
Eisner, Will. Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative: Principles and Practices from the Legendary Cartoonist. New
York: W. W. Norton, 2008. Print.
Fu, Binbin. Rev. of American Born Chinese, by Gene Luen Yang. MELUS 32.3 (2007): 274–76. Print.
Gilroy, Paul. Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 2000. Print.
Guillermo, Emil. “William Hung: Racism, or Magic?” SFGate. Hearst Communications, 6 Apr. 2004. Web. 13
Dec. 2011. <http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2004/04/06/eguillermo.DTL>.
Hill, Christian. “Practicing Text-Image Relationships.” Teachingcomics.org. National Association of Comics Art
Educators (NACAE). Web. 13 Dec. 2011. <http://teachingcomics.org/index.php?option=com_content&view
=article&id=129:practicing-text-image-relationships&catid=35:Exercises&Itemid=55>.
Izrael, Jimi. “William Hung: The New American Sambo.” Dissident Voice. Dissident Voice. 20 Mar. 2004. Web.
13 Dec. 2011. <http://dissidentvoice.org/Mar04/izrael0320.htm>.
Lai, Whalen. “From Protean Ape to Handsome Saint: The Monkey King.” Asian Folklore Studies 53.1 (1994):
29–65. Print.
“The Last Airbender Primer.” Racebending.com. 21 Oct. 2009. Web. 13 Dec. 2011. <http://www.racebending.
com/v3/background/the-last-airbender-primer/>.
“Letters to the Editor.” DailyCal.org. Daily Californian. 9 May 2003. Web. 13 Dec. 2011. <http://www.dailycal.
org/article/11562/letters_to_the_editor>.
“More Letters to the Editor.” DailyCal.org. Daily Californian. 6 May 2003. Web. 13 Dec. 2011. <http://www.dai-
lycal.org/article/11500/more_letters_to_the_editor>.
Pearson, J. Stephen. “The Monkey King in the American Canon: Patricia Chao and Gerald Vizenor’s Use of an
Iconic Chinese Character.” Comparative Literature Studies 43.3 (2006): 355–74. Print.
“Protest the Whitewashing in ‘The Weapon.’” Racebending.com. 20 Oct. 2009. Web. 13 Dec. 2011. <http://
www.racebending.com/v3/events/protest-the-whitewashing-in-the-weapon/>.
MELUS 32.7 (2007): 7–22. Print.
Shimakawa, Karen. National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage. Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2002. Print.
Woan, Sunny. “Interview with Gene Luen Yang.” Kartika Review 1 (2007): n. pag. Web. 13 Dec. 2011. <http://
www.kartikareview.com/issue1/1gene.html>.
Yang, Gene Luen. American Born Chinese. New York: First Second, 2006. Print.
Yang, Jeff, Parry Shen, Keith Chow, and Jerry Ma, eds. Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Antholog y.
New York: New Press, 2009. Print.
Yu, Phil. “Racist Comic Strip in The Dartmouth.” Angry Asian Man. 28 Apr. 2008. Web. 13 Dec. 2011. <http://
blog.angryasianman.com/2008/04/racist-comic-strip-in-dartmouth.html>.
7. Graphic Multiculturalism
Miné Okubo’s Citizen 13660
in the Literature Classroom
JESSICA KNIGHT
I first encountered Miné Okubo’s stunning graphic memoir, Citizen 13660, while pre-
paring to teach a course on multicultural American literature. I had seen it on syllabi for
similar courses before, and when I read it, I was immediately charmed by its wit and sen-
sitivity and by its pedagogical potential. Okubo’s line drawings and spare prose interact in
surprising and rich ways, and their seeming simplicity belies an emotional and intellectual
complexity that troubles boundaries between the personal and the political, between the
textual and the historical, and between libratory visibility and oppressive surveillance.
Citizen 13660 was the first published personal account of the Japanese American internment
during World War II.
As I researched the text in preparation to teach it, I found that it has had a fascinating
publication and reception history, interestingly reflective of various moments of public nego-
tiation with the history of the Japanese American internment: portions of the Citizen 13660
were first published, oddly, amidst scathing anti–Japanese propaganda in a wartime issue
of Fortune magazine; and while the book had only a brief life when it was first published
immediately following the war in 1946, renewed interest brought its republication after
Okubo testified in 1981 congressional hearings examining the possibility of reparations for
former internees.
My students found this history as interesting as the text itself, and it broadened our
discussion by allowing us to consider the text not just as an isolated aesthetic object, nor a
simple historical or ethnographic document, but as enmeshed in fraught economies of cul-
tural production. Citizen 13660 offers an incredibly rich site for literary analysis, but also
for an analysis of the cultural work that texts perform in relation to readers, writers, and
the institutions that mediate access to the tools of literacy. Textually and extratextually, Cit-
izen 13660 raises profound questions about the relationships among political, cultural, and
aesthetic representation. It offers a unique site to explore these representational complexities
in the multicultural literature classroom — complexities that tend to be masked within mul-
ticultural pedagogy, where texts and authors are often uncritically burdened with represent-
ing the experience of a particular social group.
94
7. Multiculturalism: Okubo’s Citizen 13660 (Knight) 95
The Trouble with Multiculturalism; or, Aren’t We All

Multicultural Now?
Multiculturalism is no longer quite the tinderbox as it was in the 1980s and 1990s,
when firebrand cultural critics from both the left and the right battled it out on the pages
of the New York Times and the Washington Post. Following William Bennett’s infamous 1984
National Endowment for the Humanities report entitled “To Reclaim a Legacy,” which
offered scathing criticism of the humanities’ “abandonment” of the “classic works of Western
Culture,” such polarizing figures as Allan Bloom, Stanley Fish, Dinesh D’Souza, and Jesse
Jackson helped to shine a very public spotlight on college English departments, which
became perhaps the most embattled sites on campus. Both proponents and opponents of
multiculturalism offered doomsday scenarios for the future of the humanities and American
society at large, should the other side win; and while conservative attacks on multicultural
education certainly have not ceased, multiculturalism has been thoroughly institutionalized,
in various incarnations, in most colleges and universities across the country. This is certainly
true in English departments: by 2007, the New York Times could conclude, “Today it’s gen-
erally agreed that the multiculturalists won the canon wars” (Donadio). The fact that Citizen
13660 has begun to receive attention in classrooms such as my own is indicative of the fact
that literary curricula have readily been expanded to include women writers and writers of
color, as well as works that entail a broader conception of the “literary” text.
Nonetheless, despite the sweeping predictions in the popular press of either its destruc-
tive or its libratory potential, the wide acceptance of multiculturalism within literary studies
appears to have changed very little about what happens in the classroom. The focus on the
content of the canon has come at the expense of more engaged examination of how we
present that content.1 Multicultural curricular reform, conceived as canon expansion, has
reached a dead end: if the aim is to somehow create a truly representative image of American
diversity, we will never be able to add enough non-canonical texts to our syllabi (or even
whole courses devoted to non-canonical literature) to achieve such a goal. But it is not just
that such a goal is unachievable; it should not be the aim of a multicultural critique of
literary education to begin with. Rather, as I learned in the process of teaching Citizen
13660, multicultural pedagogy can approach texts far more productively in relation to the
access to the means of literary production and social reproduction — rather than simply
focusing on the social identity of the author.2
The traditional multiculturalist argument for the study of previously-excluded texts,
which grounds its critique in the desire to make literary education more democratic by
making the canon more representative, implies that we should teach Citizen 13660 because
it makes visible the Japanese American experience or Asian American culture.3 But such an
assumption requires us as teachers to perform some tricky pedagogical gymnastics, since it
communicates to students that texts and authors can (and should) stand in as representatives
of a given social group — and further, that there is a givenness to the life of a social group;
it ignores the problematization of identity categories, despite the fact that much theoretical
work of the last four decades has done just that. A multicultural pedagogy premised on such
a model constrains the ways that students can understand authors and texts, and also over-
simplifies the complexities of identity formation and representation.4
Moreover, it assumes that there is some clear relationship between the representation
of marginalized groups on literary syllabi and the greater political enfranchisement of such
groups.5 But, as John Guillory asks, what exactly is the nature of this relationship?
There is no question that the literary curriculum is the site of a political practice; but one must
attempt to understand the politics of this practice according to the specificity of its social location.
The specificity of the political here cannot mean simply a replication of the problem of “repre-
sentation” in the sphere of democratic politics, and therefore it cannot mean simply importing
into the school the same strategies of progressive politics which sometimes work at the legislative
level [Guillory 8–9].
There is clearly a lag between multiculturalism as it has been institutionalized and theoretical
developments that have given us much richer and more complex frameworks for thinking
about the relationships among literary education, cultural diversity, and democracy. I have
found Guillory’s call to reexamine the nature of the “political” in the context of curricular
reform particularly productive for rethinking multicultural pedagogy, because he shifts the
terms of the debate from speaking about the canon as representing or failing to represent
social groups to speaking about the historical distribution of cultural capital.6 Such a shift
illuminates that a literary pedagogy with democratic aims can intervene by making visible
the processes and institutions through which this history has been enacted — by taking as
central an investigation of texts in relation to histories of literacy, broadly defined. Such an
approach requires self-reflexivity on the reader (both teachers and students).
Graphic Multiculturalism
Citizen 13660 in particular, and graphic memoirs in general, provide a deeply engaging
entrée for students into these complex questions of representation. As a genre that has only
in the past few decades begun to receive mainstream recognition and respect, and even
more recently begun to receive attention by scholars, the graphic memoir remains a rich
and largely untapped pedagogical resource. From classics like Will Eisner’s A Contract with
God and Art Spiegelman’s Maus, to more recent works like Joe Sacco’s Palestine and Marjane
Satrapi’s Persepolis, and little-known works like Okubo’s Citizen 13660, many graphic mem-
oirs explicitly address questions around narrativity, self-reflexivity, and the ethics of repre-
senting for others. The complexity of readers’ engagement with graphic narratives, as I shall
discuss below, is pedagogically useful for several reasons, particularly in encouraging critical
approaches to questions raised by the multicultural paradigm of literary studies.
Clearly, graphic memoirs are not the only examples of such “problem” texts — that is,
texts that themselves thematize and illustrate the complexities of literary production and
representation. However, I have found them to be a particularly useful way to open up
exploration of these issues in the classroom: in this digital age where visual and textual lit-
eracy are increasingly interconnected, students are eager and able to engage with the image-
text interaction in a highly sophisticated manner; and teaching them to do so critically is
ever more crucial. They clearly see the comic form as an accessible one. Its accessibility, in
fact, causes even those who are fans of comics to view its presence in a literature classroom
with some skepticism. In this sense, the genre automatically forces the question of its lit-
erariness: students reckon immediately with questions about “high” and “low” art, cannon
formation, and the relationship between institutions and culture. Students often themselves
initiate discussions about how judgments of literary and cultural value are formed — ques-
tions that are, as I have noted, central to multicultural pedagogy, but that are often obscured
by the appearance of adequate representation created by institutionalized multiculturalism.
If traditional multiculturalism privileges a tidy image of diversity and positions texts

and authors as representatives of discrete, clearly defined cultures, graphic memoirs like
Okubo’s potentially provide the space for a more complex ethical encounter with otherness.
In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud attributes the intensity of readers’ engagement
with graphic narratives to several factors. Defining cartoon style as “a form of amplification
through simplification,” McCloud says that “when you enter the world of the cartoon, you
see yourself.... The cartoon is a vacuum into which our identity and awareness are pulled
... an empty shell that we inhabit which enables us to travel into another realm. We don’t
just observe the cartoon, we become it” (36). Describing the cartoon image of himself that
he uses to narrate the text, he says, “I’m just a little voice inside your head. A concept. You
give me life by reading this book and by ‘filling up’ this very iconic (cartoony) form”
(McCloud 37). So the style of the images creates the space for an almost unconscious empa-
thy with the characters in the story, and thus the potential for students to identify intensely
with others’ experiences, however different from their own.
Advocates of multicultural education have long championed literature’s capacity to
engender such empathy, recognizing its significance to democratic dialogue. Nonetheless,
there are dangers in the empathetic response to literature, too; as the education theorist
Megan Boler says: “The uninterrogated identification assumed by the faith in empathy is
founded on a binary of self/other that situates the self/reader unproblematically as judge.
This self is not required to identify with the oppressor, and not required to identify her
complicity in structures of power relations mirrored by the text. Rather ... this self feeds on
a consumption of the other” (258). A focus on empathy risks engendering a kind of cultural
tourism in which the ideals of respect and tolerance ultimately foster an atmosphere of dan-
gerously depoliticized indifference — the last thing we want as teachers of literature is for a
student to think that, because she read and felt deeply about Citizen 13660, she “gets” the
experience of the internment and can move on, ultimately unaffected. As students are ever
more explicitly positioned as consumers, the risk of their educational experiences leaving
them thus unmoved becomes more significant. The challenge, then, lies in effectively situ-
ating a text in relation to a broader history of cultural production and consumption, to
whatever degree possible given the limits of any given pedagogical situation; and relatedly,
in fostering ways of reading texts like Okubo’s that do not lose the valuable connection cre-
ated through empathy, but that also require us as readers to be self-reflexive, to analyze our
own response to the text (be it discomfort, anger, guilt, or disinterest), and to try to under-
stand how we are all implicated in the social forces that inscribe identities and power rela-
tions.
Framing Citizen 13660 in the Multicultural Literature Classroom

In a one-semester survey course, little can be done to provide any comprehensive back-
ground on the internment; however, the goal of putting Citizen 13660 in the context of
larger currents of cultural production and consumption is crucial. Examining significant
moments of the text’s publication and reception history is one productive and efficient way
to teach Okubo’s work in such context. In its original publication, her work entered a visual
conversation with the intensely dehumanizing anti–Japanese propaganda common in the
United States wartime media. The routine portrayals of Japanese as monkeys or insects in
such mainstream publications as the New York Times and the Saturday Evening Post contrast
starkly with the everyday, human emotionality of Okubo’s characters. Given the opportunity
to page through the April 1944 issue of Fortune magazine in which her drawings first
appeared, entitled “Japan and the Japanese: A Military Power We Must Defeat, A Pacific
Problem We Must Solve,” many of my students were shocked by the magazine’s blatant
anti–Asian racism.7 But it is easy to express outrage or shock; what is more challenging,
and what I have tried to encourage in discussion, are analyses of how racism coexists with
the magazine’s clearly stated democratic ideals and how and why this kind of contradiction,
in different incarnations, continues to be perpetuated in United States culture.
Over and over again, the special issue of Fortune portrays the Japanese as naturally and
inherently evil and degraded, but the position of Japanese Americans is one that the magazine
struggles to negotiate, and Okubo’s illustrations accompany a brief editorial that ultimately,
if circuitously, condemns the internment in the name of democracy. There is a clear con-
tradiction between the racist logic of the magazine’s goal to make visible the “twisted Japanese
mind” (123)— enacted through the issue’s maps, population statistics, photographs, time-
lines, surveys, sociological analyses, and psychological exposés — and its stated aim of making
visible the injustice of the internment, an injustice based in that same racist logic. And
while the editorial against the internment does attempt to suture the gap between the mag-
azine’s insistence on naturalized racial difference and its ideal of universal citizenship, what
is more compelling is the way that Okubo’s accompanying illustrations are utilized to do
the same. As the editors alert us in their note, “All the drawings and paintings in this issue
are the work of artists of Japanese extraction” (4). The racialized presence of these artists
serves as an attempt to blunt the magazine’s blatant anti–Asian racism; the artists stand in
as both evidence of the magazine’s democratic neutrality and proof that the “twisted” Japa-
nese mind can be “remade” into something knowable and controllable. Indeed, the editors
make a point of describing one artist as a political worker “for the democratic cause” and
specifying that another’s drawings of Japan are “bitter” and “angry” (4), lest readers be con-
fused. The visibility of Okubo and the other Japanese American artists thus serves to mask
the magazine’s violently contradictory politics. This vexed notion of visibility as it relates
to race and power is one that I found particularly useful as a way to frame our encounter
with Citizen 13660 in the classroom: how, we can usefully ask, does Okubo’s work itself
negotiate questions of visibility? How does an understanding of its original context in
Fortune impact the way we experience her text?
This issue of visibility also provides a link to those theoretical questions that I hoped
to pressure throughout my course: what do we expect an author or a literary work to make
visible about history, or about the life of a social group? What is the relationship between
literature and social identity? How can we read in order to avoid making problematic
assumptions about these relationships? By their nature, graphic novels continually unsettle
the tendency to read a text as transparently “making visible” the experience of a social group:
through the non-mimetic quality of the images, readers are constantly reminded of the
artist’s presence. Okubo takes this further, often actually portraying herself in the act of
drawing a scene, making us aware of her subjective hand. In fact, one of the first things
that students often notice about Citizen 13660 is that with just two exceptions, the Okubo
character appears in each of the nearly 200 illustrations, even in scenes we might guess she
did not actually witness first hand. So, while in the preface to the 1983 edition she presents
her work as an act of documentary (as she says, “Cameras and photographs were not per-
mitted in the camps, so I recorded everything in sketches, drawings, and paintings” [ix]),
she also explicitly complicates the very notion of documentary objectivity.
Okubo clearly saw the creation of Citizen 13660 as an act of “bearing witness” and her
testimony along with the book’s submission to the Congressional Commission on Wartime
Relocation and Internment of Citizens in 1981 marks her work’s involvement in another
interesting project of making-visible, this time as part of an emerging Asian American cul-
tural nationalist politics. Okubo’s testimony expresses a new demand for visibility: she told
the Commission, “I believe an apology and some form of reparation is due in order to
prevent this from happening to others. Textbooks and history studies on this subject should
be taught to children when young in grade and high schools. Many generations do not
know that this ever happened in the United States” (Okubo “Statement,” 17). This call for
visibility was answered on several fronts: In 1983, the Commission released its report, which
recommended redress payments to survivors and found that “the broad historical causes
which shaped these decisions were race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political
leadership” (5); that same year, the University of Washington Press, a strong early advocate
of the growth in Asian American studies, republished Citizen 13660, and the text has since
become a part of a range of school curricula, such as my own.
But regardless of whether congressional hearings can actually or symbolically achieve
the goal of adequately redressing historical oppression, the literature classroom is altogether
a different context in which to encounter a text. We cannot simply take up a text as making
visible cultural difference, or oppression based on the perception of that difference, nor can
we assume that a text’s presence in our classroom has some political effect analogous to a
legislative hearing. Presenting this historical moment of the text’s life in the classroom can
engender usefully self-reflexive discussion about these issues: how was the use of Okubo’s
text to simply make visible the injustice of the internment politically advantageous in this
context? Should we read the text differently? How and why? Such questions acknowledge
the historical utility of identity-based politics, while at the same time inviting students to
see the text as a site to interrogate the processes of identity formation and representation,
rather than to see the text and its author as transparently representative. To read Citizen
13660 simply as “evidence” in the classroom limits the scope of the political project of mul-
ticulturalism. Furthermore, it obscures the nature of the political within the text itself, lim-
iting the way we read possibilities for resistance to systemic questions of justice and injustice,
thus ignoring practices of everyday forms of resistance and valorizing public visibility as a
libratory force. To read Citizen 13660 as clearly or unproblematically aligned with such a
politics is to ignore the complexity of the text’s exploration of these very issues.
The Politics of Visibility in Citizen 13660

While a detailed analysis of the text itself is beyond the scope of this article, I want to
finish with a discussion of some elements of the text that I found particularly useful in
working toward unpacking these complex ideas around visibility and representation in
the classroom. I have already mentioned the ubiquitous presence of the Miné character as
one way that Okubo complicates any sense of narrative transparency. Not only does she
continually make evident her own role as narrator, but she also makes readers aware of
themselves: like Spiegelman, Sacco, Satrapi, and other graphic memoirists, Okubo observes
for the reader and is consciously observed by the reader. We are constantly directed not
only by the frame of the illustration, but by the focus of the Okubo character’s gaze. Some
of the most powerful moments in the book come when her gaze is aimed directly at the
reader (for example, when she looks angrily over her shoulder at the reader in an image
whose caption describes the epidemics of dysentery that resulted from the camp’s polluted
drinking water). In class, I opened discussion of the text proper by asking students which
drawings or moments they were particularly drawn to. Many of them pointed to these
moments when the Miné character looks directly at them, eliciting at different moments
laughter, guilt, or empathy; that unflinching gaze pushes the limits of readers’ engagement
with the text and requires us to analyze our own emotional and intellectual responses.
The high level of reader engagement is an element not just of the visual style of par-
ticular kinds of images; rather, as McCloud argues, it is built into the comic form itself.
He examines the role of “the gutter” in comics — that is, the space between panels — describ-
ing how “comics panels fracture both time and space, offering a jagged, staccato rhythm of
unconnected moments” (67). Built in to their form, then, is the requirement that the reader
deliberately and voluntarily fill in the blanks; this reader engagement “is comics’ primary
means of simulating time and motion” (McCloud 69)— a means that necessarily highlights
the constructed nature of the narrative it recounts. One activity that proved useful during
our classroom discussion was to have students choose a series of panels that they found
compelling and examine the relationship among them to ask how they each affect our under-
standing of the others: why did Okubo choose to illustrate and narrate these particular
moments, and what effect do they have together? For instance, the text’s opening panels
offer a compelling site through which to explore the connections between power, visibility,
and race. The Miné character is at home on the day the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor, and
below the image of a cozy domestic scene, she describes hearing the news on the radio over
breakfast with her brother: “We were shocked. We wondered what this would mean to us
and the other people of Japanese descent in the United States” (8). The next three drawings
bring issues of visibility to the fore, as the gazes of the non–Japanese in the drawings become
increasingly suspicious, hostile, and intense, foreshadowing the institutionalized surveillance
that follows. And as readers, we’re made keenly aware of our own gaze. First, we see the
Miné character on the street, below a newspaper vendor shouting headlines about the recent
declaration of war against Japan. She is hunched over the newspaper, the only Japanese on
the crowded sidewalk. One man looks suspiciously over his shoulder in her direction. The
next image shows the Miné character with the paper spread before her on the table. She
looks directly at the reader with a distressed and puzzled gaze, and the bits of text sur-
rounding her (“A JAP IS A JAP,” “SEND THEM BACK TO TOJO” [10]) suggest both
her own mental turmoil and the sentiments that were “in the air” after the bombing. The
accompanying text describes the spreading paranoia and the policies it began to spawn.
Finally, the next image shows us the inside of a crowded train or bus through its window.
The Miné character sits in a boldly patterned shirt, uncomfortably gazing off to the side.
She is surrounded by white passengers with pursed lips and harsh stares clearly directed at
her. She notes, “The people looked at all of us, both citizens and aliens, with suspicion and
mistrust” (12), and then goes on to describe the institution of the voluntary evacuation of
people of Japanese ancestry. The passage ends, ominous in its matter-of-fact tone: “On
March 27, 1942, voluntary evacuation was halted and the army took over, to bring about
a forced and orderly evacuation” (13). Interestingly, while the Miné character is the obvious
object of scrutiny in the illustration, she is positioned slightly to the side. At the center of
the illustration is the passenger with perhaps the most disapproving stare; compositionally,
the reader’s gaze is directed to the passenger’s expression of scorn, rather than to that scorn’s
object.
The relationship between text and images is one of the most pedagogically provocative
elements of the graphic memoir; often it functions as a way to intertwine several different
narratives, and students can analyze how specific panels uses this interaction to create mean-
ing. Okubo’s written text is generally emotionless, a straightforward, factual account of
events, as when she describes her and her brother’s initial evacuation from their home in
Berkeley: “We tagged our baggage with the family number, 13660, and pinned the personal
tags on ourselves; we were ready at last. Our friends came to take us to the Civil Control
Station. We took one last look at our happy home” (22–23). Juxtaposed with this text are
the deeply expressive images; the abject looks on the Okubos’ faces, and the Miné character’s
tears, highlight the personal trauma embedded in these historical events. Okubo matter-
of-factly describes the process of her and her brother’s relocation from their Berkley home
to the Tanforan Assembly Center in San Bruno (a racetrack where the stables were hastily
and incompletely transformed into living quarters), during which their name was replaced
with the number 13660. The presence of the family number, on their luggage and on tags
pinned to their persons, serves as an ever-present visual marker of their dehumanization,
and makes evident the irony in the juxtaposition of “citizen” and “13660” in the book’s title.
My students were quick to note when Okubo uses irony in this way, as in one drawing of
the camp’s post office, surrounded by fences and prison-like barracks, which is accompanied
by the comment that “Letters from my European friends told me how lucky I was to be
free and safe at home” (61).
Visual repetition is one of Citizen 13660’s most powerful devices, and I found that
asking students to identify different ways that Okubo uses repetition generated discussion
about the text’s most significant themes. In the illustrations that depict both her time at
Tanforan and then her later move to the Topaz Relocation Center in Utah, the ubiquitous
presence of armed soldiers, watch towers, and barbed wire fences serve as constant reminders
of the internees’ status as objects of official surveillance, as do the searches and medical
examinations to which they are frequently subjected. Also ubiquitous and signaling another
kind of mandated visibility is the presence of the other internees; the constant crowds and
long lines resulting from the inadequate facilities engender an absolute lack of privacy that
Okubo often notes pointedly. One illustration depicts a maze of bunks and personal items,
through which the Miné character gazes at a man playing solitaire. The text reads, “Nearly
four hundred bachelors were housed in the grandstand ‘dorm.’ They slept and snored,
dressed and undressed, in one continuous public performance. Some built ‘walls of Jericho’
of sheets or blankets” (63). In another instance, she describes, “Many of the women could
not get used to the community toilets. They sought privacy by pinning up curtains and set-
ting up boards” (74). The illustration depicts the Miné character walking past a row of
women in partially-partitioned stalls, the hopelessness of their attempts at creating privacy
with scraps of cloth and wood mirrored in the abject expressions on their faces. Students’
observations of these kinds of repetition offered a way to connect this sort of formal sur-
veillance with the informal surveillance depicted in the book’s opening panels and ask, what
are the different ways that the visual is used to constitute the object of oppression?
Similarly, my students were highly attuned to the different modes of resistance in the
text. Beyond the attempts to create privacy (including her own nailing of a quarantine sign
to her door [83]), Okubo depicts other everyday strategies of resistance to mandated visi-
bility. She describes that at Tanforan, “Curfew was imposed, and roll call was held every
day at 6:45 P.M. Each barrack had a house captain who made the rounds to check on us
twice a day” (59). The accompanying illustration shows a shame-faced “house captain” with
pen and checklist, while the Miné character, seated at a table with paintbrush in hand,
looks at him over her shoulder while sticking out her tongue. Okubo next describes, “Day
and night Caucasian camp police walked their beats within the center. (‘Caucasian’ was the
camp term for non-evacuee worker.) They were on the lookout for contraband and suspicious
actions” (60). The illustration depicts the Miné character peering around the corner at a
guard who is himself peering into a window. In these instances, as in the moments when
the Miné character looks directly at the reader, Okubo depicts an inversion of the gaze,
where the watchers become the watched and the power relations implied between observer
and the observed are challenged.
Within the text, the everyday strategies of resistance-to-visibility are contrasted to
strategies of macro-political resistance, toward which the Miné character expresses at least
ambivalence and at most disdain. She describes, for example, the complex set of issues that
the internees faced when they were forced to respond to a loyalty oath:
It brought about a dilemma. Aliens (Issei) would be in a difficult position if they renounced Japa-
nese citizenship and thereby made themselves stateless persons. Many of the Nisei also resented
the question because of the assumption that their loyalty might be divided.... [The form] was
long and complicated. The questions were difficult to understand and answer. Center-wide meet-
ings were held, and the anti-administration rabble rousers skillfully fanned the misunderstandings
[175–76].
The accompanying illustration depicts a “rabble rouser” on a stage in front of a sea of people,
sobbing and gesturing into the air, and eliciting tears from others in the audience — with
the exception of the Miné character, who is standing in the corner holding her nose and
rolling her eyes. She continues, “Strongly pro–Japanese leaders in the camp won over the
fence-sitters and tried to intimidate the rest. In the end, however, everybody registered. On
the basis of the answers ... the ‘disloyal’ were finally weeded out for eventual segregation
and the ‘loyal’ were later granted ‘leave clearance’— the right to leave camp, find a job, and
‘relocate.’” (177). Here a group of men holding planks of wood like rifles approach another
man who appears to be quite fearful; the Miné character walks through the group, sticking
her tongue out at those doing the intimidating. While Okubo fully acknowledges the com-
plexity of negotiating these decisions, swearing loyalty is presented here as a strategic move
that allows people mobility and the chance to restart their lives; for those who would deny
the political efficacy of such personal resistance in favor of a more publicly visible (as well
as masculinist and coercive) resistance, Okubo seems to have little regard. The density of
these images and their text made them challenging for my students to fully understand
upon first reading, but it also made them an incredibly rich site for discussion; questions
around the need for and efficacy of cultural nationalism, the nature of political alliance and
resistance, and the ethical ambiguities these things entail, all came to the fore.
Citizen 13660 offers no straightforward moral, no tidy closure. After going through
the laborious bureaucratic preparations to relocate, Okubo describes leaving the camp:
I was now free. I looked at the crowd at the gate. Only the very old or very young were left. Here
I was, alone, with no family responsibilities, and yet fear had chained me to the camp. I thought,
“My God! How do they expect these poor people to leave the one place they can call home?” I
swallowed a lump in my throat as I waved good-by to them.... There was only the desert now.
My thoughts shifted from the past to the future [209].
The ambivalence that marks the text is not neatly resolved. There is no clear call here for
remembrance or memorialization — the text resists this response, even as its very existence
testifies to the importance of standing as a witness to history. Citizen 13660 confronts (and
forces readers to confront) the violent and scarring history of the internment, but refuses
to take on the project of suturing the American self-image, as Fortune magazine and the
commission hearings did. Similarly, multicultural pedagogy cannot simply aim to redress
inequality through adequate visibility in the classroom of texts by members of marginalized
social groups. Rather, the multicultural literature classroom should be a site to investigate
the very politics of cultural production and social reproduction.
NOTES
1. In part, this may due to the slipperiness of the term itself. In her ambitious 2005 study examining how
the abstract concept of multiculturalism has been institutionalized in English departments across the country,
sociologist Bethany Bryson examined a range of Universities, researching department policies, examining curricula
and course offerings, and conducting extensive interviews with professors. Bryson found that, across all of the
institutions she examined, “English professors found the concept to be vague and unworkable, so they changed
it. They tamed it, and molded it to fit within their everyday routines.... English professors used their organizational
structure as an interpretive frame to make sense of multiculturalism and fit it into their existing work lives” (22).
And the most common version of the definitions that emerged was that “multiculturalism is an attempt to make
literary canons represent the cultural breadth that exists within the U.S. population” (38). Thus, Bryson found
that multiculturalism has been incorporated in the discipline of English (both from the perspective of individual
professors and from an institutional standpoint) primarily as canon expansion. Fewer than 30 percent of the pro-
fessors whom she interviewed talked about multiculturalism as impacting their teaching methods, as opposed to
more simply their text selection: “The question of what they taught took precedence over how they taught it”
(49).
2. In calling for a critical reengagement with multicultural pedagogy, I add to an extant body of scholarship
aimed at rethinking multiculturalism that has developed in the wake of the “canon wars” from literary scholars
such as Guillory, Richard Ohmann, Bill Readings, and David Palumbo-Liu, as well as education scholars such
as Megan Boler, James Banks, Peter McLaren, and Christine Sleeter.
3. This model of curricular reform reflects the modes of organization of 1960s and 1970s New Left coali-
tion-building and activism — modes that, as sociologist C. Wright Mills described in an open letter in 1960 in
which he coined the phrase “New Left,” moved away from the traditional “old left” focus on labor issues and on
class as a framework for political analysis. In the United States, the various groups associated with the New Left
promoted participatory democracy, civil rights, and women’s rights, in non-classed ways, by making claims for
specific kinds of (heretofore disenfranchised) public identities. As Grant Farred describes it, “Having rejected the
Old Left’s narrow conception of politics, the New Left expanded it to include — and provide a precedent and a
platform for — modes of oppositionality that would, in the 1980s, be construed as struggles over representation
and identity” (630). The identity politics of the 1980s, including multiculturalism’s demand for the representation
of previously excluded groups, was heir to the culturally based political opposition of the 1960s and 1970s. Cer-
tainly, the expansion of the canon has been crucially transformative and brought well-deserved attention to many
significant texts that had previously been unstudied (just as the identity politics of the 1980s generally did crucial
work in politicizing culture). My intention here is to extend and complicate these changes, not to negate their
significance.
4. Shelley Fisher Fishkin discusses these tendencies among literary scholarship generally in her essay “Deseg-
regating American Literary Studies,” where she examines texts that have not been given critical attention because
of assumptions that “white writers write books focused on white protagonists (where issues of race, if present,
remain relatively peripheral); meanwhile black writers write books focused on black protagonists (where issues
of race are omnipresent and central)” (121). Fishkin calls for a shift in teaching and critical practice, focusing on
“transgressive texts” that disrupt the easy correspondence between author and textual content that would locate
and limit the meanings of race within recognizable, established parameters of representation. Fishkin’s compelling
exploration of how certain kinds of critical attention are accorded to certain kinds of texts not only highlights
the importance of attending to heretofore ignored “transgressive texts,” but also gestures to new ways of reading
established texts.
5. There is little evidence that this is kind of relationship exists even within the university: an American
Council on Education study recently reported that across nearly all minority groups, post-secondary educational
attainment have dropped in recent years (Ryu 1). Nonetheless, Cary Nelson makes a compelling argument that
the content of an anthology or syllabus matters more than Guillory seems to suggest: “The priority placed on
multicultural representation in the classroom helps persuade students about the priority of multicultural repre-
sentation on the faculty and in the student body. The admissions policy embodied in the anthology makes an
implicit comment on the admissions policy appropriate to the institution as a whole. Nor is it much of a leap
to make a connection with the nation’s admission policy — its immigration statutes and their mixed and still
politically contentious history of openness and racism. The problems of ethnic, racial, and gender representation
in an anthology devoted to a nation’s history or its literature ... speak quite directly to questions about represen-
tation in public debate and legislative bodies. Anthologies empower students to make these connections, whether
or not teachers choose to make them explicit” (30). But the anthology (or, say, the survey course syllabus) by
their nature appear to offer authoritative, adequate representation, despite its very impossibility; and it is, to my
reading, Nelson’s “whether or not” that Guillory takes issue with. It is the making explicit of the connections
between cultural production and social reproduction that needs be central to the multicultural literature class-
room.
6. Guillory’s argument shares a major premise with that of Walter Benn Michaels, which he has elaborated
in The Trouble with Diversity (2006), among other places: both are critical of the fact that class generally disappears
as a lens for analysis within multiculturalism. But as critics of Michaels such as Michael Rothberg have noted,
Michaels takes this premise in an unproductive direction when he uses it to turn an analytic distinction between
class and, say, race and gender into a normative valuation. His insistence, for instance, that race is merely a dis-
traction from class, ignores, as Rothberg puts it, the “ineluctable intermingling and intersectionality of those cat-
egories in practice” (308). Guillory’s focus on access to cultural capital allows for the consideration of how
elements of social identity mediate the reproduction of inequality — that is, how culture is directly implicated in
social inequality.
7. Of course, the end of the war did not mean the end of such sentiment: two years later, Okubo collected
her internment illustrations in book form, and while her contacts at Fortune helped her publish the book through
Columbia University Press in 1946, it was largely ignored. In a 1982 interview, Okubo describes, “It was so dif-
ficult getting it published. At that time anything Japanese was still rat poison ... it was really too soon after the
war. Anything Japanese was a touchy subject” (Gesenway 74).
WORKS CITED
Bennett, William J. To Reclaim a Legacy: Report on the Humanities. Washington, DC: National Endowment for
the Humanities, 1984. Higher Education Resource Hub. Web. 15 Dec. 2011.
Boler, Megan. “The Risks of Empathy: Interrogating Multiculturalism’s Gaze.” Cultural Studies 11.2 (1997): 253–
73. Print.
Bryson, Bethany. Making Multiculturalism: Boundaries and Meaning in U.S. English Departments. Stanford: Stan-
ford University Press, 2005. Print.
Donadio, Rachel. “Revisiting the Canon Wars.” nytimes.com. New York Times, 16 Sept. 2007. Web. 18 Dec.
2010.
Farred, Grant. “Endgame Identity? Mapping the New Left Roots of Identity Politics.” New Literary History 31.4
(2000): 627–48. Print.
Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. “Desegregating American Literary Studies.” Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age. Eds. Louis
Caton, Emory Elliot, and Jeffrey Rhyne. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. 21–34. Print.
Fortune. 29 (April 1944). Print.
Gesenway, Deborah, and Mindy Roseman. Beyond Words: Images from America’s Concentration Camps. Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1987. Print.
Guillory, John. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1995. Print.
Michaels, Walter Benn. The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality. New
York: Metropolitan Books, 2006. Print.
Mills, C. Wright. “Letter to the New Left.” New Left Review 1.5 (1960): 18–23. Print.
Nelson, Cary. Manifesto of a Tenured Radical. New York: New York University Press, 1997. Print.
Okubo, Miné. Citizen 13660. 1946. Rpt. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1983. Print.
Rothberg, Michael. “Against Zero-Sum Logic: A Response to Walter Benn Michaels.” American Literary History
18.2 (2006): 303–11. Print.
Ryu, Mikyung. “Twenty-Third Status Report: Minorities in Higher Education 2009 Supplement.” American
Council on Education. Sept. 2009. Web. 11 Dec. 2011.
“Statement of Miné Okubo Before the Congressional Committee on Wartime Relocation and Internment (1981).”
Amerasia Journal. 30.2 (2004): 15–18. Print.
United States Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians. Personal Justice Denied: The
Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians. Washington: GPO, 1982. Print.
PART III
WOMEN’S AND GENDER STUDIES
8. “The Slippage Between

Seeing and Saying”
Getting a Life in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home
SUSAN R. VAN DYNE
Situated at the intersection of contemporary theories of life-writing and theories of

sexual identity formation, my course, “The Cultural Work of Memoir,” offers two radical
propositions: we do not have a life until we narrate it, and sexual identity is not discovered
as an innate truth but is socially constructed. Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Home
offers a case study for transforming my students’ common resistance to both premises. By
theorizing how these paradoxical statements might be true, the class objective is to reverse
the apparent logic that life precedes writing and sexuality is deeper than culture by analyzing
representation as a theoretical concept and a graphic practice.
Bechdel claims she was “coming out as an artist” as much as a sexual subject in Fun
Home, in which she traces how both processes are impeded and enabled by her relationship
with her father (Hogan). Her memoir is an extended exercise in revising her own and her
family’s scripts, comically obsessive and lyrically moving by turns. The narrator is con-
founded by the revelation of her father’s closeted homosexual experiences just as she
announces her untried lesbianism with utmost certainty at eighteen; her sexual confusion
is compounded by her father’s apparent suicide a few months later. In writing her memoir
in her forties (older than her father was when he died), Bechdel is motivated by what she
experienced as the unreliable narration of her parents, the “persistent slippage between seeing
and saying” that disturbed her childhood (Lecture at Amherst College). Yet in the fluid
interaction between words and images in Fun Home, what she experienced as an epistemo-
logical crisis in childhood is transformed into a narrative device of consummate power for
“getting a life.”
Stories as Communal Property

As the title of the course suggests, I assume that literary texts do cultural work, especially
for queer subjects, by providing access to livable, public spaces in the collective consciousness
of their readers. Memoir is an especially powerful act of social transformation because, as
Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson point out, life-writing is always social, collective, and
future-oriented, “a means of ‘passing on,’ of sharing a social past that may have been
105
106 Part III : Women’s and Gender Studies
obscured, in order to activate its potential for reshaping a future of and for other subjects”
(Reading Autobiography 20–21). Theories of sexual identity formation and of life-writing
that frame my course have many intersections. Both emphasize the primacy of language
and representation as the means through which experience and subjectivity, the apprehension
of oneself as an “I,” emerges. Theorists in both fields would agree with Teresa de Lauretis
that “experience is the process by which, for all social beings, subjectivity is constructed.
Through that process one places oneself or is placed in social reality, and so perceives and
comprehends as subjective (referring to, originating in, oneself ) those relations — material,
economic, and interpersonal — which are in fact social and, in a larger perspective, historical”
(159). For life-writing theorists what follows from these insights is the proposition that
experience is not a self-evident fact that is recovered through narration, but an ongoing
interpretive process negotiated through stories. In the reflexive process of “autobiographical
acts,” narrators become readers of the stories they inhabit.
Memoir creates a textual version of double consciousness: the force of others’ stories
in shaping the subject’s interiority, and the consciousness of the incomplete or uneven fit
of available stories. In memoir, the narrating “I” becomes a “discerning subject,” to adopt
Paul Smith’s terms, “not simply the actor who follows ideological scripts ... but also an agent
who reads them in order to insert him/herself into them — or not” (xxxiv–xxxv). Gender
and sexuality may seem properties that originate in the self, yet Judith Butler supplies a
persuasively interactive and retrospective model of their social construction through “daily
act[s] of reconstitution.” We apprehend ourselves as gendered and sexed through “an impul-
sive yet meaningful process of interpreting a cultural reality laden with sanctions, taboos,
and prescriptions.” In the reflexive, retrospective understanding of memoir, gender and sex-
uality are appropriated not merely given: “not wholly conscious, yet available to conscious-
ness, it is the kind of choice we make and only later realize we have made” (Butler “Sex and
Gender,” 40).1 Though agency is muted in these accounts, the recurring terms — mindful,
meaningful, not fully conscious yet available to consciousness — are critical to analyzing
memoir.
In Telling Sexual Stories Ken Plummer creates a sociology of stories that unpacks the
idea of “ideological scripts” into separate components that make them more visible as “daily
acts of reconstitution.” Sexual stories are coaxed, produced, and consumed by a network of
other social beings located in specific historical contexts and communities. Through these
interactive social exchanges, stories become possible, legible and may wear out. As these
available cultural stories circulate, they are contested and modified, as much as they are sup-
ported and affirmed, and may lead, for sexual minorities, to “negotiated networks of collective
activity” (Plummer 20–24). While Plummer draws maps of social possibility, these nego-
tiations happen within an arena of constraint. He would agree with Smith and Watson that
although autobiographical acts attempt to fashion individual meanings, much about our
stories is communal property, “as we tell our stories, discursive patterns guide, or compel,
us to tell stories about ourselves in particular ways” (Plummer 26). Although Butler empha-
sizes the regulatory processes of subject formation most forcefully among the social construc-
tionist theorists, even she traces the possibility of resistance for the non-normative bodies
that matter: “regulatory schemas are not timeless structures but historically revisable criteria
of intelligibility” (14). Indeed Plummer’s sociological diagrams sketch how communities of
non-normative subjects can function to revise these criteria and highlight how individual
story-tellers consciously reassemble or unconsciously improvise upon existing cultural nar-
ratives, recombining a wide variety of disparate elements for shifting audiences.2
8. “Slippage”: Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (Van Dyne) 107
Reframing Comics
If the processes of interpellation to naturalize and mystify the social and historical rela-
tions that produce us, graphic memoirs could well be the form that enables us to be most
mindful of their presence. Comic theorists Douglas Wolk and Rocco Versaci propose that
the comic has distinct formal advantages over prose memoirs: the narrated “I” or historical
subject is visibly embodied as separate from the narrating “I” by being contained within
the picture panel; at the same time the interiority of that reconstructed self can be rendered
in word balloons and thought bubbles. Even more persuasively, both argue that comics
remind us visually that memoir is a process of interpretation, a “subjective attitude toward
the past,” a “transformation of the world” that is “deliberately constructed,” and is conveyed
in the signature of the graphic artist’s style (Versaci 44–45; Wolk 20, 125). That any rep-
resentation is inescapably an act of interpretation is a postmodern truth that the graphic
memoir makes palpable in the hand-drawn medium itself.
Bechdel’s graphic style depends on conventions of comics yet dramatically expands
them. She sets an internal rule of allowing only four lines of text per frame to keep her
literary language from overwhelming the picture panel (Chute “Interview,” 1011). She empha-
sizes “graphic story-telling is very much like poetry in that it matters where things fall on
the page ... a poetic form with lots of constraints, like a sestina” (Hogan). Yet if comic the-
orists are correct that words function as “timers” for readers to gauge unconsciously the
duration of the pictured event by how long it takes to read them, the effect of Bechdel’s
language, bristling with metaphor, paradox, and puns, deliberately stretches our attention
span. Often the picture panel itself contains additional texts treated as images — minutely
transcribed letters, book spines, dictionaries, diaries — that require the reader to slow down
even more. In crowding her frames with meticulously rendered wallpaper, furniture, archi-
tecture, and countless artifacts, Bechdel also exploits the comic strip’s fidelity to the quo-
tidian, the comic’s ability to reproduce historical social reality legibly in a very condensed
form. Her detail work not only documents history, it also contains trace evidence of the
unconscious. Why else is the “primitive modem” jarringly prominent in the memory of her
inability to convey the news of her father’s death? (Bechdel Fun Home, 46; unless otherwise
noted, all in-text references in this chapter refer to Fun Home). How often does the suggestive
shape of her father’s treasured art nouveau lamp register on the child the elusive secret of
his sexuality hidden in plain sight (6, 18, 90)? On the level of both text and image, Bechdel’s
practice requires a different reading strategy than comics as “sequential art” teach us. Our
reading must be recursive, comparative, and spatial, as we assimilate cues to sequence, pace,
suspense, and emphasis in the story-boarding of each page. In Fun Home, the density of
both text and image force us to read backward as often as forward.
Bechdel claims her methods as a graphic memoirist respond to the “persistent slippage
between seeing and saying” that plagued family relations in her childhood (Lecture at
Amherst College). Because language was unreliable and appearances were deceiving, neither
words nor images alone could tell the whole story, but “in the triangulation between words
and images, [she] could get closer to the truth.”3 In several interviews Bechdel reports the
impasse she reached in narrating her “core memories” exclusively in words, and that only
through “visual thinking” could she make the “segues and associations” she could not signal
in prose (Champion, Hogan, Chute). By breaking the word-story into picture panels and
text boxes, which were themselves subject to spatial rearrangement and differential scaling,
her metaphor suggests that she could indirectly calculate her shifting position in the tricky
terrain of family life as the X at the intersection of the separate, non-linear trajectories of
words and images. Bechdel’s narration, in which prose and image have equal import, yet
move asynchronously, makes significantly greater demands on the reader than what Scott
McCloud describes as “closure,” or “observing the parts but perceiving the whole,” the
reader’s process of reading across the gutters between frames in order to produce narrative
coherence and movement through time (60–67). In her metaphor of triangulation Bechdel
locates the emerging subjectivity of the narrating “I” as a third, unrepresented but imagi-
natively calculable set of points that, like the associative sequences of language and image,
are themselves always in motion.
Bechdel is drawn to maps both as a metaphor for her epistemology as a memoirist and
as a metaphor for cartooning. She tells an interviewer that maps are like cartoons, in that
both translate “complex 3D reality, ironing it out into an easily assimilable form, making
life readable” (Champion). Within Fun Home Bechdel offers maps as the topography of
containment, locating the narrow compass of her father’s life (30–31, 140) compared to the
interstate highway just over the mountain ridge that could have taken him to Christopher
Street or the Castro (126–27), an available road of sexual liberation not taken. The maps
she draws make the cumulative meanings of experience legible, and make possible “a mystical
bridging of symbolic and real.” In their two-dimensional organization of relationships,
landscapes, and possibilities, she seems to suggest that comics can reattach the signifier to
the signified, “the label and the thing itself ” in reliable ways (146). Nonetheless, she admits
these graphic moments of fixity and clarity are only temporary. “It was a chart,” the narrator
comments on the map of the wild wood in The Wind in the Willows, “but also a vivid,
almost animated picture. Look closely” (147), she advises. She playfully reminds her reader
that graphic art has the potential for a third dimension of movement through time as well
as for imaginative travel between lived experience and imaginative speculation. For Bechdel,
“slippage” is finally more productive than mapping for narrating a story that contains mul-
tiple contradictions; the term signals as well a proliferation of possibilities of who she was
in relation to her father and who they might still come to be to each other in the space of
imagination and art.
Found Art
While several early critics of Fun Home persuasively read it through the lens of trauma,4
I want to emphasize here not the tragedy of what is lost, but the comic irony of what is
found. If Fun Home can be deployed as an illustrated text for queer and life-writing theories
of subject formation through interpellation, it also has another story to tell, that of a kun-
stlerroman. Bechdel often claims in her interviews that in the seven-year project, she finally
overcame intimidating judgments by the abdicated artists her parents were. She emphasizes
in her exchange with graphic novelist Jessica Abel, “the real story of Fun Home isn’t my
dad’s death, or our shared homosexuality, but my artistic apprenticeship to my father. And
the book isn’t just about becoming an artist, it is art” (Hogan). Critics have rightly praised
her wit and deftness in using masterworks of Joyce and Proust to add heft and stature to
her personal quest, and to move her queer story out of the margins and into the canon.
Bechdel also accomplishes a democratization of intertextuality as a literary device. By allud-
ing to what might be considered the passing references of popular culture — Addams family
cartoons, scenes from It’s a Wonderful Life, an oral history from Word Is Out, a Palmolive
commercial, the televised spectacle of the Nixon

hearings — the ephemeral is raised to the status
of the iconic. The ordinary is elevated by its
insertion in the discourse of art, and what counts
as art is enlarged and enriched by the infusion
of the so-called quotidian.
In discussing several scenes of interpellation
in the text, I ask my students to produce theo-
rized close readings. We pay scrupulous attention
to the placement and meanings of words and
images as we would in any literary text, while
we analyze editing and formatting choices of the
panels and the page as we would a film. In link-
ing both kinds of formal analysis to the emer-
gence of subjectivity through discourse and
representation, we can theorize both text and
context. In analyzing the structure of the memoir
at the level of a chapter as well as Bechdel’s larger
recuperative patterns, I encourage my students
to examine how scenes are juxtaposed out of
chronological order, replicating the multiple
associations of memory-work, and how that jux-
taposition meaningfully substitutes for exposi-
tion. My students often misremember Bechdel’s
actual structure, and are tempted to reconstruct
events in a chronological order in order to pro-
duce an apparent chain of causation. Smith and
Watson would argue instead that any autobio-
graphical text “signals discontinuities that will
not bear out our own fictions of coherence.” As Figure 8.1. “I felt as if I had been stripped
naked myself, inexplicably ashamed, like
readers, we seek to “construct ideologically co- Adam and Eve.” Alison Bechdel. Fun Home:
herent ‘I’s only by under-reading the ways a nar- A Family Tragicomic. Boston: Houghton,
rative calls attention to its own fissures” (64). 2006. 112.
Picture This: Gender Under Construction

Chapter 4 of Fun Home juxtaposes two scenes of interpellation, set against each other
out of chronological order. In narrating each, Bechdel also encourages us to slip in and out
of her reading of Proust as a third textual stream of meaning. Her visit to the family’s deer
camp, “the bullpen,” initiates the pubescent Bechdel into the liabilities of female gender in
a male erotic economy. The scene opens with her father being asked by Uncle Fred to
smuggle a girly calendar out to the sanctuary of uncensored masculinity. “Don’t open it.
It’s dirty,” the father warns, but in her youthful literal-mindedness she ignores him “It
looked clean enough to me” (111). The shocking apprehension of the unlikeness of the nude
pin-up to her actual body and yet its cultural attribution to her is marked by a simple “oh”
in a thought bubble (112). In a graphic strategy that recurs in the most telling scenes of
interpellation, Bechdel positions the implied reader behind the narrated “I,” looking over
her shoulder, here at the objectified female image produced for the male gaze. This vantage
point, if we are female readers, reprises our own subject formation as we recognize that our
body’s meanings are beyond our control. The scene traces the processes through which the
tomboy sees herself as a potential heterosexual erotic object, and catches the body, not yet
visibly differentiated from her brothers, in a net of hypersexualized bodily norms reiterated
throughout the episode. The sexed body, Butler proposes, is “forcibly materialized” over
time through discourses of power: “‘Sex’ not only functions as a norm, but is part of a reg-
ulatory practice that produces the body it governs,” a practice that includes images like this
one, that “demarcate, circulate, differentiate — the bodies it controls” (1). As she watches her
brothers discover the male contraband, young Alison straddles a log suspended between
trees that Bechdel identifies in one of her verbal footnotes as “pole for hanging deer” (112).
When Alison encounters the calendar again in the cab of the bucket loader at the “strip
mine,” she tries to slip the net of her female body by asking her brother to call her Albert
rather than Alison. Bechdel annotates the girl-child’s desperate name switch in the maw of
the gigantic machinery of male construction as “a tidy melding of Proust’s real Alfred and
his fictional Albertine” (113). This “tidy melding” inserts the strip mine incident in the
Proustian narrative arc that associatively organizes all the scenes in chapter 4. Remembrance
of Things Past functions as subtext for Bechdel, suggesting at times the intersecting homo-
sexual and heterosexual paths coexist, like the apparently divergent paths of Swann and the
Guermantes. At other times Bechdel’s chapter title “In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower”
borrowed directly from Proust, suggests the possibility that she and her father might trade
places as young girls, that the gender identity that these scenes attempt to inscribe on the
body as norms are shadowed by instability. If Proust could transpose Alfred the chauffeur
into Albertine, the love object, then within representation itself might exist strategies of
resistance and another erotic economy altogether. Indeed at the chapter’s close, the narrator
rereads the photograph of her father in drag that serves as the chapter heading, as plausibly
performing a “lissome, elegant” feminine body (120). In the juxtaposition of another pair
of photos on the final page of this chapter, she imagines herself and her father “translated”
into each other, each reciprocating the desiring gaze of a lover who holds the camera.
But back at the construction site, Alison’s shape-shifting is only temporary. Bechdel’s
editing immediately moves us to another scene of male initiation, being taught to shoot a
.22 by Bill (the “outdoors type” she recognizes in adulthood as one of her father’s boyish
intimates posing as yard worker). Significantly neither Alison nor her two brothers can
handle Bill’s pistol, yet only Alison feels her possibilities as a gendered body curtailed. In a
gesture of comic excess, Bechdel arranges a final encounter with what appears to be phallic
potency as the children quail before a gigantic snake in the woods. The snake completes
the Garden of Eden trope, beginning with Alison’s first glimpse of the cheesecake calendar,
“I felt as if I’d been stripped naked myself, inexplicably ashamed, like Adam and Eve” (112).
But if the Genesis story purports to distribute shame across genders, the young girl alone
not yet in flower experiences the painful asymmetry her future embodies (Figure 8.1).
Alison feels herself named, normed, and shamed by her induction into Biblical and
ubiquitous cultural stories about “dirty” female sexuality that even her father helps circulate.
As Butler reminds us, the available cultural narratives cannot simply be refused: “ ‘Sex’ is
not simply what one has, or a static description of what one is: it will be one of the norms
by which the ‘one’ becomes viable at all, that which qualifies a body for life within the
domain of cultural intelligibility” (2). Riding home from the bullpen, Alison’s body is newly
intelligible to her brothers as an object of ridicule, culturally if not visibly differentiated

from their own. Grinning at the elder’s joke of pulling his T-shirt out to suggest breasts,
the brothers bond to exclude their lookalike, who gazes disconsolately out the window while
the narrator comments, “a postlapsarian melancholy crept over me. I had failed at some
unspoken initiation rite, and life’s possibilities were no longer infinite” (115). In the front
seat, her father and Bill stare straight ahead. Despite the fall into cultural constraint, the
scene marks a new consciousness for the alienated subject, as Leigh Gilmore suggests, “the
ways [the female subject] learns to interpret objectification as something less than simply
subjectivity itself marks a place of agency” (183).
To underscore her own artistic agency in rereading these limiting cultural scripts,
Bechdel points toward the contradictory meanings of even an archetype as over-determined
as the snake in the story she has just narrated. Between the drawing of the children’s hyper-
bolic telling of the enormity of the snake, and a drawing of the scene of her father’s suicide,
the narrator intervenes (“it’s obviously a phallus, yet a more ancient and universal symbol
of the feminine principle would be hard to come by”) and explicitly disavows binaries as
either a product of nature or as the only organization of culture (“perhaps this undifferen-
tiation, this nonduality, is the point”). To close this episode, her final image on the page
offers an almost subliminal cue to her own redigesting of these scenes in her circling structure.
Rejecting her mother’s feminine hair-styling tips, Alison turns to the father who sips sherry
while reading The Worm Ouroboros (116). In Bechdel’s dense, visual citational practice, the
image footnotes the 1922 E.R. Eddison fantasy novel (begun in sketches at the age of ten,
the same age Bechdel began drawing). The novel’s title is glossed by the cover image of the
serpent swallowing its own tail to form a circle, and the term “ouroboros” has been used to
describe Proust’s circular narrative design that she borrows.
Indeed, juxtaposed to the melancholy interpellation into a heterosexualized female
body is the flashback to five-year-old Alison’s glimpse of an alternative avatar. Deploying
her favorite strategy for taking the reader off-guard when we turn the page, Bechdel brings
the dyke in the diner into full view in the top frame of the left-hand page, “a most unsettling
sight” (117). Her bulky presence expands in the foreshortened perspective, her patient self-
sufficiency contrasting with the frowning concentration of the scrawny male cook, who
checks an invoice against what he had ordered, while we check off the bulging plaid shirt,
the full key ring dangling from a sensible belt, her hands resting on ample hips. The frame
for her entrance into young Alison’s receptive unconscious takes up two-thirds of the entire
page, and the father’s angry rebuttal in the frame below is weighed down by her looming
figure. The father’s prohibition of Alison’s imagined identification is swift and dehumanizing:
“Is that what you want to look like?” (118). In describing the “exclusionary” violence by
which gender is constructed, Butler states it is “foreclosures, radical erasures” gestures like
these that differentiate the “human” from the “more and the less human” who are “refused
the possibility of cultural articulation” (8). The five-year-old’s disavowal is forcibly solicited,
her spoken “no” echoing (or anticipating, in historical time) the mental “oh” of her wordless
assimilation and internalization of opposing female norms represented in the girly calendar
(Figure 8.2).
Alison’s response demonstrates that conscious resistance cannot prevent the process of
normative interpellation, but the unconscious identification she experiences will “sustain”
her as much as it “haunts” her father. The repressed and repudiated goes underground,
becoming the unruly underside on which the gender regime depends, but which it cannot
completely control or eradicate. Because interpellation succeeds by marking boundaries
Figure 8.2. Disavowal in the diner. Alison Bechdel. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. Boston:
Houghton, 2006. 118.
between the normative and the excluded that are inherently unstable, Butler argues that a
queer subject’s abjection serves as a “critical resource in the struggle to rearticulate the very
terms of symbolic legitimacy and intelligibility” (3). The diner scene concludes with another
postscript to Proust, in which Bechdel underscores what has been lost in the English trans-
lation of “perdu,” “not just lost but ruined, undone, wasted, wrecked, and spoiled” (119).
She bitterly names her father’s cultural conscription and disavowed abjection that he passes
on to her by pasting these terms over the image of her father reading himself into the
evasions and silences of Guermantes Way (119).
Getting a Lesbian Life

If the bullpen and diner scenes demonstrate the power of images in the process of
interpellation, Bechdel’s representation of her emerging subjectivity as a lesbian in chapter
3 emphasizes the power of texts. The entire episode is littered with language treated as
image: the dictionary page that opens chapter 3, Alison’s typed declaration “I am a lesbian,”
the exchange of letters from her parents reproduced in the picture panel, and frequent
images of the act of reading itself. I use the term “available cultural narratives” to indicate
the ways subjects recognize themselves through what Paul Smith describes as the “concepts
of personhood culturally available to the narrator when he tells his story (105). These varieties
of personhood are not ready-made, but are themselves a story. “Lesbian,” like “black” in
Stuart Hall’s formulation, “has never just been there. It has always been an unstable identity,
psychically, culturally and politically. It too is a narrative, a story, a history. Something con-
structed, told, spoken, not simply found” (45). In reading these scenes, I ask students to
explore the tension between the truths of the familiar “coming out narrative” and the mean-
ing-making processes of memory. Bechdel, and many of my students, have often used the
coming out narrative to organize their sexual stories. A genre whose conventions have been
consolidated over the last four decades, the teleological trajectory posits sexuality as a pre-
existing condition that can be unearthed through self-scrutiny and that, once accurately
named for oneself and others, can retrospectively reorder all prior experience as originating
from one unalterable fact, now apprehended beneath all cultural and personal misrepresen-
tations, as the natural truth of innate sexuality.
Bechdel draws, in the heaps of carefully lettered book spines and covers, an extensive
bibliography of the types of homosexual personhood available to her as a college student in
the late 1970s, an intertextual archive that Fun Home preserves and brings forward for a
generation who benefited from these stories even if they never read these particular texts.
Interestingly, Bechdel suppresses any clue to the psychic and social instability of the term
in any of these texts here, in favor of a seamlessly enabling history. By contrast, in her 1993
version of her coming out narrative in Gay Comix #19 she can parody the disappointments
of The Wail of Loneliness for the eager lesbian reader (“where’s th’ sexy parts?) (6). Smith
and Watson remind us that “the site of narration is also a moment in history, a sociopolitical
space in culture” (56). In 2006, Bechdel’s sociopolitical space also contains the history of
AIDS and the waxing and waning of gay rights struggles; both seem to inflect her telling
of the 1970s with wryly comic nostalgia.
The narrator’s library research on lesbianism in college enables her to name her desire
and enact it in a comically celebratory representation of cunnilingus, which is actually nar-
rated twice and is redrawn in chapter 7. In chapter 3, books not only solicit her claiming
a story, the body itself is consistently mediated through texts, as the sexually engrossed nar-
rator notes, “for me a novel fusion of word and deed” (80). The circuit from text to flesh
and back again is an unbroken moebius strip, another ouroboros. Embodied sexual knowl-
edge relocates the subject in the textual world of her childhood simultaneously made strange
and newly legible (from the delicious eroticism of James and the Giant Peach to the impe-
rialism of Christopher Robin, to the erotic etymological roots of the dictionary). The scenes
of rereading the self entail repeated re-narration of that self in relation to family, culture,
and history.
In both chapter 3 and chapter 7, the scenes of her coming-out are interpenetrated with
disconcerting news from home: her mother’s disapproval, her father’s equivocation, and the
stupefying disclosure of her father’s affair with Roy the babysitter that reduces her to a fetal
ball attached to her parents by the umbilical telephone cord. Yet the tension between her
sexual emancipation and “the swirling, sucking Charybdis” (213) of her parents’ hidden sto-
ries is more extreme in the second version. The ruptures and fissures caused by the new
knowledge of her father’s homosexual experience are marked more insistently in the later
chapter as threats to the coherence of the coming-out narrative, the narrated “I’s” arrival at
a fixed point of accomplished identity. Rather than producing a moment of mutual self-
recognition in each other’s stories, their connection recedes into an infinite regression.
“What,” she asks, “reduced to their simplest reciprocal form, were dad’s thoughts about my
thoughts about him, and his thoughts about my thoughts about his thoughts about me?”
Supposition frustratingly replaces full disclosure: “He thought that I thought that he was
queer. Whereas he knew that I knew that he knew that I was too” (212). Language that
mediates and confirms the experience of the flesh in chapter 3 appears here to fail.
Yet in the larger intertextual schema that organizes the later chapter, Bechdel substitutes
a relay of texts for the failed familial communication. As an undergraduate, the narrated
“I” turns her back on her father’s most treasured text, Joyce’s Ulysses, to embark on her own
odyssey rather than satisfy his vicarious urge to mold her tastes in his image. The adult nar-
rating “I,” however, stages her most ambitious appropriation of the touchstones of her
father’s library, proving that two can play at the Icarian games that open the memoir. For
Bechdel, her father’s library has been a scene of his clandestine seductions yet undeniably
also the scene of instruction: “the promise was very likely sexual, in some cases, but whatever
else might have been going on, books were being read” (61). In her adolescence, his library
was another arena of competition between them; she confesses she drew all over the copy
of Ulysses he lent her for her college course (Chute “Gothic Revival”). Bechdel’s reuse of
Joyce in the memoir is inter-temporal as well as intertextual. She pictures herself in college
as exasperated with Ulysses, preferring her own sexual odyssey “so seductively calling” (207).
Yet she returns to Joyce twenty years later, like Stephen Dedalus, for proof of her spiritual
paternity. She overlays her resisting and questing readings of her father’s favorite texts, and
uses them as instruments of her self-fashioning no less than his own. In the literary appren-
ticeship begun in his high school class, she now asserts her supremacy. Bechdel’s intertextual
gamesmanship exists at the level of individual frames, as when the JJ on the cover of Ulysses,
held by a frustrated reader, is replaced in the next frame by Jill Johnston’s Lesbian Nation
on top of the mounting pile of her alternative bedside reading (207). At the level of structure,
Bechdel’s intertextuality is more than an act of simple substitution. She incorporates her
reading of her father’s (mis)reading of Joyce, and her reading of his meaning in giving her
Colette, as well as her meaning in leaving behind Kate Millett for him to read — producing
an expansive, meaning-making network of cultural intelligibility for both their stories.
Colette solicits not only her erotic self-knowledge, but in the passage Bechdel reproduces,
Colette’s text can contain both the “aphrodisiac” beauty of the cross-dressing seventeen-
year-old butcher boy (sending us back to the photo of her father in a swimsuit that opens
chapter 3), as well the boy’s suicide (208), without privileging either. The final movement
of the memoir is suffused with texts, their publication, and our consumption as the very
Figure 8.3. Intertextuality. Alison Bechdel. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. Boston: Houghton,
2006. 207.
stuff of identity-formation. The last chapter contains the coming-out narrative but is not
contained by it. Texts beget rereadings and discoverable certainty about sexuality recedes,
confirming Joan Scott’s central premise that “experience” becomes “not the origin of our
explanation, not the authoritative (because seen or felt) evidence that grounds what is
known, but rather that which we seek to explain, that about which knowledge is produced”
(780) (Figure 8.3).
In the Shadow of Young Boys in Flower

Replicating the recursive reading practice that Fun Home teaches us, late in our dis-
cussion I bring students back to the photograph of Roy that Bechdel describes as the “core
of the book,” its imaginative point of origin. The largest drawing in the book, a zoom lens
close-up covering two pages, the centerfold of Roy is the single image in Fun Home without
a frame. Instead, Bechdel uses all her technologies of graphic hyperrealism to plunge us into
the scene with the narrator, as if we apprehend this photo without the mediation and dis-
tancing of comics conventions. We come upon it by surprise, as she did, and are arrested
by her most dramatic left-hand page revelation. Although the pages are partially papered
over by the narrator’s annotations, like graphic post-its, we are engrossed in the boy on the
bed. Only in retrospect can we see what associations might suture this photo with her mem-
ory of admiring a fashion centerfold in Esquire with her father (99). Just before we turn the
page, Bechdel frames the father looking over his daughter’s shoulder, then jump cuts to a
decade later when the daughter imaginatively looks over her father’s shoulder photographing
his lover, and, in some intermediate temporal zone between these two looks, imagines him
returning repeatedly to gaze at this photo.
Bechdel comments on her two drawing styles in the book, the line-drawings of the
narrated history in which shading is achieved through green ink-wash, and her reproduction
of actual family photographs, which serve as her chapter head images, in which she uses
cross-hatching to create shadows and contours. Her attempt to render photos is “a way to
keep reminding readers these are real people. This stuff really happened” as if to fulfill the
autobiographical pact with the reader despite the comic format (Chute “Interview,” 1009).5
Yet she also admits “these are photos that feel particularly mythic to me, that carry a lot of
meaning” (Chute “Interview,” 1009). This photograph, which once seen, became “embla-
zoned” in her memory and imagination (Champion) is obsessively cross-hatched, as if the
graphic artist could not be done with drawing it: the wallpaper, the curtains, the bedspread
in the children’s adjoining room, the view outside their window, and almost every inch of
the sleeping figure, are all covered with layers of cross-hatching. The narrator muses on her
father’s failed self-censorship that would attempt to blot out the year date-stamped on the
border of the print, and yet be unable to destroy the evidence of their intimacy. Bechdel at
once historicizes this moment definitively, a vacation trip to the Jersey shore in August of
1969, when she was eight, and simultaneously carries forward her father’s commemorative
project. This luminous centerfold, eroticized, estheticized, and even sacralized, opens almost
at the center of the book. The drawing is an anomaly in the memoir not only in being with-
out the comic book frame; it is also without page number. It appears on what would be
pages 100 and 101, except that for Bechdel this frameless frame exists in her consciousness
(as that dateless August may have existed in her father’s memory) outside of time or sequence.
Bechdel’s graphic representation insists we keep rereading this scene as an arrested moment
into which all past knowledge funnels and from which all future understandings of herself
in relation to her father will radiate outward. Bechdel’s enlarged close-up stages not only
the tangible evidence of her father’s rereading of the photo, but performs that recursive,
almost compulsive looking that we share with the narrator, as we move between her notes
and our own increasingly detailed perceptions of the image. For both father and daughter,
the image remains graphic testimony to the preservation, disavowal, and reproduction of
desire.
In terms of historical plot, the narrator’s discovery of the photo gives corporeal sub-
stance to what she twice draws as horrified reiteration: “Roy, our babysitter?” (74, 211). The
story of her childhood must be revised, but only here can she draw the lie installed in the
heart of the family. Parallel universes had split off from her mother’s disclosure of her father’s
affairs, making equally unbelievable the one she inhabits and the one she can barely imagine.
The photo produces an epiphany, yet one cross-hatched by contradictions. The narrator
has earlier represented her implacable antagonism with her father in childhood as proxies
for their simultaneous gender rebellion, “I was Spartan to my father’s Athenian, modern to
his Victorian, Butch to his Nelly, utilitarian to his aesthete” (15). Yet here, in this moment,
her expected anger is replaced by affinity, her betrayal superseded by identification, their
rigid binaries dissolved. “Why,” the narrator puzzles, “am I not properly outraged?” Instead,
the “trace” of her father’s “illicit awe” evokes something like it in her. She temporarily par-
ticipates in the intimate annunciation of the boy’s beauty, “gilded with morning seaside
light,” the “aureole” of his hair (unnumbered 101). No matter how long she holds the image
of her father’s desire to the light of her autobiographical eye, (and the tilted orientation of
the photo frame on the page reminds us of its profoundly destabilizing effect) she experiences
her subjectivity, especially her homosexual desire, routed through her father’s.
This singular image in the ongoing process of interpellation might explain the larger
emotional impetus of Fun Home, not only to understand what she provisionally calls “his
erotic truth” (230), but to believe her sexual choices were consequential to him, that hers
solicited in him a similar longing for a story. Bechdel’s achievement in crafting Fun Home
is to offer multiple plausible stories for linking his sexuality to hers and to his death, yet at
the same time to acknowledge these narratives serve her needs rather than his own. She
reconstructs the ephemera of the week he died — newspaper headlines, his reading Camus —
searching for circumstantial evidence. The newspaper headlines Bechdel draws next to
father’s obituary are suggestive, “Three-Mile Island Study: Workers Face Harm from Dam-
aged Plant” (27), a local story with national implications. Two days earlier, the front page
reports “Justices Uphold Hyde Amendment: Curbs on Abortion Stand” (27). Bechdel’s
insertions of these companion stories encourage us to see that the state, far from protecting
the lives and liberty of its citizens, may actively mean them harm. She rereads Camus for
portents, and draws and underlines a telling passage from the Myth of Sisyphus. Simultane-
ously, above the frame, she testifies against her own graphic evidence by admitting “I wish
I could say I’d accepted his book, that I still had it, that he’d underlined one particular pas-
sage” (47). What she has underscored, by contrast, is her lack.
As the narrative spirals again and again around “his end and my beginning” as inter-
twined textual, sexual stories, she imaginatively inserts herself and her father in several alter-
native histories. In chapter 7, Bechdel juxtaposes the possibilities of gay popular culture
that might have sustained them in New York, in which “the suspect element is revealed to
be not just benign, but beneficial, and in fact, all-pervasive” (189–91), and the AIDS narrative
of “injustice, of sexual shame and fear, and life considered expendable” that might have
killed him (195–96). The very fact that each of these hypothetical explanations is drawn
with the same degree of verisimilitude as the rest of the book persuades us of their plausible
truth. Yet the narrating “I” confesses and corrects her narcissism; inserting her father into
the available narrative of public gay life would have precluded her birth, and the “eagerness
to claim him as ‘gay’ in the way I am ‘gay’ ... is just a way of keeping him to myself ” (230).
The narrator’s self-scrutiny demands she reveal the fissures that rupture the continuity and
coherence she longs to find, “‘Erotic truth’ is a rather sweeping concept. I shouldn’t pretend
to know what my father’s was” (230).
Significantly, in the final pages of the book, Bechdel claims her father’s spiritual pater-
nity, of both her sexuality and her book, and simultaneously draws and narrates the ruined
progeny, defections, betrayals, and unpaid debts of Joyce, a great artificer like her father,
to lesbian publisher, Sylvia Beach. Bechdel imaginatively sutures what she can’t logically or
emotionally fully resolve by drawing another scene from early childhood. Instead of pre-
cariously balanced in the game of airplane, she’s safely ferried on her father’s back to the
deep end of the pool. She can afford the risk of leaping into his arms and can imagine the
embrace that acknowledges her inheritance of his gifts because she controls the ending. In
the suspended double recognition of the final two frames, she reconstitutes the father as
enabling her own queer sexuality. An act of filial redemption and artistic and sexual self-
invention, the lesbian artist fabricates the father she wants and needs.
NOTES
1. In this early formulation, Butler discusses gender alone, but her later work extends these processes to
include sexuality, as I do here.
2. For a sociological analysis of the relationships between available cultural narratives and sexual storytelling
see Plummer, especially chapters 2 and 3.
3. Bechdel made these comments in a lecture at Amherst College on April 2, 2008. She later made similar
comments in a lecture at Cornell University on April 16, 2009.
4. See Cvetokovich, Gardner, Lemberg, Whitlock, and Watson. Perhaps the consistency of these readings
has as much to do with the critical exegesis of Speigelman’s Maus, the first graphic memoir to receive serious
attention that seems to have set the terms for reading graphic memoirs. My reading is congruent with Julia
Watson’s in several dimensions, particularly our shared emphasis on the recursive patterns of narrating and read-
ing.
5. McCloud would argue that the hyper-realism of Bechdel’s photo-drawings in effect impede what he calls
“closure,” the rapid processing of separate cartoon images into narrative movement through time and space, by
making readers “particularly aware of the art,” that is, by deviating from the legible comic conventions (91). We
also become hyper-aware of ourselves reading, holding the book, when we see the narrator’s fingers in the page,
a kind of information within our visual frame as comic readers that Wolk contends we usually ignore (130). In
drawing the Roy centerfold, Bechdel interrupts our immersion in the graphic narrative to focus explicitly on the
acts of reading images.
WORKS CITED
Bechdel, Alison. “Coming Out Story.” Gay Comix #19. 1993. Print.
_____. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. Boston: Houghton, 2006. Print.
_____. Lecture at Amherst College, Amherst, MA. 2 Apr. 2008. Lecture.
_____. Reading and Discussion by Alison Bechdel at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. 16 Apr. 2009. Web. 16 Dec.
2011. <http://www.cornell.edu/video/index.cfm?VideoID=254>.
Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter. New York and London: Routledge, 1998. Print.
_____. “Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex.” Yale French Studies. 72 (1986): 35–49. Print.
Chute, Hillary. “An Interview with Alison Bechdel.” Modern Fiction Studies 52.4 (2006): 1005–13. Print.
_____. “Gothic Revival.” Rev. of Fun Home. Village Voice. Village Voice, 4 Jul. 2006. Web. 10 Dec. 2011.
Cvetkovich, Ann. “Drawing the Archive in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 36.1&2
(2008): 111–28. Print.
De Lauretis, Teresa. Alice Doesn’t. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. Print.
Edward Champion (Bat Segundo). “Interview with Alison Bechdel.” 2006. Web. 16 Dec. 2011. <http://www.
edrants.com/_mp3//segundo63.mp3>.
Gardner, Jared. “Autobiography’s Biography.” Biography 31.1 (2008): 1–26. Print.
Gilmore, Leigh. “Autobiographics.” Women, Autobiography, Theory. Eds. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. Madi-
son: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998. 183–89. Print.
Hall, Stuart. “Minimal Selves.” Identity: The Real Me. London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1988. 44–46.
Print.
Hogan, Ron. “Jessica Abel and Alison Bechdel.” Beatrice.com, Jun. 2006. Web. 16 Dec. 2011. <http://beatrice.
com/wordpress/2006/06/05/abel-bechdel-author2author/>.
Lemberg, Jennifer. “Closing the Gap in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 36.1&2 (2008):
129–40. Print.
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. New York: HarperCollins, 1993. Print.
Plummer, Ken. Telling Sexual Stories. New York and London: Routledge, 1995. Print.
Scott, Joan W. “The Evidence of Experience.” Critical Inquiry 17 (1991): 773–97. Print.
Smith, Paul. Discerning the Subject. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. Print.
Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. “Autobiographical Acts,” Reading Autobiography. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2001. Print.
Versaci, Rocco. This Book Contains Graphic Language. London: Continuum, 2007. Print.
Watson, Julia. “Autographic Disclosures and Genealogies of Desire in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.” Biography
31.1 (2008): 27–56.
Whitlock, Gillian. “Autographics: The Seeing ‘I’ of the Comics.” Modern Fiction Studies 52.4 (2006): 965–79.
Print.
Wolk, Douglas. Reading Comics. Boston: Da Capo, 2007. Print.
9. Our Graphics, Ourselves
Graphic Narratives and the
Gender Studies Classroom
M. CATHERINE JONET
Various anxieties circulate about the comics in general. Do the autobiographical

genres of popular culture merit this serious scholarly work? Are the comics able
to escape the stereotyping and racializing that is a feature of some genres? Do
they reproduce U.S.–centered and imperializing discourses?... Comics, and
indeed representations in general, need to be read with attention to their specific
productions, and the locations and relocations of their reproduction and con-
sumption.
— Whitlock and Poletti “Self-Regarding Art”
Not long ago, studies of comics and graphic narratives in the humanities-based
Women’s and Gender Studies classroom might have consisted of critique of over-sexualized
representations of women in mainstream comics or examination of the secondary or nearly
absent roles of women in celebrated graphic texts, such as Alan Moore’s Watchmen (1987).
While these issues are still important points of analysis, the possibility of a teaching approach
derived solely from them has become complicated with the success of graphic memoirs by
such women artists as Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis, 2003, 2004), Alison Bechdel (Fun Home,
2007), and Laurie Sandell (The Impostor’s Daughter: A True Memoir, 2009). Despite the fact
that a small number of women have made inroads into the comics industry as executives,
writers, and illustrators, the female writer or illustrator is by no means a fixture in the indus-
try. From mass-market texts to literary graphic novels in the tradition popularized by Will
Eisner, female writers and illustrators have been invisible in mainstream markets until
recently.1 Persepolis and Fun Home have won numerous awards, from a 2004 Alex Award
(Satrapi) to a 2007 Eisner Award (Bechdel), and have also blazed a path for other women
who illustrate and write graphic narratives. Satrapi and Bechdel’s success in the mainstream
in the United States and internationally makes their works touchstones for women writers
and artists in comics.2 The emerging autobiographical work of Sandell, who illustrates
and writes her own texts, seems to refocus the graphic novel on a new frontier: women’s
lit. The Impostor’s Daughter does something perhaps neither Persepolis nor Fun Home seeks
to do. It attempts to bring young women on a mainstream scale (who would be more
likely to read popular magazines like Marie Claire) to the pleasures of reading graphic nar-
ratives.
119
Any approach to teaching graphic narratives in a Women’s and Gender Studies class-
room should seriously consider discussing the small number of women writers and illustrators
in the comics industry. Instructors may contemplate taking the challenge of using female
illustrated and written texts as an underlying organizing principle for their courses. As this
chapter will demonstrate, such an approach does not mean that texts such as Art Spiegelman’s
Maus (1986, 1990) and Joe Sacco’s Palestine (2001) should be excluded from the reading list.
Rather, it suggests that these texts, although central to the study of a growing genre, should
not be the only examples of “serious comics” in the course (Chute and DeKoven 770). A
Women’s and Gender Studies teaching approach that does not take into consideration the
importance of including women’s texts will exclude important conversations with students
about the production and consumption of cultural texts. As the epigraph indicates, the
reader needs to pay attention to comics’ “specific productions, and the locations and relo-
cations of their reproduction and consumption” (Whitlock and Polletti ix). Excluding women
writers and illustrators makes it easy to arrive at progressive claims about women in comic
book culture without actually including women creators in the production of graphic narra-
tives. Studies of representations must attend to both issues of production and of consump-
tion, even if it is a matter of considering the so-called common practice of collaborations
between female writers and male illustrators or men writing and illustrating the majority
of the texts we read. The approach discussed in this chapter involves focusing on graphic
narratives created by women as well as relevant literary criticism. Articles on graphic nar-
ratives help reinforce course themes and serve as guideposts to the understanding of selected
texts and of graphic narratives as a hybrid discourse with both visual and textual compo-
nents.
Wonder Woman’s Airplane Is Invisible: Gender and Graphic

Narratives
Using texts that focus on social issues and analyze cultural norms and prohibitions is
certainly not new to Women’s and Gender Studies classrooms. The graphic narratives dis-
cussed in this chapter thematically mirror the critical strategies commonly employed in
Women’s and Gender Studies. I have included graphic narratives in my “Gender, Feminism,
and Popular Culture” course and have taught another class, “Gender and Graphic Narrative,”
for the Women’s Studies Program at a four-year institution. Both courses were upper division
and had undergraduate as well as graduate students. Although (or perhaps because) these
courses are not for art or literary studies, an important concern to resolve quickly when
coming up with an approach to understanding graphic narratives is the inclusion of Scott
McCloud’s Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (1994) in which he defines comics as
sequential art. Including McCloud’s work as a required text, a suggested guide, a handout,
or a supplementary reading creates a broader frame for studying graphic narratives than
course themes warrant. Students can gain an almost “self-taught” literacy of texts through
reading it together with scholarship attuned to the hybrid discourse of graphic narratives.3
For a lower-division course, however, McCloud’s work might prove essential for under-
standing graphic narratives in general, as opposed to employing scholarship in connection
with primary texts.
One last important concept to consider when formulating an approach to teaching
graphic narratives in Women’s and Gender Studies is the inclusion of male-created texts.
9. Our Graphics, Ourselves (Jonet) 121
As the titles of my classes indicate, I teach gender in addition to women’s studies. It means
that while representations of women and texts produced by women are central to the class
inquiry, these courses also study representations of masculinity. In the context of using
gender as a lens of analysis, male-authored texts provide a view into constructions of mas-
culinity that are useful in classroom discussions. David Small’s Stitches (2009), David Maz-
zucchelli’s Asterios Polyp (2009), and Craig Thompson’s Blankets (2003) are each productive
texts through which to explore constructions of masculinity. These texts offer narratives
that make male protagonists vulnerable both physically and emotionally, that destabilize
the centrality of heterosexuality, and that offer unconventional relationships with female
characters in ways that do not take for granted cultural norms.
In a graphic narrative course it is essential for students to understand the legacy of
comics, for example: they need to get a sense of the position of Maus in the history of com-
ics and the doors it has opened for graphic narratives. In my course, we read Maus as well
as Sacco’s Palestine and Howard Cruse’s Stuck Rubber Baby (1995). The knowledge students
gain from reading these texts is invaluable and is reinforced when they go on to read Satrapi
and Bechdel. Even though each of the texts listed above breaks new ground in varied ways,
their indebtedness to Maus is an important learning experience and provides an opportunity
for classroom discussion. As Ariela Freedman points out, “[l]ike Satrapi and Spiegelman,
Bechdel positions her memoir at the intersection of image, narrative, autobiography and
history” (126). This comment emphasizes the connection between these texts and speaks to
the possibility of others along the same line.
Interestingly, even though each of my courses contains the word “gender” in its title,
I never fail to receive comments from students that criticize the fact that male authors appear
on the reading list. Therefore it is important to discuss with students how they understand
the term “gender” and clarify how it is used in the course and in the scholarly field. Another
approach could include using excerpts from Maus, Palestine, or Stuck Rubber Baby, rather
than reading the full texts, depending on the course themes, cost of all the texts, and plans
for the reading list. However, I have not yet tried this approach. In my experience, the
learning gained from reading each of these in their entirety, in addition to the body of
scholarship about them, is invaluable.
“Comics” Wars: Gender Studies Versus Fan Culture

When I adopt graphic narratives in the Women’s and Gender Studies classroom, I
notice students become more engaged in reading, analysis, and cultural criticism in ways I
do not see when analyzing other narratives including films. As Edward Said argues in his
introduction to Palestine, comics “seemed to say what couldn’t otherwise be said, perhaps
what wasn’t permitted to be said or imagined, defying the ordinary processes of thought,
which are policed, shaped and reshaped by all sorts of pedagogical as well as ideological
pressures.... I felt that comics freed me to think and imagine and see differently” (ii). In
addition, students have presented their papers from my classes at conferences and made
them into the focus of their graduate work. One of my students applied for the Fulbright
Scholar Program to study in Germany in order to conduct research for a graphic novel
about an assassinated female royal she intends to create.
With all of the pedagogical success and student learning, there are often significant
challenges as well. Usually a small segment of the class feels their ownership of “comics”
under threat. Perhaps that world, as Said describes it, where comics defy the ordinary is
already open to these students, and now they witness their world of pleasure becoming
transformed into mere “texts” in a classroom and intellectualized by “outsiders”— including
me and those outside their groups. Over the last two years, I have dealt with differing class
situations, ranging from spirited debates on how to define the terms “comics,” “graphic
novel,” and “graphic narrative,” to outbursts about the importance of comics to modern
society, to long monologues about the plot intricacies and discrepancies of X-Men and Frank
Miller’s take on the Batman series. Overall, the experience teaching these courses is very
rewarding and, as the list suggests, sometimes intense or difficult to bring discussion back
to a Women’s and Gender Studies point of view. A teaching strategy devoted solely to exam-
ining the representation of women in male-authored texts is not enough. With the increasing
presence of women graphic narrative creators, it is important and productive to construct
a reading list that includes their work.
It is important to be aware that the term “graphic narrative” does not have a commonly
agreed upon definition. When teaching a graphic narrative course in a Gender and Women’s
Studies class, it is likely that many students decided to take the course because of their
interest in graphic narratives or comics. This brings about an interesting balance in the
classroom. The class can be made up of novices of gender studies and comics, experienced
gender studies students who may or may not have studied graphic narratives, and lifelong
comics fans who are invested in taking a course on graphic narratives regardless of context.
This last group of students can represent a significant proportion of the class population.
The last time I taught the course “Gender and Graphic Narrative,” these students had an
encyclopedic knowledge of comic books, their history, and debates about comics as well as
detailed information about certain titles. They generally assisted their classmates in discussing
the language and analysis of the visual elements of graphic narratives. However, many of
these students objected to the term graphic narrative. Spiegelman uses the terms cartooning
or comics as does Bechdel. Many of my comic book-invested students consider the term
graphic narrative the result of academic attempts to make comic books worthy of study by
high culture. They argue that it prioritizes “serious comics” over other forms of comics.
There is certain degree of truth to their claims, but as Hillary Chute and Marianne DeKoven
have proposed, the term graphic narrative takes into consideration the range of graphically
produced narrative, from comics, to novels, to memoirs and more (767). Since this chapter
examines approaches to teaching graphic narratives as they are connected to Women’s and
Gender Studies, this wider range of texts is central to accomplishing learning objectives. In
the course “Gender and Graphic Narrative,” we engage with texts as divergent as graphic
novels to what I call, feminist ephemera, which can be simple anonymously-made one page
cartoons on gender issues found in self-published “zines” or placed in public spaces for dis-
tribution. For these reasons and for the methodology of the course, the term graphic narrative
is the most inclusive and descriptive.
The term graphic novel is another point of scrutiny. Right now the comics and film
industries seem to favor the term graphic novel and deals are struck for adaptations of
graphic novels into mainstream films. Many graphic novels are in fact collections of serialized
comics. If graphic narratives and autographics are commonly used in academic scholarly
works, the graphic novel seems to be preferred by the industry. My students and some long-
standing comic book readers prefer “comics” and such disparity provides an opportunity
for debates among students and rich conversations in class. However, it is important to
refocus these debates within the themes of the class. Sometimes Women’s and Gender Studies
novices in the class dominated the discussion, which I consider their unconscious attempts
to redirect class discussion to their comfort zones. Comics is historically a mainstream term
referring to a male-dominated genre. In contrast, the term graphic narrative, as the class
discussed, indicates the possibility of new points of view and diverse referents. This is yet
another reason I find the term more useful in the classroom.
The Personal Is Political: Autographics and Fictional Graphic

Narratives
The majority of critically acclaimed texts by women are graphic memoirs, not novels
in the traditional sense.4 Graphic memoirs or “autographics” are a growing focus of current
scholarship.5 Many journal articles are devoted to studying them and there have been some
special issues, for instance: Modern Fiction Studies special issue on “Graphic Narrative” in
winter 2006 and Women’s Studies Quarterly’s special issue on “Graphic Narratives of Witness”
in spring and summer 2008. In my classes, we read both “autographics” and fictional nar-
ratives written and illustrated by women. In my experience, using well-known texts such
as Persepolis and Fun Home as “anchors” helps introduce students to lesser known female-
produced fictional texts.6 For example, students are intrigued to read other graphic narratives
after learning about the possible accessibility and brilliance of the medium and women
artists’ significant contribution to comics through studying Persepolis. Graphic novels, such
as Mariko and Jillian Tamaki’s Skim (2008), Lilli Carré’s The Lagoon (2008), and Megan
Kelso’s The Squirrel Mother (2006) become important texts in my courses. Rutu Modan’s
Exit Wounds (2008) provides a useful example of fictional narratives produced by women.
Modan is an Israeli writer and illustrator and Exit Wounds centers on a male character,
which gives students the opportunity to discuss the representation of a male lead in a graphic
novel by a female creator. Daniel Clowes’ Ghost World (1997) is an interesting text to con-
sider in courses that explore graphic narratives about female friendship and it tells a story
about female adolescent friendship that is written by a man. I mention Exit Wounds and
Ghost World not specifically because of their cross-sex interest or appeal, but rather because
of each book’s ability to challenge students’ preconceptions in such matters. These texts
prompt students to reconsider their ideas about young men or young women’s friendships.
In terms of existing scholarship on autographics, Satrapi and Bechdel count prominently
in this growing field. As Jared Gardner comments, “[t]he early 1970s is a watershed moment
for autobiographical comics, and there is evidence that the first decade of the twenty-first
century is another momentous moment in the life story of this peculiar form, as more
graphic memoirs than ever are being published, and even more important, gaining critical
and cultural attention”(1). Graphic narratives have inspired what might be thought of as
two developing forms of scholarship. The first approach tends to examines texts primarily
through their written words and views the images as secondary or less important.7 Chute
and DeKoven note: “[m]any critics struggled with the language of comics, in the sense that
they virtually ignored the fact that Maus is a work of comics” (770). This in part is a result
of academia’s long resistance to comics as a suitable literary form for scholarship and for
use in classrooms. Chute and DeKoven further contend: “Sophisticated and complex, Maus
threw open the question of ‘serious comics’— and the problem of taxonomy that graphic
narrative provokes — when Book One was nominated for a 1986 National Book Critics
Circle Award in Biography.... Book Two was published in 1991, and by the time the series
won a ‘Special’ Pulitzer Prize, in 1992, Maus had entered fully into public discourse, defining
the potential of the field but existing as essentially its only example” (770).8 The success of
Maus as “serious comics” also raises the question whether the graphic narrative has to be of
this nature (serious, sophisticated, historical, and complex) in order to merit academic
inquiry. While the question is not easy to answer, it does appear that there is a growing
acceptance of all forms of graphic narratives in the classroom and scholarship.9
The second form of scholarship taking shape around the graphic narrative pays attention
to reading images together with words. Both Women’s and Gender Studies journals as well
as journals without a specific gender focus reflect the growing academic interest in graphic
narratives. This growing body includes the 2006 special issue of Modern Fiction Studies
devoted to graphic narratives. As mentioned above, Fun Home has generated an increasing
amount of scholarship. Part of its appeal stems from the text’s role as the author’s autobi-
ography as well as the biography of Bechdel’s father. It also generates interest because it is
both a graphic narrative by a woman and a queer text.10 For example, Ann Cvetkovich has
located Bechdel’s text within the influential notion of queer trauma and the archive of feel-
ings. Cvetkovich states, “Fun Home confirms my commitment ... to queer perspectives on
trauma that challenge the relation between the catastrophic and the everyday and that make
public space for lives whose very ordinariness makes them historically meaningful” (111).
The 2008 special issue of Women’s Studies Quarterly on witnessing includes Cvetkovich’s
essay between an essay on Satrapi and another one on Bechdel. Critical essays on Persepolis
have also been published in the context of postcolonial studies. These critical essays suggest
not only the significance of these graphic narratives, but also the growing archive of schol-
arship and their utility in multiple pedagogic contexts.
While the growth and success of Persepolis and Fun Home contribute to their continued
evolution through scholarship and in the classroom, there is little scholarship on Sandell’s
The Impostor’s Daughter beyond book reviews as of yet. It will be interesting to see whether
Sandell’s work will count prominently in studies on graphic narratives and autographics
because the text is a popular narrative and is focused on the women’s market. When I
included it in my “Gender, Feminism, and Popular Culture” class, Sandell’s text stood in
contrast to Satrapi and Bechdel’s texts, which seem not only to transcend language and
regional/cultural boundaries but also gendered boundaries. Neither book is thought of as
“women’s literature” or aimed at female audiences. These are important issues to discuss in
the classroom because “women’s literature,” sometimes derogatorily referred to as “chick
lit,” carries with it a stigma. It is not considered as important as “literature.” Texts that are
coded female are often positioned in ways that prevent them from having the so-called uni-
versal appeal. But, a text specifically labeled “women lit” can also become a part of a devoted
niche market. If The Impostor’s Daughter becomes popular as women’s literature, its potential
to exist as a niche text may allow it and additional graphic narratives to be produced within
the field of women’s literature. This possibility for graphic texts to proliferate within women’s
literature brings about the makings of a shift in the area of graphic narratives that comic
strips industry has not been able to produce.11 However, it will also be important to see
whether The Impostor’s Daughter will become a stable part of Women’s and Gender Studies
reading lists and whether it will be taught in courses outside of Women’s and Gender Studies
as Persepolis and Fun Home often are. These issues are important to engage in the classroom
and to discuss in wider scholarly context.
In addition to life-writing, fictional narratives by women are important for class dis-
cussion as well. Even though the argument can be made that nearly all well-known graphic
narratives published in recent years are memoirs, a space opened by Spiegelman’s Pulitzer
Prize–winning Maus and continued through David Small’s Stitches, limiting class reading
to only texts that feature lived experience is restrictive. My Gender and Women’s Studies
courses include fictional graphic narratives. One fictional graphic text in particular that I
employ is Mariko and Jillian Tamaki’s 2008 narrative, Skim. It tells the story of a high
school student nicknamed, “Skim,” who negotiates the twists and turns of developing a
sense of identity, friendship, and selfhood. Skim is probably the most successful graphic
narrative I have taught in not only the graphic narrative class but also “Gender, Feminism,
and Popular Culture” classes. This text brings forth more nuanced, varied, and passionate
discussion, as well as intellectually engaged conversation and written work than any other
text I teach in those classes. It is a text full of narrative possibility that can be read through
both queer and normative lenses. It is relatively easy for students to connect with the per-
sonal, intimate story. As a result, it usually inspires points of discussion that would not
occur otherwise. For example, the idea of a student “coming to voice” in a Women’s Studies
class has long been an important tenet of feminist pedagogy. In my experience Skim prompts
students to “come to voice” again and again. Other texts that have become an integral part
of my teaching practice are Carré’s The Lagoon (2008) and Kelso’s The Squirrel Mother
(2006). Each of these texts contains what I would describe as the narrative potential of
fictional texts. These texts play with the mysteries of narrative desire and the reader’s inabil-
ities to explain his or her life at times. As an instructor, I especially like the way that The
Lagoon troubles students with questions of interpretation and carries with it the first joys
of storytelling from childhood. The stories in The Squirrel Mother, especially the title story,
suggest the reader’s inabilities to understand the snaking paths of his or her life and that of
others. Narrative devices such as these allow us a moment of contemplation. As Theresa M.
Tensuan argues in her essay on “Comic Visions and Revisions in the Work of Lynda Barry
and Marjane Satrapi,” the narratives in The Squirrel Mother are “interested in the ways in
which comics help us see how particular narrative conventions and visual idioms work to
enscript our critical perspectives and purviews” (951). In the title story, through the juxta-
position of stories about a squirrel and a human family, readers get a sense of why mothers
could possibly leave their children. “Green River” presents an ambiguous story in which
the main character and narrator may have waited on a serial killer of women while working
at a fast food restaurant. The connection these texts have with Persepolis and Fun Home as
well as the related critical reading helps students envision how narrative texts can work
through issues of history, trauma, memory, and identity in ways that are relatable to the
autographics.
In addition to The Squirrel Mother and other texts, Kelso has produced a serialized
comic for The New York Times Magazine in 2007, “Watergate Sue.” It is available online
and is useful for discussions on women and gender. As its title indicates, the story focuses
on a couple’s marriage and pregnancy during the Watergate period and centers on a birth
through temporal framing device. The Watergate scandal occurs concurrently with women’s
liberation movement. One panel in the final installment presents fictional domestic diva,
“Agnes Blubird, Home Economist.” Agnes, a background presence throughout the comic
as a figure from television commercials, is a home economist, a character that would seem
out of style or anachronistic to the period since many women struggled to have lives outside
their home and attempted to share domestic labor with male family members at the time.
In one of the panels, Agnes speaks of herself as a dinosaur and an anachronism while she
cleans a bathroom, which she refers to as the “drudgery of housework” (“Watergate Sue”).
This panel is central to the comic, set during the time of “liberated ladies.” Agnes’ focus
on cleaning is a space in which she has control; she can solve problems and trust in the
authority of her knowledge about cleaning, not to mention the authority in cleaning prod-
ucts. Agnes happily buries herself in the “drudgery of housework” while the nation confronts
great challenge and the family depicted in the comic is falling apart. Agnes can solve her
problems and make her life gleam with elbow grease.
The last panel featuring Agnes is not only important to classroom discussion in regard
to the entire story but also culturally. Agnes offers the possibility of discussing women who
resist messages of second wave feminism including sharing domestic duties and working
outside home. The world outside the home with its challenges and lack of cohesion does
not offer the closure and the sense of accomplishment and control that the inside, domestic
world does. Using such a graphic narrative in the classroom provides students an opportunity
to explore why some women prefer the “inside world” and return to it and the implications
of such preference.
Other texts useful in the context of women and domestic versus public spaces include
Satrapi’s Embroideries (2005) and Jessica Abel’s La Perdida (2006). Each text produced a
strong reaction among students when I adopted them in the classroom.12 Embroideries,
another autographic from Satrapi, helps students rethink and question their understanding
of Iranian women and sexuality. Moreover, the very term “embroidery” generated lively
discussion on what the practice is and how the text represents it. La Perdida, written after
Abel lived in Mexico City, asks students to consider the life of a naïve young woman in
search of her roots. In keeping with Chute and DeKoven’s more inclusive, expanded notion
of the range of graphically produced narrative (767), I also assign the visual essays of Maira
Kalman. She creates blogs for The New York Times as their “visual columnist” and has pub-
lished two collections of essays and visuals from these blogs. One of the collections, The
Principals of Uncertainty (2007), takes students through an entirely different conception of
the graphic narrative compared to the “serious comics” of Bechdel and the mysteries of nar-
rative desire of Carré. Kalman’s visual essays, while not conventionally narrative, offer a
combination of narrative elements that leave space for the reader to pause and are filled
with a sense of whimsy.
These fictional graphic narratives in general were published in recent years and have
received little critical attention from scholars. In my opinion, these texts illustrated and
written by women may never receive as much critical attention as do texts such as Persepolis
and Fun Home. Despite this absence of critical discussion, works by Gillian and Mariko
Tamaki, Carré, Kelso, and Kalman remain useful in the classroom. These texts can bring
students to discuss social issues, historical events, and civic engagements. In addition, it is
important that students get a glimpse of the long tradition of feminist and queer cartooning
through Diane DiMassa’s work, the feminist and queer comics found in zines or other forms
of self-produced ephemera, and other samples.13 Comics, cartooning, and zine production
itself have long been spheres where cultural producers create alternatives excluded by main-
stream culture.
Conclusion: Thinking Through Method

In her article on Satrapi, Chute contends: “[t]he field of graphic narrative brings certain
constellations to the table: hybridity and autobiography, theorizing trauma in connection
to the visual, textuality that takes the body seriously. I claim graphic narratives, as they
exhibit these interests, ‘feminist,’ even if they appear discrete from an explicitly feminist
context” (“Texture,” 93). I embrace this idea that graphic narratives, especially those that
bring “certain constellations to the table,” are “feminist” in some sense, even if they appear
discrete from any kind of explicit feminist context. First, approaches to teaching graphic
narratives that take Chute’s idea of “certain constellations” into consideration help reshape
the term feminist in the classroom with students. These narratives, be they autobiographical
or fictional, afford the opportunity for students and professors to discuss the meanings of
feminism from multiple perspectives, beyond the preconceived notions students enter the
class with. Secondly, do texts in a Women’s and Gender Studies have to be explicitly labeled
as “feminist” for inclusion on the reading list? It is surprising to learn when speaking to stu-
dents how many might think so. With feminist theories operating on such a broad scale,
it seems difficult to believe that any text would have to be described as explicitly “feminist”
to be included in the reading list. The texts discussed in this chapter offer students a set of
readings that may not explicitly label themselves as “feminist” but function in the classroom
to open students up to discussions of feminist theory and philosophy. The approach, texts,
and nod to the growing body of scholarship on graphic narrative in general and autographics
in particular discussed in this chapter are brought up in order to help create a methodology
and space for further dialogue. In my view, the most hopeful factor that can arise from
teaching graphic narratives in Women’s and Gender Studies classes is that both instructors
and students contribute to the scholarship on graphic narratives. Teaching graphic narratives
and forming any number of approaches to the subject offers opportunities for productive
discussions, course work, and generating further interest. As outlined in this chapter, since
the majority of scholarship seems to focus on the work of Satrapi and Bechdel, the expansion
of cultural work to other creators and topics is essential for the growth of the medium and
scholarly interest.
NOTES
1. This excludes the rich tradition of female writers and illustrators circulating in alternative feminist and
queer cultural currents. Examples include Diane DiMassa’s Hothead Paisan, Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist and
Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For series. DiMassa’s and Daphne Gottlieb’s collaboration, Jokes and the
Unconscious is a graphic novel that I intend to include in future courses.
2. Satrapi works in Paris and is part of the artist-run publishing group, L’Association. Her work has been
translated into numerous languages. Bechdel’s Fun Home was serialized in France in the newspaper, Libération
and it, too appears globally in numerous translations.
3. In my courses, I have chosen to make McCloud’s work a suggested text. One of the important learning
features of my courses is for student to gain access to graphic narrative literacy by reading assigned critical schol-
arship. My reluctance to use McCloud’s important book or other works is primarily to avoid opening up the
class to a broad discussion of “comics” in general that time does not allow. Excerpts of the book can very useful,
however. Also, I typically receive feedback from at least one student at the end of the semester suggesting the
inclusion of this book to improve the class. Of course each instructor must find a balance between making the
course about “graphic narrative” per se or a theme such as gender and identity. In the first option, McCloud’s
text may function better as a required text.
4. The most critically acclaimed authors would be Satrapi and Bechdel, although critical work on Lynda
Berry and Phoebe Gloeckner is also making a presence in scholarship on graphic narratives.
5. Gillian Whitlock coined the term “autographics” in order to “draw attention to the specific conjunctions
of visual and verbal text in this genre of autobiography, and also to the subject positions that narrators negotiate
in and through comics” (966).
6. I include Persepolis early in the semester because it is often a consuming text that attracts readers not
accustomed to reading graphic narrative. Moreover, one does not require much experience reading comics in
order to appreciate this text. Fun Home, on the other hand, is a text I assign near the end of the semester. I am
aware of the appearance of the text on many non-graphic narrative syllabi (for example, courses on memoir). I
agree that this text would be a great inclusion for such a course. Because of the density of images and text in
Bechdel’s work, I suggest that the instructor and the students read supplementary material about reading images
in graphic narratives, such as McCloud’s work and scholarship that examines the visual language as much as
written language in Fun Home.
7. Chute notes: “As I hope to make clear, authors of graphic narrative are not interested in creating images
to be independent artworks, but rather in what Spiegelman calls picture writing, and Satrapi calls narrative draw-
ing” (qtd. in “Texture,” 107).
8. It is possible to challenge Chute and DeKoven’s claim here. Comics artist Will Eisner, creator of The
Spirit, invented the term graphic novel in 1978 with his A Contract with God, and Other Tenement Stories that
consisted of four short stories drawing heavily on Eisner’s childhood that took place in the same tenement.
9. Note the creation of the Comics Studies Program at the University of Florida and the journal it hosts,
as well as the conference on comics that it puts on every year. These demonstrate the proliferation of academic
activity around all forms of comics. Moreover, since the traditional approach to comics in Women’s and Gender
Studies classes and scholarship has been to examine the sexism and absence of women, and to critique the forms
of masculinity produced in all forms of graphic narrative, it could be argued that comics outside of long-form,
serious narratives have been a part of the academy for some time.
10. Fun Home received a GLAAD Media Award, a Stonewall book award, and a Lambda Literary Award,
to name a few.
11. Bringing more women or/and girls into the readership of comics has seemed to be the “white whale”
for the comics industry. In 2006 DC Comics announced the creation of its imprint MINX that would go into
production in 2007. MINX would be a gazette-sized line of comics aimed at young adult women. A senior vice
president of the company, Karen Berger noted the popularity of Satrapi’s Persepolis with young women and
Japanese manga as an inspiration (Matt Brady). According to George Gene Gustines in an article for The New
York Times, “[a]s a whole, the line is positioned as an alternative for teenage girls who have, especially in bookstores,
become increasing smitten with the Japanese comics known as manga” (“For Graphics a New Frontier”). In that
same article, Berger makes the claim that “[t]o us [DC Comics] it doesn’t matter if the person has written comics
before or is known to the comic book market” (Gustines). This statement seems to imply that women would be
seriously involved in the creation of the comics. The business plan for the imprint failed and DC Comics
announced the cancellation of the line in 2008. Interestingly, Comic Book Resources reported that “[m]ultiple
sources close to the situation agree [Shelly] Bond [the imprint’s chief editor] and DC aren’t to blame for MINX’s
cancellation, and that this development should be seen as a depressing indication that a market for alternative
young adult comics does not exist in the capacity to support an initiative of this kind, if at all” (Khouri). This
statement puts the blame on the target market as opposed to the industry’s real lack of making change by involving
more women in the writing and illustrating of comics and actually trying to reach non-mainstream or teenage
male-dominated groups. The imprint was roughly 18 months into production when it was cancelled.
12. Unlike Carre’s and Kelso’s fictional texts, Satrapi’s Embroideries is autobiographical, based on family
discussions.
13. As with graphic narratives, a growing academic interest in zines and other forms of self-produced media
is becoming visible in scholarship and teaching approaches. I include the study of and workshops on the pro-
duction of zines and self-made feminist/gender ephemera (such as one page cartoons) in my popular culture
class. It is also important to note that Bechdel’s work outside of Fun Home is greater than Dykes to Watch out For
and is very significant for postmodern and popular culture classes. A panel from one of the Dykes to Watch out
For has produced what is popularly called the “Bechdel Test.” This can easily be discovered online, and is an
appealing talking point for Women’s and Gender Studies classes. Bechdel also wrote a book review of Jane
Vendenburgh’s A Pocket History of Sex in the Twentieth Century: A Memoir in a visual style that is reminiscent of
the one she created in Fun Home for The New York Times (26 Mar. 2009 Sunday Edition). This, too, is easily
available online.
WORKS CITED
Brady, Matt. “Karen Berger Talks MINX.” Newsarama.com. 27 Nov. 2006. Web. 13 Dec. 2011.
Chute, Hillary. “The Texture of Retracing in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 36.1–2
(2008): 92–110. Print.
_____, and Marianne DeKoven. “Introduction: Graphic Narrative.” Modern Fiction Studies 52.4 (2006): 767–
82. Print.
Cvetkovich, Ann. “Drawing the Archive in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 36.1–2 (2008):
111–28. Print.
Freedman, Ariela. “Drawing on Modernism in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.” Journal of Modern Literature 32.4
(2009): 125–40. Print.
Gardner, Jared. “Autobiography’s Biography, 1972–2007.” Biography 31.1 (2008): 1–26. Print.
Gustines, George Gene. “For Graphic Novels, a New Frontier: Teenage Girls.” The New York Times. 25 Nov.
2006. Web. 13 Dec. 2011.
Kelso, Megan. “Watergate Sue: Chapter 22.” The New York Times Magazine. 2 Sept. 2007. Web. 13 Dec. 2011.
Khouri, Andy. “DC Cancels MINX Young Adults Line.” Comic Book Resources.com. 24 Sept. 2008. Web. 13
Dec. 2011.
Said, Edward. “Homage to Joe Sacco.” Palestine. Joe Sacco. Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics, 2005. i–v. Print.
Tensuan, Theresa M. “Comic Visions and Revisions in the Work of Lynda Barry and Marjane Satrapi” Modern
Fiction Studies 52.4 (2006): 947–64. Print.
Print.
_____, and Anna Poletti. “Self-Regarding Art.” Biography 31.1 (2008): v–xxiii. Print.
10. Performing the Veil
Gender and Resistance in Marjane Satrapi’s
Persepolis and Shirin Neshat’s Photography
JUDITH RICHARDS and CYNTHIA M. WILLIAMS
Art can be a powerful means of challenging the stereotypes of mutually

antagonizing nations.
— Aphrodite Désirée Navab
In courses on Arab and Muslim Women’s Writing, our pedagogy attempts to initiate
dialogue around a specific site of struggle: the portrayal of Muslim women and the veil as
a symbol. To develop our curriculum, we focus on two Iranian (autobio)graphical accounts:
Marjane Satrapi’s coming-of-age graphic novel, Persepolis and Shirin Neshat’s multi-signi-
fying photographs. Satrapi depicts herself in dialogue and graphic representation first as a
child and then as an adolescent growing up during and after the Iranian Revolution, while
Neshat’s “Women of Allah” images allow her to “return” to the Islamic Revolution that she
did not experience directly. Satrapi and Neshat perform family histories and portray hybrid
identities: Satrapi documenting an oppressive, volatile Iran, while Neshat negotiates between
her adopted American self and Iran’s post-westernized Islamic state. By juxtaposing two
different genres that feature Muslim women’s veiling, we can address the national, cultural,
and personal displacement articulated by these artists.
To examine these artistic productions in class, we use a multilayered theoretical approach
in which we apply elements of performance theory to Satrapi’s (autobio)graphic novel and
Neshat’s stylized photographic images of herself as a veiled woman. For educators the veil
is a critical site for teaching global controversies, since its multivalence is central in numerous
histories, politics, and cultural struggles. Our approach aligns with Edward Said’s theory
of Orientalism in which we aver that, like the harem, the veil is part of the western construc-
tion of the East. Our pedagogy seeks to demystify (for the West) and de-familiarize (for
the East) the veil. We explore the veil as Reina Lewis defines it: “an item of clothing dra-
matically overburdened with competing symbolism” (10). The veil — the specific and diverse
practices of body covering by Muslim women, such as burqa, chador, dupatta, hijab, niqab—
functions as a strategic boundary that divides the West from Islamic nations. In the West,
the veil is a controversial, politically-charged image, often associated with terrorism, the
oppression of women, and obscurantism, which makes it a vital focus in a Women’s and
Gender Studies classroom and other courses that deal with Islamic culture and history.
130
10. Performing the Veil (Richards / Williams) 131
In designing the class, we take into account biases and misunderstandings toward
veiling among some western-oriented students who are mostly non–Muslim. Helpful in
class discussion and campus interactions are the diverse views provided by the large, inter-
national student bodies at each of our universities, and who take our Muslim Women’s lit-
erature courses. Middle Eastern students who have participated in the class include Shi’a
and Sunni Muslims, Coptic Christians, Buddhists, and Hindus. As a result, these groups
contribute historical and cultural insights that reveal the heterogeneity of their diverse
faiths.
We teach veiling practices as a form of performance that opens possibilities for read-
ing/viewing the (autobio)graphic novel and revolutionary images. When we use the term
“veiling,” we refer in general to practices that include different kinds of covering, from the
head scarf to a full garment. In this chapter, we refer to the chador, which specifically defines
the head and body covering of Iranian women. In applying veiling to theories of perform-
ance, we open up ways of discussing with our students both the general practice of veiling
and specific performance of the chador in textual and visual form. These theories lend them-
selves to examining controversial and misunderstood veiling practices since performance
proliferates into different expressions that ground one’s actions, identity, and political knowl-
edge in diverse cultural contexts. In doing so, performance affirms a specific subject position
that destabilizes essentialist notions of cultural reproductions and beliefs (Carlson 182). By
teaching through the lens of performance, we steer students away from embracing easy and
erroneous stereotypes and assumptions and tap into the postmodern experience of many
students who spend hours watching rappers on MTV and indie artists on YouTube and who
relate to Hollywood blockbusters more easily than to literature. Because of this, we have
students read graphic novels as a way to engage them in content that later allows us to
explore in class the construction of race, gender, ethnicity, and class.
Not only does the graphic novel engage students in the visual arts, but it also offers a
productive platform for experiencing Iranian women’s autobiography. According to Hillary
Chute, “the field of graphic narrative brings certain constellations to the table: hybrity and
autobiography, theorizing [socio-political upheaval] in connection to the visual ... [textual
and oral] that takes the body seriously” (93). The visual and verbal format offers multiple
modes of expression for investigating the body’s role in the process of women’s socialization,
agency, and identity. By reading the body as a graphic image, we use Persepolis and Neshat’s
photography to teach students visual literacy and analysis. For example, they often skip
over the troubling images of war and state torture or avoid engaging with Satrapi’s black-
and-white minimalist drawings of bodies that are being “cut up,” executed, tortured, and
killed. Because our students are so inured to violence and because of its ubiquitous presence
in film and video games, we draw their attention to how, in real situations, the state not
only disciplines bodies but also contains and punishes them. In Persepolis, a multivocal and
emotional autobiography, we see how repression impacts the bodies of ordinary citizens
who are forced to comply with extreme measures of control. In this graphic novel, we see
bodies forcibly veiled, imprisoned, conscripted, and sacrificed. In contrast, in Neshat’s
“Women of Allah” we see an inscrutable severity in the images’ lack of a frame and context
in which the body appears fragmented. In many of Neshat’s portraits, women are shown
only partially: feet, hands, faces, or other body parts. It is as if women are reduced and thus
made vulnerable by outside forces that we do not see. We find Persepolis works well with
Neshat’s images in terms of their performance of veiling and their subsidiary autobiographical
narratives that, as Chute says, “take the body seriously.” In this way we encourage students
to see similarities and differences between the novel and the image, the performance of
fragmented and partial depictions in both artists’ work.
In depicting their own bodies, both artists illustrate their response to Iran’s abrupt
political, cultural, and religious reformation. They represent the veil as an “ideological sign”
of social upheaval and repression, to use Satrapi’s words. However, the artists take different
directions, both artistically and personally. In Persepolis, Satrapi’s family, valuing the inde-
pendent and self-directed nature of their daughter’s personality, sends Marji to Austria to
continue her schooling and to keep her safe. She later returns home a startled and confused
teenager before eventually leaving Iran again for France. In her narrative we see the horror
and disruption caused by the Glorious Revolution that Marji experienced as a child and
then an adolescent.
In contrast to Satrapi, Neshat left Iran the year before the Revolution to study in Cal-
ifornia where she remained for twelve years. When she returned to Iran for a visit in 1990,
she found herself both drawn to and disoriented by the profound physical and cultural
changes surrounding her. And in this lost time and place Neshat returns to post-revolu-
tionary Iran. In doing so, she begins a journey into the experiences of Iranian women during
the Revolution and its aftermath by staging and photographing herself as a veiled woman
in Middle Eastern settings. In effect, the contrasting vectors of the two artists’ choices are
instructive to our study: Satrapi’s narrator permanently sheds her veil for life in the West,
while Neshat travels between New York, London, Mexico, and various locations in Muslim
countries where she explores, critiques and resists what Jon McKenzie describes as “com-
pulsory performances of social norms” (221).
Performance Theory: A Brief Discussion

To discuss the “compulsory performances of social norms,” we offer students examples
of how Satrapi and Neshat’s images depict “the body” enacting strategies of political resist-
ance to state control of women’s bodies. Our classroom instruction focuses on the body and
how the artists portrayal embodies identity comprised of gender, race, and ethnicity through
act, gesture, and dress, always in flux. To discuss bodily performance, we refer to Judith
Butler’s theory that considers gender and identity as socially constructed entities. In Gender
Trouble, Butler states: “the very notion of ‘the body’ [is] not as a ready surface awaiting sig-
nification, but as a set of boundaries, individual and social, politically signified and main-
tained. No longer believable as an ‘interior truth’ of disposition and identity, [gender] will
be shown to be performatively enacted signification ... [and] occasion the parodic prolifer-
ation and subversive play of gendered meanings” (44). In this scheme, individual identity
does not exist outside of culture, but the subject instead is “performatively constituted” by
what Butler calls “the repeated stylization of the body” or “a set of repeated acts within a
highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce ... a natural form of being”
(43–44).1 Performative acts are reiterative and ritualized “under and through constraint”
dictated by power structures, social codes, and normative modes of behavior, including
those acts that signify a specific gender (qtd. in Carlson 171). Butler further argues that reit-
erative actions, like words, are deployed in diverse temporal and spatial settings and therefore
take on different meanings in different contexts. When meanings shift, reiteration initiates
a process of change that can be stabilizing or destabilizing; that is, it can fortify or undermine
signifying conventions (Vasterling 22–23). Both Satrapi and Neshat adapt this notion of
reiteration and destablization in their art: Marjane repeatedly plays against norms just as
Neshat’s work mimics and unsettles the image of the veiled woman.
Butler particularly notes how reiteration or imitation can become a parody of gender
and work to destabilize socially and politically constructed gender categories. She asserts
these gender reiterations to “effectively displace the meaning of the original” (176), with
such performances viewed as a strategy to move beyond the social disciplining of the body
and its gendered behaviors. Performance, then, contains the potential for the subversion of
rigid, culturally-derived gender categories and their enactment. Performance situates gender
not as a fixed sign but as a tactic to negotiate self and identity. Butler indicates that reiterative
acts, transformed through individual performance, can provide political self-agency. Here,
the boundaries of the body are reestablished in ways that give women power to assert their
resistance to normative gender structures and to affirm female self-agency. As Butler states,
“the task is not whether to repeat, but how to repeat, or indeed repeat, and through a radical
proliferation of gender, to displace the very gender norms that enable repetition itself ”
(148). In other words, she indicates that repetition does not occur willy-nilly, but is stylized
in a way to parody and challenge power structures and compulsory norms.
To help students understand Butler and how she defines reiteration, we refer again to
Jon McKenzie, who describes performance as more than body movement, but body place-
ment in relation to other actors or props. Such placement allows readers and viewers of
Satrapi and Neshat to critique how power and oppression are structured and applied.
McKenzie defines the liminal quality in Butler’s theory as “a mode of embodied activity
whose spatial, temporal, and symbolic ‘betweenness’ allows for dominant social norms to
be suspended, questioned, and played with, transformed” (218). In other words, as a liminal
space, performance has the ability to veer beyond the boundaries of socially sanctioned
structures. McKenzie notes that Butler’s theory is double-sided and describes not only the
potential for “marginal, transgressive and resistant” behavior but also can show submission
to a “dominant and punitive form of power ... that both generates and constrains human
subjects.” Essentially, he states, Butler highlights both the “transgressivity and normativity”
of gender identity performance (McKenzie 220–21). In referring to McKenzie, we suggest
to students that the graphic nature of the Satrapi’s novel is a prop that facilitates Marjane’s
political performance: the text is her stage. In Neshat, the woman’s body serves as an object
draped by different and reiterative kinds of veiling. In the classroom, this theoretical dis-
cussion of reiteration and the use of props introduces students to another aspect of how the
state, to exert its control, disciplines the human body.
When discussing veiling, we do so in the context of how dominant power structures
assert control over the body. In this regard, the normativity of gender performance reflects
Michel Foucault’s theory of bio-power and the docile body, which describes an individual
who, disciplined to power structures, voluntarily submits to social control. Power is distrib-
uted through a network of relations — family, neighbors, school, state officials, ayatollahs —
that, as Foucault observes, “subjects the body to a dispersed set of procedures, analyses,
norms, and controls that, through the interplay of their anonymous convergence, serves ...
as a matrix of coercion” (141). In this “matrix of coercion” or bio-power, Foucault contends
the body becomes compliant and passive, submitting to the myriad offshoots of control that
come from several socially-based sources. Foucault describes how this network creates a
body that becomes “docile,” and can be “manipulated, shaped, trained, punished, worked,
ranked and observed” (141). With bodies inevitably embedded in networks of power, Fou-
cault claims that: “individuals do not simply circulate in those networks; they are in a posi-
tion to both submit to and exercise this power. They are never inert or consenting targets
of power; they are always its relays. In other words, power passes through individuals. It is
not applied to them” (qtd. in Brah 78). Though bodies can be socially disciplined and made
docile, as non-inert “relays” of power, the body can resist and transcend power structures.
Butler indicates that performance can show submission to power; however, she emphasizes
that in the liminality endemic to performance an individual can stage various forms of
resistance and self-empowerment. She particularly focuses on gender performance and how,
in initiating resistance, performance can parody, and thus subvert, social norms and disci-
pline. For example, many of Neshat’s “Women of Allah” appear to be passive in their impen-
etrability; however, their poses exude an un-intimidated presence that does not indicate
docility or compliance.
As Sartrapi’s drawings and Neshat’s photographs reveal, people’s behaviors are not
intrinsic to their identities or personalities but are socially constructed to ensure their com-
pliance with social norms. When the subject reiterates ritualized performance in the expres-
sion and representation of gender, the restorative constitutes what Theodor Adorno calls a
“negative dialectic” in which the recitation can never quite copy the ideal or exactly replicate
the original. Therefore, within the negative dialectic, there exists what Carlson calls “slip-
page,” where the performance will not match the cultural ideal and thus deviates from it;
it therefore carries the possibility of transgressing social boundaries. We cannot view social
scripts as set in stone, fixed or immutable. Alfred Schulz posits that humans perform identity
out of “a patchwork ... of knowledge,” in which “motives, means and ends, as well as causes
and effects,” are strung together without clear understanding of their real connections. An
example here is Neshat’s “unreadable” series of portraits in which the connections are not
necessarily clear, reflecting her own displacement and conforming to Schulz’s view of per-
formance as staging the “gaps, intermissions, discontinuities” (qtd. in Carlson 49). In other
words, social performance is not “pre-scripted” by culture, but is constantly constructed,
negotiated, reformed, fashioned, and organized out of scraps of “knowledge” (Carlson 49).
As Butler contends, liminal gender performance is always open to reorganization and renego-
tiation, which works to resist and transgress gender constructions and social conditioning.
In discussing these theories, we point out to students that we are applying a Western
theory to artists who come from cultures where normative processes are bound to be quite
different. In Western liberalism we recognize the concepts of resistance are often culturally
shaped and can present themselves in various ways. In the West, we have a diverse menu
of options in which to express and stage resistance. We cannot assume that people from
other cultures resist in a similar manner. Though Satrapi’s character asserts her independence
and individuality in ways we recognize, we see Neshat using a different strategy. As noted
above, she does not seek to individuate her identity, which would be a Western form of
resistance and self-agency, but instead enacts her hybrid role both as photographer and
model, her performance more instinctive than academic as she moves back into a culture
of community and pre-scribed roles. Indeed, we find it necessary at times to argue against
our own theory and its application to Satrapi and Neshat. Putting Persepolis and “Women
of Allah” in dialogue, we ask students what kind of subject is normative within a particular
political belief system; how Western artists, critics, and the public might view Islamic
women’s agency; how Eastern viewers might respond to the images of Islamic women in
images apparently aimed at Western viewers; whether there are universal norms and values
regardless of one’s cultural context; and, whether an emancipatory and individuating model
can be the optic we use for discussing the subjectivities of Muslim Women.
Teaching Persepolis and “Women of Allah”: First Steps in

Performance Pedagog y
To prompt students to examine the questions we posed above, we begin the class by
encouraging them to unveil their own cultural ignorance and prejudices. We make clear to
our students that discourse veils the body and the mind. We give them an outline of a veiled
woman and within the outline they are to list words that define the veil, i.e., their “language”
on the veiled woman’s body. Then, we ask students to draw their own bodies, just as Satrapi
draws hers on which they describe their identities. We allow them to discursively construct
themselves and write on their bodies just as they wrote on the veiled women. We then ask
students to compare and contrast the veiled woman’s scripted body to those of students’
self-description. Finally, we have students make comparisons and reveal their own concep-
tions of self and (mis)conceptions of the veil.
After this activity, we give them Neshat’s 1993 photograph “I Am Its Secret” that shows
a woman’s face completely wrapped in the drape of her black chador, leaving only her
eyes and the upper portion of her nose
visible (Figure 10.1). Overlaid onto the
original photograph is a poem by feminist
Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad, written
in ornate red and black ink in circles on
the woman’s visible features.2 The woman
in this image performs contradictory
identities: her exterior self is carefully
covered while the intricate Farsi script
reflects her subjectivity, thoughts, desires,
and memory. In class we discuss how the
Farsi script of the poem alters her image.
We provide the poem and have students
write a response in relation to the photo-
graph and the veiled woman’s gaze. In
their responses, students also compare “I
Am Its Secret” to the words they wrote
earlier in class on the outline of the veiled
woman and address the question: how the
veiled woman’s identity changes when the
poem’s words are added to the photo-
graph.
To provide comparisons, students
can examine dialogues or written essays
of social events that have affected their
lives and how their identities have
changed as they moved from childhood
into adolescence. Once we have com-
pleted these activities, we then conduct Figure 10.1. “I Am Its Secret” from “Women of
Shirin Neshat, 1993. RC print and ink (pho-
more close reading of Persepolis and Allah.” tograph taken by Plauto). 49 1 ⁄ 2 ¥ 333 ⁄ 4 inches. ©
Neshat’s images through the lens of per- Shirin Neshat. Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New
formance. York. Reprinted with permission.
Persepolis and the Performance of the Veil

To discuss the veil and its reiterative function in Persepolis, it is useful to first point out
the impact of repeated images found in graphic narratives. Satrapi’s artful use of expressionist
drawings and skillful pairing of violent scenes with those of “normal” life maximizes the
opportunities the graphic novel offers for representing that which is unrepresentable. Marji,
as the autobiographical narrator, bears witness to revolution, rigid social control and carnage;
Satrapi, as the artist, invites the reader to bear witness as well. Her graphics are reiterative
of Marji’s first-hand testimony. On reconstructing trauma Chute notes: “graphic narratives
reconstruct in order to counteract. It is useful to understand the retracing work of graphic
narratives as ethical repetitions (of censored scenarios) ... manifested with particular force
in the hybrid, verbal-visual form of the graphic narrative, where the work of (self ) inter-
pretation is literally visualized; the authors show us interpretation as a process of visualiza-
tion” (93). The reiterative graphic not only reveals the ubiquitous presence of trauma in
Marji’s childhood, but also, in its repetitive depiction of the veil, places it as central to her
experience of social disintegration.
Satrapi’s graphic of the veil, as a reiterative symbol, emphasizes its normative function
during the Islamic Revolution in Iran. The legal requirement transforms clothing into
“restored behavior” that all women must don and thus act out. The veil serves to make all
women appear similar, with the implication that covering their bodies makes women behave
appropriately. In her work, Satrapi depicts the required veil as a reiterative sign of the dis-
ciplined female body. The veil marks her body as socially separate and shielded; the robe
serves to remove the body from sight. However, the required covering of women’s bodies
makes them highly visible, in that one reading of the garments is that of fear. The chador
exerts specific social disciplining on the female body, turning it into a seemingly docile
space, allegedly a stable sign of gender, when it is more likely to be a contested and therefore
unstable sign of gender regulation.
The first chapter of Persepolis depicts “restored behavior” and its reiterative power. In
the first panel, ten-year-old Marji is veiled in black. The next panel portrays four similarly
veiled girls that Satrapi indentifies as posing in a “class photo.” Since performance is often
described as a process in which reality is “mirrored” through restorative behavior, the reit-
eration of girls in the veil indicates a “display of culturally coded behavior.” The four girls
in the frame are in the same pose: arms folded and faces forward. The class photo only
shows Marji’s sleeve and a portion of her veil.
In this format, Satrapi sets Marji apart from the other girls, a strategy that foreshadows
her independence. The other girls form a group; however, each one has a different facial
expression and Satrapi gives them individual names, Golnaz, Mashid, Narine, and Minna.
Despite the reiterative graphic of the veil and the girls’ identical postures, the liminal peeks
through when we see the girls’ dissimilar facial expressions and learn their individual names.
Satrapi’s veil as performance conforms to Butler’s double-sided liminality: on the surface
and in practice, wearing the chador reinforces the “dominant and punitive form of power
that ... generates and constrains human subjects” (220–21). Clearly, the veil restricts the
girls and effectively suppresses their self-expression. However, as discussed above, women
also can perform the veil in ways that are “marginal, transgressive and resistant” (Butler
221). At the bottom of the page, the liminal is no longer simply “peeking out,” but has
taken over. In a large frame, the unveiled girls are playing on the playground, putting their
veils to inventive uses: in one instance a jump rope, in another an executioner’s hood, and
in yet another the garb of the “Monster of Darkness.” Here the veil loses its reiterative func-
tion as clothing; the girls use it to mimic the violence surrounding them, including execu-
tions and torture. The fact that they “repeat” violent acts indicates that violence is becoming
normative everywhere.
Linked to the reiterative performance of veil as a body cover, page two of the first chap-
ter shows non-religious schools being closed and children undergoing gender segregation.
In this instance, we see a “veiled” man whose dark beard covers most of his face. Though
his mouth is hidden behind his beard, he speaks commandingly against “Western decadence.”
Satrapi clearly identifies women’s veiling as a masculine-initiated mandate. The man’s behav-
ior, accompanied by his ominously slashed eyebrows and pointing finger, indicates an angry,
law-enforcing patriarch, a revolutionary who has claimed the prerogative to discipline
women. Satrapi destabilizes the male, patriarchal performance by inserting a frame of women
in veils with fists up confronting a group of non-veiled women. In these frames, we see
groups of women engaging in democratic social debates: veiled women trying to discipline
uncovered women, while at the same time we see men enforcing the revolutionary law.
The tightening of control becomes more pronounced as the story unfolds. At the bot-
tom of page three we see a frame of a street scene where five men peer angrily down on
Marji’s mother who is not veiled. Feeling the men’s condemning gaze, she dons dark glasses
and burrows into her overcoat, as if she can feel the heat of the men’s disapproval. In this
frame, she is resisting the mandate to veil by not wearing one; however, she strives to hide
behind the overcoat and sunglasses. No longer is the veil a child’s game; it’s become a con-
tentious political symbol instilling terror and requiring absolute obedience.
In this environment, young Marji struggles to understand what revolution means and
begins to perform what she has learned about it. In books, she reads about the resistance
in Palestine and Cuba and the Vietnam War. In her imagination, she performs various rev-
olutionary roles, pretending she is Che Guevara, Trotsky, or Castro. Eventually, Marji recog-
nizes the revolution’s harsh and violent nature; in the process, she loses her political naiveté.
Her religious faith becomes a formulaic, hollow practice, particularly when she is forced to
veil.
As the novel progresses, the veil becomes more liminally situated, particularly as Satrapi
incorporates its image into acts of overt resistance to undermine its stability as a political
and religious sign. Much of Satrapi’s narrative features the Iran-Iraq War, in particular a
chapter titled “The Key.” As a form of social disciplining, the “key to heaven” is given to
boys and young men to induce them to fight in the war. Highlighting the slaughter of
young soldiers, the chapter simultaneously reveals adolescent girls’ defiance of social control.
For example, in one scene, the girls are supposed to be knitting hoods for the soldiers. They
put the hoods on over their veiled heads and make silly faces while the teacher scolds them.
The girls, by sticking out their tongues and making bug-eyes, not only mock the hoods and
the enforced support of the war, but their buffoonery also satirizes enforced veiling. The
graphic of the hoods as toys reiterates their use by executioners in the first chapter as signs
of state-sponsored violence. By performing with the veil and the hoods, the girls make con-
nections between the three different head coverings. The women’s veil, the soldiers’ hoods,
and the executioner’s hood all signify social disciplining of the body, with the executioner’s
hood, as a symbol of state-initiated violence, looming over the text. By the middle of the
novel, the veil, however, departs from representing state control when it becomes incorpo-
rated into open acts of defiance, with the girls often risking expulsion from school or facing
corporal punishment as they “perform” the veil in insurgent ways.
In the same vein, we later see how social control extends to adolescent boys. Marji’s
cousin Shabab tells her and her mother about the new recruits sent to the front. He notes
“they come from the poor areas, you can tell ... first they convince them that the afterlife
is better than Disneyland, and then they put them into a trance with all of their songs....
They hypnotize them and just toss them into battle. Absolute carnage” (101). The following
page presents the massacre in Marji’s imagination: young boys are flung into the air, the
keys of heaven dangling around their necks. In the drawing, the boys are depicted as black
silhouettes and lack facial features, an image that emphasizes the large-scale slaughter of
the new recruits. The image also mirrors the veiled women whose individuality is overridden
and made insignificant by state disciplining. Simultaneously in the lower frame, Marji, who
is trying to live a normal life, goes to her first party. The frame shows adolescent boys and
girls dancing to punk rock. Marji’s figure, the largest in the frame, displays an exaggerated
smile, her hair flying. The juxtaposed frames underscore the way class and privilege function:
despite revolutionary rhetoric celebrating Iran’s superior values in contrast to Western
immorality, middle and upper-class families still hold parties for their children while their
poor contemporaries fight the Iraqis.
The theme of middle-class privilege also appears in another chapter titled “Kim Wilde.”
Marji, performing as a typical teenager, dons Nike tennis shoes, a denim jacket, and a Michael
Jackson pin. In this garb, she goes out secretly to buy a Kim Wilde CD, music strictly for-
bidden by the regime. Her veil, paired with “Western dress,” is a hybrid image with the
light-colored denim jacket over her chador; is no longer ubiquitously black, but instead
expresses Marji’s adolescent, non-conformist personality. She manages to get her blacklisted
CD, but her transgression becomes more serious when Marji is accosted by veiled female
Revolutionary Guards who “had been added in 1982 to arrest women who were improperly
veiled” (Satrapi 133). The frame reveals the women terrorizing Marji who breaks into sobs
and makes up a story of her mother being dead and an evil stepmother waiting for her at
home. The women let her go, but we see that Marji becomes more radicalized by the
encounter as the story unfolds.
All these examples of adolescent resistance to social norms resonate with students, who
often seek to express their individuality by performing non-sanctioned behaviors, which
includes their manner of dress and their alternative and “shocking” musical choices. However
they do not face disappearance and death when they challenge social codes. To explore this
with our students, we have them storyboard consequences they faced with defying author-
ity. In their graphics we ask that they portray a source of social control that could impose
punishment. By doing this, we evaluate systems of micro-power and the imagery associated
with them. In studying these diverse symbols, we then can further discuss with students
the oppositional function of veiling in Satrapi’s text. Significantly, the chador, is often drawn
in the novel in a “split” or liminal space. It never remains static and is not simply “backward”
or “fundamentalist” but becomes a sign of contemporary political and social protest. By
reconfiguring the chador, Satrapi constructs the novel’s narrative space into an expression
and performance of female self-agency. The veil articulates Marji’s independent personality.
Indeed, the “comic” format with the split frames represents the split space in which the veil
moves and operates: in performance the veil is used to undermine social control and disci-
plining and to articulate one’s individuality.
To explore the liminal space of Satrapi’s novel, we need to examine the question: “why
does she choose the graphic format to tell her self-story?” Chute contends the graphic nar-
rative is a highly effective form of autobiography, and poses the question that we provide
to students, “what does it mean for an author to literally reappear — in the form of a legible,
drawn body on the page?”(93). Chute offers an intriguing answer:
Persepolis proliferates selves on the page. The graphic narrative form allows for a dialectical con-
versation with different voices to compose the position from which Satrapi writes, verbally and
visually inscribing the multiple autobiographical “I”s. Satrapi’s older, recollective voice is most
often registered in overarching narrative text, and her younger, directly experiencing voice is
most often registered in dialogue and in the discursive presentation of pictorial space — the “visual
voice” of the book is one of its many narrative levels [97].
It’s important to point out to our students the dialectical nature of Persepolis’ narrative voice,
or the multiple, autobiographical “I”s that populate the text, i.e., Satrapi as a child, a teen-
ager, a veiled woman, and an artist. Once we explore the dynamic autobiographical feature
of the text, we then have students access their own experiences by asking them: “what forms
of social disciplining affect our various identities and how do we develop strategies to assert
and retain them?” We have students write a response to this topic, which they will revise
and refine when they study Shirin Neshat’s photographs of veiled women.
Shirin Neshat: Additional Pedagogical Perspective

Neshat’s “Women of Allah” is a series of thirty-eight images characterized by stylized
portraits of veiled women, mostly in black chadors. Farsi text or ancient Persian verses appear
on the unveiled portions of subjects’ bodies, feet, hands, or eyes.3 In most photographs the
model posing in “Women of Allah” is Neshat herself, enacting an autobiographical journey
as she occupies the image of the other Iranian woman she is not. Together the images’ aes-
thetic composition comments on the violence of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, which she
viewed from afar, the role of militant women in reestablishing an Islamic, non–Western
republic, and the desire of a hybrid subject to reconnect with an important part of her cul-
tural self. Because of this, transgression is not so easily fleshed out or represented; nor is the
normative aspect of veiling clearly demarcated. This obscurity may be attributed to the veil
as representative of a “mask” or “disguise” and of Western people’s misconceptions of the
veil. Clearly Neshat confronts viewers with their lack of cultural grounding or understanding:
she performs the veil as private to the wearer and an enigma to the Western viewer. Shirin
Neshat handles similar themes to Satrapi’s work but produces different results. Neshat seeks
to experience revolutionary Iran while Satrapi reenacts her memories of it. Both autobio-
graphical works depict black veils against white backgrounds, a strategy that reinforces the
disturbing images of repression associated with revolutionary Iran. In contrast to Satrapi,
whose clear-cut images give life to the veiling conflict, Neshat’s projections of violence and
social disciplining remain understated. Though her history is not as accessible as that in
Persepolis, Neshat presents viewers with multiple selves and stories. There is a reiterative
dynamic in her metonymic productions: a single image cannot quite copy the ideal or exactly
replicate the authentic revolutionary self she is seeking. Her images contain a profound
ambivalence to both transgression and normativity, blurring the line between social disci-
plining and resistance to it. At this point, using Neshat’s liminal optic, we suggest that stu-
dents continue to examine their personal experiences of social norming by asking them to
consider areas of ambivalence and contradiction within their knowledge of power.
As we have established, her staged photographic performances function as restorative
behaviors, opening a liminal space in which multiple meanings of her “self ” uneasily coexist.
For instance, in “Speechless,” we see only a small portion of the right side of a woman’s face
overlaid with straight lines of Farsi script. The missing portion of her countenance unsettles
the image and intensifies the viewing experience (Figure 10.2). The woman’s eye looks away
from the camera while the rifle barrel, held close to her ear and cheekbone, points to the
camera lens and the viewer. Is she being threatened or protected, or is she collaborating? Is
she mourning, resolute or resigned? Who might hide behind a woman concealing a weapon
inside her veil? Here the image carries contradictory meanings: according to the regime’s
ideology, the veil protects women from violation yet that same covering is defiled by violence,
with the gun constituting an ominous intrusion of the woman’s sacred space. Given that
veiling is “about sanctity,” and “is privacy’s visual metaphor” (El Guindi 96), the image is
not speechless, but is rather voluble through its signs of violation and usurpation of women’s
sacred space while the erasure of her features troubles the viewer.
Similarly, in Persepolis violence intrudes into private space and the veil, imposed on
women in order to “protect” them, instead exposes them to the brutal control of the state.
On one occasion Satrapis’ neighbors who were “totally devoted to the new regime” are
arrested for having records, videocassettes, playing cards, and a board game in their home.
As the couple is shoved into a police van, the veiled wife is exhorted to “get your ass in the
car” and “Shut up, slut!” (105). In both Neshat’s and Satrapi’s depictions, appropriately veiled
women are betrayed by the same State that insists on the “protection” afforded them by the
chador and instead they are subjected to
degrading assaults.
Another approach to Neshat’s
“Speechless” image is to recognize her
parody of the State’s concern about
women’s privacy and public spaces. As
Butler notes, women “can create cate-
gories that are in some sense new ones,
by means of the artful parody of the old
ones.” Moreover, parody is “born out of
the sense of a (strictly limited) freedom”
(Nussbaum 6). In “Speechless” the par-
odic distortion arises from her vulner-
ability: the only parameter shielding this
woman is her veil. In this liminal gap,
does the presence of the gun, itself a
masculine sign, with its proximity to the
woman’s head increase her concern and
ours? As a result, the parody arising from
the image of an unprotected woman
“unveils” the Islamic State’s rhetoric of
protecting women’s purity, using and
abusing them instead. Furthermore, we
do not know the extent of the agency of
Neshat’s veiled women, which makes
Figure 10.2. “Speechless.” Shirin Neshat, 1996. RC
print & ink. 46 3 ⁄ 4 ¥ 337 ⁄ 8 inches. © Shirin Neshat.
their veiling not only an ambivalent artic-
Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York. Reprinted with ulation, but destabilizes it as a symbol
permission. of normativity. Neshat’s images also ani-
mate Western ambivalence toward Islamic militancy and the sign of the veil, a strategy that
unsettles the viewer and, in turn, destabilizes any meanings we might attribute to it.
In discussing these images, we note the use of the camera in Satrapi and Neshat. The
viewer sees all including the privacy depicted in “Women of Allah,” in contrast to the lack
of seclusion in the graphic novel in which Marji’s moods, mistakes, fears, loss of self, and
relationship with her parents are on view. In effect, the reader as a witness, who follows
Marji on her various adventures, knows more than her parents do. In Persepolis, the dou-
ble-perspective eye at the top of the first page, a kind of camera itself, serves to record the
events that must not be forgotten, as Satrapi states in the book’s preface as her reason for
writing her autobiography. Clearly the role of the visual in the graphic novel (nowhere to
hide) serves Satrapi’s purpose to engage the reader-witness in alternative worlds, unveiling
a middle-class family and revealing its humanity.
In contrast, Neshat’s role in her images suggests her desire to situate herself in a past
she did not directly experience. Neshat’s search for a place in that past is elusive. Building
on Schechner’s concept of liminality, we characterize performance in Neshat’s “lost” auto-
biographical moment as an insistent isolation that stands in contrast to the flow of energy
endlessly generated in Persepolis. Aphrodite Désirée Navab sees Neshat’s camera work as an
instrument of the “telling-self ” (42). However, in a liminal space, the “telling-self ” performs
in isolation and, despite the presence of the camera, is not exposed in its entirety to the
audience. As a performance, the autobiographical self remains only partly visible; for exam-
ple, in “Speechless” only a portion of the woman’s face is available. With this ambiguous
and uncertain theme, Neshat’s images of the “telling-self ” conform to Butler’s conceptual-
ization of performativity: “Performativity describes this relationship of being implicated in
that which one opposes, this turning of power against itself to produce alternative modalities
of power, to establish a kind of political contestation that is not a ‘pure opposition,’ a ‘tran-
scendence’ of contemporary relations of power, but a difficult labor of forging a future from
resources inevitably unpure” (qtd. in McKenzie 228). In other words, when we reiterate
gender performance, how do we distinguish between what is truly transgressive and what
is normative? Neshat’s images directly articulate this dilemma, so much so that when viewing
her photographs we are never certain how much self-agency is generated in her female sub-
jects. On the other hand, Marji’s self-agency is clearly staged for us, with the graphic format
emphatically exposing both her exterior and interior life.
One way to encourage our students to examine the relationship between the two artists
is to contrast the kinesthetic aspect of the graphic novel’s images and pacing with Neshat’s
carefully staged and iconic photographs. In both Neshat and Satrapi, we see the disciplined
body engaged in telling a story of disruption and estrangement. However, Marji is frequently
in motion; her energy suggests a future that she herself will and does decide, while the
posed “Women of Allah” stare watchfully, their gaze by-passing the viewer and camera.
Each image suggests an intimate and inaccessible story, with Neshat reminding us that
public space is masculine where women are rendered silent and invisible. In contrast, Satrapi’s
story is quite public, with her characters in most cases facing the audience with expressions
that are easy to decipher.
As a final exercise, after students have discussed the ways the novel and photographs
inform and interact with each other, we have them write a response paper on the key question
posed by Adair Rounthwaite: “Are there/should there be universal norms and values regard-
less of one’s cultural context [and gender], and if so, what would those norms be?” (179).
This final writing exercise positions students to use knowledge and insights gained from the
juxtaposition of characters and genres to reconsider earlier assumptions, and to establish

this line of questioning as an ongoing challenge.
In this chapter, we have discussed the variety of ways that Satrapi’s graphic novel and
Neshat’s photographic images help students to develop visual literacy through the optics
both artists have provided. In keeping with Satrapi’s goal that we read in order to “not for-
get,” we appreciate Chute’s observation that the “visual practice”— in this case, the inter-
action of the two genres we worked with — is “about examining and bearing witness to the
intertwining of the everyday and the historical” (105). In our efforts to “not forget,” we have
called upon aspects of performance theory to both clarify and problematize how social con-
texts and historical moments impact human behavior in repressive situations. At the same
time, we acknowledge the imperative that Western notions of society and behaviors become
more open to epistemological opportunities outside of one’s natal culture as a way to visualize
change.
NOTES
1. Butler’s description of performance resonates with Satrapi’s use of the comic format, where the “regulatory
frame” contains repeated images of veiled children and their teachers, angry women, scornful men, and crowds
in protest.
2. The poem reads: “I’ll be greeting the sun again/and the stream that flowed through me/and the clouds
that were my long thoughts/and the painful growth of the aspens in the grove/that passed through droughts with
me.”
3. Some critics have accused Neshat of attempting to acquire cultural authenticity as a “real” militant, to
bolster conservative agendas and to revive Orientalism. On the other hand, critic Iftikhar Dadi attributes hostile
criticism of Neshat’s work to non–Western understanding of the “veil,” which he describes as a “visual marker
of women’s practices and subjectivity foreign to Western liberalism and individuation” (Dadi 25). Rounthwaite
notes that negative critiques of Nehsat’s work may well be more a function of Western liberal ideologies and
values than what we might learn from rethinking the roles of transnational artists whose work may be more about
the elimination of borders between cultures than about Islam (Rounthwaite 179).
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PART IV
CULTURAL STUDIES
11. The Weimar Republic Redux

Multiperspectival History in Jason Lutes’
Berlin City of Stones
JOSHUA KAVALOSKI
Berlin City of Stones, a graphic novel written and illustrated by Jason Lutes and published
in 2000, is unique for its multiperspectival approach to the history of Germany’s Weimar
Republic. Its distinctive strategy is foregrounded in a scene when a professor of art history
explains perspectival representation to a group of students (Figure 11.1). For him, perspectival
representation plays a central role in visual arts because it determines what is seen and
creates the illusion of three dimensions. To demonstrate how it operates, he refers to a
woodcut by Albrecht Dürer entitled “Der Zeichner der Laute” (“Man drawing a lute”). It
depicts an artist using a piece of string affixed to a point on the wall to accurately draw a
musical instrument. The professor states that the method depicted in this drawing is impor-
tant because it shows how artists use a “reverse vanishing point” in order to create a mimetic
effect (Lutes 103). The point on the wall represents the perspective of the artist as well as
that of the artwork’s observer, who appropriates the artist’s gaze. It is no coincidence that
Dürer’s 1525 woodcut serves here as an example for perspectival representation, since this
innovation of the Renaissance influenced the practice of the visual arts for centuries after-
wards. Its fixed point of view also has something in common with historiography, which
often relies on a fixed narrative perspective in the portrayal of historical events. Elizabeth
Deeds Ermarth writes that just as “neutral space is the main product of the formal consensus
of Renaissance perspective systems ... neutral time is the main product of the formal con-
sensus produced by modern historical writing. History, in other words, is a version of the
perspective grammar of Renaissance painting” (285). History, of course, is not the only
type of discourse that relies on neutral time, since it is also present in narrative texts such
as short stories, novels, and graphic novels.
An understanding of perspectival representation is, according to the aforementioned
art historian in Berlin City of Stones, “perhaps the most exciting aspect of art in the modern
era” (Lutes 103). The next frame, however, shows the students standing wordlessly. “Perhaps
not,” says the disappointed professor in response to the silence. The contradictory reactions
in this scene — enthusiasm by the professor, apathy by the students — reflect the graphic
novel’s larger strategy, which simultaneously employs and subverts single-point perspectival
representation. On the one hand, the graphic novel’s visual images are relatively conventional
in their perspectival depiction of people, places, and events. The individual frames are gen-
145
146 Part IV : Cultural Studies
Figure 11.1. A fictional professor of art history uses Albrecht Dürer’s 1525 woodcut to illustrate per-
spectival representation. Jason Lutes. Berlin City of Stones. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly, 2004.
103. Reprinted with permission.
erally drawn from a fixed point or reverse vanishing point not unlike the one in Dürer’s
woodcut. By no means does Lutes appropriate avant-garde visual techniques of early twen-
tieth-century art. In Berlin City of Stones, there are no images reminiscent of Cubism’s frac-
tured perspectivity, Dada’s collage technique, or Futurism’s dynamism of movement. In
other words, Lutes’ drawings operate according to the paradigm of mimetic aesthetics ini-
tiated in the Renaissance and institutionalized during the period of Realism. On the other
hand, however, the graphic novel’s narrative often departs from a fixed third-person point
of view. Instead of a single, neutral, and external narrative perspective, it has many different
characters who often tell their own stories in the first person. These characters frequently
disagree with one another and present divergent points of view. This pluralistic perspectivity
in the narrative of Berlin City of Stones ultimately ruptures the inherited historical under-
standing that we have today of the Weimar Republic.
There is therefore a palpable tension in Berlin City of Stones between its single-point
visual aesthetics and its multiperspectival narrative. While the former continues the realist
tradition of art that arose in the Renaissance, the latter evokes the innovations of literary
modernism. Indeed, Berlin City of Stones uses forms of stream-of-consciousness, montage,
and multi-perspectivity, and these techniques evoke early twentieth-century novels such as
James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), and Virginia
11. Weimar Republic: Lute’s Berlin City of Stones (Kavaloski) 147
Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse (1927), to name a few. What is the significance of a graphic novel
that utilizes modernist narrative strategies in its approach to history? This question takes
on additional urgency if it is true that “narrative is not merely a neutral discursive form ...
but rather entails ontological and epistemic choices with distinct ideological and even specifi-
cally political implications,” as Hayden White states (ix). This chapter argues that the mul-
tiperspectival and largely decentralized narrative structure of Berlin City of Stones seeks to
rewrite the conventional depiction of the Weimar Republic by historians. After all, any his-
torical account of the years between 1919 and 1933 is obliged to explain a particular phe-
nomenon, namely the subsequent rise of the Nazi Party in Germany. Eberhard Kolb admits
that “the scholar’s perspective is necessarily determined by these direct and indirect conse-
quences of the failure of Weimar democracy” (139). The catastrophe of World War II and
the horror of the Holocaust, both perpetrated by the Nazis, overshadow the preceding
epoch. Historiography thus relies on a teleological method in an attempt to understand the
tragic end of the Weimar Republic. Yet when historians proceed in this manner, they utilize
a point-of-view that is located long after the events are over. This historical perspective
roughly corresponds to the reverse vanishing point first used in the Renaissance, but it
arguably suppresses the uniqueness of the past in the interest of a totalizing narrative. By
utilizing multiple perspectives in his depiction of the past, Jason Lutes performs the dynamic
and entropic culture of the Weimar Republic. By offering an alternative to the conventional
teleological approach of most historians, Berlin City of Stones seeks to recover the first-hand
experience of the people who lived during the Weimar Republic. Readers of the work interact
with the past in a way that keeps it alive and relevant. When we experience a communist
demonstration through the eyes of a female character whose boss just fired her in order to
increase his profit margin, for example, we increase our comprehension of the complex
social circumstances of the period. It is precisely this type of first-hand testimony that
engages our curiosity and empathy. With the incorporation of first-hand narrative perspec-
tives, Jason Lutes brings the fates of his fictional characters closer to the readers, and he
does so in a way that for the most part is ideologically balanced. His graphic novel dismisses
neither communism nor fascism but tries to uncover the human stories that caused indi-
viduals to join these and other movements. Berlin City of Stones ultimately gives us a glimpse
of an extraordinarily complicated epoch of Germany’s past with a minimum of preconcep-
tions. For that reason, it serves as a unique vehicle for teaching students about the history
of Germany’s Weimar Republic.
To what degree does Berlin City of Stones engage the history of the Weimar Republic?
While the primary characters are all invented, there are appearances by numerous individuals
who actually lived during the period: Paul von Hindenburg, Ernst Thälmann, Carl von
Ossietzky, Joachim Ringelnatz, Hugo Eckener, Hans von Schiller, and others. There are
frequent references to the well-known communist activists Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Lux-
emburg, who were both murdered in 1919. The graphic novel also depicts an unnamed Nazi
leader who cannot be anyone else but Joseph Goebbels. In addition to including notable
individuals of the period, the graphic novel also accesses the past by referring to actual
events from German history of the early twentieth century. It briefly depicts the enthusiastic
German soldiers marching off to war in 1914, a brief battle scene from World War I, and
the broken souls returning home in 1918 after the war was lost. Another sequence shows
events from the German Revolution of 1918–1919, when numerous political groups used
force in an attempt to take control of the country after Germany’s defeat in the war. Although
there are several short flashbacks to the years during and immediately after the war, the
bulk of the graphic novel takes places from September 1928 to May 1929, which was largely
an uneventful time sandwiched between the early chaotic years after World War I and the
political problems that reemerged with the Great Depression in late 1929. This brief period
of relative prosperity and stability in the Weimar Republic of the late 1920s is often referred
to as “Die goldenen Zwanziger” (“The Golden Twenties”). It coincides with the “Roaring
Twenties” in America and describes the economic upsurge that took place after currency
controls stabilized the German financial system. During the nine-month time span covered
by the main narrative trajectory of Berlin City of Stones, very few historical events are
depicted. These include a parade in honor of Hindenburg’s birthday and the flight of the
airship Graf Zeppelin from Germany to Lakehurst, New Jersey. The graphic novel ends on
May 1, 1929, when an annual march by workers erupts in violence.
Despite this inclusion of historical individuals and events, Berlin City of Stones does
not retell the history of the Weimar Republic in a manner reminiscent of conventional his-
toriography, which typically utilizes a centralized narrative voice, as mentioned above.
Rather, the graphic novel explores the lives of numerous fictional characters with divergent
perspectives, beginning with Marthe Müller and Kurt Severing. Müller is a young woman
trying to escape her past, while Severing is a hard-boiled journalist critical of political devel-
opments in the present. The graphic novel opens with Müller traveling by train from
Cologne to Berlin where she plans to live and study at the Academy of Art. As she sits in
her train compartment, she sketches a young man sleeping in a seat near her. His political
affiliation with Nazism is strongly insinuated by his uniform and its accompanying armband.
Yet there is no visible swastika. The conspicuous absence of this symbol here and elsewhere
in the graphic novel marks an attempt by Lutes to avoid ideologically-laden imagery that
might evoke a knee-jerk reaction by readers. Nazi swastikas are deservedly seen as evil today.
But Lutes did not want our present-day knowledge of the atrocities of World War II and
the Holocaust to overshadow his depiction of Berlin during the Weimar Republic. When
asked in an interview why there is not a single swastika in Berlin City of Stones, he answered,
“I chose to remove it from the story because I didn’t want readers bringing in their associ-
ations to the symbol — I wanted them to see the events unfolding without the simplifying
shadow of the swastika looming over them” (Lutes). By the late 1920s, the Nazi party had
already developed a racist, imperialist, and violent agenda, but the group was still quite
small and not yet viewed as a serious threat to the fragile democracy of Germany at the
time. Lutes signals here his intent to represent the Weimar Republic without a monological
teleology, that is, without an inexorable endpoint that determines all preceding events. This
strategy effectively reexamines the past for its own sake so that readers can experience
Weimar-era Berlin as many Germans did at the time.
As Müller sits sketching on the train, Kurt Severing enters her compartment and
engages her in conversation. While they introduce themselves and speak with each other,
Lutes depicts them from within the train, using a conventional third-person perspective.
The visual point of view here is thus external and objective. But as the train approaches
Berlin’s Potsdamer train station, several frames suddenly suggest that Müller is narrating
the events (Figure 11.2). Each of these frames is divided horizontally in two parts, and while
the lower part of each frame shows her in the narrative present, the upper part depicts her
writing about the day’s events at a later point in time. In the first of these split frames, she
writes in her journal, “I am anxious and excited as we emerge from the train station” (16).
The lower part of that same frame shows her and Severing walking out of the station together.
The depictions of her writing in her journal comprise what narratology calls a prolepsis,
which entails a temporary jump

into the future from the moment
of the narrative present. This
particular prolepsis anticipates
how Müller reflects later on her
initial perception of Berlin. She
describes, for instance, her many
subjective impressions when she
encounters the city for the first
time. The sensory overload she
experiences at this instant is
underscored by her later journal
statement, “I am losing myself ”
(17).
Immediately after the
frames depicting Marthe Mül-
ler’s first-person perspective is a
striking full-page drawing of
Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz (Figure
11.3). Located in the center of
Berlin, Potsdamer Platz was a
protean scene of modernity dur-
ing the Weimar Republic because
of its frantic traffic and com-
merce. The image’s reverse van-
ishing point is located above and
to the side of the intersection,
showing the perspective of a
third-person narrator. Lutes’
oversized drawing of Berlin’s
Potsdamer Platz is significant for
three reasons. First, it visually Figure 11.2. Marthe Müller as a first-person narrator. Jason
Lutes. Berlin City of Stones. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly,
articulates the quotidian chaos of 2004. 16. Reprinted with permission.
big-city life. Indeed, the build-
ings, streets, and vehicles are
introduces here as important urban “actors” in the graphic novel’s story. Second, the drawing
enacts Müller’s journal statement by visually “losing” her among the confusion of Potsdamer
Platz. She no longer frames the narrative but is instead only a minuscule speck lost in the
metropolitan panorama. And third, Lutes renders here an actual historical photograph of
Potsdamer Platz around 1930 (see Huyssen 59). This drawing arguably represents an instance
of montage, a technique that was frequently used in the modernist texts of the early twentieth
century.
Immediately after the image of Potsdamer Platz, the narrative perspective shifts. Not
Müller but rather Severing is now telling the story (Figure 11.4). Three frames, which together
comprise another prolepsis, depict him sitting at a typewriter at some point later in time,
perhaps that evening. As earlier with Müller, each frame has two parts so that a moment
from the future is paired with a moment in the narrative present. It becomes clear from
Figure 11.3. Drawing of Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz. Jason Lutes. Berlin City of Stones. Montreal: Drawn
& Quarterly, 2004. 18. Reprinted with permission.
Severing’s written reflections that his experience

of the city differs from Müller’s. As a native Ber-
liner, Severing is familiar with the manifold sights,
sounds, and smells of the city’s Potsdamer Platz.
He concentrates on her reaction to the urban chaos
and expresses concern when she appears over-
whelmed. In his journal, he asks himself, “Why
do I feel protective of her? Why not let her go, let
it drag her under and shake her up a little?” (19).
This sequence of images — Müller’s journal writ-
ing, the oversized drawing of Potsdamer Platz,
and Severing’s journal writing — epitomizes the
graphic novel’s multiperspectival narrative. We
experience, in turn, the first-person point of view
of a new arrival to Berlin, the third-person point
of view of Potsdamer Platz, and the first-person
point of view of a local journalist who knows the
city well. Müller, the third-person narrator, and
Severing all have diverse impressions of the same
physical space at the same moment in time, and
these multiple perspectives reveal the graphic
novel’s real subject, the multiperspectival experi- Figure 11.4. Kurt Severing as a first-person
narrator. Jason Lutes. Berlin City of Stones.
ence of Berlin during the Weimar Republic. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly, 2004. 19.
Although the city’s chaos does engulf Müller, Reprinted with permission.
as Severing anticipates, the result is not negative.
Approximately two months later, she writes in her journal, “instead of losing myself, I feel
a part of something larger, my life like a thread, unspooling and intertwining with those I
pass on the street” (100). It is precisely this metaphoric act of “intertwining” with the city’s
inhabitants that describes the narrative structure of the graphic novel. While Berlin City of
Stones privileges the points of view of Müller and Severing, it also depicts numerous other
characters with uniquely different perspectives of the city. The narrative act of intertwining
is set into motion when Müller and Severing go their separate ways at Potsdamer Platz. The
chapter does not end with their departure, since that would suggest that their characters
are the raison d’être for the entire graphic novel. Instead, the narrative capriciously shifts to
a nearby policeman in a traffic tower in the middle of the intersection of Potsdamer Platz,
in front of the train station from which Müller and Severing just emerged. Rather than
depict him writing in his journal, as it does with Müller and Severing, the graphic novel
utilizes a stream-of-consciousness technique that reveals his thoughts about food, his wife,
and his frustration with the endless flow of automobile traffic: “Detestable herd. Lamentable
herd. Ceaseless herd!” (21). The inner impressions of his mind signal the narrative’s intent
to explore the lives of multiple characters, not just Müller and Severing.
If Chapter One of Berlin City of Stones introduces Müller, Severing, and Potsdamer
Platz, then Chapter Two shifts the focalization to the city and its inhabitants. This chapter
opens with an art class where students are sketching a nude model, and while Müller is
present here, she is no longer the primary concern of the narrative, which depicts the
arbitrary thoughts of art students who are in the room with her. One unnamed student who
is cold wonders, “Why can’t they put me closer to the heat?” (31). Richard Blunck, another
student, thinks, “I remember the horse I rode at Uncle Walther’s farm when I was a child”
(31). Blunck becomes the first link in a narrative sequence that presents a cross-section of
Berlin. After the art course during the day, the narrative shifts to a night scene in the apart-
ment of Blunck who is in the middle of a nightmare about his inability to create an adequate
drawing. When he awakes, he crumples up his latest failed sketch in frustration and throws
it out the window into the rainy darkness. The wadded-up piece of paper falls onto the wet
sidewalk, where it is accidentally stepped on by a plainly-dressed woman named Gudrun
Braun. Braun is rushing to catch an early-morning streetcar to work, and once she is on
board, the thoughts of her fellow passengers are depicted in the first person. As Braun tries
to remember if she has everything that she needs for work, a well-dressed woman sitting
next to her thinks to herself, “Theodore, what did you mean last night when you smiled
at me so gay and bright?” (43). Here, the radically divergent concerns of different individu-
als are visible. After exiting the streetcar, Braun walks by a newspaper boy named David
Schwartz who is standing in the rain, selling the latest edition of the communist-run Arbeiter
Illustrierte Zeitung (“The Workers Illustrated Newspaper”). In a moment of compassion,
she lends him her umbrella, transferring the narrative gaze to Schwartz. Later in the day,
Schwartz is walking home deep in thought when he encounters a group of boys who attack
him, yelling anti-communist and anti–Semitic slogans. Schwartz runs off, and the ensuing
chase is glimpsed from the window of a nearby apartment by an art student named Anna,
who describes what she sees to Müller. This circular sequence begins and ends with Müller,
but she is essentially just a catalyst that sets the wandering gaze into motion. What do we
learn about the characters of Richard Blunck, Gudrun Braun, David Schwarz, and Anna?
As an art student, Blunck is plagued by nightmares about the limitations of two-dimensional
aesthetics. As a poor mother of three children, Braun struggles to provide for her family
with her poorly-paid and unstable job weaving cloth for the hull of zeppelins. As the son
of a lower-middle class Jewish family, Schwartz attests to the challenges facing a minority
group which is attempting to assimilate into mainstream German society. And as an art
student and lesbian, Anna is forced to hide her sexual orientation from everyone but her
closest friends. Each of these characters offers a unique perspective of life in Berlin during
the late 1920s. There is no single dominant point of view, and the characters are often
limited in their knowledge of their surroundings. Braun, for example, gives Schwartz an
umbrella although he doesn’t really want it. And when Anna sees Schwartz being chased,
she mistakenly thinks that he is a nationalist although he actually sympathizes with com-
munism.
Although Müller, Blunck, Braun, Schwartz, and Anna each appear multiple times in
the graphic novel, they are not the only central characters. Indeed, they serve as means for
the narrative to explore even more subjective perspectives of life in the city of Berlin. Gudrun
Braun’s husband, Otto, is a case in point. He is a former World War I soldier who now
works in a factory, and the tension in his relationship with his wife shows the tragic con-
sequences of intransigent ideologies. While Gudrun’s empathy with the working poor causes
her to move gradually toward communism, Otto sees himself as a “true” German and aligns
himself with nationalism. When he later discovers that his wife has lost her job, he leaves
her, taking their young son Heinz with him. His anti-communist and anti–Semitic beliefs
lead him to a local group of fascists, and it is not long before he and another Nazi follower
attack a Jewish bakery in order to steal bread and, as Otto says, “crack a Jewish skull or
two” (141). Otto readily adopts the racist principles of the Nazis, and he enrolls his son Heinz,
who has not yet been indoctrinated, in a day camp where he receives military discipline.
The multiperspectival narrative also extends to historical events such as World War I,
which appears once in the dream of an unnamed homeless man who is a veteran of the war.
In his dream, he is a war-weary and experienced soldier, crouching in a trench with two
fresh recruits who have just arrived at the German front. A shell explodes nearby and the
older soldier realizes that the enemy artillery is targeting them. Since he knows that it is
only a matter of time before a shell hits their trench directly, he leads the two young recruits
across the battlefield and into a nearby streambed for safety. One of the new recruits, Him-
melman, is injured by artillery fire before he makes it to the shelter and he lies screaming
for help on the open battlefield. The other new recruit, Theo Müller, impulsively rushes
back out onto the unprotected open space to assist his friend, and both young men die in
a subsequent shell blast. Although this dream of World War I is initiated by the homeless
veteran, it concludes in the mind of Marthe Müller, who is shown waking up in bed immedi-
ately afterwards. Indeed, she is emotionally distraught because the one recruit in the dream
is her brother, Theo Müller, who was killed in the war. The fact that the dream is shared
by both the homeless veteran and Martha Müller demonstrates that the graphic novel is less
concerned with history per se than with the repercussions of history on individual lives.
Thus World War I is primarily of interest for the way that it affects characters uniquely.
While the war traumatizes the veteran so that he becomes homeless and later dies of exposure
during the winter of 1928-1929, Marthe Müller deals with the past through art. Her enrollment
in Berlin’s Academy of Art acts as a metaphor for the edifying function of art, which can be
therapeutic when used to work through traumatic events such as the death of a loved one.
As is clear in the scene with Müller and the homeless veteran, Lutes’ Berlin is a city
that connects or intertwines the fates of disparate individuals. The other characters, however,
do not share dreams or otherwise experience any harmonic convergence of minds. Instead,
they are often involved in conflicting activities. Political agitation against the Weimar socialist
government is depicted at a political rally where the communist leader Ernst Thälmann
exhorts the crowd to remember the sacrifices of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, two
leftist activists who after World War I tried to implement communism in Germany until
they were murdered in 1919. Thälmann instrumentalizes their tragic fate, which for him
attests to the crimes committed by the center-left socialist government of the Weimar Repub-
lic. By extolling Luxemburg and Liebknecht, Thälmann underscores what he sees as commu-
nism’s “correct” moral foundation and political mission. As a result of this political rhetoric,
Gudrun Braun decides to participate in the May-Day parade of 1929 in order to show her
support for Germany’s workers. As she marches peacefully with other communists through
the center of Berlin, Nazi supporters meet at their own rally just a few streets away. The
speaker is unidentified but he is likely intended to be Joseph Goebbels, who was “sent by
Hitler in 1926 to become Gauleiter (Nazi Party leader) in the leftist stronghold of Berlin”
(Ladd 118). The speech by this Nazi figure is filled with slurs against communists and Jews,
and he incites his followers to demonstrate their political clout by confronting the May-
Day marchers.
When the two groups encounter each other, violence breaks out and the police rush
in with batons in order to disperse the antagonists. A dangerous escalation ensues when sev-
eral communist marchers begin throwing rocks, since the police respond by firing on the
unarmed crowd with live ammunition (Figure 11.5). An image of Gudrun Braun, split
between two separate frames, visually depicts the fateful consequence of this gunfire. At the
moment that a bullet hits her in the chest, she is separated into two frames that visually
enact the violence on her body. Then the narrative adopts her perspective after she falls to
Figure 11.5. The graphic novel appropriates Gudrun Braun’s first-person narrative perspective as she
dies. Jason Lutes. Berlin City of Stones. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly, 2004. 207. Reprinted with
permission.
the ground, and we see people running down the street through her eyes. The frame slowly
dissolves, suggesting through form that she has lost consciousness and likely died. The
graphic novel ends immediately thereafter with an unrealistic sequence that functions as an
epilogue. In it, Gudrun Braun and her separated husband Otto sit together on a grassy hill-
side on a warm and sunny day. In what is a relatively common German custom, they have
undressed and are enjoying nature in the nude. This fantasy-laden and wordless sequence
poses a hypothetical question. How would the lives of Berlin’s inhabitants be different with-
out extremist ideologies in competition with one another? The saccharine answer, set in
Arcadian scenery, can be surmised. Yet peace among men and harmony with nature remain
unattainable illusions in the urban environment of Weimar-era Berlin.
If we agree that Berlin City of Stones examines Germany’s Weimar Republic using mul-
tiple perspectives, then it should be asked how this technique is unique when compared to
other graphic novels that are also unambiguously contextualized in a historical framework.
The number of comic-like works that thematize history is not small, and they arguably
constitute a significant subgenre. Unlike historical novels, which are often treated by critics
as a trivial and inferior form of the novel, graphic novels that explore the past occupy a
place of respect in the literary genre of comic books. By reimagining the past, Berlin City
of Stones shares strategic similarities with other graphic novels that depict history, including
Maus by Art Spiegelman and Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi.
History is prominently foregrounded in Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, the crit-
ically acclaimed work whose first volume was published in 1986. It recounts how Vladek
Spiegelman survived the Holocaust, but one factor that complicates this story is the narrative
structure, since Vladek’s experiences are organized and presented by a storyteller, his son
Art Spiegelman. Scenes depicting Vladek in Auschwitz, for instance, often appear alongside
later scenes of Vladek in New York explaining to his son what happened then. The narrator,
Art Spiegelman, both tells the story and plays an active role in it. When he says, “Auschwitz,
Pop, tell me about Auschwitz,” he directs his father to return to memories of the past (25).
Different temporal frames exist side-by-side, so that the reader is forced to negotiate between
events of the story and the narrative’s retelling of them. Narratology theorists call these two
temporal frames “story time” and “narrative time” respectively.1 These frames do not, as
might be expected, have the effect of isolating the Holocaust from the contemporary lives
of Vladek and Art. Instead, Maus blurs the temporal boundary separating past and present.
Erin McGlothlin writes, “even though Spiegelman’s comic project appears to contain two
separate, seemingly unconnected narrative strands that strictly delineate the then of the
father’s Holocaust story and the now of the narration of that story, the text evades any
attempt on the part of the reader to keep these two chronological levels distinct from one
another” (179). The active involvement of Art as a narrator therefore challenges the separation
of storytelling and story, historiography and history. As a result of this ambiguity, Maus
could be characterized as “historiographical metafiction,” a term Linda Hutcheon proposes
for literary works which address the past in order to “open it up to the present” (110). As a
phenomenon of late twentieth-century postmodernism, historiographical metafiction
describes texts which are intensely self-reflective but which also include depictions of actual
historical events. Because these literary texts view the past as an imaginative tableau, they
bare the artifice of history’s narrative system.
While Maus juxtaposes Vladek’s experience in the past with Art’s narrative present,
Satrapi’s 2000 graphic novel Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood presents an autobiograph-
ical story with no overt juxtaposition of different time frames. Persepolis is set in Iran after
the Islamic Revolution of 1979, and it was inspired in part by Spiegelman’s Maus.2 Satrapi
presents the experiences of her childhood in a chronological sequence. Unlike in Spiegelman’s
Maus, the storyteller is not depicted as a character in the story, but Satrapi’s narrative voice
is present in many frames, since she offers frequent commentary about the events of her
childhood from a perspective located in the present. The narrator remarks, “Then came
1980: The year it became obligatory to wear the veil at school. We didn’t really like to wear
the veil, especially since we didn’t understand why we had to” (3). The black-and-white
characters are drawn in a cartoonish manner reminiscent of children’s books, but this seem-
ingly frivolous style is offset by the seriousness of topics such as religious fundamentalism,
political repression, and ideological violence. Indeed, the graphic novel is nothing less than
a meditation on the cultural conflict between Iran and the West. Persepolis does not merely
function didactically, and Gillian Whitlock writes that it “troubles a sense of self and the
norms that frame recognition of self and other” (191). As such, the graphic novel reflects on
the challenge of authentic memory and the problematic history. Because the narrative frame-
work instills ambiguity about her childhood during the Iranian Revolution, Persepolis resists
the tendency of historiography to instrumentalize the past. Satrapi’s graphic novel demon-
strates the impact of historical events on individuals and evades any simplistic and singular
portrayal of the past. Although the narrative self-reflection in Persepolis is less overt than in
Maus, it can also be categorized as historiographical metafiction.
While Lutes shares similarities with Spiegelman and Satrapi, he is also significantly
different from them. Berlin City of Stones certainly tells a story set against a historical back-
drop. But unlike Maus, Berlin City of Stones does not blur past and present through the
presence of an intrusive narrator. And unlike Persepolis, Berlin City of Stones does not frame
the past through narrative commentary from a later point in time. What distinguishes Lutes
is that his work forgoes the narrative present and refrains from refracting events through
the prism of a storyteller. Berlin City of Stones is characterized by an immersion in a pluralistic
past, and its multiple points of view recall the notion of “polyphony.” Proposed by Mikhail
Bakhtin, polyphony is defined as “a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and con-
sciousnesses” (6). When a text provides differing perspectives that cannot be reconciled with
one another, then it evades any clear articulation of a singular authorial vision. In Problems
of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, first published in 1929, Bakhtin uses polyphony to describe literary
works whose individual characters are not dominated by an overarching narrative framework
or ideological position. In a polyphonic novel, each character has a life of its own and rep-
resents an autonomous perspective which cannot be synthesized into the whole. This sort
of heterogeneity is ostensibly the sign of an authentic artist who brings fictional figures to
life as equals. In Bakhtin’s early writings, it is Dostoevsky who best exemplifies polyphony.3
Up until the late nineteenth century, texts in the Western literary tradition arguably sought
thematic and perspectival unity, but Dostoevsky overturned this model when he innovatively
created a pluralistic world within the framework of the novel. The notion of polyphony
cannot be restricted to Dostoevsky’s mid–nineteenth-century writings, however, since it
arguably culminates in the early twentieth-century movement known as modernism. Berlin
City of Stones is deeply indebted to modernism, the very cultural period that is depicted by
the graphic novel. As a term, modernism refers to an array of techniques and strategies that
emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Among the distinctive features
of modernism are the depiction of dynamism, the use of montage, and the exploration of
states of consciousness.4 All three features are evident in Berlin City of Stones, and the fol-
lowing three paragraphs explore each in turn.
The depiction of dynamism is visible at the beginning of the graphic novel as Müller
and Severing’s train approaches Berlin. This scene evokes Walter Ruttmann’s 1927 film Ber-
lin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (Berlin: Symphony of a Great City). This silent film has neither
characters nor dialogue, and screenings of it were typically accompanied by live musicians
playing an original score composed by Edmund Meisel. It documents a single day in Berlin,
and the tight chronological structure enables the film to depict the rhythm of the city from
dawn, when its inhabitants wake and go to work, to dusk, when the dining, dancing, and
gambling takes place. While there are vast differences between the film and the graphic
novel, both works are defined by a central passion — the desire to portray the dynamism of
Berlin in the 1920s. Both the graphic novel and the film open, for example, with a train
steaming into the city. In addition, both works convey the impression of motion and speed
by the way that the train passes telephone poles and trees. As the trains in each work approach
the city, images of soot-covered industry and poverty clearly indicate a non-idealized view
of Berlin. While the train in Berlin City of Stones arrives at Potsdamer Platz, the train in
Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt steams into the Anhalter train station, which was located
only a few hundred meters away.
The use of montage in Berlin City of Stones is not unlike Alfred Döblin’s 1929 Berlin
Alexanderplatz. Döblin’s modernist novel thematizes the complexity of the city, and its
inclusion of non-literary texts recalls Joyce’s Ulysses, which was published seven years earlier
and which may have inspired Döblin.5 Like photomontage in the visual arts, the technique
of montage incorporates elements from other external sources into a text. When used in the
context of literature, montage “refers to a specific form of intertextuality that combines var-
ious levels of perception (e.g., dream, fantasy, reality) and quotations of both literary and
nonliterary texts (newspaper headlines, advertising speech, etc.) to form a new work” (Mon-
tage 326). Döblin’s novel inserts excerpts from newspapers, political speeches, popular songs,
advertisements, stock market reports, the bible, Greek myths, and so forth. These diverse
materials document life in Berlin and emphasize the city’s unbridled dynamism. When
Berlin City of Stones includes a drawing of Potsdamer Platz that imitates a 1930s photograph,
as discussed earlier in this essay, it also employs a version of montage. In addition, the
graphic novel directly inserts numerous cultural documents from the period. In one scene,
art students examine Frans Masereel’s 1919 expressionistic image novel Mein Stundenbuch
(“My Book of Hours”). Several pages from this work are incorporated into the graphic
novel. In another scene, a character watches Buster Keaton’s 1924 American film The Nav-
igator. And in yet another scene, several characters attend a cabaret show and hear Marcellus
Schiffer’s 1928 popular song Es liegt in der Luft (“There’s Something in the Air”). There is
no mention of either the song’s title or composer, but performers sing numerous lines from
it on stage: “There’s something in the air called objectivity, there’s something in the air like
electricity” (51). This song recalls the 1920s Weimar-era art movement called “Neue Sach-
lichkeit” (“New Objectivity”). It should be noted that Berlin City of Stones does not use
montage as much as Döblin’s novel. Berlin Alexanderplatz incorporates an incredibly wide
range of external materials, and there are many dozens of instances of montage, if not hun-
dreds. The novel, however, avoids aesthetic anarchy by filtering this diverse material through
a single character, Franz Biberkopf. After he is released from prison, Biberkopf immerses
himself in the chaos and vitality and Berlin, where he struggles to make a life for himself.
It is not only the main character who gives form to the novel, since there is a third-person
narrator who organizes and manages the dissimilar elements of the text. Berlin Alexanderplatz
thus demonstrates how a central narrator uses a main character to dominate the plurality
of voices and texts. While Döblin’s novel relies on a single narrative consciousness to unify
the diverse material, Berlin City of Stones lacks both a main character and a centralized nar-
rative voice.
While the depiction of motion and the use of montage in Berlin City of Stones enact
the culture of the Weimar era, the graphic novel’s use of polyphony has few direct prede-
cessors in the period’s German-language literature and film. German and Austrian mod-
ernists such as Alfred Döblin, Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, Hermann Broch,
and Rainer Maria Rilke all largely rely on single main characters. And because a central nar-
rator dominates their works, there are few instances of anything approximating polyphony.
There are modernist works that depict divergent perspectives, but they are largely by Anglo-
American authors such as James Joyce, William Faulkner, and Virginia Woolf. In his pio-
neering work Mimesis (1946), Erich Auerbach addresses the question of perspective in
Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse, and he writes, “there actually seems to be no viewpoint at all
outside the novel from which the people and events within it are observed” (534). Although
Auerbach was surely not aware of Bakhtin’s theory of polyphony, it can be applied to Woolf ’s
work. Richard Pierce writes, “Woolf ignored, displaced, [and] undermined all the conven-
tions that have traditionally empowered the monologic voice and provided coherence and
unity” (81). Similar assertions could also be made about Joyce and Faulkner. Does Berlin
City of Stones appropriate polyphonic narrative techniques from Anglophone modernism?
That certainly seems plausible, but it is also possible to identify later German-language
works that demonstrate modernist techniques. When the graphic novel depicts thoughts of
multiple characters, it recalls Wim Wenders’ 1987 film Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of
Desire). The film is set in the 1980s when Berlin was divided into two parts, the communist
east and the capitalist west, and it tells the story of an ethereal angel named Daniel who is
an observer of human behavior and who able to eavesdrop on mortals. In one scene, Daniel
stands in a subway train and listens to the thoughts of the passengers. One young man
reflects, “Maybe she doesn’t have the money to see another doctor.” Another man sitting
nearby asks himself silently, “Why am I living?” The inclusion of diverse forms of con-
sciousness here strongly recalls the scene in Berlin City of Stones when the thoughts of
multiple trolley passengers are depicted.
Taken together, the depiction of dynamism, the use of montage, and the presence of
a polyphonic narrative suggest that Berlin City of Stones represents a return to the scene of
modernism. It would be impossible for the graphic novel to authentically recreate the mod-
ernist culture of the Weimar Republic, but it does recapture its spirit by enacting various
aspects of 1920s Berlin in literary form. The consequence of this strategy is suggested by
Michel Foucault, who in The Archaeolog y of Knowledge disparages unified, comprehensive
approaches to the past. For Foucault, traditional historians utilize a fixed point of view that
organizes the past according to a narrative trajectory with origin and dénouement. When
conventional historiography relies on a single perspective, the past is “rearranged, reduced,
effaced in order to reveal the continuity of events” (8). One example of this procedure is
Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbons presents a compre-
hensive explanation for disparate events when he asserts that the collapse of the Roman
Empire is largely due to the loss of civic virtue among its citizens. Even though his scholarly
work was published in the eighteenth century, its use of a central narrative influenced later
historians of the nineteenth and twentieth century. A similar central narrative is also evident
in the historical representation of the Weimar Republic, as this essay establishes above. Fou-
cault criticized this model, however, because the past for him is a site of conflicting interests
that cannot be harmonized according to the needs of a single point of view. Any compre-
hensive account of history misleadingly overlooks the complexity and diversity of the past.
Foucault contends that the methods of traditional historiography should be replaced by an
investigation of history’s ruptures, since the distinctiveness of the past can only be captured
by empowering individual voices. As a result of its modernist-like composition that incor-
porates irreconcilable perspectives and evades narrative dénouement, Berlin City of Stones
offers a corrective to conventional historiography’s teleological narrative about the Weimar
Republic.
NOTES
1. For an elaboration of story time and narrative time, see Günther Müller, 157–58.
2. Arie Kaplan writes that “Art Spiegelman’s Maus ... was the first comic book that Marjane Satrapi read
that got her hooked on comics as a medium” (238).
3. In the later theory of Bakhtin, it is no longer a certain kind of novel but the novelistic genre as a whole
which becomes exalted. The novel is understood as best capturing in a text the linguistic forces found in the
outside world. See his work The Dialogic Imagination.
4. See Bradbury and McFarlane, 26.
5. Although some scholars have claimed that Döblin modeled his novel on Joyce’s Ulysses, Peter Barta writes,
“To point out where and how Döblin changed his own manuscript in order to imitate Joyce is of little comparative
interest, since all authors, consciously or unconsciously, write against an intertextual horizon” (76).
WORKS CITED
Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1953. Print.
Bakhtin, M.M. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984. Print.
Bradbury, Malcolm, and James McFarlane. “The Name and Nature of Modernism.” Modernism: A Guide to
European Literature 1890 –1930. Eds. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane. London: Penguin, 1976. 19–
55. Print.
Döblin, Alfred. Berlin Alexanderplatz. 1929. Print.
Ermarth, Elizabeth Deeds. “Beyond ‘The Subject.’” The Nature of History Reader. Eds. Keith Jenkins and Alun
Munslow. London and New York: Routledge, 2004. 281–94. Print.
Friedrich, Thomas, and Stephen Spender. Berlin: A Photographic Portrait of the Weimar Years 1918 –1933. London:
John Calmann and King, 1991. Print.
Foucault, Michel. The Archeolog y of Knowledge. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972. Print.
Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. London and New York: Routledge, 1988.
Print.
Huyssen, Andreas. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2003. Print.
Kaplan, Arie. Masters of the Comic Book Universe Revealed! Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2006. Print.
Kolb, Eberhard. The Weimar Republic. London and New York: Routledge, 2004. Print.
Koshar, Rudy. Germany’s Transient Pasts: Preservation and National Memory in the Twentieth Century. Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Print.
Ladd, Brian. The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1998. Print.
Lutes, Jason. Berlin City of Stones. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly, 2004. Print.
_____. “Personal Interview.” 1 Dec. 2008. Web. 10 Dec. 2011. <http://gritsandroses.org/2008/12/01/interview-
with-jason-lutes/>.
McGlothlin, Erin. “No Time Like the Present: Narrative and Time in Art Spiegelman’s Maus.” Narrative 11.2
(2003): 177–98. Print.
“Montage.” The Feminist Encyclopedia of German Literature. Eds. Friederike Ursula Eigler and Susanne Kord.
Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997. Print.
Müller, Günther. “Erzählzeit und erzählte Zeit.” Morphologische Poetik. Gesammelte Aufsätze. Tübingen: Max
Niemeyer Verlag, 1968. 257–68. Print.
Pierce, Richard. “Virginia Woolf ’s Struggle with Author-ity.” Image and Ideolog y in Modern/Postmodern Discourse.
Eds. David B. Downing and Susan Bazargan. Albany: SUNY Press, 1991. 69–84. Print.
Ruttmann, Walter, director. Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt. 1927. Film.
Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood. New York: Pantheon, 2003. Print.
Spiegelman, Art. Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Began. New York: Pantheon, 1991. Print.
Wenders, Wim, director. Der Himmel über Berlin. 1987. Print.
White, Hayden. The Content of the Form. Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore, MD:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. Print.
Whitlock, Gillian. Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Print.
12. Ivorian Bonus
Teaching Abouet and Oubrerie’s Aya
SUSANNA HOENESS-KRUPSAW
“Mom, may I have that Fix und Foxi book, please?”1

“No, we have to go.”
“Why not?”
“Because.”
“Because why?”
“Because it’s making you stupid.”
“How is it making me stupid?”
“It’s drivel, and we’re not spending any money on that. Come on now and quit nagging me.”
These are my earliest memories of cartoons and comics. Once in a while, my mother’s
reluctance would break down, particularly when my older boy cousins let me have a shopping
bag full of their discarded Mickey Mouse, Batman, and Superman comics. Thus, my child-
hood was not completely devoid of the joys of rifling through cartoons. Nonetheless, to this
day, buying comics and checking them out from the library carry an element of the illicit
for me. My mother’s position in a city in southern Germany around 1966 was not unique,
nor do I think — despite recent journal articles to the contrary2— that attitudes in some
circles have changed significantly. Why this trend persists is difficult to explain. Canadian
author Margaret Atwood who described herself as a member of the “comics generation”
observes that her “parents objected to them” (113). Comics’ ill reputation appears to be the
consequence of its often questionable subject matter during the 1940s and 1950s, the Golden
Age. Atwood, for instance, mentioned “curvaceous blondes” being dragged through “the
swamps of Louisiana” (113), fuelling Frederic Wertham’s diatribe against comics in Seduction
of the Innocent (1954).
Not too long ago, as I was driving to work while listening to National Public Radio,
I heard a review of Marguerite Abouet’s new graphic novel Aya. My childhood memories
of forbidden comics made me listen up as the reviewer praised the content and layout of
this work. I went ahead and ordered the novel, always feeling a bit guilty that I would con-
sider teaching a graphic novel in my college classroom. I was delighted to receive my desk
copy from Drawn and Quarterly and revel in its lush illustrations. That summer, my then
fifteen-year-old niece came to visit us, saw the book on my desk, and sampled it. Somewhat
censoriously, she inquired its purpose. When I truthfully replied that I would be teaching
it in my composition course, she too seemed surprised. Even though she enjoyed browsing
through it, this modern teenager doubted its usefulness for the classroom.
161
Aya’s World
The graphic novel Aya is a joint venture by the French author Marguerite Abouet and
the French illustrator Clément Oubrerie. According to Drawn and Quarterly’s website,
Marguerite Abouet, born in Abidjan in 1971, came to France together with her older brother
when she was only twelve years old. A resident of Romainville, a suburb of Paris, she is a
legal assistant who writes fiction on the side. Her first comic Aya, derived from her recol-
lections of life in Ivory Coast during the 1970s, wishes to “tell an unpretentious and gently
humorous story of an Africa we rarely see — spirited, hopeful, and resilient” (Drawn and
Quarterly’s website). The illustrator Clément Oubrerie, born in Paris in 1966, had some art
school training before starting his publishing career in the United States. First published in
France in 2007, the novel quickly gained much acclaim, winning such prestigious awards
as Best First Album at the Angouleme International Comics Festival, the Children’s Africana
Book Award, and the Glyph Award; the novel was nominated for the Quill Award, the
Young Adult Library Services Association’s Great Graphic Novels list, and the Eisner Award;
it was included on “best of ” lists from The Washington Post, Booklist, Publishers Weekly, and
School Library Journal.3
Six volumes, each focused on a unique episode, exist now; only three of them are cur-
rently available in English translations. The series follows the daily adventures of nineteen-
year-old Aya of Yopougon (also called Yop City), a suburb of Abidjan, Ivory Coast, during
a time of economic prosperity in the 1970s. She and her girlfriends dream of future jobs,
boyfriends, and happiness — just like teenagers anywhere else in the world and at any given
time. The first volume introduces readers to Aya’s world, and we learn of her friend Adjoua’s
pregnancy. The second volume is preoccupied with the true paternity of Adjoua’s baby
while the third volume focuses on Aya’s friends’ participation in a beauty contest held in
Yop City. In the fourth, fifth, and sixth volumes, Aya takes up studies in medicine biology,
and the setting shifts partly to Paris following the exploits of Innocent the hair stylist.
When I found Aya, I had been looking for a special treat for a group of honors students
in a section of freshman composition. I hoped to complement their work on a personal
experience essay with a visually stimulating literary text. At the same time, I aimed at com-
plementing the reading list of a World Literature in Translation course, in which I was plan-
ning to teach five classic novels, with an accessible text that would invite students to become
careful readers and thinkers, familiarize them with basic literary terminology, and facilitate
discussion of cultural differences. Aya fulfilled my expectations and allowed my students to
hone their visual literacy skills. As a matter of fact, since my project first began, I have come
to realize that what I more or less intuitively worked out and implemented on my own is a
procedure that current scholarship in teaching graphic narratives theorizes as an effective
pedagogy.
Writing with Aya

Not too long ago, during a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of technology
in the classroom, a student in a sophomore-level composition course remarked that she
wished all of her instructors included PowerPoint presentations since she was tired of looking
at middle-aged instructors all the time. In increasingly visually oriented composition class-
rooms, comics can play an important role by furthering a discussion of the power of visual
12. Ivorian Bonus: Teaching Aya (Hoeness-Krupsaw) 163
representation even when we are looking at cartoons and not photos (Chute and DeKoven
771–72). As a consequence of our students’ visual preferences, all of the composition text-
books I have recently reviewed include chapters on visual literacy; many of the literature
texts I use, both introductory and those designed for various survey courses, now include
visual stimuli, such as drawings, paintings to be paired with poetry, or other images designed
to anticipate the contents of a particular book chapter. Many of the composition texts utilize
print, television, or Internet advertisements as primary materials for discussion because
these resources are readily available and relate well to the students’ everyday experiences. I
fear, however, that my students’ responses to these commercial prompts have become trite
because they have used them time and again since middle school. This is clearly an area
where graphic narratives, especially those addressing unexpected topics and providing attrac-
tive visual stimuli, can open up new and refreshing challenges for close reading and critical
thinking exercises. Marianne Hirsch, for example, has discussed how useful comics are in
helping readers gain visual literacies (1210).
Since current pedagogies attest to the importance of fostering and enhancing students’
multiple literacies and multimodal competencies, I find that the occasional use of a suitable
graphic narrative, such as Aya, offers me new opportunities beyond advertisements, websites,
and other Internet sources to engage students in various literacy activities. Clearly, a colorful
and suspenseful narrative like Aya invites even the most reluctant readers to enter into the
imaginary worlds created by the text and to pay attention to its rhetorical details. Over the
last few years, I have found that an increasing number of students on all levels and in all
majors prefer short reading assignments and balk at reading longer prose novels. I am certain
that all of my freshmen and world literature students completed their Aya reading assign-
ment, because both groups eagerly shared their reading experience.
While working on their own personal experience essays, my freshmen students were
able to observe how Abouet handles the constraints of the autobiographical narrative. They
noted Abouet’s use of a lead, her development of Aya’s persona and voice, the management
of time and space, and other descriptive details. Even beginning composition students
benefited from a close analysis of the means the comics author employs in creating transitions
within the story line, from panel to panel, and from page to page. Visualizing transitional
devices can help students “see” what it takes to guide readers successfully through their nar-
ratives. Aya offers a clear advantage for the composition classroom by making “the question
of style legible” (DeKoven and Chute 767). In its awareness of its own fictionality, the
graphic novel lets composition students study formal elements for their personal experience
essays in a manner that is at least overtly more playful than other textbook examples, thus
removing the air of difficulty that adheres to more traditional texts.4
Scott McCloud’s seminal work Understanding Comics provided a useful rubric of panel
sequences that students could use for analysis, particularly in small-group activities. Most
of Abouet and Oubrerie’s transitions occur “moment-to-moment”5 since the narrative is
relatively simple and straightforward. Aya’s conversation with her father concerning her
plans to study medicine offers a suitable example of this development (22). “Action-to-
action” transitions occur in the panels illustrating Adjoua and Bintou’s catfight over their
boyfriend Moussa (85). Requiring more reader input to make connections, “subject-to-sub-
ject” examples are not as frequent, but my students were able to figure out the meaning of
the first volume’s final scene: as the girls are hovering over Adjoua’s newborn son at the hos-
pital, pondering whom the baby resembles, Mamadou sticks his head in the door (Abouet
96). This moment also serves as a foreshadowing device for the actions to unfold in the sec-
ond volume. “Scene-to-scene” transitions test the reader’s deductive reasoning abilities
(McCloud 71). This level of reader involvement is apparent in the panels detailing the plan-
ning of Adjoua’s wedding when the scene suddenly shifts, without any further narrative
commentary, to the actual wedding party (84–85). Neither “aspect-to-aspect” nor “non-
sequitur” type transitions are used in this graphic narrative. McCloud explains that American
comics favor the “action-to-action” sequences while “aspect-to-aspect” transitions prevail
in Japan with “quiet, contemplative combinations” (79). Discussing different kinds of tran-
sition in Aya allowed my students to draw inferences concerning the author’s techniques
that they could apply to their writing assignments.
I often emphasize the importance of showing rather than telling when I teach narratives
about personal experiences, a concept that I can support more easily by examining comics
elements. Chute and DeKoven helpfully point out that careful examination of graphic novels
can also initiate a discussion of “the boundaries of what can be said and what can be shown”
(772). Hirsch’s article also describes the ability of comics to produce an “affective experience”
in the reader which emphasizes our emotional intelligence and furthers yet another type of
literacy (1211). Awareness of their own emotional reactions to Aya’s father thwarting her
ambitions to study medicine, for instance, helped teach students a simple lesson about how
words and images in comics create an emotional affect. Thus, students recognize the power
of pathos in their own writing more easily. When my students became emotionally involved
in Aya’s adventures, I encouraged them to bring this level of engagement to their reading
of other texts and to their own writing.
While not always desirable or suitable, kinetic hands-on activities are another beneficial
outcome associated with the study of graphic narratives. Students can retool their personal
experience essays in a graphic medium. For instance, with crayons, poster board, and speech
bubbles, they could design a simple eight-panel cartoon generated from the most important
parts of their essay to share with their group during a peer review workshop. This short
exercise forces them to reconsider the climactic moments of their narrative in a different
medium and observe their impact on the audience.6
Reading with Aya

To instructors who still worry about the introduction of graphic narratives into their
courses, current research offers encouraging data. Indeed, in his recent National Council of
Teachers of English (NCTE) publication, James Bucky Carter suggests that by furthering
multimodal literacies, graphic narratives possess great value for literacy education (3). Refer-
ring to other studies indicating that exposure to art can improve learning opportunities in
public schools, Carter maintains that sequential art is also capable of “enriching educational
experiences” (5). Other evidence presented by Carter suggests that “dual coding,” that is
the use of “words and pictures together, produced better recall and transfer than either did
alone” (6). Given such reassuring data, I hope that my teaching of Aya has allowed students
to engage various intelligences. Both literature and composition courses benefit from careful
comics reading because, as Chute and DeKoven have found, these strategies allow transfer
of knowledge to other media (775).
A look at Aya’s cheerful cover art may lead instructors to infer that this young adult
novel might offer too juvenile a reading experience to college students. Research conducted
by Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey, which shows that “reading multiple genres and texts
improves comprehension and critical thinking” (28), can easily assuage these fears. They
found that graphic narratives, which some reluctant readers will perceive as “easier,” work
better in their “focus lesson” during which they model appropriate reading strategies (30).
The literacy skills learned in this manner can then be transferred to more traditional prose
novel assignments. They suggest that comics can be used to teach mood and tone and other
literary devices (Fisher and Fry 32). I have certainly been able to confirm this observation
in my own classes. Even though graphic narratives cannot replace traditional texts, they
offer different perspectives and teaching opportunities. Once students feel comfortable
answering questions about graphic narratives, they are more likely to volunteer responses
to other texts.
Creating the Cultural Context

In my World Literature in Translation class, each of the five units began with a cultural
background discussion to flesh out setting and context. Aya offered some unique challenges
because my students knew even less about the African cultural context than about the South
American and European contexts for some of the other texts on the reading list. Abouet’s
“Ivorian Bonus” chapters supply additional background information and allow my students
to gauge what historical, social, and political changes have occurred since Abouet’s adoles-
cence in the 1970s. Together with Alisia Grace Chase’s Preface for the English language edi-
tion, the glossary of frequently used phrases, and the Ivorian recipes offered on the last pages
of the book, Abouet’s chapters provide a rich cultural collage of her home country that
helps students culturally contextualize the novel. My students received a reading guide to
help them navigate the novel. Through our Blackboard course site, I suggested additional
links to world encyclopedias and government websites that I considered reliable and then
sent students on a treasure hunt to find out as much as possible about the country under
investigation. Instructors can easily design specific Web quest activities to arrive at more
controlled and predictable results for class discussion.
At my university library, educational librarians conduct library orientations for our
students aimed at different target audiences (such as freshmen composition students, students
in research-oriented courses or upper-level seminars, among others). I coupled the intro-
ductory treasure hunt activity with a library orientation for the purpose of narrowing down
students’ searches and reviewing some of the information about research techniques that
students may have received in other classes but may have forgotten. Students had the oppor-
tunity to evaluate the information they found on different commercial webpages together
with scholarly sources retrieved through the librarian recommended databases. Our work
yielded valuable insights into Ivory Coast’s official language, location, colonial history, con-
tinued French influence, and current political affairs. Class discussion revealed that the class
had little to no prior knowledge of this country or its history; most students were quite
eager to learn more from the perspective of this autobiographical graphic narrative.7
In addition to exploring the importance of social and cultural contexts, Aya also initiated
a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of autobiographical criticism. Nineteen-
year-old Aya narrates the story set in 1978, but Abouet’s introduction informs the reader
that she modeled the narrator’s experiences on her own. Additional print and video infor-
mation about Abouet is readily available online. I have noticed that almost all of my literature
students find it easier to relate to authors and their works after they have seen them in a
video or heard an interview. In class discussion I reminded them, however, that reliance on
autobiographical approaches may limit the reader’s understanding of the author’s artistic
goals. In general my students felt that knowing something of Abouet’s background made
their reading of the novel more meaningful. In their view, because Abouet grew up in Ivory
Coast under similar circumstances as Aya and experienced first-hand situations similar to
those fictionalized in her novel, the novel seems more believable and verisimilar.
In his discussion on memoirs and the graphic novel, Rocco Versaci points out that
most readers expect the autobiographical genre to live up to its truth claims. He examines
the means employed by traditional writers in their efforts to authenticate their work. Writers
of graphic narratives encounter such issues. Because the graphic language in Aya seems
simple and non-realistic, these issues become more pertinent. It would seem unlikely to
sustain any truth claims if Abouet did not employ other techniques to underscore the
verisimilitude of Aya’s experiences. My students observed that the preface to the American
edition by Chase attaches to the novel a sense of scholarly and academic importance, con-
veying documentary depth through the comics venture. Equally important are the Ivorian
bonus pages at the end of the book, including the glossary of Ivorian terms as well as recipes
and suggestions on how to tie the pagne, that give the book a touch of the documentary.
Albeit brief and sketchy, the author biographical note with photos adds another realistic
element to the narrative of Aya and her friends.
Conducting a Close Reading

The story begins with an account of the changes wrought by the introduction of tel-
evision into Ivorian society. Seeing Aya’s family assembled in front of the newly acquired
television set, the reader can immediately identify with them. The style of these first pages
resembles that of an individual showing her photo album to her friends, an experience to
which most of us can easily relate; thus, we are invited into the novel in a very friendly
manner and get to view Aya’s photo album, an effective ruse enhancing the immediacy of
the narrative. It may deal with events removed by time and place from the reader’s experience,
but it offers itself in a format readers immediately recognize. At first glance, Oubrerie’s
“graphic language” (to borrow Versaci’s term) appears childishly simple, reinforcing the
friendly and welcoming aspects of the novel. In reality, a very complex mechanism operates
here that illustrates Scott McCloud’s theory of the iconic qualities of comics. In an elaborate
scheme, Understanding Comics illustrates how levels of realism vary. McCloud finds that
simplifying the image actually amplifies its meaning (30). Therefore, comics can occupy a
realistic space in terms of subject matter while embracing a less photographic and more
abstract artistic expression. McCloud asserts that more abstract images allow readers to
identify more readily with them (30). Oubreries’ graphics thus give the Ivorian-French
author Abouet another means of reaching out to her American audience.
Oubrerie does not alternate between more or less realistic depictions as do some illus-
trators of action comics and manga; his drawings maintain the same level of simplification
throughout the book. In particularly emotional moments, the characters’ facial expressions
are exaggerated, taking on an almost expressionistic quality enhanced by color palette. The
page layout consists of equal-sized panels almost consistently. Unlike many other comics,
these panels have irregular and at times crooked outlines that evoke a handcrafted, person-
alized feeling. They smack of the childish or the folkloric. The hand-lettering of the speech
bubbles further enhances the sense of a personal voice (Versaci 190). In moments of intense
emotion, the speech bubbles look frayed and break through the panel boundaries to add to
the intensity of the situation.
Moreover, the family and friends who greet the reader on the first pages establish the
feel of the novel. Even though its title would lead the reader to expect that Aya is the main
character, Abouet does not deliver a traditional protagonist in a traditional setting. She
takes advantage of the comics’ ability to exist at the margins and to incorporate material
that others may have found uninteresting or even disreputable. As the novel’s preface points
out, Abouet wants to acquaint the reader with a positive image of Africa that is unlike the
information we receive from the news and history books. With Aya as the narrative’s central
consciousness, her friends really take center stage while Aya reports their adventures. Thus
the novel questions the rampant individualism many readers may associate with the tradi-
tional comics superheroes. Aya makes use of a communal setting from the first moments.
Class discussion concerning the means of characterization available to the graphic artist
can be quite complex. From time to time, we hear Aya’s narrative voice and, of course, we
see her in action. We observe her within the circle of her family and friends; we overhear
conversations between her and her girlfriends, and we even see and hear other characters
talking about her. As Versaci maintains, the self here becomes socially constructed (52). It
is, however, more difficult to know what she thinks in certain instances — unless, of course,
we see her frowning face or realize her impatience when we observe her with her friend
Hervé.
Where traditional narratives operate with descriptive passages by an external narrator,
Aya’s characterization occurs through pictures and brief dialogue bubbles. The author uses
longer text boxes for more complex narration. Despite our discussions regarding the graphic
genre’s limitations for characterization, my students found Aya a very reliable narrator. This
unexpected reaction may originate in the universal nature of cartoon images, which, accord-
ing to McCloud, allows for easier identification with what one sees. I did not expect my
students in Southern Indiana in 2008 to identify so strongly with African teenagers in the
1970s. McCloud maintains that “the cartoon is a vacuum into which our identity and aware-
ness are pulled” (36). He sees this as one of the strongest features of cartoons. In a reference
to Gillian Whitlock’s work, Chute and DeKoven confirm that visuals allow us to relate
more easily across cultural boundaries (778).
Especially when dealing with an audience of non–English majors, I find it necessary,
at the beginning of the semester, to build a working knowledge of literary terminology so
that students can more comfortably and productively discuss the elements of the literary
works they are reading.8 Looking at some of the full-panel illustrations of Yop City and
Abidjan, the class received strong visual impressions of place; through a shift from black
and white to color illustrations in the two opening pages, we also got a sense of the changing
times through the introduction of color television in Ivory Coast in the 1970s. Yet Abouet
needed some text boxes to fill in what traditional narrators usually convey to their audiences.
Students also quickly grasped how illustrators create mood and tone, one of their favorite
examples being Moussa’s slouching home to face his parents (Abouet 68). The comparison
between literary and visual techniques helps couple discussion of the graphic novel with
the study of a traditional novel or play. Students will notice that the author of a graphic
novel has to operate differently from the author of a traditional novel. Since lengthy descrip-
tive passages by the narrator would reduce the graphic elements or upset the balance between
text and image, setting must be created through images and dialogue instead.
In discussions of comics, many artists and critics insist that the movie analogy is fraught
with errors and does not work well since reading a graphic novel demands far greater and
more active reader input than watching a movie. Consequently, I found Charles Hatfield’s
discussion of Love & Rockets by Gilbert and Jamie Hernandez helpful, for it provided my
class presentation with solid strategies for discussing panel layout in terms of movie shots.
Moreover the movie analogy encourages class participation since many students already
possess ample familiarity with that medium. To support his argument, Hatfield maintains
that comics artists often integrate references to other media in their work (72). This is also
true for Abouet’s television reference in the beginning of the first volume and her use of
photography in the second. As previously mentioned, the novel’s opening with a shot of
Aya’s family assembled in front of the television serves to set the scene and to give readers
a sense of the significance of this medium to Ivorian society: Suddenly the color palette
changes from black and white to multi-colored. The opening shot of the Solibra beer com-
mercial also anticipates connections to Aya’s father’s work for the Solibra company. Television
viewing connects directly to the rise of a commercial middle class in Ivory Coast during the
1970s.
Some of the other “filmic devices” Hatfield observes in Hernandez’s work (73) also
pertain to Abouet and Oubrerie’s uses of close-ups. Oubrerie zooms in on each of Aya’s
family members on the first few pages. From viewing the large family picture, the reader
transitions to individual close-ups of friends and family, which are accompanied by captions
about each person’s significance to the story. Hatfield claims that close-ups of individuals
manage to convey “characters’ most intense emotions” (73). We also see this concept at
work when Moussa’s parents find out about Adjoua’s pregnancy, and Moussa shrinks in size
next to his angry parents (72) or when Moussa’s mother wonders about the baby’s paternity
while the other women are cooing over the little boy (96).
Regarding the two-shot, Hatfield observes that a close-up of two characters facing
each other “stresses the mutuality of the exchange by giving equal emphasis to both parties”
(73). We can easily confirm this observation by looking at the many exchanges between Aya
and her girlfriends. In her interactions with Félicité, Aya adopts a more maternal role, clearly
underscored by Félicité’s deferential glances when Aya offers her a party dress for her date
with Hervé (Abouet 76). In a two-shot foregrounding Aya’s angry face, we can read her
reactions to a passer-by’s unwanted attentions to her (Abouet 20). When Bintou storms
into Aya’s room after the wedding announcement, Aya’s wide-eyed response bespeaks the
troubles she anticipates (Abouet 84).
According to Hatfield, foreground framing is another device comics borrows from cin-
ema in which “in each panel, the ‘framing’ of one figure by another ... in the near foreground
reminds us of the physical relationship between the characters and implies a larger space or
work ‘outside’ the panels” (73). The novel abounds with examples of this device. For
instance, a large image of Aya frames a page-sized panel that features Adjoua and Bintou
doing chores in the background (Abouet 16). It offers a wordless commentary on what the
caption describes as their “endless discussion” during which Aya dreams of college while
the other two swoon over boys. The heated interchange between Adjoua’s father and Mr.
Sissoko offers another excellent example in which the much larger body of Mr. Sissoko
dominates not only the panel but also the two men’s relationship (Abouet 82).
As Hatfield maintains, despite the applicability of cinematic techniques to a discussion
of comics, distinct differences exist, particularly in the fact that the images remain on the
page and permit the reader to travel back and forth among them quite freely (74). This
effect creates “uncured closure,” a term used by Joseph Witek, which requires “the wholes
of page and of story to clear up abrupt, nonlinear transitions” (qtd. in Hatfield 70). While
the language of film is often helpful in discussing certain facets of comics, students need to
understand critical differences between the two media. This paradox offers a great oppor-
tunity to address the greater freedom of the comics creator and the comics reader. Readers
are “not trapped” inside a pre-fabricated space but freely move around the page to create
their own spaces (Chute and DeKoven 770).
Despite the productive comparisons to plays and films, I introduce some of the classical
graphic elements that scholars in this field like to investigate to my students. In any litera-
ture survey course, the comics’ long historical ancestry can be established: from the pyra-
mids and cave paintings to Hogarth’s visual satires and Blake’s poetry illustrations (McCloud
9), one can incorporate an exciting survey of the interactions between pictures and writing
and their discursive possibilities (Chute and DeKoven 768). Among the comics’ ancient
ancestors and contemporary practitioners, Aya’s literary heritage is difficult to establish. The
brevity of each of the currently available six books, and the fact that these are six consecu-
tive volumes that follow the life of the heroine and her friends, suggest the serialized com-
ics that spurred the rise of the graphic novel. The bold colors of the text associate Abouet
and Oubrerie with the accomplished color printing of European presses. Hatfield discusses
at some length the introduction of the ligne clair or “clear line” by Hergé, but Clément
Oubrerie clearly does not operate solely within this French tradition (60–61). On the con-
trary, his figures seem hastily drawn while background elements are suggested with light
brush strokes.
Another topic of discussion unique to graphic novels regards their handling of transi-
tions. As I mentioned above, the graphic artist draws on several possible techniques to
bridge time lapses. The narrative tends to move forward as we follow the panels across the
page. While I felt at times lost in Aya and found some of the transitions rather abrupt, my
students seemed unfazed. I wonder if my sense of time relies more on the linearity of nar-
rative and clearly indicated written markers of time’s passage — elements my students no
longer expect. Chute’s recent article in PMLA attests to the importance of comics as an art
form with sophisticated possibilities of juxtaposing and overlapping past, present and future
moments on one page (453) so that the element of time “can be traced in complex, often
nonlinear paths across the space of the page” (454) with the gutter assisting in the pacing
when text alternates with empty space to slow down our reading. According to Chute, the
comics’ self-conscious awareness of its own limitations and representations (457) turns it
into an interesting historical visual text. It requires context but it rejects transparency.
McCloud agrees that a certain reading pattern is assumed, but the artist can be “deliberately
ambiguous” (86).
Marianne Hirsch also emphasizes comics’ ability to overcome the “word-image” oppo-
sition that has plagued our culture for so long (1210). This interdependence of the two
mediums draws attention to the hybridity of the comics form. Due to this hybrid position,
Aya is capable not only of depicting the neglected side of Africa, but also of skillfully incor-
porating elements from popular culture, for instance, of advertising through references to
Solibra beer commercials, the pervasiveness of French music among African teenagers, and
the teenage girls’ desire to wear Parisian fashions. Moreover, through cooperation by two
artists — one writer and one designer — on one comics project, comics demonstrates to our
students not only that team work occurs in real life, but also that boundaries of traditional
generic and formal definitions are crossed all the time, redefined, and rejected (Chute and
DeKoven 769). Thus, the graphic narrative manifests its ability to incorporate significant
political components of resistance.
In addition to providing a basis for an introduction to literary and visual analysis, the
narrative permits sophisticated conversations regarding gender roles in Abidjan. Abouet’s
somewhat stereotypical depiction of African males concerned me much more than it did
my students. We pondered matters of marital fidelity, premarital sex, and teenage pregnan-
cies. It appears that our discussion of Aya confirmed some of Chute’s observations. She finds
that many of the graphic narratives currently on the market can make the unspeakable
visible (in Aya’s case, the relative power of women in general and mothers in particular
within the household) and manage to overcome the invisibility of the private sphere (459).
It may take comics to make visible those aspects of African politics, society, and socio-eco-
nomic realities that often remain invisible to Western eyes.
Discussions of genre characteristics can be productive, especially with students who
have prior experience with manga or anime. I have found them generally interested in
exploring common assumptions about cartoons and comics. They eagerly distinguish them
from the graphic novels they read, including Aya. Fully realizing how authors adapt storylines
to a visual medium, students enjoy exploring both the freedom and the constraints of the
graphic medium. Informal surveys in my classes reveal that many students enjoy manga and
anime and are quite familiar with genre distinctions and special features. It would, however,
be wrong to claim that they all favor these types of literature. Many of my students must
have had parents that shared my mother’s opinions on the question of reading comics: they
look surprised when they come back from the bookstore with a copy of Aya that cost them
more than a paperback book would.
Conclusions
In teaching Aya, I found that attention to details and close reading of texts and images
help prepare student to write their essays and discuss classic novels on the reading list. Since
it is desirable to train multiple literacies, we can certainly argue for the use of graphic novels
in our classes. Moreover their multimodal quality is obviously another great advantage of
teaching with graphic narratives. With the help of a graphic narrative such as Aya, instructors
can examine elements of setting created by the illustrations and elements of characterization
through text and images. Exploration of selected story frames illustrates the sophisticated
handling of time through the visual medium. Another benefit is the level of student engage-
ment in the discussions of graphic narratives. Aya was the one piece during this entire semes-
ter that all of my students actually read and were ready to discuss. I was surprised how many
interesting questions my students were willing to address and believe now that the brevity
and relative ease of the text freed them to apply their critical thinking skills to a variety of
social and cultural issues.
Aya created a huge “Ivorian Bonus” for my course. With Michele Gorman, I would
argue that comics are a great way of encouraging reluctant readers. I agree with her that
graphic narratives cannot replace traditional novels, but I will begin to pair them more fre-
quently with traditional works. Despite what I still perceive as limitations of the graphic
format (perhaps my mother’s influence persists), I am glad that I ventured into this new lit-
erary terrain. As a co-learner with my students, I revamped my teaching style and as a result
have found new ideas for my other classes.
Sample Discussion Questions

1. What did you know about Africa before reading Aya? Does this novel change any of
your views? If you are interested, please conduct research on Ivory Coast and its cul-
ture.
2. The colonial past is very important to our understanding of contemporary politics.
Moreover, the new French president, Nicolas Sarcozy, promotes much more restrictive
immigration policies than his predecessor. How will immigrants from former French
colonies be affected by such policy changes? You can compare and contrast immigra-
tion policies of France and the United States.
3. How does this novel represent men and women (boys and girls)? Do you think these
behaviors are typical of people in Abidjan in 1978 or do we find examples of them
today in the United States?
4. Do you like reading graphic novels? Why and why not?
5. Do you think it is appropriate to read graphic novels in a college-level course? Why
and why not?
6. Discuss the graphics of Aya, the book’s layout, and bonus parts (the preface and glos-
sary). Do you like this book’s artwork? How do visuals and texts complement each
other? When compared to a traditional novel, what are the advantages and disadvan-
tages of writing a graphic novel? What are some of the stylistic similarities and dif-
ferences?
7. What accounts for the huge popularity of manga and anime today? Look up some
book reviews. Do you agree with any of them? Explain your position.
8. The novel examines some teenage issues such as work, school, and premarital sex.
How does Abouet deal with them?
9. Character development in other novels we have discussed this semester is quite
detailed. How much detail can Abouet give us in this graphic narrative? How do her
characters deal with important moral dilemmas?
10. What are some of the recurrent themes and issues?
11. How does Aya compare to anything else you have read in the past (or seen in films
or on television)?
12. What roles do TV set and the advertisements for Solibra beer play in the book?
13. Discuss the relationships within extended families and those between parents.
14. Discuss the class differences, especially between members of the family who live in
the countryside as opposed to those living in Abidjan.
NOTES
1. Fix und Foxi is a popular German cartoon produced by Rolf Kauka. For additional information see the
author’s webpage: http://www.kauka.de.
2. Marianne Hirsch, Hillary Chute, and Marianne DeKoven recently published articles in highly respected
journals such as PMLA and Modern Fiction Studies. The latter dedicated an entire issue to graphic narratives, all
hailing their versatility and value.
3. Information about authors and critical reception all according to the publisher’s website: www.drawn
andquarterly.com. A survey of current publications in the United States also reveals generally positive responses
to Aya. Kirkus Review considered it a “modest tale ... told with a gentle humor and grace” while praising Oubrerie’s
“vibrant illustrations” (“Aya”). Callaloo remarked on the importance of African comics and the smoothness of
the collaboration between author and illustrator (Lancaster 944). World Literature in Review also gave the novel
its thumbs up despite its “lack of depth and seriousness” (Walker 60). Even The Wall Street Journal mentioned
the novel’s publishing success with an initial printing of 10,000 copies (Berretta).
4. I use McCloud’s terms for comics panel transitions (70–81).

5. Chute notes the anti-elitist elements of this art form (455).
6. NCTE’s “Read Think Write” site offers a cartoon generator. Although designed for younger students, it
provides a convenient starting point even for college-aged writers: http://www.readwritethink.org/classroom-
resources/student-interactives/comic-creator-30021.html.
7. According to Chute’s definition, Aya is a “graphic narrative” because it blends fiction and autobiogra-
phy.
8. Gorman’s book provides a handy list of popular graphic novels and their literary devices (14).
WORKS CITED
Abouet, Marguerite and Clement Oubrerie. Aya. Trans. Helge Dascher. Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, 2008.
Print.
_____. Aya of Yop City 2 (Aya de Yopougon). Paris: Gallimard, 2006. Print.
_____. Aya: The Secrets Come Out Aya de Yopougon 3. Paris: Gallimard, 2007. Print
Atwood, Margaret. “The Comics Generation.” Playboy (Dec. 2008): 113–14. Print.
“Aya.” Kirkus Review 75.12 (2007). EbscoHost. Web. 8 Dec. 2011.
Berretta, David. “Adviser — Comics.” The Wall Street Journal (5 Sept. 2008): W2. Web. ProQuest. 18 Dec. 2011.
Carter, James Bucky, ed. Building Literacy with Graphic Novels: Page by Page, Panel by Panel. Urbana, IL: NCTE,
2007. Print.
_____, and Marianne DeKoven. “Introduction: Graphic Narrative.” Modern Fiction Studies 52.4 (2006): 767–
82. Print.
Drawn and Quarterly Website. 18 Dec. 2011. <http://www.drawnandquarterly.com>.
Gorman, Michele. Getting Graphic: Using Graphic Novels to Promote Literacy with Preteens and Teens. Worthington,
OH: Linworth, 2003. Print.
Fisher, Douglas, and Nancy Frey. “Altering English: Re-examining the Whole-Class Novel and Making Room
for Graphic Novels and More.” Carter 26–38. Print.
Hatfield, Charles. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Language. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005.
Print.
Hirsch, Marianne. “Editor’s Column: Collateral Damage.” PMLA 119.5 (2004): 1209–15. Print.
Lancaster, Guy. “Review Article.” Callaloo 31.3 (2008): 941–44. LexisNexis. Web. 18 Dec. 2011.
Versaci, Rocco. This Book Contains Graphic Language. New York: Continuum, 2007. Print.
Walker, Jessica. “Fiction Review.” World Literature in Review 31.3 (2008): 59–60. Academic Search Premier. Web.
18 Dec. 2011.
13. Digging Up the Dirt?
Teaching Graphic Narratives in German Academia
STEFAN HOEPPNER
Why should we teach and write about comics in Germany? In contrast to the United
States, Japan, Belgium, and France, graphic narratives have never played a prominent role
in German culture. In particular, there is no tradition of teaching graphic narratives in aca-
demia, and they are rarely used for educational purposes in schools or museums.1 Comics,
while being an essential part of popular culture, have long been rejected by the cultural elite
for various ideological reasons in Germany. Thus, they faced rejection by an academia largely
made up of members of the same elite. However, this is beginning to change. Although
university classes incorporating comics are still few, interest has substantially increased in
the publishing market and academic research. This chapter examines what literature and
comics have in common as narrative media as well as the different ways in which they estab-
lish communication with the reader, using “Literature and Comics,” a class taught at the
University of Freiburg in 2007-2008 as a case study. Adopting graphic narratives from West
Germany’s literary counterculture in the late 1960s to contemporary adaptations of literary
texts, this class shows how literary studies in Germany would benefit from adapting a more
open stance towards “popular” art forms in general and graphic narratives in particular.
Graphic Narratives in Germany: A Short History

There are practically no German comics before World War II.2 Early American comic
strips were strongly influenced by cartoons of European artists such as Rodolphe Töpffer
(1799–1846) and Wilhelm Busch (1832–1908), and German American artist Lyonel Feinin-
ger (1871–1936) who drew his Kin-der-Kids for the Chicago Tribune while living in Germany
(see Platthaus 99–127). But the new medium itself, with few exceptions, did not catch on.
This changed after 1945, when American GIs introduced comics to German readers. They
quickly became popular and were even traded on the black market (Dolle-Weinkauff 1990,
23). Soon afterwards, a number of American titles appeared in German translations. Micky
Maus started as a monthly magazine in 1951 and soon became extremely successful.3 By
1957 the circulation per issue had already reached as much as one million copies (Faulstich
206).4
While translations of American series continued to dominate the market, there were
173
a large number of domestic comics as well. The early boom came to a sudden halt when
the West German parliament passed a law against the “Distribution of Writings Liable to
Corrupt the Young” in 1953. While the law against “dirt and smut” originally targeted pulp
fiction and its display of eroticism, as well as the glorification of World War II German mil-
itary, it exerted a greater effect on comics (Dolle-Weinkauff 1990, 99–100). While relatively
few comics were banned, the law had a devastating effect on their distribution (Faulstich
210). In the conservative climate of the 1950s, comics were largely regarded as a threat to
European culture by an American “Unkultur” (Saldern 90–91),5 or as “Bildidiotismus” (image
idiocy) undermining the morals of young readers. In the long run, the hostile climate of
the “dirt and smut” campaign did more damage to both the reputation and the circulation
of comics than the law itself.
The 1960s saw the introduction of DC and Marvel superheroes in German translation;
domestic periodicals also assisted in popularizing French and Belgian series such as Spirou
& Fantasio, Tintin, Astérix, Lucky Luke, and The Smurfs. The early 1970s witnessed a first
wave of research on graphic narratives: while the major shifts in West German culture trig-
gered by the student protests of the late 1960s included a reassessment of popular culture,
the emerging counterculture remained deeply ambivalent about any popular art forms. Pop-
ular culture was regarded as “the culture of High Capitalism that has finally found its true
identity” (Hermand 22).6 Products of popular culture were regarded as mere commodities
that invariably fail to meet the artistic standards for “real” (that is, “high”) art, are produced
in an “alienated” fashion and are designed for maximum profit. In this respect, no other
text was as influential as Theodor W. Adorno’s and Max Horkheimer’s essay “Cultural Indus-
try.”7 By keeping consumers from developing political awareness, cultural industry ultimately
contributes to the spread of fascism.8 The result of these clashing views was at best a deeply
ambivalent stance towards graphic narrative. A typical example is the book Massenzeichen-
ware (“Mass Drawing Product”) by Wiltrud Ulrike Drechsel and her co-authors (1975):
“The needs that the mass drawing product promises to satisfy, but really only stimulates in
order to betray them, are neither imaginary nor merely forced onto the buyer, even if they
are so deformed that their essence remains hardly recognizable. In fact, they are extremely
real and arise necessarily under the conditions of capitalist production and cannot possibly
be objectively satisfied” (Drechsel et al. 22). Mainstream 1970s left-wing academic criticism
attacked graphic narrative with the same fervor as the protagonists of the “dirt and smut”
campaign, but with opposite arguments.
While most of academic criticism tapered out by the mid-seventies, the same period
witnessed a growing subculture of fans and collectors. Throughout the 1970s and the 1980s,
a network of fanzines, comic shops, and conventions emerged, although graphic narrative
never achieved the same cultural status as in France, Belgium, or Italy. New artists like
Brösel (Rötger Feldmann), Gerhard Seyfried, Walter Moers, and Ralf König quickly gained
a following. Since the mid-nineties, Germany has also witnessed an increasing popularity
of manga, often by a younger audience trying to distance itself from older readers of Amer-
ican, German, or Franco-Belgian comics. This rise of comics in public esteem found its
most recent manifestation in 2008, when the German National Library in Frankfurt ran its
major exhibition Comics Made in Germany (Dolle-Weinkauff 2008, see also Scholz).
Even so, the status of research remained marginal for a long time. The University of
Frankfurt am Main houses an immense comic collection, significantly as part of their German
Institute for the Research of Books for Young Readers. Founded in 1963 and originally
designed to provide the basis for research in the tradition of critical theory, it is by far the
13. Digging Up the Dirt? (Hoeppner) 175
largest archive of graphic narratives in the country and provided the material for the 2008
exhibition; for a long time, however, it was hardly used for research purposes. Between the
late 1970s and the late 1990s, the overall number of academic publications on graphic nar-
rative remained small, and much of the existing output focused on questions of pedagogy.
However, this has changed in recent years: in 2005, a number of literary scholars founded
the German Society for the Research of Graphic Narrative, which holds annual conferences
and publishes the yearbook Deutsche Comicforschung (Comfor n. pag.). But even outside
these circles recent years have witnessed a substantial increase in research interest, resulting
in a number of conferences, monographs, and edited collections of essays (Hein, Hüners,
and Michaelsen; Arnold and Knigge; Schmitz-Emans; Grünewald).
In my opinion, there are three main reasons for this development. First of all, the Ger-
man departments have shown more interest in cultural studies in the Anglo-American tra-
dition and in popular culture. Second, there is a growing awareness of literature as a medium
among others, resulting in reexaminations of what constitutes literature and the features it
shares with other media. And finally, German publishing houses have adapted the label
“graphic novel” to market graphic narratives targeted at adult readers, at least implicitly
crossing into the realms of “high” culture. Since being coined in the 1970s, the term “graphic
novel” has a double implication: On the one hand, it presents a challenge for graphic nar-
ratives to “rise” to the standards in narrative complexity and character development repre-
sented by traditional literature. On the other hand, the term “graphic novel” also presents
a challenge to literature by claiming to be on par with its artistic complexity, which is obvi-
ous when it comes to such classics as Maus, Watchmen, or The Dark Knight Returns. These
developments do not, of course, occur separately, but are strongly interconnected.
The Class: Literature und Comics

I taught the class “Literature und Comics” at the University of Freiburg in the Winter
Semester of 2007-2008, the first course on graphic narratives offered at this institution.
The Department of German has about 2,000 students, one of the largest majors at the uni-
versity. Most majors either study for a B.A. or a High School Teaching Credential. While
a substantial number of students specialize in German Linguistics or Medieval German Lit-
erature, many enroll in courses in post–1600 Modern German Literature. The number of
students was rather small (four), partly due to the fact that this class did not fulfill any
requirements towards a degree. The positive side is that this class attracted motivated students
with a high level of interest in the subject matter. The class included two parts: creating an
awareness of graphic narratives as a medium and analyzing selected texts and their relation
to traditional literature.
We began with Horkheimer and Adorno’s influential essay on “Cultural Industry” and
the “dirt and smut” campaign of the 1950s. We discussed how the long-prevailing negative
attitudes towards graphic narratives both in academia and in German society were by and
large due to specific cultural factors rather than to the medium itself. While students agreed
that Horkheimer and Adorno’s essay left little room for a positive evaluation of popular cul-
ture, they found some of their ideas still valid, for example: the commodification of art,
and the appropriation of original and even subversive movements by a capitalist cultural
industry.
Next we discussed comics as a medium in its own right. We used excerpts from Marshall
McLuhan’s Understanding Media (1964), highlighting his widely cited statement “The
Medium is the Message” (7), meaning that the way a given medium operates restructures
human society much more profoundly than the content that is used to transmit the message.
We consented that McLuhan’s arguments helped deflate the arguments of Horkheimer and
Adorno against popular art inasmuch as they do not deal with the valorization of a work
of art as much as with the workings of a specific medium regardless of its artistic merit.
We then advanced to graphic narratives as a phenomenon of intermediality. Building
on the definitions of Irina O. Rajewsky, we conceptualized graphic narratives as a “combi-
nation of at least two media traditionally viewed as distinct entities,” in which “the pluri-
medial basic structure becomes a specific feature of a (single) new medium” (Rajewsky 15).
Graphic narratives usually incorporate both text and images, which in most “traditional”
literature appear separate from each other. However, we found that Rajewsky’s definition
does not cover some of the important elements of graphic narratives such as onomatopoetic
writing, speed lines, and the panel-to-panel movement of narration.
The main reading of our theoretical section was Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics
(1993). To view comics in McLuhan’s terms enables McCloud to “separate form and content”
and arrive at a definition that is “strictly neutral on matters of style, quality or subject
matter” (McCloud 5). His explicit goal is “an examination of the art-form of comics, what
it’s capable of, how it works.... How do we define comics, what are the basic elements of
comics, how does the mind process the language of comics” (McCloud Introduction, n.
pag.). In McCloud’s view, these general elements are a common feature of all comics inde-
pendent of their content and their ideology. McCloud developed an overarching, powerful
framework applicable to all forms of graphic narrative regardless of the individual specifics
of their artists or their culture of origin, from ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs to contemporary
Manga. Our main focus, however, were the narrative aspects of McCloud’s theory. This
includes his system of six kinds of transitions between panels (McCloud 74–80), the por-
trayal of time (McCloud 94–117), and the process of closure, which allows us to “mentally
construct a continuous, unified reality” from the “staccato rhythm of [the] unconnected
moments” of single panels (McCloud 67). Thus, McCloud’s text provides a common vocab-
ulary to discuss specific example of graphic narratives regardless of style, genre, and ideo-
logical content.
Moreover, we compared McCloud’s concepts to a number of academic articles on the
narrative aspects of comics from the vantage point of literary studies (Strobel, Barberi,
Dammann). Ultimately, they often reach similar conclusions as McCloud and do not sub-
stantially extend beyond his theory. My students consented that McCloud’s explanations
seemed more to the point, possibly due to the fact that he is an experienced comic artist
rather than a scholar. Furthermore, the clarity and conciseness of his arguments might also
be due to the fact that Understanding Comics is a comic book itself and is able to demonstrate
arguments in drawing and narrative rather than circumscribing them in text only. Overall,
we found McCloud’s book extremely helpful except that one student objected his definition
of comics being “sequential art” as not specific enough.
In addition, we also discussed Ole Frahm’s article that accuses McCloud of completely
disregarding the implicit politics of comics. Frahm takes issue with a “violent” politics of
identification he sees at work in McCloud’s theory. In his opinion, a seamless, unreflecting
identification with the characters in a graphic narrative is not only a forced act, but also a
dangerous undertaking “in whose projection all differences in materiality, in the way the
lines are drawn, are disappearing in repetition” (Frahm 76). For Frahm, a graphic narrative
unfolds its specific power only where it reminds readers of political and social violence
inherent to capitalist society. As an example, he uses two issues of Entertaining Comics from
the 1950s, the series that ultimately led to the introduction of the Comics Code in the
United States (Dolle-Weinkauff 1990, 96–98). These horror comics, Frahm argues, invite
and dispel reader identification at the same time, thereby sparking a process of reflection
on violence, the power of art, and ultimately political power that McCloud deliberately
keeps out of the picture. Although the openly displayed violence seems “graphic” in both
senses of the term, he claims them to be paradoxically less implicated in actual violence
than a cultural mainstream that tacitly approves of the powers that be (79–82).
In a vivid discussion we reached the conclusion that Frahm’s article constituted a pro-
ductive yet deliberate misreading of Understanding Comics. It was certainly not McCloud’s
intention to divert readers’ attention from the ugly aspects of capitalism, but rather to arrive
at a vocabulary for the analysis of comics as an art form and a medium in its own right. In
some aspects, we regarded it as the return of 1970s academic criticism with a postmodern
twist, giving us food for thought, but not helping us with the analysis proper. However,
we agreed that McCloud does indeed leave out at least one critical dimension of McLuhan’s
theory of media — their impact on society. Such an analysis of individual comics would not
necessarily be as fervently anti-capitalist as Frahm’s, but might lead to criteria to differentiate
“good” from “bad” comics, however these categories may be framed. This, however, would
clearly oppose McCloud’s approach of treating all forms of graphic narrative on an equal
basis.
The second part of the class was dedicated to analyzing graphic narratives by Rolf
Dieter Brinkmann, Isabel Kreitz, and Marjane Satrapi with an emphasis on the relations
between literature and graphic narratives: the use of graphic elements in a work of literature
(Brinkmann), an adaptation of a literary text as a graphic narrative (Kreitz), and Marjane
Satrapi’s autobiographical Persepolis. There is a considerable difference between Satrapi’s
book and the other two. While it has become the object of numerous research articles in
literary studies, it is neither an element in a literary work (as in Brinkmann) nor an adaptation
of a text (as in Timm/Kreitz), but a work of art in its own right.
Brinkmann was a West German poet who included comic strips in his collection Die
Piloten (The Pilots, 1968) and Acid (1969), an anthology of American underground literature
he co-edited with Ralf-Rainer Rygulla. In the late 1960s, Brinkmann was generally viewed
as the enfant terrible of West German literature. Indeed, a large share of his writings specifi-
cally aimed to provoke the figureheads of “high” culture:
The dead admire the dead! Is there anything more ghostly than this German cultural industry
(Kulturbetrieb) with constantly crying for style etc.? What is your style, what is your style? ...
Why should I explicitly care for style, if everything around me is already stylish anyway! That
would be just plain boring. What did Warren Beatty say to the German movie theater owners
when Bonnie and Clyde came out: You have to crank up the volume when the final scene comes
around [Brinkmann 186].
His provocative attitude received much attention, and led to bitter fights with the literary
establishment; some prominent writers accused Brinkmann of glorifying violence or, worse,
of secretly paving the way for the resurgence of fascism (Walser). From a historical distance
at least, Brinkmann did something altogether different: He championed American literature
and pop culture in order to oppose established West German culture, both in the traditional
and the “oppositional” Marxist vein. The mixture he used was highly heterogeneous: It
included Canned Heat and Andy Warhol, Charles Bukowski and Marshall McLuhan —
and, of course, graphic narratives. In Brinkmann’s opinion, all of these had in common that
they glorified merely the “surface” of things without going into the “depths” of German
culture (Murnane).
In Die Piloten, Brinkmann uses comics as a subject of his poetry and as an element of
illustration. The volume is framed by two untranslated drawings by American underground
artist Joe Brainard (1942–1994), while the three sections of the book are each introduced
by short anonymous four-panel strips “from the New York comic scene” (371), translated
by Brinkmann. He uses elements of American popular culture in order to oppose both Ger-
man popular culture and traditional poets who see themselves as part of a long elitist artistic
tradition:
They sit around somewhere, invisible, having said something sometime in the past, now they
keep the cultural words occupied instead of walking around and looking at a lot of things. They
are the living dead, of course more difficult to get rid of than the great old role models on the
shelves of the used book stores. Welcome to the Rolling Stones! The Fugs have better lyrics.... You
have to forget that there is such a thing as art. You just have to start [Brinkmann 185–86].
Comics, then, are part of this undertaking exactly because Brinkmann regards them as
trivial, everyday objects alien to German “high” culture, just like rock bands, Hollywood
icons Humphrey Bogart, Douglas Fairbanks, and Ava Gardner, Chiquita bananas, Coca
Cola or the German detergent Persil that appear in other poems. On the surface, this practice
looks like an affirmation of a superficial consumer culture — but in a subversive manner
heavily inspired by the aesthetics of Andy Warhol (see Gemünden). Brinkmann not only
reproduces elements of popular culture, rather adds his own twist as well. This becomes
obvious in his poems “Comic No. 1” and “Comic No. 2,” both of which employ Batman
and Robin as their main characters. The superheroes and their antagonist, the Joker, are
displayed in an act of consensual gay sex (Brinkmann 266).
The “dirty speech” of this poem is not an end in itself. Just like the other cultural icons
in Die Piloten, Brinkmann uses Batman and Robin to criticize the prevailing standards in
Western Culture, namely its prudishness in matters of sexuality. The poem can only be
understood properly by readers who are familiar with the characters (Seiler 159–60). At the
time, this practically excluded most of West Germany’s academically trained critics and
much of the potential audience for contemporary poetry, which felt provoked by Brinkmann’s
use of elements of American graphic narrative. This is also true for the three comic strips
by the unnamed author. We noticed that the former — three strips of four panels each —
uses the typical format of newspapers comic strips. The rather crude drawings show an
adaptation of familiar characters from various comic strips. The basic story line is as follows:
the character Nancy enters a Dick Tracy strip. When Tracy asks her what she is doing in
his strip, she replies: “I’ve entered the area of the classics to help out in the fight against
kitsch comics” (Brinkmann 188), here represented by Fred Flintstone, Yogi Bear, and his
sidekick Boo Boo. In the second strip, Yogi Bear recites some badly rhymed poetry (“I play
the lyre/better than C. F. Meyer”), causing Nancy to faint. In turn, Dick Tracy tries to
shoot Yogi Bear, but the bullet goes right through him, and the Hanna-Barbera characters
leave the scene laughing (216). In the third strip, Tracy is left puzzled as to why his bullet
failed to kill, but Yogi Bear, back in “Kitschland,” provides the answer: “What the cop
doesn’t know is that we kitsch people (a product of American bourgeois culture) refuse to
admit the reality of death ... and that is why we’re immune to it” (247). What we found
remarkable is that the line that the strips draw is not between comics and “high” culture,
but between “classic” and “kitsch” comics, even though no reasons are given why Yogi Bear
falls under one category and Dick Tracy under another. But what looks like a simple criticism
of American popular culture also has a subversive effect with regard to German literary tra-
ditions: precisely because popular culture denies the existence of death, it is also free of the
excessive depth and pathos of traditional literature (Seiler 154–55), a feature that is partic-
ularly associated with German literature, be it Hölderlin, Novalis, Kafka, or Nietzsche. In
this respect, we found that both the poems on comics and the inclusion of the strips can
be read as part of Brinkmann’s strategy that aims to arrive at a form of poetry that is spon-
taneous and simple, free from the heaviness of the German tradition.
In addition, we discussed Brinkmann’s poems and poetics in the light of Leslie Fiedler’s
famous essay “Cross the Border — Close the Gap” that seeks to redefine and overcome the
borders between “high” and “low” art in favor of a new, “postmodern” literature that would
not need these boundaries. While Brinkmann’s works use graphic narratives in literary texts,
the next book we discussed was a comic adaptation. Uwe Timm’s novella The Invention of
Curried Sausage (1993) tells the story of an old woman from Hamburg who supposedly
invented the popular dish whose exact origins are unknown. The main part of her tale was
about the last days of World War II in Hamburg and how she hid Bremer, a German soldier
who has deserted from his unit, and had an affair with him. Time and again, Frau Brücker’s
meandering report defers the issue the narrator really wants to know about — how she even-
tually came to invent that sauce. When she finally reveals how that event came to pass, the
episode was barely an afterthought to the main plot. Later on she opened her sausage stand
that became a success. In 1996, acclaimed German comic artist Isabel Kreitz published a
graphic narrative adapting Timm’s text. We read both the novella and the adaptation, and
used Kreitz’ version as an example for the transformation process that occurs when a literary
text is adapted to the medium of graphic narrative. The most interesting aspect was the
subtle changes Kreitz made to the plot.
In Timm’s novella the narrator returned to Frau Brücker several times to hear the entire
story, and while he was only there for the invention of the famous curry dish, he heard more
and more about her affair with the young soldier. She only returned to the subject of curry
at the very end, almost as an afterthought. Kreitz lets Frau Brücker tell the story on a single
day instead of over several visits; thus the urgency of the narrator’s inquiries about the sup-
posed core of the story (the invention of the curry sauce) is missing, as is the repeated defer-
ment that contributes to the inherent suspense. As a result, the plot appears much more
linear.
Timm uses a framework that is very common for the traditional German novella: the
narrator reports a secondary narrative told by another character. Timm’s narrator hints at
the form several times and the text ends with the word “novella.” In such a structure the
narrator has to rely on what Lena Brücker tells him, although he occasionally doubts the
truthfulness of her tale. Timm does not use quotation marks, making it difficult to decide
whether a statement comes from the narrator, Frau Brücker, or another character in her
tale. Sometimes the narrator describes things he cannot possibly know such as the taste in
Bremer’s mouth when he returns to taste Frau Brücker’s curry sauce (185). Kreitz, however,
locates all the action in the drawing and does not (and perhaps cannot) adopt the double
framing of the narrative and the unreliability of the narrator and Lena Brücker. Graphic
narratives are usually not drawn in subjunctive mode, but suggest that events have taken
place. Thus, some of the enigmatic, uncertain character of Timm’s novella is lost in the
adaptation. But my students agreed that this was almost unavoidable in the transformation
process from a literary text to a graphic narrative. My students agreed that Kreitz managed
to capture the “essence” of Timm’s text quite well. One student attributed this to Kreitz’
stark black and white drawings. While her style seems quite fitting for the bleak atmosphere
of war-torn Hamburg, her use of the same style for the frame narrative set in the 1990s
appears out of place to us. In Timm’s novella, nothing suggests that the gloom of the Nazi
era or its aftermath is still present in the frame narrative.
Using McCloud’s critical apparatus of frame-to-frame narration, we found ourselves
at a loss to describe why we found the essence of Timm’s novella so well preserved in Kreitz’
adaptation. Evidently, McCloud is concerned with the inner workings of the medium, not
with the process of transformation from one medium to another. At the time, we did not
know of any approaches that explicitly attempt to overcome that gap. In the meantime,
German scholar Nicole Mahne has attempted to develop a transmedial theory of narrative.
Its aim is to describe both the common narrative core of divergent narrative media such as
the novel, film, comic, the radio play, and hyperfiction, and the specific means they use.
Transformations from one medium to another are not taken into account. While Mahne
does resort to Rajewsky’s notion of transmediality — according to which the same “media-
unspecific” subject can be told in different media with their individual specific means
(Rajewksy 13; cf. Mahne 9)— she does not take into account what Rajewsky describes as
“media transfer,” the transformation from one medium to another.
The final text we discussed was Satrapi’s Persepolis. Here, our focus was how Satrapi
transforms her personal experience into graphic narrative. The simple black-and-white style
reminded us of children’s drawings, thereby successfully mirroring a child’s point of view
of the political and social events of the Iranian revolution and its aftermath. We found that
the style of the drawings slightly evolves throughout the book, as the autobiographical main
character going from childhood to adolescence. While we agreed that we admired Satrapi’s
work, it was somewhat out of the line of the other works we covered, having little to do
with the relations between literature and comics. Unfortunately, the discussion was therefore
not very fruitful.
Student Responses
For the purpose of writing this chapter, I interviewed two of my students.9 My questions
concerned the content of the class, their attitude towards comics before taking the class,
and whether these attitudes had changed. Both reported that they enjoyed reading comics
as children, although their parents were discouraging: “When my sister and I were allowed
to pick our reading for summer break at the public library, we were only allowed to pick
books, not comics.... There never was an explanation why we could not pick comics. I only
remember that I envied my best friend at the time because he was allowed to check out
comic books at the library” (Balle and Menne n. pag.). My selection of texts was generally
welcomed, especially when it came to including both theoretical texts and graphic narratives.
One student commented on the selection of the primary texts: “Kreitz’ adaptation was suc-
cessful and aesthetically pleasing. Satrapi’s comic was appealing as well, especially in com-
parison to the film version.... At the same time, the Currywurst was somewhat monotonous,
also because it was black-and-white, while I really liked its etching-type optics” (Balle and
Menne n. pag.). The only criticism was that while the selection of theoretical texts proved
helpful (especially McLuhan, McCloud, and Rajewsky), some students would have preferred
to dedicate a larger chunk of class time to textual analysis; this problem could be solved by
an approach that combines theoretical readings and examples of graphic narrative more
strongly (Balle and Menne n. pag.). One student suggested a section on the film adaptations
of comics, an interesting point in the light of recent productions such as Sin City, Watchmen,
Hellboy, and the Spider Man and Batman films. One student also suggested the Kafka biog-
raphy by Robert Crumb (Balle and Menne n. pag.).
Both students clearly stated that the class has changed their outlook on comics favorably.
One of them wrote enthusiastically:
I have become much more open towards comics ... and I spend much more time looking for
comics and reading them. Since our class, my visits at [Freiburg’s local comic book store] have
at least quadrupled ... I have also become a fervent defender of comics.... Before, comics had
simply been cool; after this class, I see them as an art form that can evade any definition if it —
or its author — wants to. I have also become sensitized to comics in general, I noticed that literally
EVERYBODY has something to say about comics and does not have inhibitions about being
vocal about it, which is often the case with literature. For me, the seminar has opened a door
into another world [Balle and Menne n. pag.].
This student was trained to become a high school teacher, and the use of graphic narratives
in pedagogy was her main motivation for enrolling in this class. The experience of classes
like mine has the potential to make a difference in the treatment of comics in the German
secondary school curriculum.
Toward the Integration of Graphic Narratives into Literature Classes

Although things have begun to change gradually, classes on graphic narratives in Ger-
man academia are still few and far between. This seems mostly due to the cultural factors
mentioned above, particularly the ongoing reluctance towards popular culture by tradition-
ally trained teachers and scholars. Many teachers are simply unfamiliar with the wide variety
of texts that are available. Many graphic narratives are challenging works of art on par with
the best of literature. A thorough study of these works can yield insights on the similarities
and differences of differing forms of media. In this context, Jan Baetens’ suggestion to treat
graphic novels as examples of “visual literature” (79) is particularly helpful. Baetens has
asked: “[H]ow does the graphic novel challenge our idea of literature?... [H]ow does the
graphic novel force us to adapt methodological and theoretical tools that we use to study
literature?” (82). He successfully elaborates on some features that deserve comparison
between the two media, such as “the narrator, narrative style, narrative tension, and narrative
units” (Baetens 87). In this respect, adaptations of literary texts, such as Isabel Kreitz’ version
of Die Entdeckung der Currywurst, would be useful.
In Germany, graphic narratives are well-suited subject matter for studying the contested
relationship between “high” and “popular” culture and the changes it is undergoing (or
not). In recent years, at least some texts seem to have overcome the traditional boundaries.10
But does that mean that the graphic narrative as a whole has found wider acceptance? Or
does the line between “high” and “popular” now run between different types of graphic nar-
ratives? That would indeed be an interesting question. Even if one generally regards graphic
narrative as artistically inferior to a novel by Joyce or Goethe, one could still argue for a
social (sociological) analysis of graphic narratives. Gerald Graff argues that “there is no nec-
essary relation between the intellectual complexity or value of any object of study and the
difficulty in studying it ... any text becomes challenging to the right kind of analysis” (67).
Even if we choose to regard graphic narratives as “popular” and (implicitly) inferior to “high”
culture, it is still a worthwhile object of study. Why is it a popular medium? Does its specific
combination of words and images in a sequential manner contribute to its popularity? How
is it possible to identify with the characters? Is it even desirable? What is the ideological
content of a given narrative? While this approach looks somewhat similar to critical theory,
it is somewhat different in that it does not necessarily carry an ideological agenda of its own,
but rather strives to take a step back and look at the texts critically — but with an open
mind. Students would benefit from a critical stance towards media other than the canonized
texts that make up most of our curricula, and would thus even profit in non-academic areas.
Moreover, graphic narratives might make an especially interesting object of study for those
students who later go on to teach at high schools, as many of mine do.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
I thank Nadine Ihle-Höppner and Barry Murnane for their helpful comments, Bernd Dolle-Weinkauff and
Hartmut Fischer for additional materials, and my students Christiane Balle and Sarah Menne for their elaborate
and helpful responses.
NOTES
1. In my usage, however, “graphic narrative” serves as an umbrella term for comics of any subject matter
or length, as comics as a “sequential art” as defined by Will Eisner does per se come in a narrative form.
2. For a detailed history of graphic narrative in West Germany, see Dolle-Weinkauff; Knigge 23–87;
Dolle-Weinkauff 8–67.
3. Even today, Disney comics are much more popular in Europe than they are in the United States. On
the particular popularity of Donald Duck comics in Germany, see Bernofsky.
4. For the years between 1945 and 1990, I will exclusively deal with graphic narrative in West Germany.
Contrary to common stereotypes, however, comics did exist in communist East Germany. See Dolle-Weinkauff,
24–28.
5. At the same time, the defenders of the anti-“dirt and smut” did draw on American sources when it was
convenient, particularly on Frederic Wertham’s then-popular Seduction of the Innocent (1954) (cf. Hesse-Quack
66).
6. Hermand explicitly includes comics in his criticism (11, 13, 17).
7. All translations are mine, unless otherwise noted.
8. Reading these arguments today, one has to take into account that Adorno and Horkheimer wrote these
lines in their exile in Pacific Palisades, California, where they had fled from the Nazis. In fact, in Nazi Germany
a close alliance between the political powers and the entertainment industry did exist, and both radio and film
were deliberately used as instruments of fascist political power. Moreover, Adorno and Horkheimer composed
their essay in the immediate neighborhood of Hollywood. For a detailed discussion of Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s
attitude towards popular culture, see Plass.
9. At the University of Freiburg’s Department of German, there is no formal evaluation system in place.
Evaluations are only performed once a year for statistical purposes and the results of individual classes are, as a
rule, not made available to instructors.
10. Since I first wrote this article, things have changed a bit — at least at the University of Freiburg. In the
past year, two renowned comics scholars have joined the faculty: Evi Zemanek at the Department of German
and Stephan Packard at the Department of Media Studies. While Packard regularly includes comics in his
curricula, Zemanek offered the very first regular graduate seminar on graphic narrative in the spring term of 2011.
Packard plans to host the annual conference of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Comicforschung in the fall of 2012,
and further activities are on the way.
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PART V
GENRE STUDIES
14. Making the Unseen and the

Unspoken Visible and Audible
Trauma and the Graphic Novel
EDWARD BRUNNER
The concept of trauma should not be unfamiliar to comics scholars. The origin of the
superhero, for one thing, often carries traumatic overtones. Such noirish aspects of Batman
as his withdrawal to the shadowy recesses of the city are justified in part by the intransigent
memory of witnessing his parents’ murder. Freud’s 1917 “Mourning and Melancholia” essay
influentially proposed that one damaged by trauma can be trapped within a sense of over-
whelming loss that holds him compulsively (melancholy) when what is needed is the ability
to move on by understanding that an irreversible change must be accepted (mourning). For
Freud, Bruce Wayne’s identity as Batman is the product of a melancholic who is acting-out
a scene inscribed at a deep level of the unconscious, not a mourner working-through a
problem of which he has become aware (Freud 203–18; Sandifer 177–79). Each time Bruce
Wayne becomes Batman, he is drawn to crime scenes that figuratively return him to his
boyhood experience in Gotham’s “Crime Alley” where he witnessed a criminal executing
his mother and father. While Batman’s crime-fighting activity effectively prevents such a
devastating event from happening to others, Bruce Wayne is condemned to revisit the scene
and never be able to correct it. As traumatized, he can neither escape nor confront the bur-
ied conviction that he holds himself somehow responsible for the death of his parents.
Such highly-calibrated analyses of popular culture are not unusual in the years following
9/11, when trauma studies have burgeoned as an area of interest. Originally developed as a
clinical method for handling the damaging effects of the Holocaust on survivors and their
families, post–9/11 trauma studies became a paradigm for discussing the problem of handling
cataclysmic events. Judith Butler has argued that answering violence with violence invokes
the classic dilemma: the traumatized, not fully aware of the depth of the injury, is drawn to
repeat and relive the situation that has been so detrimental. “In the United States, we have
been surrounded with violence,” she writes, “having perpetrated it and perpetrating it still,
having suffered it, living in fear of it, planning more of it, if not an open future of infinite
war in the name of a ‘war on terrorism’” (Butler 28). Warfare’s violent response, far from
seeking a way to think through and beyond an initial attack, enlarges the wound.
Discussing the tenets of trauma theory establishes a base from which students can find
similarities in recent texts that might not otherwise be considered together, such as the
185
186 Part V : Genre Studies
graphic novels, the experimental fiction and the extended poetic sequences that were revealed
as having common ground in a graduate level seminar “The Everyday, the Traumatic, and
the Social Imaginary,” offered in 2009 at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. Trauma
theory invites engaged interpretation because trauma can be known only by the indirect
marks it leaves. A class focusing on trauma is able to find bridges between the practice of
cultural studies, which is sharply aware of the contingent and the momentary, and the
practice of the literary, which is sharply aware of the need to bring nuanced judgment to
bear on analyses of subtle details that may convey significant information in a compressed
and dramatic form. It helps demonstrate, as Rita Felski has written, that “[h]igh culture
and popular culture do not function as homogeneous and mutually exclusive blocks” (40).
Trauma escapes full understanding. “Not all blows or wounds create trauma — just
those that produce the characteristic aftershock,” Diana Taylor reminds us. “Thus trauma
is known only by the nature of its repeats.... Past blows haunt our present and shake the
individual or social body” (1675). Traumatic existence is never patent but must be deduced:
it is evident in traces that it leaves behind and that require skillful and patient reading. Thus
a course on traumatic effects can test whether graphic narratives are as effective as experi-
mental fiction and poems in extended sequences in calling the reader to pay close attention
to texts that present circumstances that are inherently troubled and controversial. Graphic
narratives come to resemble less a variant on a commercialized means of delivering infor-
mation and more an innovation-bearing form. Like the unmoored perspectives of experi-
mental fiction and the multiplying voices of the extended poetic sequence, graphic narratives
elicit a level of projective engagement that can identify signs of trauma and can begin to
use them as a framework for understanding not just the methodology of a work but the
larger diagnostics that work may be proposing.
This chapter discusses graphic narratives by Alicia Torres, Seth, Chris Ware, and Kim
Deitch alongside experimental fiction by Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicholson Baker and
extended poetic sequences by Gabriel Gudding and Martha Collins. The choice of texts is
important because this seminar, primed to examine everyday experience for signs of trauma
and seeking to identify a social imaginary that can address the traumatic, encourages a range
of different authors who work through unanticipated conjunctions as they present their
work to an adventurous public. The long poem that mimics antiquarian research into dusty
newspaper archives (Martha Collins’ Blue Front) and the fictional work portraying a multi-
generational family defined by idiosyncratic members ( Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely
Loud and Incredibly Close) are similar because each work is addressed to a skilled readership,
a readership comfortable with constructing a text’s meaning out of suggestive fragments
and implicit hints. In addition, neither text will be limited to expressing meaning through
only the verbal but will use devices such as the look of words on the page as an element in
generating interpretation. Collins, for example, deploys the blank spaces between what
could be described as the remnant of stanzas and alludes to documents of all kinds, from
postcards of a lynching to newspaper editorials, and Foer introduces colorized markings,
sketches and documentary photographs that could not be more controversial (the image of
falling figure from one of the twin towers that was almost at once withdrawn from television
coverage of the event). The interplay between the verbal and the visual in a graphic narrative
as well as such traits as the page-as-a-unit-of-meaning and the pacing established by size,
number, and position of adjacent panels are akin to those in avant-garde fiction and poetry
that prompt a meaning-making process among readers.
The course positions its students to notice how pages position them as active readers
14. Trauma and the Graphic Novel (Brunner) 187
by considering the traits that Marianne Hirsch singles out in her overview of Art Spiegelman’s
In the Shadow of No Towers (2004). Hirsch’s characterization of her reading tactics embrace
what she calls a “visual-verbal binocularity” that mixes word and image and that can apply
to other texts that include material other than the verbal, that use the placement of clusters
of language as signaling meaning or the presentation of a recognizable image. Hirsch praises
Spiegelman’s work for its evocation of what is not there, in which “not seeing becomes vis-
ible, and even audible” (1213). The reader can carry such discovery over to other works in
which apparent omissions convey significance. When Hirsch also commends Spiegelman
for exposing “the protective mechanisms that are deployed by the images in which viewers
typically operate in our culture” (1215) that claim resonates with other works that expose
the reductive aspect of conventionalized (usually commercialized) representations. For
Hirsch, these elements constitute an engagement with the traumatic, and Spiegelman’s work
“performs an aesthetic of the trauma: it is fragmentary, composed of small boxes that cannot
contain the material which exceeds their frames and the structure of the page” (1213). This
response is transferable to the other writings (whose “small boxes” might not be so patent
as in graphic narrative but which display themselves in stanzas or paragraphs or other visual
depictions). Placing graphic narratives alongside novels and poems in this class, I try not
so much to establish a direct route through the texts as to propose likely paths that encourage
students to find ways that work for them.
Given the new emphasis on trauma after 9/11, it is apt to begin the course with Alicia
Torres’ under-investigated American Widow (2008), a graphic novel that directly registers
the destruction of the Trade Center towers in New York. This collaborative text — script by
Torres, drawings by Sungyoon Choi — portrays the aftermath of the disaster as a bureaucratic
nightmare for those who lost family members on that day. Because Torres’ husband was
newly employed at the twin towers, the record of his presence there was problematic, a fact
destined to keep open the wound of her loss, and make her unbearably aware of the gap
between official efforts to shape the event (to name its significance, to identify how to
respond) and her personal memories. What is not there and unseen thus constitutes her
new reality. Torres is an anguished participant, and her text is a remarkably articulate exam-
ination of that most inarticulate of all emotions, anger. Among the numerous themes, the
most controversial one is her resistance to what Jeffrey Melnick calls the urge to heal the
event’s “profound rupture in tine and space” by providing us with a convenient response
that presses us toward “compulsory and ritualized behaviors” that pretend the event’s cat-
astrophic implications have been largely resolved (20). What Melnick values are works that
“rather than providing a readymade answers” produce instead “a generative question” (21).
Pregnant with her first child at the time of 9/11, Torres is gripped in a birth-oriented time-
cycle that already operates outside the procedures organized to handle families affected by
9/11. Her anomalous position underscores the expediency of a state mechanism designed to
allocate relief through aid programs that force those who are bereaving into stylized mourn-
ing. Incapable of succumbing to the standard established for a group, Torres finds, in the
resistance within further moments that follow her initial refusal, a position that, while
anguished, nevertheless registers the actual pain of loss, and that recognizes the extent to
which anger pervades loss.
Torres is ironically gifted by an unlikely element — the anger within a small quarrel
that fueled the parting between her and her husband on the last day they were together.
Because of this imperfect parting, she is unable to withdraw into the kind of memory of
perfectionism that a media apparatus wants to supply to victims deemed to be martyrs. In
addition, the intimate rage that she remembers painfully in her final words with her husband
provides a framework for evaluating the annoyed anger that the bureaucracy provokes as
well as acknowledging the unpleasant anger of others. Torres and Choi use the angle of
vision in certain panels to place the reader in the line of fire, and within a single image,
they can suggest the clash between both personal and cultural memory as it might occur in
examining a daily newspaper. Other pages stand by themselves, surrounded in darkness,
evoking time as it crawls by; though Torres’ thoughts range over the city and across time,
she is often seen on her bed in her small room at a precise moment. When Torres achieves
a breakthrough, Choi’s illustrations change temporarily into colored images and snapshots.
The fragility of these colored images is conveyed through an expanse of detail unavailable
in drawings.
Torres’ work resembles Jonathan Safran Foer’s multifaceted novel, Extremely Loud and
Incredibly Close (2005) in that a public disaster brings to bear on a child the cultural memories
that thrust one into a public life. Foer’s work draws on extra-verbal material for part of its
narrative: several pages of photographs appear in a group and others are scattered through-
out; still other pages place a single phrase at their center; three pages reproduce in color the
jottings customers leave behind at a shop where they sample magic markers before purchasing
them; the reproduction of a memoir by one character features numerous “errors” circled in
orange ink; a narrative sequence apparently speeds up until it literally compresses itself into
typographical darkness; and a sequence of photographs of a man falling from the twin
towers presents itself in reverse chronology so time appears to work backward. At their sim-
plest, Foer’s visuals insist on a digression from storytelling-as-usual, an interruption in nar-
rative’s course; at their most complex, interruption itself figures in the storytelling as the
memorial of memory disrupted that cannot be excluded from the meaning of the day.
In Foer’s story, the Schell family’s youngest, nine-year-old Oskar, responds to the loss
of his father (in the twin towers) with a mix of helplessness and ingenuity that continually
transfers elements of his pain into other settings where it can be temporarily managed. Mel-
nick suggests that the novel grants, as a “gift,” a “liberation from the narrow channel of
‘uplift’ that has confined so much 9/11 art” (86). Foer’s Oskar is a tangle of emotions, whose
rage against his mother is unbearably deep, whose adoration of his lost father is obsessive —
he returns to recall stories his father left with him, including the tale of a long-lost Sixth
Borough of Manhattan, to which (in his dad’s fanciful telling) the world’s greatest jumper
used to leap once a year. The image of a man falling from the twin towers thus gestures
toward becoming a mythic figure in a personal family tale of aspiration and ambition.
Family becomes important, as the novel reaches back into previous generations, recovering
the story of his grandfather and the Holocaust (as well as his hopeless efforts to communicate
his anguish to his grandmother and to Oskar’s father). Awareness of loss, then, takes central
place as defining the Schnell family — it is the heritage of the twentieth century now trans-
planted into the twenty-first, and unable to be brought to closure. If time is asked to run
backwards, as it appears at the close, then it is largely to recover a point of view from which
to understand gaps in understanding that too quickly and too simply provoke anger. Ulti-
mately, Oskar’s search for finality must be set aside as impossible.
A strong model for conceptualizing trauma within recent graphic novels is Chris Ware’s
monumental Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (2000), a narrative whose focus
on multiple generations examines a dysfunctional family that intersects with the immigrant
culture of nineteenth century Chicago. Jimmy Corrigan constructs a narrative of four gen-
erations of Corrigan families, each damaged in some way by a profound evasiveness, by a
tendency to withdraw into reverie if not outright fantasy. As the visual arrangement of
numerous pages allows narratives to overlap, Ware’s structure both demonstrates such with-
drawals and exposes their existence. A panel sequence showing a real exchange will seamlessly
flow into a fantasy sequence, often with violent events, or a page will be stabilized by corner
panels that register wishful outcomes to a crisis; in many cases, the sequential movement
over a series of panels will be problematic, with more than one way to proceed in processing
the information.
Ware establishes the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair as an origin point for this generational
narrative and thus embeds his family within an expansive American history that, in the
1890-era panels, recall obstacles to immigrant assimilation and barriers to racial justice.
Jimmy’s great-grandfather installs glass for buildings on display in the fair’s pavilions —
pavilions quickly-assembled for show purposes only out of plaster of Paris. This expression
of American strength is a cover-up, a show-job, whose architecture (with its numerous ref-
erents to European monuments) is designed to bully crowds into awed submission. Com-
parable to this fantasy of power-laden assemblages is the tale’s opening episode in which a
very young Jimmy stands in awe of a costumed superhero making a personal appearance at
a local shopping center. When he treats Jimmy and his newly-divorced mother to a dining-
out experience that flares into an overnight tryst with Jimmy’s mom, the event anticipates
other moments when women will be discarded by evasive males. The general narrative that
Ware presents emerges from a tangled nexus of rejection and evasion. An older Jimmy is
contacted by his father, striving to reach out to a son he had previously abandoned. His
father has been urged to make that contact with Jimmy by his adopted daughter — a sister
Jimmy had never learned about, who also happens to be African American (and, as Ware
discloses in a remarkable two-page synopsis that provides a lineage for the past, also happens
to be a blood relative). When a series of coincidences ends with the unexpected death of
his father, Jimmy’s readiness to withdraw is only heightened.
While the work by Torres and Choi has attracted little scholarly attention, Jimmy Cor-
rigan has been thoughtfully examined by Gene Kannenberg (186–97), Thomas A. Bredehoft
(869–90), and Daniel Raeburn (64–79). Presentations from these essays are reasonable class
projects. Anthony Baker has further detailed Ware’s tendency to disrupt his pages “in ways
that make readers aware of their own reading process” that at the same time mock the notion
of reconstructing the past by providing “intricate cutout models of a robot from Jimmy’s
dream and of Jimmy’s grandfather’s boyhood home” as well as a page of “clippable, double-
sided playing cards depicting buildings in Waukesha.” Baker views these as demonstrating
“ways in which the story’s elements may leak outside the traditional reading experience” as
well as parodies of the “tie-in merchandise” of marketing industries (115–16). The flimsiness
of the enterprise also points to a dire emptiness at the center of an American imagination
for architecture. A culture that is quick to throw away other humans necessarily finds it
easy to manufacture disposable buildings. Ware’s interest in Midwestern architecture is evi-
dent in a 20-minute DVD whose display in class can also spark conversation about the cri-
tique of architecture on Ware’s pages (see Glass).
A nation willing to be ignorant of its own historical masterpieces, such as the pioneering
works of architecture destroyed by Chicago developers, is necessarily unaware of its history.
With such a proposal, the concept of trauma begins to expand beyond just 9/11. Reading
film historian E. Ann Kaplan’s overview of “intergenerational trauma” provides students
with a framework against which to appreciate Ware’s narrative. In Kaplan’s view, it is entirely
possible for subjects to be “haunted by tragedies affecting their parents, grandparents or
ancestors from far back without conscious knowledge” (106). Further developed by sociol-
ogists Jeffrey Alexander, Neil Smelser, Ron Eyerman and others, intergenerational trauma
is at the center of Martha Collins’ long poem Blue Front (2006), which dramatizes her own
struggle to reconstruct events surrounding a 1909 lynching in Cairo, Illinois, that she believes
her father may have witnessed when he was five. Ware identifies local examples of social
injustice as instituting negative affects. These tacitly penetrate the fabric of everyday life,
culminating in the facades of the 1893 exposition as well as the commercial architecture of
Waukesha. In a related manner, Collins tracks the extensive denial that cloaks a violent
event in an obscurity that tacitly permits it to live on over generations, even replicating
itself through similar incidents decades later. A brutal event that has never been wholly
explained, with its victims never exonerated, becomes a metonym for a culture that cannot
acknowledge its racist past and thus keeps racism alive. What draws Collins to her effort at
historical reconstruction are the contradictions she finds in her father’s life story. He
belonged, in his twenties, to the KKK, but all his lifetime he befriended blacks, often delib-
erately aiding them. Yet such contradictions also define this 1909 lynching in a rapidly-
modernizing border city of Illinois whose mob’s actions (including suspending the hanged
body of the victim from the elaborate display of electrical lights on the busiest intersection
of downtown) were elaborately described and intricately documented on sets of souvenir
postcards.
Students who have worked through the overlapping intricacies of a page in Ware’s
work, and who have learned to navigate a comic-strip form that juxtaposes episodes from
different generations, are in fact now prepared to handle Collins’ erratic struggles to assemble
a working history of the events up to and after the 1909 lynching. To force an understanding
of events that are both unreasonable and unbearable, Collins submits to the fourteen-line
space of the sonnet, releasing word associations whose flow surrounds details of the lynching,
always approaching and withdrawing from its brutality. By meditating on the word “drag,”
using it as a title that opens the first line, Collins encapsulates the process of lynching even
as she turns away in anguish. She opens by applying the word to a series of actions (“a
woman this time, to haul down the street, the alley”) and then lists a series of activities in
which “drag” is the central verb, culminating in a lynching (24). While Collins describes
the past actions that together led to the lynching, she is struggling in the present with her
own reluctance to draw close to the violence that unfolds. This uncomfortable process of
association is an overlay of past and present, an impossible collision that is the linguistic
equivalent of Ware’s juxtaposed panels from the 1890s and the 1990s. The clouded narratives
that surround the lynching are characteristic, as sociologist Neal Smelser explains, of the
ambivalence that denominates cultural trauma — where new investigations, rather than pro-
ducing a resolution, tend instead to “sprawl and include ever-new ranges of phenomena”
(59).
The importance of the investigation for Collins can be aligned with the importance
of Ware’s exploration of generational abandonment. Collins begins her poem in the time
just after her father’s death as a requiem act. She would commemorate him by reconstructing
a historic event in his hometown that he may have witnessed as a boy, though the fact that
he never spoke openly of the lynching suggests he was unaffected by it. Yet his escape (if it
can be called so) is mitigated considerably by the continuing presence of racism, evident in
the ruins that are all that is left of Cairo today, a community whose economics have been
decimated, whose once-prosperous downtown consists of empty lots, abandoned buildings,
and crumbling edifices. Her title is, in one sense, a local reference: the Ohio River joins
the Mississippi at Cairo, and its clear water contrasts with the muddier flow of the Missis-
sippi. The Ohio’s “blue front” distinguishes the east side of the town from the “brown front”
on the west side. This divide, of course, recalls the racism in the region that led to a ritual
murder. At the same time, her title is an intricate pun. If the episode of this lynching has
been suppressed, and if the postcards and family albums recording the lynching remain
documents held in secret by family archives, then the nation itself may be diagnosed as put-
ting on a front to disguise its unwillingness to mourn for a victim of mob violence; the
“blue front,” then, refers to a cover-up steeped in melancholy. The neat resolution that
Freud called for is nowhere evident, and in this real-world perspective, the response to loss
is more likely to be an ever-shifting amalgam of working-through and acting-out.
Collins’ poem ends with a placid description of children, black and white, playing
near the Mississippi, but this glimpse of everyday normalcy is complicated by rivers whose
different colors fail to blend. That blending may occur at a distance, way downstream, as
if in a future that Collins summons for her gaze: it is, as she writes, “a line that we can cross
/ or not disappearing beyond the point” (78). Her conclusion, as well as the fragments of
her father’s life that she reproduces, recalls that trauma can never be known directly but
only deduced from indirect events, as an astronomer calculates an unseen object based on
gravitational pulls. That complex understanding hovers at the edges of Seth’s comic artwork
in It’s a Good Life If You Don’t Weaken (2003), a sympathetic study (with autobiographical
overtones) of a gently alienated collector of comics memorabilia whose pursuit of an elusive
cartoonist without a successful career anxiously serves as a mirror of his own life-story. As
students at this point in the course will recognize, to dismiss Seth’s collector as “traumatized”
is far too simple a description of a central figure who willingly embraces a marginal position,
happily operating there. At the same time, we are continually prodded by Seth to take note
of numerous life-changing opportunities that he draws back from and that seem invisible
to the collector. He breaks off a relationship with a girl he has met who seems fully appre-
ciative of his meditations, because she quietly offers an opposite perspective, one that looks
with pleasure toward a future that will change.
In one sense, the story is a gentle protest against the modernity of a world that seems
to be crystallizing into functionality, a world bent on erasing its slower, quieter past. Seth
regularly offers whole pages that offer silent panels, from which humans are just as likely to
be absent as present, in which older objects and material from nature are placed in rela-
tionships that are clear, simple, yet enigmatic. These panels provoke considerable discus-
sion and often divide a class into admirers and detractors. In one sense, the images are a
relief from instrumentality, as they are ostentatiously non-functional. Even the relations
that might connect buildings or apparatus to an operative system are removed, in a series
of draw ings that sketch the outbuildings surrounding rail traffic that Seth’s collector observes
while on a journey. At the same time, the images can be read as if they were steeped in an
unvoiced sorrow, their clarity one step away from desolation.
Henri Lefebvre’s examinations of modernity can be used to approach Seth’s emphasis
on ordinary, everyday experience. Lefebvre described modernity through an “everyday” that
he defined as “a set of functions which connect and join together systems that might appear
to be distinct” (9). Seth’s collector has an obsessive interest in the obscure cartoon-work of
a long-forgotten artist —“Kalo,” the working name of one Jack Kalloway, whose entire recov-
ered oeuvre is limited to eleven examples. Yet for Seth’s collector, Kalloway represents one
of those persons who have succeeded in dealing with unwelcome reversals. If his name is
unknown and his work unrecognized, his cartoons radiate a clarity that has a powerful
appeal. While everyone “has trauma in their life to deal with,” the collector tells a friend
(recognizably the Canadian cartoonist Chester Brown), with “most people these traumas
mess them up inside ... but a few people come through even better adjusted” (129). Seth’s
collector ultimately tracks Kalloway to his own home town and, in meetings with his family
and friends, introduces them to a side of their son and brother that they had not known.
The collector serves as an agent of memory, recovering not just Kalo’s lost work but the
presence of Jack Kalloway. The tale ends with a panel in which Kalloway’s mother smiles
with delight at a published cartoon she’d never seen and says “I didn’t know he had it in
him” (164).
If modern time is threaded with a secret history of the forgotten, as Seth suggests, then
the collector’s search that recovers the lost becomes an action that negates the erasures caused
by trauma. At the same time, in Seth’s telling, the detective-collector discovers information
about Kalo through an obsessive commitment to detail that threatens his relations with
other persons. He comes perilously close to resembling Annie, a disoriented inhabitant of
a provincial motel whom the collector meets as a guest in an adjacent room; she lives in a
clutter of memorabilia that is meaningful to her but mere trash to others (the brief exchange
with Annie spoils the collector’s ability to appreciate a rare edition of Turok, Son of Stone
that he rescued from a junk shop). It’s a Good Life If You Don’t Weaken centers on the for-
gotten objects of an earlier visual culture but also works through the silence and simplicity
of the panel with its abstract representation to offer a concentrated sense of graphic narrative
as a retreat from the merely functional. But the achievement of Seth’s storytelling is to unite,
at its close, the two types of people in a mixture: to restore a figure from a forgotten past
so others know him is to work against and beyond trauma, even as Seth himself remains
unsettled.
By imagining a life that might exist beyond trauma, Seth constructs a partial escape
from his own sense of entrapment. This becomes a chance to reconsider trauma for its pro-
ductive possibilities. A related approach is pursued more ritually in Nicholson Baker’s A
Box of Matches (2003), whose premise is that middle-aged technical writer and editor
Emmett will rise around 5 o’clock in the morning everyday, well before his wife and children,
and by the light of a blazing fireplace, consider various thoughts. Once his morning med-
itations exhaust a box of thirty-three matches, he will end his project. Baker’s character,
successful and satisfied, nevertheless discloses memories that suggest unfilled longings. Should
we be satisfied with lives lived in an atmosphere of a quiet that is almost inseparable from
desperation? Baker is no fan of modernity, and his Emmett admires his eighteenth-century
stone hearth and knows the locations of abandoned trolley lines where he strolls in the eve-
ning with his wife. He brings a historical sense to a project that cannot help but evoke time
as it fleets by, each match equivalent to a moment that flares.
Since his work allows him to remain at home, to stay in touch with his children, to
loiter with family pets, he is immersed in ordinary rhythms. Baker positions us within a
daily routine, and his chapters run to just about five pages more or less, their restricted nar-
rative echoing that of the “classic” eight-page comic strip story of the 1950s, just as his
early-rising premise recalls “one-note” Sunday strips with their ritualized encounters over
familiar incidents or at recognizable sites. Many of Emmett’s early-morning adventures turn
on discovering the pleasure in simple acts — carefully cleaning the residue from a casserole,
for example, after it has been loosened by night-long soaking. In the process, one experiences
the very shape of the bowl through one’s tactile movements of cleansing. Just to be drawn
into noticing is a powerful aspect of the project, recalling how much Seth’s silent pages that
register the look of objects silently and starkly juxtaposed contributes to the larger sense of
material that lies in wait to be discovered.
Yet to use time so that some element of its past remains, even carried forward for as
long as possible into the future, also becomes a quality that must be pursued even as it con-
tinually reveals how little is left behind. To counter loss is always possible even as it is
painful. Chapter 28 describes Emmett’s memory of his father’s efforts to resist the dissolution
of the local train station where they had spent time together; all that remains physically is
a random sampling of the handmade tiles that architect Richard Brinsley had designed for
the station, placed in the fireplace of his parents’ home, long sold out of the family — though
Emmett retains them as fixed in his thought, down to the repairs he made to them as a
child under his father’s eyes: “when I look up at night I see them in the constellations, sur-
rounded by black grout” (72). The mournful call of the whistles of passing trains — whistles
manufactured in Emmett’s hometown — register, in their Doppler effect, a cadence of loss,
and that sound courses through each chapter, many of which record the leave-taking of a
daily freight. These meditations that recapture what is left of the past always emphasizes
how little can be brought along, how much is left behind, until one’s time on earth dwindles
to rare moments outside of the everyday routine, extended fleetingly, as a match’s brief life
is temporarily amplified by fire.
Both Seth and Baker negotiate a delicate rapprochement with trauma, but to do so,
they also position themselves as remotely as possible from the stress that most of us encounter
in our daily living, including the obligations of a job that demands commitment to a rigid
schedule. Their solutions, then, may appear as fragile compromises that are at best fleeting.
Jonathan Flatley has maintained that some involvements with melancholy may be “the
opposite of depressing, functioning as the very mechanism through which one may be inter-
ested in the world” and in some cases, a “ghostly relationality” serves as a cure (1). Writing
on Henry James, he ventures the notion that “it is only as ghosts (when we are possessed
by an emotion from the past) and with ghosts (the people who are stand-ins for lost objects
from our past) that one can be affectively attached to the world and the people around us”
(104). The observance resonates for Seth and Baker, deeply immersed in considering memory
and the past. Others who are in different circumstances, though, may well possess memories
that refute such wisp-like awareness. In the concluding segment of the course, we approach
texts that employ a sense of history to expose flaws, evasions, and rearrangements that
explain how we may have inherited a social environment that endlessly replays a narrative
of compromise that should prompt our opposition even as such a reaction is already antic-
ipated and diffused by that very environment.
Kim Deitch, in Boulevard of Broken Dreams (2002), narrates the history of the animated
cartoon industry as a long falling-off. Despite utopian beginnings, it has devolved into
products designed to adjust us to rules that commandeer our lives and transform us unto
docile citizens at the same time as it contains disarming eruptions through developing fictive
characters that channel disturbing energies. For Deitch, the animated cartoon is a synecdoche
of consumerist culture that endlessly reduces innovative options that initially promise intel-
lectual and emotional freedom into commodities that are increasingly easier to reduce to a
process; what begins, that is, as an outburst of raucous energy that responds to disruptive
events becomes simplified and diminished in a repackaging job that fossilizes the aberration,
sustaining in a new and manageable form that which had been once energetic.1
Deitch’s narrative builds around the cartoon image known as “Waldo the Cat,” an icon
of boisterous adventure in the pioneering years of the cartoon industry who is bowdlerized
in later cartoons into a brand-name, an industry logo, an emblem of prosperity and good
will. The original iconoclastic Waldo, however, survives in the mind of his creator Mishkin,
for whom Waldo had served as an alter ego, as a hallucinatory figure, a Waldo as an emotional
wreck, his flamboyance turned into a self-destructive bravado, his spontaneity reduced to
an aggressive swagger. Deitch takes immense pleasure in sketching this debased icon that
emblemizes trauma that no one else can see but Mishkin. This distorted Waldo, who seethes
with rage, whose emotions are out of control, represents the powerful energy lost when
popular culture turned commercial. Deitch draws his story as a caricaturist, simplifying
human bodies as distortions just as cartoons anthropomorphize animals, and the panels out
of which his characters explode are alive with objects whose attributes escape containment.
The most elaborate scenes in Deitch’s story depict animated cartoons that narrate an
escape from the rigidity of day labor into fantasy life, but Deitch’s panels also show the
work behind the final product, the orchestras that accompany the animation, and the tech-
nicians that add sound effects, so the toil of producing escapist art is folded back into the
cartoons Deitch illustrates. Deitch concludes his narrative with the hallucinatory Waldo
revivified in all his outrageousness as he watches black-and-white TV showing early cartoons
that have fallen into obscurity, that others doze over but which still brim with excess energy.
Deitch at times presents Mishkin’s attachment to Waldo as a form of madness, and Charles
Hatfield, in a reading that carefully associates Deitch’s work with a history of cartooning
that recognizes the formulaic aspect of the Disney-version in contrast to the improvisational
energy of such innovative predecessors as Max Fleischer, regards Waldo cautiously, as a
largely negative figure. Within a context of trauma studies, however, Waldo appears as an
expressive agent that registers creativity denied, productivity halted. By bringing forward
the figure of Winsor McCay, whose remarkably innovative Sunday strips and pioneering
animation work was curtailed when William Randolph Hearst redirected him toward edi-
torial cartooning, Deitch signals he is presenting less an aesthetic view of graphic narrative
as he is a politics of resistance that registers the social cost of supplanting intuitive ambitions
with commercial enterprise. Hatfield’s argument can be challenged to demonstrate what an
awareness of trauma studies contributes to graphic narrative, allowing students to exercise
their new confidence as scholars alert to issues and concepts beyond a formalist reading.
Deitch’s Waldo is important, then, because he disrupts arrangements designed to con-
tain disorder. To what extent are such conditions that sustain and even normalize trauma
now embedded in our daily life? By examining a site that we all inhabit so often that we
take it for granted, the interstate highway system, poet Gabriel Gudding offers a text that
opens that to question. Gudding’s epic poem describes cross country highway driving at a
moment in his own life when separation from his wife and young daughter created a personal
crisis that overlapped with such public events as war in Iraq. Rhode Island Notebook (2007)
offers a documentary record in the form of notebook jottings from September 2002 to
December 2004, as Gudding embarks on marathon weekends of 20 hours on the road that
take him on one-way voyages of nearly 1100 miles, from Normal, IL to Providence, RI and
back, from the center of the Midwest to a port city on the Long Island sound and back.
Though Jack Kerouac famously described across-the-nation driving at mid-century in On
the Road (1957), and wrote evocatively of such moments as crossing the Mississippi at Iowa
and sensing the landscape’s change, the environment that Gudding inherits has gone largely
unrecorded, certainly in the form of the epic journey (“anabasis” and “katabasis”— the way
out and the way back, in ancient Greek — are terms Gudding invokes for his round-trip),
perhaps because it is so vacuous, emptied of superfluous content, dedicated to functionality.
Into this vacancy by way of radio floods news of impending and then evolving warfare in
Iraq, on a public level, and on a private level by way of memory interactions with his daugh-
ter and her mother. Gudding’s family interactions, recollected within the interstate’s zone,
portray a divisive relationship, with mother and father each desiring to protect the child in
their own way. “Who would not succumb to melancholia / in such a world?” (44) ends the
entry for September 29, 2002, prefiguring the poet’s task: to find a position from which to
resist the rage that the Iraq war arouses in him, and from which to shield and respect a child
in danger of warring parents.
The interstate environment becomes a crucible for that task, its elements thrust into
sharp relief as initially useless, but ultimately taken up as obstacles that call out to be trans-
formed. When Hirsch considered Spiegelman’s recent work, she recognized not only “an
aesthetics of trauma” that is “fragmentary” but also the role played by “euphemism,” broadly
construed as those mechanisms that “obstruct seeing, saying, and understanding” (1214).
Gudding’s sense of the interstate, especially when coupled with the notion of trauma as that
which has wounded us but whose wounding we do not register except indirectly, becomes
not a metonym for trauma but an embodiment of it at every mile: a radical disruption of
the land, blandly unresponsive to geographical detail, imposing a semiotics of functionality
in which the language on signage is instrumental or commercialized, in which the speech
flowing from a radio is either simplified (country and western music) or politicized (inter-
views with administration officials), in which the markings on autos and trucks are reduced
to numbers or slogans. The processed food with its ironic names (an “old-fashioned” is
Gudding’s preferred breakfast food — here, the name of a type of doughnut from a restaurant
chain) is equivalent to a discourse reduced to telegraphic gestures.
Jottings made on the fly of course lend themselves to fragmentariness, but even as
Gudding fulminates with freely-associating dark thoughts, he pauses to spot wildlife at the
edge of the roadside (sometimes still alive, mostly processed into scraps), glimpses sites that
remain still attached to nature (Meander Lake, a halfway point, becomes almost a fond
companion, greeted with an air of slight, ironic surprise), and tracks changes in the light
and air that introduce an almost-forgotten grace and elegance. Out of such moments, Gud-
ding finds his way towards a Buddhism that builds upon contrary detail and that recasts his
young daughter’s offhand remarks as fresh observations. The process is long-term and exten-
sive, and when introducing Gudding, I recommend selective reading, much as one initiates
readers into Pound’s Cantos with particular passages.2 But just as Deitch uses the tableau
of the comic-strip panel to anatomize the elements of the commercially-produced animated
cartoon, Gudding uses the compressed image of the poetic notation to declare against the
multiplying “euphemisms” of the functionalized highway. The environment that Gudding
discovers parallels the cartoon-world of Deitch in its mix of the unbearable and the banal.
The social imaginary of the twenty-first century may then be burdened by its inheriting an
environment in which coercion and incoherence coexist as a dynamic that, unless it is rec-
ognized, works in an underground fashion to shape behavior.
As this course aims to demonstrate, trauma takes myriad forms in recent texts, but our
awareness of it can function as a powerful diagnostic that can reorient our understanding
of our culture and ourselves. As such, it operates as a useful relay that shuttles between cul-
tural studies, with its emphasis on the contingent, and literary reading, with its emphasis
on interpreting the meaning in significant details. Such a response is useful, Richard Gray
has argued, at the present time, which needs artistic practices that take “the chance, maybe
even the obligation, to insert themselves into the space between conflicting interests and
practices, and then dramatize the contradictions that conflict engenders” (147). Graphic
narratives, when placed in relation to other extremist developments in fiction and in
poetry — experimental prose that deviates from characters exchanging dialogue in a setting
detailed with realistic touches, innovative verse that situates the lyric experience within a
historical setting — become a co-equal of other productions, and all more or less equally
engage with current dilemmas in mutually reinforcing ways. If anything, the visual/verbal
arrangement of the graphic novel — which allows for juxtaposed panels that represent dif-
ferent times, which pries open for examination the differences between showing and telling
(between what we see and what we say about it), and which develops stylized relations
between characters and their environment — contributes enhanced understandings to a proj-
ect that is intent on examining what goes hidden and unsaid in daily life.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This chapter draws on aspects of a Spring 2009 graduate seminar at Southern Illinois University at Car-
bondale. I thank the students whose participation defined that course: Dee Blair, Roy Bearden-White, Joseph
Donica, Christopher Field, Benjamin Foster, Paul Huggins, J. T. Lorino, Emily McQuillan, and Morgan Siew-
ert.
NOTES
1. I spent some class time showing examples of early animated cartoons that illustrated that Deitch’s sense
of history was more or less accurate. Any of the early Felix the Cat cartoons from the 1920s offer scenarios whose
inventiveness derives from the simplicity of the material (Felix is always picking up an object and reshaping its
simple lines into a new instrument for work or play); by contrast, Felix the Cat in the 1930s has been reconceived
and marketed as an outstanding member of the community, a hard-worker not a mischievous figure. I have
shown “Felix Doubles for Darwin,” a 1924 silent film directed by Dave Fleischer and then “The Goose that Laid
the Golden Egg,” a 1936 musical cartoon directed by Burt Gillett. The second especially confirms Deitch’s glum
view of animated history.
2. Gudding’s long poem would overwhelm most classes if it were entirely assigned. A reasonable abridgement
would direct students to read: “12.7.02–12.9.02” (76–93), “2.14.03–2.19.03” (109–35), “The Bridge” (163–64),
“3.7.03–3.17.03” (165–93), “6.17.03–6.20.03” (231–67), “12.20.03–12.24.03” (303–19), “7.5.04–7.8.04” (366–
76) and “10.6.04–10.19.04” (377–91). The “Appendix” is lengthy but useful to consider, for it brings the United
States history and especially relations with Native Americans into the interstate landscape.
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Tabachnick. New York: MLA, 2009. 111–19. Print.
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15. Exposition and Disquisition
Nonfiction Graphic Narratives
and Comics Theory in the Literature Classroom
ADRIELLE ANNA MITCHELL
Perhaps the contradiction, or at least, the surprising juxtaposition, is not immediately

clear: nonfiction graphic narratives in the literature classroom. Traditionally a text-dominant
environment (with images playing only a supporting role, as a supplemental film or an
example of source for an ekphrastic poem), the literature classroom does not easily or auto-
matically incorporate graphic narratives in a manner that honors the full complexity of the
form. Furthermore, the use of nonfiction in the literature classroom is relatively infrequent,
limited to those texts which conform to certain standards of “literariness” or historicity (for
example: an essay by Emerson, Frederick Douglass or Virginia Woolf, an excerpt from Boe-
thius’ Consolation of Philosophy, or a manifesto by Ezra Pound).
Thus, I believe instructors of literature (in English and in other languages at the under-
graduate and graduate levels) need explicit tutelage in how to elicit from students verbally
and visually responsive critiques to the challenging body of work. This chapter offers a
rationale for incorporating complex nonfictional comics works into literature courses and
at the same time provides theoretical precepts and practical techniques aimed at enhancing
delivery.
Why Nonfiction?
Prior to the consideration of the formal aspects of the graphic narrative, a few comments
on the privileging of nonfiction graphic works over fictional ones are needed. An important
reason for this choice involves audience reception and centers on the necessity of countering
stereotypical perceptions of the comics medium. For many students (and many of our col-
leagues as well) in the United States, speaking of comics brings to mind superheroes, garish
primary colors, triviality, popular culture, and other jejune pursuits. A “comics geek” might
boast about his growing Green Lantern collection; a colleague might “admit” that he avidly
read comics as a child before learning to appreciate real literature in high school or college.
I use the masculine gender advisedly in these examples, as the primary demographic of
comics readers in the United States has traditionally been white adolescent males (Brevoort).
198
15. Nonfiction Graphics and Comics Theory (Mitchell) 199
Though research aimed at revealing unexpectedly complex themes and issues in this comics
tradition is currently being disseminated in both specialized and general scholarly venues,
it still remains unpalatable to most American professors and students to dedicate significant
time to the study of such “disposable” literature (Duncan and Smith 13). Americans, in
general, still appear stuck in a reductive, ill-informed (non)relationship with the medium,
associating it exclusively with children (and not very bright ones, at that), mass pablum,
and violence. We are lagging behind many other nations in this respect, particularly Belgium,
France, Japan, and Mexico; such attitudes are not globally shared, and it is quite normal
for adults of diverse backgrounds to take such texts seriously (Duncan and Smith 291). Per-
haps Americans may be more easily brought up to speed by presenting them with full-
length expository graphic narratives steeped in topically rich, historically situated content
like Joe Sacco’s war reportage oeuvre including Palestine (2001; originally published as serial
comics, 1993–1995), Safe Area Goražde: The War in Eastern Bosnia, 1992 –1995 (2000), and
his recent Footsteps in Gaza (2010), or Holocaust narratives following the Maus (1986) tra-
dition, like Miriam Katin’s We Are on Our Own (2006), or 9/11 responses like Alisa Torres’
memoir, American Widow (2008) and Jacobson and Colon’s 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation
(2006).
Nonfiction graphic works appear regularly in recent years, lauded by the press, some
literary critics, and a growing cadre of readers interested in cultural, political and historical
documents. These texts make up the bulk of the “art” or “literary” subsection of the medium,
and we are seeing a renaissance in belles lettres, the essay and the literary memoir due in part
to these thoughtful works. A.D. New Orleans After the Deluge (2009), Josh Neufeld’s inter-
view-based examination of Hurricane Katrina, Emmanuel Guibert and Didier LeFevre’s
The Photographer (2009) which includes numerous photographs in addition to comic nar-
rative and tells the story of Doctors Without Borders in Afghanistan during the 1980s’ Sov -
iet invasion, and subjective histories like David B.’s Epileptic (2005) and Marjane Satrapi’s
Persepolis (2003) all contribute to the increasing influence of the comic medium in recent
years. These undeniably weighty, even grim, texts seem to work better at boosting students
and faculty members’ interest in comics than the strips in periodicals and newspapers, the
superhero and funny animal tradition, and works of fiction.
Another argument for the foregrounding of nonfiction graphic narratives is the potential
expansion of readership. As mentioned earlier, serial and superhero comics have been pri-
marily consumed by young white American males. Full-length, nonfiction works appeal to
a larger demographic, bringing people of color, women and non-heterosexuals into the fold.
Works like Alison Bechdel’s memoir, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006)— a palimpses-
tic, rigorous study of family, sexuality, and literature by the author of the popular long-
running serial comic, Dykes to Watch Out For, Toufic el Rassi’s Arab in America (2008),
Andrew Helfer’s Malcolm X: A Graphic Biography (2006), Inverna Lockpez’ Cuba: My Rev-
olution (2010), and Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos Papadimitriou’s Logicomix: An Epic
Search for Truth (2009)— a study of Bertrand’s Russell’s life and ideas, bring diverse new
writers, new content and hence, new readers, into the community, and expand our notions
of what comics are, and for whom they are written. It is not difficult to find works of sig-
nificance that complement ethnic literature, world literature, gender studies, area studies
and cultural studies course curricula and learning objectives. These nonfiction works (mem-
oirs, literary essays, war reportage, etc.) might be more palatable to readers who feel alienated
by the tropes of fantasy, crime, and science fiction stories, and in turn, will open up a space
for the exciting new kind of visual and verbal critique this chapter will now extol.
Why Graphic Narratives?

Graphic narratives offer the reader a chance to apply cutting-edge critical apparati to
a challenging dual-track medium which richly rewards such work. Graphic narratives are
useful in the classroom not because comics are increasingly popular as witnessed by the
flood of film adaptations of comic books nor is it because today’s students are visual learners
and we might as well capitulate or because we need to find ways to make literary studies
“sexy,” “fun” or, to put it in my students’ words, “relatable.” As Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester
acknowledge in A Comics Studies Reader, “The very popularity of comics as a mass medium
and the existence of readerly expectations can be a problem for artists who are trying to
create work that is more personal and less bound by genre convention” (174). This problem
extends into the area of comics study, particularly in the college literature classroom which
often — wittingly or unwittingly — inculcates elitism in favor of “classic” texts and “great
writers” from the past. Yet, comic texts can support so many of the sophisticated, poststruc-
turalist, and postmodern moves of recent literary criticism, a fact lost on academics who
are not familiar with the medium. Working with graphic texts engages such key literary
concepts as: the writerly text that demands an active reader who co-writes the book, the
non-linear narrative (and concomitant non-linear reading techniques), close reading or for-
mal analysis (this time, of both verbal and pictic elements), and figurative and tropic analysis
(giving new life to the image-based deep structure of metaphor and metonymy, synecdoche
and personification).
The visually expressive nature of graphic narratives demands that we turn our critical
eye to images, which, for those of us relatively untutored in the visual arts, will require extra
training and constant vigilance. In the literature classroom, it is all too easy to forget that
one is working with a visual text, particularly when the content covered by the text is suffi-
ciently interesting to students and instructor alike. Habituated to textual analysis, the reader
may unwittingly elide important information contained in the panels, speed-reading the
text boxes, speech balloons, and voice-overs, forgetting to linger on the crucial data contained
in the pictures. As Thierry Groensteen reminds us in The System of Comics (2007): “[I]n an
image-based story, as in film or comics, each element, whether it is visual, linguistic, or
aural, participates fully in the narration” (11). In a given panel, the pictured elements may
significantly differ from the content contained in the text, as in Figures 15.1 and 15.2. Without
carefully reading the image, there is the potential to miss the poetic gloss, the flashback, or
the juxtaposition of remembered past with critically informed present-day commentary.
One might miss irony, clever details, repeated motifs, and whole swaths of unspoken nar-
rative. Simply glancing at the pictures while focusing on the words will not allow the text
to come into its full being; it would be as cursory as reading every second line of a poem.
Strengthening visual analysis starts by slowing down the reading process. Pausing to
interrogate panels, pages, and image series (a Thierry Groensteen concept that I will explain
more fully below) adds layers of meaning to one’s reading of a given comic. Charles Hatfield,
a leading comics scholar and a professor of literature, offers the following in his Thought
Balloonists blog entry on November 4, 2009: “When I first read a comic, I buzz through it
as quickly as possible, reading exclusively for the plot, but as soon as I finish, I immediately
re-read more slowly, to catch nuances I missed the first time and to wallow in the images
in an aesthetic-picture-plane manner” (Fischer and Hatfield). This technique makes sense,
though I find that my view of a graphic narrative is quite fragmented until I engage in a
visually attentive, slower reading.
Moreover, in my teaching practice, I con-

sider collaboration with art department faculty
as another way to do justice to the medium. In-
viting a colleague to help everyone to “read” pic-
tures more accurately should delight students,
and will deepen cooperation between disciplines
(fine arts and literary arts) which already share an
often overlooked affinity. Reading art theory
(Viktor Shklovsky, Roger Fry, John Berger, W. J.
T. Mitchell and others) might sensitize both pro-
fessor and students to how and why we look at
pictures; immersing in visual media (attending
museum and gallery exhibits, taking up or return-
ing to an art, studying single artworks carefully)
might encourage habits of mind that facilitate
nuanced reading of the graphic medium. Finally,
one can look to comics theorists who are paving
the way in this field (Bart Beaty, Roger Sabin,
Charles Hatfield, Candida Rif kind, Joseph Witek,
Thomas Inge, Thierry Groensteen, Hillary Chute,
and others)— scholars who are producing nu-
anced, detailed critical work that addresses both
the visual and verbal aspects of the medium.
Top: Figure 15.1. Yirmi Pinkus. “Black Milk.” Cargo: Comic Journalism Israel-Germany. Berlin:
Avant-Verlag, 2005. 37. Bottom: Figure 15.2. Alison Bechdel. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. New
York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. 212.
Which Courses? Which Narratives?

With careful selection, graphic narratives can be successfully incorporated into any lit-
erature class, graduate or undergraduate, lower-division or upper-division; world, British,
or American; contemporary or premodern; topic courses; interdisciplinary studies courses;
and certainly, as stand-alone courses on the medium. Single texts can be chosen to illuminate
an issue, time period, identity, or style. They can be paired with similarly themed text-only
narratives. They can be grouped together as a semester-long study of the medium, as I do
in my biannual upper-division undergraduate literature course, International Graphic Nar-
rative. Though I am thrilled we can offer a dedicated course like this at my college, I also
believe that graphic narratives should not be limited to contemporary and popular culture
or in specialized contexts. Used with care, a well-chosen graphic narrative or two in a world
literature survey, or one in a women’s studies course, another in a history of the book course,
or one in a seminar on literary theory would greatly expand reductive academic associations
of comics exclusively with popular culture courses.
European nations like Germany, England, Belgium and France, especially, have a full
century or more of production behind them; Japan has been at it nearly as long and competes
in range and quantity. Manga, and this may be surprising if one’s experience is limited to
Barnes and Noble’s ever-expanding shelves of translations of youth-oriented manga series
(like Fruits Basket, Yu-Gi-Oh, and InuYasha), contains many works of nonfiction on topics
like daily life, the atomic bombs dropped by the United States on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
in 1945, raising an autistic child, and cuisine. Canada has impressive comics talent (among
them Seth, Julie Doucet and Guy Delisle); Seth, in particular, has developed stellar, moody
novels and memoirs that loosely shape themselves on reality in works such as It’s a Good
Life If You Don’t Weaken (2003), Clyde Fans: Book 1 (2004) and George Sprott 1894 –1975
(2009). In the United States, we are watching the heyday moment: new graphic works
(many of which are nonfiction) are released regularly in recent years.
Compendia are being produced apace, designed to help one find and select such works
(for example: Gene Kannenberg’s 500 Essential Graphic Novels: The Ultimate Guide [2008],
Danny Fingeroth’s The Rough Guide to Graphic Novels 1 [2008], and Paul Gravett’s Graphic
Novels: Everything You Need to Know [2005]). There are list-serves which serve the academic
community (the best of which is the University of Florida Comics Scholars list), dedicated
conferences (such as the International Comic Arts Forum, themed conferences sponsored
by the University of Florida and ImageTexT, and the annual Festival International de la
Bande Dessinée d’Angoulême in France), and scholarly journals — many of which are peer-
reviewed — including ImageTexT, The Comics Journal, International Journal of Comic Art,
and two new British peer-reviewed journals, Studies in Comics and Routledge’s Journal of the
Graphic Novel and Comics. Academic presses are beginning to issue works of comics schol-
arship regularly (for example: Yale University Press and the Modern Language Association
which recently released an outstanding collection, Teaching the Graphic Novel [2009], edited
by Stephen E. Tabachnick); some have developed impressive backlists in the field, like that
of the University of Mississippi Press under the guidance of tireless and devoted editor Seetha
Srinivasan. Publishers such as Top Shelf, Drawn and Quarterly, First Second, and even main-
stream houses like Pantheon regularly offer new works of high quality. Reviews of recently
published graphic narratives appear often in literary, scholarly and current affairs publications
including The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, The New Yorker, Slate.com, and
Salon.com. There is no shortage of material out there; the question is how to keep up.
Comics Theory in the Classroom I: Scott McCloud and

Thierry Groensteen
Before discussing the special addition of comics theory to graphic narrative pedagogy,
I must mention that I continue to use select pieces of critical and cultural theory in my
Graphic Narrative course. Comics studies does not replace other forms of criticism; it adds
another dimension. My students read deconstructionist, post colonial, feminist and queer
theory alongside formalist studies of the graphic medium. For example, students in my
course find that queer theory helps them unpack Bechdel’s Fun Home, Edward Said’s work
helps illuminate Craig Thompson’s Carnet de Voyage (2004), a travelogue featuring an
American cartoonist in Morocco, and Roland Barthes’ concept of the “writerly” text helps
them make general sense of how much reader work is required when grappling with graphic
texts.
Working with graphic narratives allows us to add one more body of theory to our
critical work in the classroom, one that is unique to the form. Comics theory offers a range
of approaches, from clearly-written, example-laden practical tutorials to complex, dense
high-theoretical meditations on visual representation and structure in comic texts. Students
can delight in and learn from Scott McCloud’s seminal 1993 study, Understanding Comics
(along with its sequels: Reinventing Comics [2000] and Making Comics [2006]). McCloud
is not an academic; he is a comic artist who manages to contain his original, provocative,
and sustained thoughts on the medium in comic form. My students read Understanding
Comics as their first book in the International Graphic Narrative course (Figure 15.3).
It simultaneously acclimates them to the form while introducing them to now standard
comics terms like “gutters”— the extra-diegetic space between and around panels in which
the reader must imagine unrepre-
sented backgrounds, connections,
and action, and “closure”— the
work the reader does to synthe-
size disparate panels into a coher-
ent narrative. McCloud’s terms
offer students a useful new vo-
cabulary to discuss the structure
of subsequently read works, and
also provide food for contempla-
tion, as McCloud is a provoc-
ative, meditative thinker. In
addition to referencing him con-
tinually in class (Understanding
Comics becomes the touchstone
text, as it does in many other col-
lege comics courses), students
often return to McCloud’s work
near the end of the semester,
when it is time for them to
engage in a sustained, research-
based paper on a particular text Figure 15.3. Scott McCloud. Understanding Comics: The
or concept. Invisible Art. New York: HarperCollins, 1994. 132.
At the other end of the abstruseness spectrum lies Thierry Groensteen’s amazing and
dense work, The System of Comics, recently translated into English by Bart Beaty. French
theorist Groensteen — using Belgian, French and American comic examples sparingly —
offers a structuralist reading of the comic form, providing a set of terms and concepts that
help the reader to read not just individual panels, and basic linear narratives, but non-linear
“series” of related, albeit non-contiguous, material. He writes: “[C]omics is not only an art
of fragments, of scattering, of distribution; it is also an art of conjunction, of repetition, of
linking together” (Groensteen 22). He labels the entire reading process “arthrology,” sug-
gesting that the reader of comic texts is pressed to hold the full work in mind, connecting
panels, character development and action backward and forward. These distal images and
elements share, according to Groensteen, “iconic solidarity,” a meaning-driven relationship
that binds them despite their non-contiguity (Groensteen 18). Linking, for example, a panel
from page 45 to a panel on page 3 and another on page 106 results in a perceived series (say,
on fragility); this series — along with others perceived by an observant, slow-progressing
reader — adds to the cumulative effect of the narrative. One main point, for Groensteen, is
that a strictly linear reading (first page to last) does not do justice to the special nature of
a visually-dominant comic text.
With Groensteen’s assistance, students can learn to move around a comic text fluidly,
detecting the iconic solidarity — or strong ties — between distal panels. This is a lesson I
believe students of literature should learn to apply to all texts, graphic and traditional. Prac-
ticing with the scattered but connected visual elements of a graphic text, our students might
find that they can do the same kind of non-linear searching when reading any piece of lit-
erature. Instead of reading the book once straight through and relying on this vectorized
reading to support all subsequent critical insights, the student can become more facile at
jumping around the text, looking for connections, repetitions, contradictions, etc. This
method works particularly well with “difficult” texts, those that due to linguistic challenge,
cultural difference, or experimentation, befuddle our more literal-minded students. I have
had success teaching this approach to students in courses covering such non-graphic texts
as Virginia Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse (1927), Zoe Wicomb’s You Can’t Get Lost in Cape
Town (2000), Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2001), and the prose-
poetry of William Carlos Williams.
Comics Theory in the Classroom II: Graphic Memoir Studies

The rapidly expanding field of comics scholarship includes a healthy subfield centered
on a thriving genre of recent alternative or literary comics: the graphic memoir. Since a
number of the texts I work with in both my teaching and my scholarship can be thus clas-
sified, I have also found it useful to introduce students to sustained examination of this crit-
ical subfield. This is hardly to suggest that studies of autobiographical comics represent the
only worthwhile critical subgenre; there are many other seminal articles and books with
different foci, and rigorous and compelling new work on all comic genres moves the field
forward continually, including, we hope, the very book you are reading right now! For the
purposes of my pedagogy, however, the robust body of criticism on “autobiographics” carries
greater weight on my syllabi.
Bart Beaty, in his Unpopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic Book in the
1990s (2007), examines the emergence of “literary” comic works in Europe, particularly in
France, Belgium, Scandinavia, Spain, and England. This ambitious study includes a chapter
on graphic memoirs, entitled “Autobiography as Authenticity,” in which Beaty suggests that
autobiography may be the most promising of the graphic genres for securing solid footing
in the literary world:
In the first instance, autobiography is the genre that offers the most explicit promise of legitimizing
cartoonists as authors. The death of the author pronounced by Roland Barthes in the 1960s was
confirmed in the decades that followed, as Janet Staiger has pointed out, by the prevalence of
post-structuralist criticism and the ubiquity of a mass-mediated marketplace of ideas. According
to Michel Foucault, the author-function continued to exist to the extent that the concept upheld
bourgeois sensibilities about art. For cartoonists, this assertion functioned as a promise. If car-
toonists could assert their own identities as authors by conforming to these sensibilities and meet
the expectations placed on artists in other fields, their social position could be improved.... Auto-
biography ... becomes a mode which foregrounds both realism (as opposed to traditions of fantasy)
and the sense of an author demanding legitimacy (in contrast to the hack slaving away to turn
out mass-mediated product).... Far from propounding the death of the author, as de Man would
have it, autobiography in comics holds the possibility of giving the author birth for the first time
[143–44].
Precisely because autobiographical comic artists walk a slippery line between realism and
subjectivity, their works offer fertile ground for the active reader to create meaning and co-
generate the text while simultaneously inferring the writer-artist’s stake in the content,
structure, and point of view of his/her text. Graphic memoirs demand a high degree of
reader involvement in the form of identification, truth-testing and contextualization, but
they also present a rounded depiction of the author him/herself, in the form of a self-ref-
erential character to be seen and heard throughout the work. Rather than canceling each
other out, these two opposed gestures can result in unusually strong bonds between writer
and protagonist, protagonist and reader, and finally, writer and reader.
In my course, we are particularly concerned with the ways in which a personal narrative
conveys material outside the bounds of a single lived life: the individually filtered versions
of a war, a country or region (particularly a contested one), a culture, an ethnicity or a
disease (e.g. cancer, a popular topic of recent graphic autobiographies). There is no doubt
that such texts are partially didactic, meant, as Aleksandar Zograf puts it in Regards from
Serbia: A Cartoonist’s Diary of a Crisis in Serbia (2007), to help us “see [X] through [the
comic artist’s] eyes (35).” This must, in part, account for the stunning popularity of Marjane
Satrapi’s Persepolis in the States at this time; whatever the graphic merits of this text, Amer-
ican readers (particularly educators at the secondary and tertiary level) feel grateful for an
“inside” look at a culture (Iranian, Persian) about which they are quite curious. It probably
helps that Satrapi’s censorious take on the post–1979 regime change accords with many of
our own biases, and further, that she takes pains to Westernize her self-depiction such that
European and American young people can exclaim over and over again that “Marji” seems
like everyone they grew up with, and like themselves. The highly problematic nature of this
facile identification aside, this empathic response (carefully fostered, I believe, by Satrapi)
has ensured that thousands of students (including mine) have “learned about Iran” through
this accessible, just-serious-enough-without-being-depressing, memoir. The real question
raised by examples like Persepolis, then, is not why they are so popular, but how to responsibly
consume their didactic material.
Though my tone in the preceding paragraph is skeptical, I do not want to imply that
there is something “inauthentic” happening in Satrapi’s memoir, i.e., that she is strictly
pandering to Western audiences. Satrapi’s careful work with her “usable past” has resulted
in a satisfying (for both writer and reader) graphic nonfiction text that abounds in “teachable
moments.” This is definitely not to say that writers of nonfiction graphic narratives are
offering us white papers on nation, region, ethnicity, sexuality, etc. which, once we have
consumed them, educate us passively on the “foreign” subject. The inherent slipperiness of
a creative work should quickly disabuse us of such notions — no memoir can be seen, of
course, as an entirely fact-bound entity. In fact, I often find it instructive to share with stu-
dents some of the exciting new work in autobiographical studies (very much emerging from
Philippe Lejeune’s theory of the “autobiographical pact” but sufficiently divergent to be
renamed “New Autobiographical Studies”) and memory studies (for example, Evelyne
Ender’s Architexts of Memory: Literature, Science and Autobiography [2005]) which profoundly
question the very creative act of remembering itself: more and more, we’re hearing about
memories as present-day constructions (subject to continuous reshaping), not file acquisition
from a database of discrete and calcified memory chunks.
Thus, the question of authenticity and facticity or fidelity continually arises when
autobiographical texts are under consideration. Charles Hatfield, in the chapter “Irony and
Self-Reflexivity in Autobiographical Comics” of his Alternative Comics: An Emerging Liter-
ature (2005), suggests that the very appeal to truth (regardless of actual attainment, if such
a thing is even possible) gives value to the enterprise of autobiographical graphic works:
But why does the “authenticity” of autobiographical comics matter, anyway? To be frank, the
very idea of authenticity (or its pejorative flipside, inauthenticity) carries a moralistic and meta-
physical charge that should rouse our skepticism.... [T]alking about “authenticity” in nonfiction
comics is dicey at best — the sort of thing that invites anxious throat-clearing and the fretful use
of quotation marks. Yet ... the ethic of “authenticity” (there I go again) stands in polemical con-
trast to the fantasy genres that have for so long dominated the comics mainstream. Invoking
“authenticity” means taking a stand — this is one of the fundamental appeals of alternative com-
ics — and autobiographical comics that strive after authenticity have the potential for radical cul-
tural argument. Again, there is a democratic subtext to the genre and at its best an awareness of
the linking, indeed inextricable knotting, of the personal and the political. Simply put, the idea
of authenticity offers an escape from escapism (in the narrowest, most retrograde sense) [128–29].
I am particularly struck by Hatfield’s use of, and satisfaction with, the term “strive.” Auto-
biographical comics that strive after authenticity are valuable, in and of themselves. They
show greater likelihood to engage in what Hatfield refers to as “radical cultural argument,”
and can be esteemed for this attempt without need of an (impossible) measurement of truth
content. I know that fans of the more complex examples of the fantasy genre of comics
could argue vigorously against the dichotomy created here (what about the radical cultural
arguments of Watchmen [1995], V for Vendetta [1995], and The Sandman [2002]?), but I do
side with Hatfield here (as I argued at the beginning of this chapter) that nonfiction comics
show serious engagement with the matters of the world, and have the potential to bring
about in their readers informed, sustained consideration of world affairs that might have
passed relatively unexamined.
Returning to Satrapi’s creatively shaped memoir, Persepolis represents an Iranian child-
hood using visual and textual markers that are surprisingly “familiar” to Western readers.
This familiarity may trouble us, but Satrapi offers an argument for this choice in an interview
given at the 2007 New York Film Festival press conference, on the premiere of her own
(with Vincent Paronnaud) animated adaptation of Persepolis. Intentionally simplified, the
urban backdrop in panels depicting her childhood in Iran “can be Tehran, but [also] it can
be Cincinnati” [!] she says, and the city she chooses to exoticize is the one of her adolescence:
Vienna (Satrapi, IFC News). In an interesting twist, the visual locus of Tehran (basic city
streets, her family’s apartment, a schoolyard) is comfortably recognizable to the western
reader, while Vienna (the western city) is imbued with strangeness, foreign-ness, to capture
the teenage Marjane’s strong feeling of otherness during her stay there (Figures 15.4 and Fig-
ure 15.5). Satrapi has reversed the cues to aid her French (and other, predominantly west-
ern) readers in entering into her personal experience of culture, region, world. Considering
Satrapi’s depiction of the veil, Gillian Whitlock, in “Autographics: The Seeing ‘I’ of the
Comics,” has argued similarly with regard to the western reader’s experience of Persepolis:
There can be no simple universality in the associations produced by cartooning across very dif-
ferent relationships. Nevertheless this encounter with the cartoonish Marji and the veil is an
opening, a distinctive mediation of cultural difference, and an interpolation of Western readers
(“the other ones”) into a frame of dissonance, association, and juxtaposition that troubles a sense
of self and the norms that frame ways of seeing the self and other [977].
Persepolis, a thickly drawn,

clear-line, black and white
text written about a child,
and explicitly “for” western
readers, could not be more
easily “consumable” and
hence, is one of the most
“popular” graphic narra-
tives today. At the same
time, it richly rewards in-
quiry like that of Whitlock
above, and mine here. To
accuse Satrapi of merely
pandering would be to
Top: Figure 15.4. Marjane Satrapi. The Complete Persepolis. New York: Pantheon, 2007. 45. Bottom:
Figure 15.5. Marjane Satrapi. The Complete Persepolis. New York: Pantheon, 2007. 198.
ignore the value of her attempt to make legible, cleverly, an individual’s experience of self
and other, here and there, us and them.
Graphic memoirs like Persepolis work well in pedagogical situations designed to push
students to move beyond superficial understandings (of life-story, of comics, and of places
like Iran) into more considered, textually responsive interpretations. When they work, even
rudimentarily, they bring students to the point of assertions of the “I thought X about Y,
but now I realize Z” type. If Z is a reasonably solid assertion for which they can provide
grounds and support, the student is already a step beyond stereotype, assumption and igno-
rance, even if it will take subsequent learning to deepen this progress. For reasons including
those presented here, graphic memoir (with its attendant, growing critical body of related
studies) is a comic genre ideally suited to the critical literature classroom.
Postscript: A Brief Meditation on Names

My final thoughts concern the nomenclature we use to designate graphic works in an
academic setting. The problem of what to call the form (comics, graphic novels, sequential
art narratives, or graphic narratives) is hardly solved, and just when I thought I had cast
my lot, I find myself returning to the problem. By naming my course “International Graphic
Narrative,” I felt that I was calling explicit attention to the fact that “novel” does not ade-
quately represent the nonfiction genres robustly featured in my course (memoir, reportage,
travelogue, etc.). After several years of asserting the superiority of the term “narrative” over
“novel” in both my classes and conference presentations to colleagues, I found that the
response was generally affirmative. For the most part, colleagues and students alike agreed
that narrative was a far better choice — for its broadness of reference, “serious” tone, and
downplay of the fictive. Recently, however, and particularly because I am spending increasing
amounts of time considering the creative play of these nonfiction works (after all, is not the
very choice to visually depict “real” matter necessarily imaginative?), I am growing less
confident about my vehement preference for the term “narrative.” Perhaps “graphic novel”
(which does indeed seem to be rising to the top as the preferred term) is not quite the mis-
nomer it appears to be. If the lines between objective and subjective are as indistinct and
immeasurable as our literary and cognitive theorists would have it, then choosing to empha-
size the creative act (as “novel” might) could come closer to the spirit of the comic medium.
Here, I wish only to register my ambivalence and to thus call attention to the host of ques-
tions the deceptively simple task of labeling a medium continues to raise in this nascent
academic field of inquiry. I will continue to refer to the body of works as “graphic narrative”
for now, and to champion the use of nonfiction comic texts as I do here, but not without
acknowledging that even these seemingly objective terms are problematic when it comes to
graphic works.
WORKS CITED
Beaty, Bart. Unpopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990s. Toronto: Toronto University
Press, 2007. Print.
Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. NY: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. Print.
Brevoort, Tom. Marvel Comics Blog. Web. 11 Dec. 2011. <http://marvel.com/blogs/Tom_Brevoort/entry/1598>.
Duncan, Randy, and Matthew J. Smith. The Power of Comics: History, Form and Culture. New York: Continuum
Books, 2009. Print.
Fischer, Craig, and Charles Hatfield. Thought Balloonists Blog. 4 Nov. 2009. Web. 11 Dec. 2011. <http://www.
thoughtballoonists.com>.
Groensteen, Thierry. The System of Comics. Trans. Bart Beaty. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007.
Print.
Hatfield, Charles. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007.
Print.
Heer, Jeet, and Kent Worcester. A Comics Studies Reader. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009. Print.
Satrapi, Marjane. “Interview.” 2007 New York Film Festival Press Conference. IFC News, October 11, 2007.
YouTube. Web. 11 Dec. 2011. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMwfzqEqVLk>.
Print.
Zograf, Aleksandar. Regards from Serbia: A Cartoonist’s Diary of a Crisis in Serbia. Marietta: Top Shelf, 2007.
Print.
16. Serial Self-Portraits
Framing Student Conversations
About Graphic Memoir
JONATHAN D’AMORE
“I made my way downtown,” writes comics artist Frank Miller in his short autobio-
graphical piece, “Man with Pen in Head,” as he renders himself, clad in black, sprinting
and leaping through city streets as the tails of his coat glide gracefully, super-heroically
behind him. “No,” he clarifies parenthetically, “I didn’t travel this way. I just walked, all
right? But this is a lot more fun to draw” (8).
I use Miller’s twelve-panel piece to introduce the students in my undergraduate liter-
ature courses to both the practice of reading graphic narratives and the important distinction
between the writing and the written self in autobiography and memoir. The comic is Miller’s
short meditation on the production of the film Daredevil (2003), based on a long-running
comic Miller had re-worked to some acclaim, and his relations with the filmmakers. In this
piece, Miller — in life not a particularly robust physical specimen — grants himself not only
the remarkable sprinter’s gait, but the opportunity to deck Ben Affleck with one punch and
the privilege of seducing Jennifer Garner with one kiss. The unreality of the situation —
and Miller’s candidness in the decidedly less spectacular and more believable narrative “cor-
rections,” for example: “Nothing on this page is true” (Miller 9)— serves as a direct, visual
example for my students of Roland Barthes’ assertion that autobiography is more an author’s
experiment with a whole other existence than a representation of his actual one — that, in
writing autobiography, an author is not recording his or her life in words, but rather is
“freewheeling in language” (56).
Graphic memoirs provide a unique pedagogical tool for illustrating to students the
rather complicated interplay of identity, authorship, and creativity in autobiography. Con-
vincing my students that memoir and autobiography are as rich, complex, and open to
interpretation and investigation as other literary forms is a primary goal of teaching these
texts. Self-consciously constructed texts like Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering
Genius (2000), John Edgar Wideman’s Brothers and Keepers (1984), and Joan Didion’s The
Year of Magical Thinking (2005)— all of which I often teach alongside autobiographical
comics — do much to demonstrate that complexity, but I have found that it is often through
the graphic memoirs that my students come alive to the notion of reading autobiography
as a literary exercise. (It does not hurt that they also come alive to the notion that reading
graphic novels is a literary exercise as well.) The focus on autobiographical works can lead
210
16 . Serial Self-Portraits: Student Conversations (D’Amore) 211
students both to a broader conception of the range of expression they can approach and
analyze as “art” and to a more nuanced perception of the relation of narrative to their own
lives.
The foundation for guiding students toward such understandings and the stimulation
of productive classroom discussions is autobiography theory. The field of life-writing studies
is large and growing, and scholars from disciplines ranging from literary studies to political
science to neurobiology are engaging the general topic for myriad purposes from myriad
angles. For this reason — and because I am not, at present, teaching courses exclusively on
memoir or life-writing — I do not present my students with complete works of criticism or
attempt to teach the relevant theories for their own sake, but rather I use ideas and obser-
vations from scholars in the field as an apparatus for approaching a memoir as a constructed
narrative, as a text to be analyzed, as a work of literature rather than as a biographical doc-
ument conveying a factual summation of an individual life. Toward this goal, I instruct my
students to embrace what I call the three contradictions of autobiography. These contra-
dictions are a basic condensation of the major concepts life writing theorists and critics have
been articulating and refining for more than fifty years, with early contributions from George
Gusdorf, Philippe Lejeune, and Elizabeth Bruss as well as from high profile theorists like
Barthes and Jacques Derrida, on through the great expansion of life-writing studies behind
the work of Paul John Eakin, James Olney, Sidonie Smith, and Julia Watson, and continuing
with important recent work by Thomas Couser, Leigh Gilmore, Gillian Whitlock, Ben
Yagoda, and many others.1 These scholars’ names rarely if ever come up in my classroom,
but their work and the rich conversations about life writing they have fostered inform the
approach I take with my students. The contradictions I present to students are my distillation
of their varied scholarship and serve as the entry point for college readers engaging with
this important element of contemporary literary studies.
When we start a unit on memoir or an individual autobiographical text together, I
share the contradictions with my students and inform them that these are my articulations
of the basic frustrations I expect to feel when reading. Expressed as expectations rather than
rules, these concepts allow for the range of authors’ intentions and readers’ interpretations
in autobiography and help new critical readers of memoir (hopefully) accept the convolutions
of a text’s relation to “real life” as an impetus for exploration rather than rejection. The
three contradictions are: (1) The author and the character who shares his or her name in an
autobiographical text are the same person — and they are not. (2) A memoir is a true story
based in fact — but memoirs don’t strictly adhere to facts or let the “facts” get in the way of
the “truth.” (3) An autobiography is (typically) an individual narrative presenting an individ-
ual perspective on an individual life — and a group endeavor built from many voices, many
perspectives, and many interdependent narratives. With these probable conflicts advertised
to my students as essential to the otherwise loosely-defined genre of autobiography, I send
them off to read “comic books about real people,” most of them for the first time in their
lives, and almost all for the first time in their academic careers.
The methods of reading graphic narratives diverge from those for reading traditional
prose narratives in significant and useful ways. For reading and discussing memoir, the
visual form of graphic narratives, with images typically contained within frames and text
within boxes, speech balloons, and thought bubbles, provides a useful narrowing of focus
that allows readers to see the visual and verbal elements of a particular comics frame as a
singular self-portrait, a representation of the author at one moment in her life, and as an
installment in a series which is likewise a representation of the author’s life. The author-
subjects of such texts generally intend the individual frames to cohere as a self-portrait con-
structed of words, images, allusions, ideas, and memories, and when my classes’ readings of
such works address both the individual and collective instances of the memoirists’ self-
expression and self-representation and then progress into explorations of concepts beyond
the structures, forms, and varieties of literary autobiography, I feel the course is successful.
In the remainder of this chapter, I step through my three contradictions using examples
from a number of graphic memoirs I have taught — with success, I believe. Texts I will dis-
cuss include: Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (2007), selections from Harvey Pekar’s American
Splendor (first anthologized 1986), Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood
(English-language version 2003), David Small’s Stitches (2009), Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A
Survivor’s Tale (1986), and selections from the aforementioned Dark Horse Comics collection
Autobiographix (2003). My intent is not to provide readings of these books as wholes or to
delineate a particular path through the graphic memoir genre, but rather to identify some
practical loci for analysis and insight my students and I have shared and to illustrate my
approach to our discussions. In some cases, I have had students read these texts together;
as often as not, though, one of these pieces stands alone as the only comic we read in a
given course. The three contradictions provide a frame for our conversations, regardless,
and give a direction to our readings that is open to productive wandering. Like the best lit-
erary conundrums, such irresolvability is its own intellectual reward.
The Illustrating and Illustrated “I”

A traditional understanding of autobiography — one which most work on the subject
takes for granted as flawed or, at the least, insufficiently complex — is a work in which the
writer and the publisher has affirmed the identicality of author, narrator and protagonist.
Philippe Lejeune made the seminal articulation of this concept in his important essay “The
Autobiographical Pact,” and then went on to correct and expand his concept by inclusively
defining “autobiography” as “a particular realization” of the discourse of the self “in which
the question ‘who am I?’ is answered by a narrative that tells ‘how I became who I am’”
(124). This particular formulation frees us as students and critics from insisting upon a firm,
inextricable identification between author and subject. Instead, the narrative can take a
form which reflects upon the author’s life and identity without having to transcribe, in
effect, the entirety of the facts of that life. Thus, the character who shares a name and, in
most graphic memoirs, a likeness with the author need not be viewed as identical to the
author in order for a work to be an autobiography or memoir. In A Poetics of Women’s Auto-
biography, Sidonie Smith describes the multiplicity of selves actually present in autobio-
graphical narratives. She writes, “the doubling of the ‘self ’ into a narrating ‘I’ and a narrated
‘I’ and, further, the fracturing of the narrated ‘I’ into multiple speaking postures mark the
autobiographical process as rhetorical artifact and the authorial signature as mythography”
(Smith 47). This contradiction, the notion that an author of an autobiography, its narrator,
and its subject are connected but do not constitute a coherent “self ” is inherent and plainly
visible in graphic memoir, and I have found the visual component of these works ideally
suited for demonstrating the fracturing of the narrated self.
The popular comic books my students are familiar with have a long tradition of “frac-
tured” protagonists; that is, the well-known alter ego trope in which a mere pair of horn-
rimmed glasses and a rumpled sport coat can convince an entire newsroom staffed with
award-winning investigative journalists that a virtually invincible, extraordinarily intelli-

gent, and exquisitely coordinated super-being is just another awkward reporter. Clark Kent
is Superman, but he is also a calculated, deceptive fiction — or rather, since Clark has an
authentic personal and family history, it is his appearance and mannerisms, his limited self-
representation, and his merely human as opposed to superhuman identification which are
fictional. Likewise, the “alter egos” that the authors of these graphic memoirs present can
be read both as one and the same as the authors themselves, and as fictionalized facades that
stem from a real personal and family history but which, intentionally or otherwise, conceal
a separate, more complete identity.
The aforementioned short comic by Frank Miller about his “life” flashing before his
eyes as he is “faking it. Dying, that is.” is a quick and handy introduction to this concept
of homonymous alter egos (6). The comics artist draws and writes a version of himself which
is visible and apprehensible, Miller and — indisputedly, confessedly — not Miller. Students
rightly see fiction, wish fulfillment, death fantasy, confession, concealment, evasion and
reality in the brisk thirteen panels of “Man with Pen in Head.” The drawings of his own
face Miller uses are certainly lifelike enough that a reader would not dissociate the image
from the real man entirely. Conversely, readers of Maus must rely on names, family history,
and other identifying evidence to fix the image of Art Spiegelman’s alter ego in Maus, a
human-like figure with the face of a mouse, to the author himself. For most readers, the
connection is easily enough established and quickly subsumed into the subconscious because
of Speigelman’s efficient drawing and effective storytelling. However, no reader thinks that
Spiegelman is presenting a life-like self-portrait or drawing other humans as mice, cats,
pigs, dogs, etc. because he believes it realistic; readers know he is using visual metaphor (a
topic my students and I discuss at greater length along with the second contradiction). The
artistic technique makes plain, however, that the character Art may be a representation of
Spiegelman, but is not, of course, really him.
In the case of Harvey Pekar, the legendary underground comics writer whose work
gained considerable mainstream traction after the feature film American Splendor appeared
in 2003, the illustrations that make up his many comics come from a variety of collaborators
and not the author’s pen; hence, the image of American Splendor’s protagonist — its narrator,
its author, its subject — is visibly different throughout the body of work. By paging through
the American Splendor collections or seeing a brief PowerPoint slideshow, students can easily
see the close resemblance of each artist’s incarnation of Pekar and simultaneously note their
explicit distinctions. The comic’s protagonist Pekar appears one way when drawn by R.
Crumb, another when drawn by Gary Dumm, and still others when drawn by Sue Cavey
or Gerry Shamway, and these are just a few of his many collaborators. Further, these artists
made alterations to their versions of Pekar throughout their work together. And inevitably,
given American Splendor’s subject matter — Pekar’s comics alter ego aged along with his cre-
ator, adding further variation to the illustrators’ different versions. Add in a clip from the
opening of the 2003 film version that I also show, and you get the actor Paul Giamatti as
Pekar and Pekar appearing on camera as himself: a man of many faces. Every iteration of
the Pekar character corresponds to the man himself, the author of a distinctly autobiograph-
ical work, but none of them, students come to see, are indistinguishably or indisputably
the same as him.
“The Harvey Pekar Name Story,” a short piece that opens the American Splendor col-
lection, takes the simultaneous senses of visual connection and distinction that come from
the comics’ images and extends it to the author-protagonist’s name. Complete with illus-
trations by R. Crumb which are among his least resonant and least distinctly Pekaresque,
the short piece searches for the soul of the “unique” name “Harvey Pekar” by tracing the
distance and proximity our Harvey Pekar feels from men with whom he shares the apparently
not-quite-unique most fundamental words of identity with, but not, necessarily, the fun-
damentals of identity. By juxtaposing something trivial (entries in a phone book) with some-
thing monumental (the deaths of two other Harvey Pekars), the piece uses Pekar’s words to
figuratively illustrate his closeness to these other men and literally illustrate his isolation
from them (by placing his image, alone on a white background, in each frame of the comic).
The Pekar-protagonist ends the piece asking, “Who is Harvey Pekar?”— and though his
image has appeared 48 times in the comic, the students can ask themselves if they really
know. Certainly, the piece shows, identifying a person by name hardly scratches the surface
of identity, and so, the notion that an author and his memoir’s protagonist share a name is
not sufficient evidence of their inextricable identicalness.
Because Pekar delegates illustration to his collaborators, the distinction between these
fractured visual incarnations of the narrated-I is apparent, though not, necessarily, bound
by an authorial “signature” in the same way his words are. But in the other texts we cover,
the illustrating-I and the illustrated-I, as I call them, share a name and share a visage, but
demonstrate the distinction just as well. The very first frames of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis:
The Story of a Childhood provide a poignant example of the narrating and illustrating-I and
a narrated, illustrated-me. Satrapi writes in the opening text box, “This is me when I was
10 years old.” Here, the narrator has claimed a shared identity with the child-image in the
frame below, but the distance between the author — whom my students and I called
Satrapi — and her narrated childhood persona — whom we call Marji — is apparent and
deeper than just the years that separate them. In the second panel, the illustrating-I hasn’t
even managed to keep her illustrated self in the frame as she introduces her childhood
friends. A few pages later, Satrapi provides another demonstration of the multiplicity of
identifications and desires inherent in verbal self-representation but not so easily represented
in other media as they are in graphic narrative. She draws three imaginative images of herself
in one panel, a triptych of her childhood idealized self. The text at the top of the frame
reads, “I wanted to be Justice, Love, and the Wrath of God all in one,” and Marji’s image
appears three times, each in the same patterned nightgown, but the first holding scales and
wearing an impassive expression, the second smiling with her right hand raised in a gesture
of benediction, and the third holding a shield and a sword and an expression of anger (9).
This frame is an autobiographical act embodying many of the contradictions of both auto-
biography and identity: it is retrospective and prospective — looking back at a child’s vision
of her ideal self— and its identification with the author is unified but also, clearly, fractured
and multiplied. For teaching students, this moment in the text shows the divisibility of the
self as rendered by the artist in her three self-images, held together in one frame, singular
yet separate, serial self portraits presented as one.
Real Life, True Stories, and the Metaphor in Memoirs

David Small’s coming-of-age memoir Stitches employs a further fracturing of the nar-
rated-self to tell the story of Small’s textual alter ego. Early in the work, Small recalls his
youthful fascination with Lewis Carroll’s Alice, and recreates an episode from his childhood
in which he wears a yellow towel over his head in an effort to emulate her beautiful blonde
hair, to seize her “magic ability to travel to a land of talking animals, singing flowers and
dancing teapots” (56). The illustrated-self experiments with another separate identity and
goes “freewheeling” in Alice’s wonderland for a short while, until his reality returns to him
in the form the bullies who chase him, shouting “Fag!” and “Sissy!” David’s escape is a clev-
erly drawn metaphor — he rushes back to his house and departs the danger of the real world
for the safety of an illustrated one. Small depicts his younger self sitting down in front of
his paper and crayons and literally diving into a space contained within the paper. As a
memoirist, he takes the reader with him as he revisits both that dangerous reality populated
by aggressive jerks and the joyful world of his pad and pencil full of dancing, welcoming
cartoons. The illustrating-I takes the illustrated-I first to a place where he is someone else,
an Alice surrogate, and then to a place where he is, in effect, a surrogate for the illustrat-
ing-I, a person whose pen gives power and agency to another version of himself. For my
students — and for myself, I confess — it’s a confounding and exciting mobius strip that
embodies my first contradiction of autobiography and leads fluidly to a discussion of the
second.
Students typically say, when asked what makes a work “literary,” that it must be imag-
inative; employ metaphor; have “meaning” which extends beyond the plot. Memoirs are
stories about someone’s life. Enticing my students to grapple with the unintuitive concept
that the author of an autobiography and its subject are neither indivisible nor inextricable
is the first step in getting my students to read autobiography like they read other literature.
Showing them that autobiographers often use the same techniques that novelists and poets
do is the next. Direct or indirect meaningful references to other literary works, such as
Small’s invocations of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and, later in the book, of Lolita, are
one way to call their attention to the creative intellectual work of the authors. Additionally,
they can identify the imaginative element in wordplay and verbal metaphors, but even more
dynamically so in the “graphic” elements of these self-portraits. The persistent and inescap-
able allegory of cat and mouse Spiegelman wordlessly weaves into his personal, family, and
public history is an easy starting point for discussing the art and the artifice that go into
writing memoir, and can generate a great deal of discussion just from the book’s cover,
which features two mice-Jews crouched defensively in the shadows below a swastika adorned
with an abstracted image of a feline Hitler. Using the first contradiction, I try to shift stu-
dent thinking toward seeing Spiegelman’s “self-portraits” in Maus, as well as the more lifelike
ones in Persepolis or Stitches or “Man with Pen in Head,” as a kind of metaphor for the real
person. If they can see the drawing as a device which stands in for but is not the same as
the individual, then I believe they can see the stories they are reading in similar relation to
the author’s personal history. And from that point, I guide them to see the constituent ele-
ments of these memoirs similarly.
One among many of the merits of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home is its clear demonstration
that writing autobiography is as much a literary act as a biographical one. With its pervasive
allusions to texts by Fitzgerald, Proust, and others, and its system of visual metaphors, the
book provides a class with a great deal of literary meat to chew on. Fun Home is Bechdel’s
portrayal of her relationship with her father, a funeral director, an English teacher, and a
closeted gay man who was killed when accidentally hit by a truck. With great attention to
visual detail, Bechdel tells the story of her childhood in her family’s Victorian-style home,
carefully decorated by her father, along with the story of her own coming out to her parents
while she was in college. The truck that killed her father, a Sunbeam Bread truck, provides
a metaphor for the book, which serves in many ways as a posthumous coming out narrative
for Bechdel’s father. As one of my students put it, “The bread truck ‘shed light’ on her
father’s whole life.” Bechdel repeats images of Sunbeam bread into several of the frames
that have nothing directly to do with her father’s end, cueing readers — including my stu-
dents — to the significance of his death in her own life story. This visual metaphor also
shines a light on Bechdel’s manipulation of the facts of her life. My students never really
doubt the truth of the account, but Bechdel’s willingness to adapt the visual narrative draws
their attention to her willingness to adapt the narrative as a whole.
The second contradiction of autobiographies — that they are true stories that rarely
present just “the true facts”— is actually the one with which they’re most familiar, given the
attention James Frey and his exaggerated and fictionalized memoir A Million Little Pieces
(2003) received a few years ago and the fact that, at least in the immediate aftermath of
that episode in the history of autobiography, Frey’s memoir is perhaps the one most com-
monly read by them before my course. I use a metaphor to explain to students that the rela-
tionship to the actual world is, indeed, different for autobiography than for fiction, though
the result may seem much the same in a literature classroom. I tell them that the relationship
between autobiography and fiction is like the relationship between green apple-flavored
candy and blue raspberry candy. Green apple candies, as unlikely as it may seem when you
eat them, are an effort to recreate the taste of a green-colored apples, or at least to approx-
imate them. Sucking on a green apple hard candy is certainly not the same as crunching
into a Granny Smith, but the flavor does correspond to “apple.” Blue raspberry on the other
hand, despite its textual invocation of raspberries, is complete fiction. It might seem like
something from the real world, but you could never find its referent. Thus, though they
might both be candy and you might consume them with equal pleasure and equal purpose,
your mind is able to make a connection between green apples and green apple flavor that
it cannot make between blue raspberry flavor and actual, not-blue raspberries. Similarly,
though autobiography is not concretely the same as life, it refers to factual existence with
a degree of closeness that is notably distinct from fiction, though the experience, style, and
literariness may be quite similar. The difference is one of both intention by author and
reception by readers and it is worth highlighting for students, even if I want them to approach
autobiography and fiction with similar analytical techniques.
A valuable demonstration of the representation of concrete elements of real life in auto-
biography comes in an artistic strategy repeated throughout Fun Home. Bechdel recreates
visual items from life in such a way that evokes the original image without precisely repro-
ducing it. In Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, comics artist and critic Scott McCloud
makes a distinction between cartoons and realism that is relevant to Bechdel’s technique
and other artists’ similar work but incomplete in its possible application to graphic memoirs.
“By de-emphasizing the appearance of the physical world in favor of the idea of form,”
McCloud claims, “the cartoon places itself in the world of concepts. Through traditional
realism, the comics artist can portray the world without— and through the cartoon, the world
within” (41). Bechdel, in realistically reproducing tangible objects from real life in the context
of a piece of comic art that is not hyper-realist, casts the relation between the real and a
narrative about real life in a meaningful light for student discussion. Her rendering of a
Robert Redford film, a Zelda Fitzgerald photo, or lines of text from Albert Camus, and, in
other places, of her own journals, of family photos or, most significantly, of a suggestive
photo of a young man her father kept private during his life, is a message to readers that
Bechdel is working in the realm of reality, but also a reminder that she is manipulating and
recreating, hence reinterpreting her experience rather than merely replicating it, employing
the “world without”— to use McCloud’s phrase — as a tool to explore the “world within”
of her life.
Family Memory and Relational Selves

The freedom from fact, the emphasis on reinterpretation rather than replication, leads
to the third contradiction — that though an autobiography or memoir is usually the story
of an individual life told from an individual perspective, the act is generally a plural one,
insofar as both the narratives of others and their relation to the autobiographer play an inte-
gral role in the primary narrative. In her article “The Entangled Self: Genre Bondage in
the Age of the Memoir,” Nancy Miller explains the model of the “relational self ” which
feminist critics of autobiography have been exploring in women’s autobiography for over
twenty years. “The female autobiographical self,” the theorists assert, “comes into writing,
goes public with private feelings, through a significant relation to an other” (Miller 544).
Miller argues persuasively that the notion of the relational self is essential not just to women’s
life writing, but to all writers who set out to write their own lives. “Perhaps,” she suggests,
“it is time to understand the question of relation to the other — to others — as being as
important, foundation, to the genre as the truth conditions of the ‘autobiographical pact.’
Not the exception but the rule.... Autobiography’s story is about the web of entanglement
in which we find ourselves, one that we sometimes choose” (544).
In Persepolis, young Marji relies on her parents, her grandmother, her Uncle Anoosh,
and others for much of the information and many of the stories which combine in her per-
sonal history and experience of Iran’s public history. The politics of Iran in the 1980s are
an ineradicable part of Satrapi’s answer to the question Lejeune says is inherent in autobi-
ography: how I came to be who I am. Because she was just a child at the time, however,
her experience of the Islamic Revolution came, mostly, through her family members’ per-
spectives and the filter of her own juvenile interpretations of the situation. Identification
with a hero is a common aspect of childhood, and Marji sees her Uncle Anoosh as a personal
hero and one for the resistance against the religious rulers. Fittingly, then, she turns over
the telling of this hero’s tale to Anoosh himself in the chapter “Moscow.” His voice fills the
text boxes at the tops of frames from which Satrapi’s voice usually narrates. The images flick
back and forth between Marji’s bedroom, where Anoosh is telling the story, and the moments
he describes of his own earlier life, illustrated by Satrapi despite never having witnessed the
scenes. Satrapi reinforces the fact that this man’s story is, indeed, an essential part of her
own with the words she allows to end his narration: “I tell you all this because it’s important
that you know. Our family memory must not be lost. Even if it’s not easy for you, even if
you don’t understand at all.” Marji responds, “Don’t worry, I’ll never forget” (60). The
exchange ties the two together for the reader and makes evident to students that “family
memory” is frequently an essential part of individual memory and so is also an inextricable
element of autobiographical narrative.
Bechdel’s Fun Home is an even more thorough example of the importance of the rela-
tional self Miller identifies as so significant to autobiographical narrative. In essence, the
self Bechdel presents in her text exists only in relation to her father’s life; all other aspects
of her personal history and sense of identity are subjugated to secondary relevance behind
her memories of her father. She captures the nuances of her and her father’s perceptions of
their gender roles and the tension and connection their non-conventional personalities estab-
lished between them by representing her life through the filter of her father’s life and death.
An early page in the text sets up the counterbalance between the two that Bechdel clearly
aims to use as a rhetorical device, inviting readers to see her younger self as a mirror to her
father and as an opposite. Though they appear together in any number of frames throughout
the story, four panels unite them by constraining their aesthetic conflict within the shared
space of the frame. “I was Spartan to my Father’s Athenian,” Bechdel captions them, “Mod-
ern to his Victorian, Butch to his Nelly, Utilitarian to his Aesthete” (15). Bechdel defines
her character in relation to her father. And her story, both within the action of the narrative
and the narrative itself, exists only in relation to his. An example of this intertwining of
narratives that I highlight for my students is Bechdel’s presentation of her coming out as
lesbian to her parents, an exchange in which her mother reveals that Bruce Bechdel had
affairs with other men and had been molested as a boy. Bechdel’s reaction to the “staggering
blow” is first to feel “upstaged, demoted from protagonist in my own drama to comic relief
in my parents tragedy” (58). Then, after her father’s fatal accident, she doubts its accidental
nature and “assume[s] a cause-and-effect relationship” between her coming out to her parents
and her father’s death (59). The story of Bruce Bechdel is the story of Alison Bechdel, Fun
Home insists and, especially in these moments of the text, vice versa.
Fun Home is a story of father and daughter, a narrative of their shared and separate
paths. Spiegelman’s Maus is a father and child story, and the narrative of Spiegelman talking
to his father about the latter’s experience during the Holocaust is the frame for the bulk of
the book, which is given over to Vladek Spiegelman’s accounts of his own life, in his own
voice, an extended (and chronologically earlier) example similar to Satrapi’s use of her
uncle’s voice. This shared narration provides a visual and textual example of the phenomenon
present in many of the literary memoirs my students will go on to read, in which the author
turns over the narrative — sometimes literally, usually figuratively — to the proximate others
so important to the author’s life. The complication, and the contradiction, of course, is
that, despite the deferral to another’s voice, despite the plurality of perspectives necessary
to reconstruct the story of a life, autobiography is almost exclusively a singular act of the
author, who maintains final control of the text. In short, Vladek Spiegelman’s voice in Maus
is, in fact, an act of ventriloquism. Art Spiegelman “speaking” in his father’s voice.
A series of panels in the final third of Maus is a demonstration of how that ventriloquism
works both verbally and visually: Spiegelman re-illustrates for the reader a schematic of a
secret bunker his father (or rather, the Vladek Spiegelman character) draws for Art, and he
recreates his father’s words describing that bunker, allowing his father to speak and speaking
for him simultaneously (110). Further, this particular page again exemplifies for students the
first contradiction — as Spiegelman repeats the image of himself (and his father) in eight
consecutive frames, even changing perspective in the final panel, stepping back and effectively
making himself a shadow in the frame — as well as the second, with the juxtaposition of the
metaphoric unreality of the mouse image and the seemingly factual, indisputable confidence
in the construction of the bunker his room describes, down to the specific dimensions of a
coal cabinet.
I want to emphasize that these books and ideas provide an entry point into the study
of autobiography for my students. I have found that these conversations have made our
approach to related works, such as a messy, multilayered, self-conscious memoir like A
Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius or a fictional work that invokes the form and the
implied complications of memoir, like Jamaica Kincaid’s Autobiography of My Mother (1996),
much more vibrant and rounded. These concepts and methods of looking at a text have
been productive for our analysis of individual works and for making useful connections
between them. Working through these graphic memoirs together has, I believe, led my stu-
dents to think about the process of reading, both individually and as a dynamic group.
I have also only skimmed the surface of the exciting field of life writing studies and
autobiography theory, as I have lingered only briefly on the fundamental questions of the
field, questions that have led and are leading scholars to fascinating and important research
into memory studies, issues of gender and sexuality, trauma and disability studies, ethics
in representation and in the business of publishing, and important questions of contemporary
political and cultural concerns well beyond the books we read.2 When I teach these texts
using my contradictions as a foundation in the critical work, it is with the intention of
starting several conversations that the subject matter of the books and the individual lives
they describe lead us to, beyond the analysis of form and function that the focus on con-
tradictions initially provokes. By helping students frame their discussions about autobiog-
raphy as a complex and literary work, I aim to spur them not just to consider the text in
their hands, but the world around that book and those hands and the many stories and per-
spectives that make it up. Putting graphic memoir, this provocative and fairly new form of
literature, into their hands seems to me to be a good start.
NOTES
1 For a concise yet thorough history of the theory and criticism of autobiography, see chapters seven and
eight in Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson’s indispensable Reading Autobiography.
2. As noted above, Smith and Watson’s Reading Autobiography is an excellent introduction to the field and
topic for students and teachers alike. For more particular ideas and guidance on incorporating memoir and other
life writing into undergraduate courses, as well as graduate studies and other classroom settings, see Teaching Life
Writing Texts, edited by Miriam Fuchs and Craig Howes.
WORKS CITED
Barthes, Roland. Roland Barthes. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. Print.
Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. Print.
Fuchs, Miriam, and Craig Howes. Teaching Life Writing Texts. New York: MLA, 2007. Print.
Lejeune, Philippe. On Autobiography. Trans. Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
Print.
Miller, Frank. “Man with Pen in Head.” Schutz 5–10. Print.
Miller, Nancy K. “The Entangled Self: Genre Bondage in the Age of the Memoir.” PMLA 122.2 (2007): 537–
48. Print.
Pekar, Harvey. American Splendor. 1986. New York: Ballantine-Random House, 2003. Print.
Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood. New York: Pantheon-Random House, 2003. Print.
Schutz, Diana, ed. Autobiographix. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Comics, 2003. Print.
Small, David. Stitches: A Memoir. New York: W. W. Norton, 2009. Print.
Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. 2nd ed. Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Print.
Smith, Sidonie. Poetics of Women’s Autobiography. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Print.
Spiegelman, Art. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. Vol. 1. New York: Pantheon-Random, 1986. Print.
PART VI
COMPOSITION, RHETORIC , AND COMMUNICATION
17. Batman Returns (to Class)

Graphic Narratives and the Syncretic Classroom
KATHARINE POLAK MACDONALD
The proliferation of the multimodal classroom has prompted not only a broader
approach to the process of composition, but also a reconsideration of the kinds of texts that
are useful for students as consumers and producers of texts. Our expanding concept of com-
position embodies rhetoric more completely, as the visual, musical, audible, hyperlinked
texts that our students commonly encounter have reformulated both the way a text is read
and the way in which it is produced and experienced. Marguerite Helmers and Charles Hill
state in their introduction to Defining Visual Rhetorics (2004) that “[i]n order to counter
what has been called a paragonal relationship between word and image — a struggle for dom-
inance over meaning between verbal and visual discourse — we suggest that readers and
scholars working with visual rhetoric attend to the notion that word and image are used by
writers and illustrators to accomplish different aims” (2–3). Arguably, this multiply layered
discourse is most well represented in graphic narratives and comics. The use of graphic nar-
ratives in the composition classroom provides an excellent starting point for students’ devel-
opment of their own multimodal texts, as the combination of visual and textual rhetoric
underscores the point that rhetoric operates on multiple levels in all texts. I have used a
number of graphic narratives in my classroom, including Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight
Returns (1997), Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta (1995), Charles Burns’ Black Hole (2008) and
others. Students are tasked, in addition to their final research essays, with a “creative analysis”
project that addresses some aspect of the multimodal texts that they have encountered in
the classroom, using their major as a platform for analysis.
By incorporating visual/pictorial analysis, a form of analysis with which they are very
comfortable, with rhetorical analysis, students typically become more engaged with textual
material as it is connected to current events and examples of cultural production. Before they
approach the text, I provide an overview on how to read and interpret graphic narratives,
including a PowerPoint presentation showing a variety of methods for setting up the comic
frame and the comic page. In addition, they are given a historical contextualization of the
characters, politics and culture in which the text was produced. Students in both my compo-
sition and literature courses were able to better understand texts as a medium of culture when
studying the relation between written language and visual representation. Students also acquire
more complex understandings of audience, purpose and voice, as the dual pictorial and tex-
tual narratives enhance the way in which rhetoric operates on numerous levels simultaneously.
221
222 Part VI : Composition, Rhetoric, and Communication
My students have often demonstrated significant maturity in their ability to analyze

political and cultural constructs embedded within comics. That many students seem to be
more comfortable with this mode of analysis should be reason enough to consider incor-
porating graphic narratives into the curriculum, but even more compelling is that students
also were able to engage with more traditional genres better after being introduced to these
concepts as they appear within the graphic narrative. This transfer of skills between genres
is particularly important in both literature and composition classrooms, as we are attempting
to demonstrate the importance of literary and cultural analysis to everyday life in the former,
and in the latter we are also trying to help students adopt the conventions of written language
and develop as unique producers of texts. In addition, graphic narratives can potentially
enhance the quality of classroom discourse, especially within the context of lower-division
literature and composition courses for undergraduates. I have developed multiple lesson
plans for various graphic narratives which help students understand the tenets of both
rhetorical and visual analysis, and while most students are aware of the power of the image,
many are able to better appreciate the power of the word in the context of the image. In
the following sections, I discuss several classes in which I used graphic narratives and organ-
ized around specific thematic constraints. I will describe the way in which the final assign-
ment in particular helped students develop a multimodal literacy that would enhance the
production of their own multimodal texts.
Theoretical Underpinnings
Dale Jacobs, in “Comics as Sponsors of Multimodal Literacy,” asserts that “comics are
a rhetorical genre, comics are multimodal texts, and comics are both an order of discourse
and discrete discursive events” (182). This categorization follows delineations of the widely
cited definitions of comics by Scott McCloud (“juxtaposed sequential art”), Dylan Horrocks
(an expanded definition that locates comics both generically and culturally as artifacts of
discourse communities with a given set of properties), and Robert C. Harvey (who argues
that both visual and textual content are vital to the “comic” genre). Jacobs’ definition, built
on those that sought to differentiate the genre, seeks rather to relate comics to other genres
more familiar to most teachers. In this consideration of genre, the onus is on the reader and
the teacher to expand their concept of literacy commensurate with the kinds of texts that
are increasingly becoming the norm. Multimodal texts, especially those we see on the Internet
in the form of YouTube videos and blogs with multi-genre content, are now commonplace.
This is important to understand as teachers who are preparing students for the production
of their own texts in the “real world,” particularly because our notions of literacy can some-
times valorize outdated models of texts.
It is important here to consider the nature of cognition and perception, because the
perception of the object is both shaped by and filtered through various learned literacies of
the reader/perceiver. In “Lost Literacy: How Comics Can Recover Visual Literacy in the
Literacy Classroom,” C. Gillenwater has noted:
Rudolf Arnheim argued that over time, society has come to overvalue cognition at the expense
of perception. For Arnheim, cognition is the mind’s manipulation of concepts resulting from
direct perception of objects, people, images, etc. He contends that cognition is bound to per-
ception; therefore, historically determined dichotomies between seeing and thinking, perception
and reason, are damaging to full cognitive development. According to Arnheim, verbal language,
17. Batman Returns (to Class) (MacDonald) 223
which has come to represent cognition and imagery, tends to be perceptual and is deficient in
the sense that the verbal is actually an abstracted aural symbol that lacks a referent [33].
Arnheim’s establishment of the relationship between perception and cognition as it connects

to Ferdinand de Saussure’s “Course on General Linguistics” is particularly interesting in
light of the comic as-read in the multimodal context. The famous example of de Saussure,
that the word “tree” (the signifier) and a picture of a tree (the signified) bear no direct rela-
tion to one another, metaphorically expresses this relationship between cognition and per-
ception. While the signifier is independent of the signified, the signifier shapes expectations
about the signified, as the signified shapes conceptions of the signifier. This would seem to
map onto comics in that the textual portion correlates to the signifier, while the pictorial
depiction correlates to the signified. But the pictorial component of the comic is still a sig-
nifier, because the images are mediated as they have been produced for a particular end in
the story. However, this is where the relationship between perception and cognition become
important — the signified, in de Saussure’s model, is always perceived. The signifier is the
resultant cognition of the signified object. The comic is an organic example of the multi-
modality towards which de Saussure gestures, and a requirement thereof is the multiply
literate object-processing put forward by Arnheim. Gillenwater goes on to assert that “[p]ic-
tures can provide both context and subtext for words; consequently, complicating verbal
messages” (35), arguably one of the most important lessons in multimodality that comics
can provide — multimodality as it is deployed in comics develops the way in which students
recognize milieu, and gestures to the way in which they encounter the world in terms of
multiple literacies which must be simultaneously read for subtextual elements, as well as for
their interrelations.
The use of comics in composition and literature classrooms involves teaching students
alternative styles of reading, as well as alternative styles of writing. Jacobs cites the New
London Group’s work on the pedagogy of multimodal literacies as including three basic
elements: Available Design, Designing, and the Redesigned. Available Design deals with
“all the available resources for making meaning in both the production and consumption
of multimodal texts” ( Jacobs 184). Designing refers to our ability “to take available resources
and use them to shape meaning (as both producers and consumers) from multimodal texts”
( Jacobs 184). The Redesigned creates “new meaning,” thus producing other resources for
Available design. While this all sounds rather abstract, this cycle is foregrounded in the
multimodal classroom. Students are generally inclined to focus on one mode of discourse
or another in any multimodal text, depending on with what they are more comfortable.
Some will look primarily at the pictorial representations and merely skim the text, while
others will read the text and all but ignore the pictorial representations.
This division between reading styles represents a frequent problem with reading mul-
timodal texts, because of the new literacy/methodology of engagement required for the inte-
gration of the elements. After students have read a graphic narrative in my class, our first
discussion generally focuses on reading strategies, and using the text with which they have
worked, I task them with a small group project in which they pair up with a peer who favors
a different comic reading style. Using discussion questions focusing on the text and on the
pictorial representation, I tell them to focus on the same portion of the text, and explain
to one another how they gained meaning out of the respective parts. After they have discussed
these components, I ask them to write a short collaborative essay on how their modes of
reading can be incorporated so as to produce a stronger reading of the text as a whole. This
exercise allows students access to other styles of reading (and learning), often overlooked
when they individually approach a text, and also difficult to visualize with more traditional
genres. In addition, this activity encourages an assessment of the meaning that is lost during
their reading, and thus promotes closer reading. The exploration of what is lost during a
narrow type of reading is an excellent lesson, particularly when one considers the assumptions
that many students make upon entering a text. Pointing out the problems in their strategies
of consumption of the text can help students recognize assumptions they make in the process
of reading or viewing.
This issue of consumption is essential to any pedagogy that engages with multimodal
literacies. In their article, “Critical Visual Literacy: Multimodal Communication Across the
Curriculum,” Barb Blakely Duffelmeyer and Anthony Ellerston aim to
show how multimodal composing reinforces and further develops at least three essential charac-
teristics of a critically literate person, thus helping to lift what W.J.T. Mitchell (2002) so aptly
called the “ideological veil”: (1) understanding that a text is not a transparent window on reality,
but is constructed; (2) developing and demonstrating rhetorical awareness both as a composer
of text and as a reader of text; and (3) developing agency as a communicator and as a reader,
rather than opting for the passivity that our popular media environment makes so easy [1].
These goals are particularly interesting in light of the use of comics as multimodal texts.
The first characteristic they cite points towards the concept that any produced item is always
mediated, but the “transparent window” metaphor is also prominent, which students often
understand in terms of television, film, photographs, and produced images. Comics are
visually deployed through the conventional use of panels and frames, which visually mimic
this window metaphor, but simultaneously draw attention to the mediated work. As the
comic is obviously produced, it is composed for drawings rather than photographs, and is
often hand-lettered rather than having fonts; the hands of the creators are everywhere
present. While this is in itself evident, it is important to immediately introduce the ways
in which other forms of media are also depicted in comics, and the way in which this points
towards the way in which these other media are constructed, like the comic.
The second characteristic speaks to those elements of Design Jacobs discusses from the
New London Group. The development of rhetorical awareness comes partly from this under-
standing of the constructedness of the text, but also must be acknowledged in the students’
own writing. The exercise in assumptions and methods of consumption is again useful, as
it dispels the notions of transparency that many students cling to. The third characteristic
reformulates the idea of cognition and perception as mutually enriching engagements —
“perception” is often a coded word for passivity, while “cognition” is an essential part of the
development of “agency,” but in the case of comics, the textual component maintains a sort
of forced activity on a level which requires further engagement, while maintaining a steady
stream of images that may be “passively” perceived and incorporated into the play of the
text.
Jacobs asserts that “Marvel (and the other comics companies) were and are invested in
promoting a particular kind of multimodal literacy rather than positioning comics as an
intermediate step to print literacy” (186), but comics are in some sense an “intermediate”
step. They are neither towards print literacies nor visual literacies, but are towards complex
multimodalities and exist rather as a liminality that can be exploited in the classroom as a
space of radical literacy, and thus, of radical production. Of course, Jacobs is talking primarily
about comics in their serialized form as an artifact that promotes a particular variety of lit-
eracy with an end dominated by consumption and brand loyalty to comics companies. It
is however very difficult to teach serialized comics in a classroom during a ten- or fifteen-
week course. Many ongoing serial comics have ten to twenty years of history, and the well-
known superheroes often have more than fifty years of the primary run as well as offshoots,
riffs by different writers and artists, brief appearances in other series, etc. Jacobs’ point about
serialized comics is primarily that the brand of multimodal literacy marketed by comics
companies promotes a specialized consumption, but I note serialized comics engender prob-
lems that teachers may encounter when working with well-known superheroes and other
characters. For example, we assume that our students are familiar with Superman, but there
are relatively few individual “graphic narrative-type” story lines that could be used in a class
delimited by the quarter or semester systems. Most storylines reference prior storylines, and
continuity in series, though critiqued when it is violated, becomes profoundly problematic
as one finds it necessary to explain how a particular scene addresses a problem in the origin
story that is not in fact depicted in this comic, but was depicted in issue seventeen, some
three hundred issues prior to the comic under current consideration.
Serialized comics are fundamentally different from graphic novels, in both duration
and content. Graphic novels tell a discrete story, and while they may draw from characters
created elsewhere, most take the time to explain relevant traits and their source prior to
launching into a story. Comics, because they were created for consistent consumption over
a period of years, often have less in the way of explanation-per-issue. While the differenti-
ation of terminology is important, and a number of definitions have been produced to this
end,1 this chapter will instead focus on comics in general and their pedagogical utility. To
this end, I will include my use of both graphic narratives and serialized comics/trade paper-
backs. In this chapter I use the terms “graphic narrative” and “comic” interchangeably,
because in these courses only comics that were collected into a single, discrete volume were
used (whether they were a part of an ongoing series, focused on an iconic character, or were
produced as a volume originally). The graphic narrative opens possibilities in composition
and literature classrooms.
Composing Perspective: Point of View and Comics in Composition

Classes
My English Composition 103 class during the spring quarter of 2007 was the first time
I had the opportunity to work with a full-length graphic novel in the classroom. The (now
defunct) Composition 103 course was meant to build on the skills learned in 101 and 102,
and focused primarily on the analysis of literature.2 The class was predominantly composed
of students in the final quarter of their freshman year, most of whom had taken the 101-
102-103 series in consecutive quarters. A few students had failed a previous course and had
had to retake either 101 or 102, and some had taken several quarters off of English classes
before returning for the final installment in the series. The course was thematically centered
around violence and aging, and the final research paper focused on The Dark Knight Returns,
Frank Miller’s 1986 graphic narrative that explores Batman’s return to the cape after a hiatus
during which he has become an old man. For this project, I asked students to build on the
character analysis and the examination of an issue through literature essays that they had
already produced, and asked that they focus on one particular issue at stake in the graphic
narrative: the media, heroism, the American city, or villainy. Through one of these topics,
they produced analyses of how age and ageism operate in the text. This thematic focus
proved to be somewhat challenging for the students (most of whom were eighteen or nineteen
years old), but allowed them to explore this issue (which has a very obvious visual compo-
nent) to which few had given much thought.
My Intermediate Composition 289 class during autumn quarter 2009 was composed
primarily of sophomores and juniors, most of whom were originally from Cincinnati. This
course was nominally themed around visual culture and issues of iconicity. Students found
that the use of comics helped illuminate the terms around which the course was built, “dis-
course community” and “genre.” Comics provided an important platform for the discussion
of genre, as comics are a genre that partakes of several genres, and comics themselves can
be divided into subgenres. During our examinations of genre, we used short selections from
Art Speigelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, two texts
commonly used in both composition and literature classes. These were supplemented with
Bill Watterson’s Calvin & Hobbes, which during its ten years of production appeared pri-
marily in newspapers and collections. Students found that the vastly different visual styles
of these comics helped them import a fairly obvious assertion (“things can be drawn differ-
ently”) into other modes of visual culture, which itself fed into a discussion of different
rhetorical styles within the context of other types of multimodal texts.
The final project for this course is to analyze an issue with which we have been working,
using a variety of modes of analysis, rhetorical, visual, narratological, aural, and so on, to
engage with the issue. For this project, students must focus in one of two ways, either on
a particular discourse community and the different ways in which it produces and consumes
texts, or on a particular issue and the ways in which various discourse communities produce
and consume texts surrounding the issue. Composition courses are centered on the student’s
development as a writer, so in some senses it may seem counter-intuitive to use multimodal
texts as a base for these types of classes, because it could conceivably distract students from
the primary purpose of the class. However, most students during college and in their career
will be producing multimodal texts far more often than traditional essays, since the workplace
becomes increasingly digitized. So, what is the argument for the use of graphic narrative-
based assignments?
Multimodality is in some senses based on the combination of words and pictures.
While Jacobs is right when he indicates that comics are promoting a particular kind of mul-
timodal literacy, that kind of literacy can be translated to other multimodalities. It is par-
ticularly important to use graphic narratives and comics in the composition classroom for
this reason — they represent a basic formulation of rhetoric at play between genres, and how
those genres combine to create a new mode of communication. In addition, popular culture
is always a good bet for keeping students interested in the writing process, and graphic nar-
ratives offer a platform for this which is often unfamiliar to a majority of students. Comics
are popular with a fairly narrow subsection of the geekery, and for the most part, students
in the composition classroom have never read comics beyond the funny pages in the daily
newspaper, and possibly a few political cartoons. This alternative type of literacy is impor-
tant, again, for the work to be done bridging between classical notions of literacy and more
complex multimodal literacies that require learning new ways to read on an almost daily
basis (for example, many websites require radically different ways of reading because of their
arrangement). This issue of arrangement is foregrounded in comics in terms of the exam-
ination of the layout of panels on the page, the analysis of what is depicted versus what is
relegated to the gutter, how space is used within the panels as well as on the page and the
purpose therein and the style(s) of artwork. Drawing attention to the kinds of choices the
producers of comics are making helps students better grasp issues of composition and
arrangement in texts that are predominantly textual, but more importantly, in texts that
combine numerous modalities. In addition, comics demonstrate visually and textually how
the producer of a text may direct the reading of that text — speed is the most obvious element
in comics, as lengthier panels encourage the reader to linger, while short panels depict
shorter periods of time, and encourage the eye to skim across them.3 Speed is not, however,
the only element that directs/controls/modulates the reading process of direction. The num-
ber of panels on a page, and the size of the panel in relation to others adjacent (or in the
book as a whole) denote importance. In Watchmen, for example, the panels are mostly laid
out in a nine panel-per-page grid format, with a few notable exceptions, including the final
scene in which a dead squid monster is teleported into central New York — the carnage
reaches over two full pages, jarring the eye from the habit of reading that the book has pro-
moted thus far. When students recognize these choices, they become more conscious of
their own agency in the creation of their texts.
Spandex and Analysis: Comics in the Literature Classroom

Two of the literature classes I have taught at the University of Cincinnati have been
entirely focused on comics and graphic narratives. The first, in the autumn quarter of 2008,
was themed around the figure of the vigilante, and explored the concepts of justice and
justified violence. The class met on Wednesdays from 6:30 to 9:20 P.M.— the timing is not-
able as it gestures toward the make-up of the class. While most of the students were in their
early 20s, much of the class also either held down full-time jobs or had particular demands
in their majors that required they take night classes for scheduling purposes. In addition,
a large percentage of the class had families of their own, which limited the times at which
they could take classes to those hours during which their spouse would be available for child
caretaking. The unique composition of this class proved to be a boon, as many of the stu-
dents enjoyed reading, but with their many other responsibilities, rarely had time to sit
down with a book. The second, in the summer quarter of 2009, was themed around women
in comics, and explored representations of women and violence. The class took place over
three weeks during one of the accelerated summer terms, and therefore necessitated an enor-
mous time-commitment from students. This class was primarily composed of students in
their early 20s, most of whom were attempting to finish their degree quickly — a very moti-
vated bunch.
It is useful to examine these two courses side-by-side both because of their composition
and because of the way in which the material appealed to the divergent groups. The course
on vigilantes used Brian Azzarello and Marcelo Frusin’s Hellblazer: Freezes Over (2003),
Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s Watchmen (1987), Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale’s Batman: The
Long Halloween (1999), Bill Willingham et al.’s Fables: 1001 Nights of Snowfall (2008), and
Mat Johnson and Warren Peace’s Incognegro (2008). In addition, the final reading assignment
was a single comic by Garth Ennis called “Punisher: The End,” which depicts an aged Frank
Castle leaving a bunker in Sing Sing a year after the nuclear Holocaust. Vigilantes have
always captured the imagination of the American public, and the figure of the vigilante has
been perceived in both positive ways (as is often the case with individual retribution when
the justice system has failed) and negative ways (as with lynching of African Americans).
The extra-legal nature of the vigilante’s actions makes them alternately admired as protectors
of the common man and abhorred as fascists. Comics often provide the most interesting
and nuanced portrayals of those who work outside of the law in the name of “justice.” By
examining this phenomenon in this course, we worked to gain a better understanding of
how we construct the identity of the vigilante, the “hero,” the “other,” and our own moral
and ethical identities. The course on women in comics included Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home
(2006), Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s V for Vendetta, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis 1 (2003),
Daniel Clowes’ Ghost World (1997), and Bill Willingham et al.’s Fables: 1001 Nights of Snow-
fall. Women have always represented a kind of vacuum in comics — since they do not rep-
resent a large portion of the readership, male authors are generally given tacit approval to
formulate the female body and mind in whatever way they deem necessary for the work.
This has bred reiterations of virgin/whore stereotypes, and also, a tacit acknowledgement
that women are never the “heroes” of their stories. In addition, the female body has been
used in disturbing ways in comics, as everyone knows the stereotypical “comic-book body,”
which is a grotesquely mutated form of the hourglass. However, women have increasingly
become a more integral part of the comic world both as readers and as writers. We looked
at the above “atypical” comics about women, and examined the different ways in which
stereotypes have been overturned or have sneakily remained.
The final project in my comics literature classes has two distinct parts: a literary analysis
and a “creative analysis.” These two parts must be linked, and must build upon one another,
demonstrating the organic reciprocity found in comics. I suggest that students use analytical
tools learned within the context of their major as interventions for the creative analysis par-
ticularly, to help them become more comfortable with the platform of “creativity.” “Literary
analysis” is a phrase that many find daunting because of its lack of specificity and the fact
that most students are worried about their interpretations being “wrong.” I reiterate the idea
that most literary analysis is based in making an argument through available textual evidence
about some larger phenomenon. In the course that considered the vigilante figure, we focused
primarily on the vigilante and anti-hero, but we also discussed race, sex and gender, class,
psychology, and myth in America, and made cases for various figures being certain “types”
and various types of justice being fore-grounded. The analytical paper built upon this, mak-
ing a sustained argument about a character, a comic as a whole, what their actions or the
path of the plot are saying about truth, justice, the American way, and the vigilante tradition.
In the course on women in comics, we worked with various theoretical lenses from a feminist
perspective, but the most important component was the line we drew between various kinds
of visual depictions of women versus how they actually functioned in the plot.
The second part is a “creative analysis” and includes analytical and creative components
that respond to the New London Group’s theory of Design. It is difficult to compose direc-
tions for something that requires room for significant variation, so I instead begin with my
reasoning for this part of the assignment. I tell students that literary analysis is important
work, but it does not efface the value of other forms, and in fact, most literary theory draws
from contributions made by philosophy, economics, geography, scientific discourses, feminist
and masculinist theories, psychology, and other disciplines. By the time students are taking
their literature requirement, most have chosen a major and have a general idea of the con-
tributions they would like to make to society. My goal with this second part is for students
to use the tools and modes of thinking that they have developed in their major to produce
a project that uses one of the comics we studied (or a comic they have found that would be
more relevant) within the context of their primary work. This project must engage with,
analyze, and creatively intervene with the themes of the comic.
After assigning the essay, a number of students come into office hours (this assignment
is a great way to encourage individual interaction), complaining that they are “not creative.”
My first response is “what is your major?” We then launch into various topics of interest in
that particular major that could be adapted to this project. For example, one of my ballet
students was at a loss for to how to incorporate her major into the project — an understand-
able condition in a class primarily focused on vigilantes and violence. I suggested she use
Fables: 1001 Nights of Snowfall, and she offered to perform short versions of the classical and
contemporary versions of a ballet to address the visual dimension of retelling. In her literary
analysis, she primarily focused on how the fable retellings were visually rendered, and how
this connected to pictorial depictions in children’s books contra the original fables. In her
creative analysis, she drew on her analysis of the retellings to discuss ballets based on fables,
and the manner in which visual representation in ballet has changed from classical to con-
temporary forms, as well as how this connects to audience expectation. Her discussion of
the various styles of artwork in 1001 Nights of Snowfall allowed her to enter into a closer
analysis of her own preferred mode of visual representation, underscoring for this student
how literature connects to her work.
Students Producing Their Texts

In each of the classes above, one or two comics provoked particularly visceral reactions
in students, and their enthusiasm for these texts translated into their final projects. In exam-
ining these texts for their relative popularity with the class, I would do a disservice to the
other texts used, since each work built upon the last, and the critical lenses introduced with
each successive text were useful for all. However, the result of the popularity of particular
texts is that the students produced texts in corresponding modes of literacy, extrapolating
on thematic concerns raised in the text, and demonstrating the critical range that was my
goal in the final project.
In my Vigilantes Literature class, Batman: The Long Halloween spoke to the majority
of the class, especially the males, while Fables: 1001 Nights of Snowfall seemed to appeal to
the females. This was partly interesting for the fairly strict gender lines the class fell into,
but the resultant works indicated that this broad categorization insufficiently explained stu-
dents’ investment in particular texts. Two projects in particular stood out. A male student
produced a GIS map of Gotham based on research from the book and from the DC universe,
and using the philanthropic efforts of the Wayne foundation, described how monetary
resources could be allotted so as to reduce the overall crime rate in Gotham, therefore reduc-
ing the need for Batman. By examining other comics and maps produced of Gotham, he
correlated particular incidents in the series with particular neighborhoods, and based on
the types of crimes, described how resources could be allotted to reduce these types of
crimes, including an overall recommendation for enhanced funding for education to secure
against future crime. This project was compelling for a number of reasons, the first of which
is undoubtedly the production of a different kind of multimodal text in response to a par-
ticular issue raised in the comic. While this student was a geography major and so had
access to the knowledge (not to mention the equipment) to produce a text of this complexity,
he also did an enormous amount of research to create multiple maps that responded to this
issue in the text, using real world data on the reduction of crime rates to project expected
crime rate reduction in Gotham. In addition, the mapping technology itself was interesting,
as the comic gives a localized view of place, while the map’s aerial view allows one to see
the structural aspects of a city. This correlation between the global and the local allowed
this student to see the connections between larger issues (like urban planning and community
development) and the individual (like the victims of crime in a neighborhood with high
crime rates). In addition to these maps, the student created a scenario in which the maps
could be plausibly presented: a city hall meeting. The creative analysis component was com-
posed of the minutes of this meeting coupled with the maps.
This was obviously an impressive project, and among the best in the class, but it also
reveals interesting points of engagement which comics provide. While Batman is firmly
entrenched in the realm of fantasy, it also addresses realities in the students’ lives, particularly
in a university setting in a high crime area of a metropolis. The thematic connections there-
fore become more obvious because they are foregrounded against a backdrop of the make-
believe. Unlike more realistic fiction, fantastical comics allow the student to focus on the
material reality as it is depicted, rather than as they have experienced it. Susan Naomi Bern-
stein explores this from a different angle in her article “Writing Classroom: Intersections in
Discovery for Young Women Reading Persepolis 2,” in which she discusses how Persepolis 2
promoted agency in remedial-level writing students. Persepolis 2 is a memoir, and as such
is based on actual events, but there is a gulf between the experience of a privileged Iranian
girl forced to flee her country and the students in Bernstein’s class. However, this gulf in
experience allowed students to better engage with the text partly because of this unfamiliarity.
She notes that “[t]he awareness of material realities in the classroom accounted for both
cultural and textual ‘intersectionality’ in our everyday practice,” and goes on to explain that
the concept of “intersectionality” refers to subjects that are “constructed of multiple social
forces” (Bernstein 5). Intersectionality refers not only to the student as subject, but also to
the subjects addressed in the text — the graphic narrative, through its multimodality, reveals
the multiply layered nature of subjecthood.
In my Intermediate Composition 289 course, students were required to seek out their
own multimodal texts. This course focused on writing, addressing issues of genre and devel-
oping an understanding of discourse communities. Two projects in particular stood out in
terms of their use of graphic narratives. The first addressed the figure of Batman, analyzing
multiple genres in an attempt to argue that Batman’s appeal to a number of discourse com-
munities was based in his propensity to excessive force (unlike many other superheroes),
rather than other factors. This student addressed problems of violence in media as they are
represented in works like The Dark Knight Returns, in addition to using a number of films,
blogs, and literary analyses to examine the nature of Batman’s popularity. The second was
not directly focused on a well-known comic character, however — it focused on the various
genres of zoos around the world, and argued that zoos were relevant to daily life in a number
of different ways, depending on the discourse community from which one approached the
institution. While her analysis of various genres focused on both scholarly and fictional
accounts of zoos, she used Pride of Baghdad to underscore her point about the potential
problems we encounter not when we anthropomorphize animals, but rather when we fail
to do so. While this student was well-aware of the problems with such an argument, she
drew many of her points from other literary references, including Aesop, to indicate that
zoos occupy a place that is essential to any society. These two examples demonstrate one of
the important uses of graphic narratives in the composition classroom — the graphic narrative
as a platform for the examination of multimodal culture at large. By understanding the
comic genre as producing a particular kind of literacy, students were encouraged to look at
other types of “texts” as objects that could be “read.” In the case of the first student, the
realization was that one could not only read a book about the character, but one could read
a character’s cultural location. The second student realized that reading institutions was
important, particularly in light of how one formulates a political project. Teaching students
multimodal literacy, particularly through comics, helps students develop their analytical
skills to a wide range of situations. This is essential in three respects. First, through learning
about the panel and page layout, they learn to consider structure as a rhetorical element of
writing. Second, by analyzing the visual components individually and in relation to the tex-
tual components, students gain a better understanding of the way in which rhetorical ele-
ments operate simultaneously. Finally, students are able to transfer this knowledge to other
types of literacies. Giving students the tools to develop their own literacy practices is arguably
the most important use of graphic narratives in the composition classroom.
Graphic narratives and comics are a vital genre to consider when constructing courses,
particularly those that are geared towards students who are early in their college experience.
Because the workplace increasingly demands production of multimodal texts, teachers of
literature and writing should work towards incorporating multimodal texts and the concept
of multimodal literacy into their classrooms. Given the ambiguity of multimodality, espe-
cially with the vast variety of texts that the term encapsulates, it is important to consider
how best to introduce students to this concept — particularly through genres of which they
are already aware. Graphic narratives provide a unique platform for this pedagogy, as they
combine relatively familiar genres to produce one that is entirely new. In addition, their
framework provides an exceptional opportunity for the interrogation of all cultural artifacts
as the products of mediation. This allows students to use their final projects to reflect on
their own interactions with media, both as producers and consumers of a variety of texts,
no matter how creative they are convinced they are not.
NOTES
1. Scott McCloud’s “juxtaposed sequential art,” Hillary Chute and Marie deKoven’s “graphic narrative,”
Theirry Greonsteen’s position of the primacy of the pictorial, etc.
2. The English Composition department replaced 103 in 2008 with Intermediate Composition 289, which
offers a platform for a broader analysis of discourse communities by incorporating texts from a number of different
disciplines in a variety of genres.
3. See McCloud’s Understanding Comics.
WORKS CITED
Bernstein, Susan Naomi. “Material Realities in the Basic Writing Classroom: Intersections of Discovery for Young
Women in Reading Persepolis 2.” Journal of Basic Writing 27.1 (2008): 80–104. Print.
de Saussure, Ferdinand. “General Course on Linguistics.” Norton Antholog y of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent
B. Leitch. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001. Print.
Duffelmeyer, Barb Blakely, and Anthony Ellerston. “Critical Visual Literacy: Multimodal Communication across
the Curriculum.” Across the Disciplines. 11 Nov. 2009. Web. 21 Dec. 2011. <http://wac.colostate.edu/atd/
visual/dufflemeyer_ellerston.cfm>.
Gillenwater, Cary. “Lost Literacy: How Graphic Narratives Can Recover Visual Literacy in the Literacy Class-
room.” Afterimage 37.2 (2009): 33–36. Print.
Helmers, Marguerite, and Charles Hill. Defining Visual Rhetorics. New York and London: Routledge, 2004. Print.
Jacobs, Dale. “Marveling at The Man Called Nova: Comics as Sponsors of Multimodal Literacy.” College Compo-
sition and Communication 59.2 (2007): 180–205. Print.
18. 300 Ways to Teach the Epic
MARY ANN TOBIN
Film critics, several academics of my acquaintance, and even Iranian President Mah-
moud Ahmadinejad criticized the movie 300 (2007) for its fantastical and inaccurate por-
trayals of the Battle of Thermopylae (480 B.C.E.). In their critiques, they disparage the
unlikely event of a battle-decked rhinoceros careening across that particular battlefield, the
possibility of a giant lobster-clawed executioner, the demonization of Persians, and, appar-
ently most disconcerting of all, a seven-and-a-half-foot nearly-naked Xerxes. Conversely,
others praise director Zack Snyder’s use of choreographed performances before a blue-screen
in order, as Todd McCarthy says, to “sumptuously realize” (par. 13) Frank Miller’s graphic
novel 300 (1998), a retelling of the second-hand account of the conflict written by Herodotus
half a century after the event took place. Regardless of 300’s flaws, it relies on the ancient
conventions of the epic to depict Spartan concepts of honor, duty, glory, combat, and
victory. As such, it offers an engaging means of teaching epics like the Iliad, the Odyssey,
and the Aeneid to students of the YouTube generation.
Beyond illustrating epic conventions, in its use of the current cinematic and video-
game method of narrative suture, 300 presents opportunities to explore the form and func-
tion of epic poetry as oral history, helping twenty-first-century students to appreciate such
texts in an entirely new way. Stephen Heath defines “suture” as “the dual process of multi-
plication and projection [forming] the conjunction of the spectator as subject with the film”
(par. 40), in which “a character in the film com[es] to take the place of the absent one posed
by the spectator” (par. 21). In other words, the action in the film is typically shown from
the viewpoint of one or more of its characters, and the audience sees the action through
those eyes. This method has been adopted by the video-game industry for use in role-
playing games, wherein players select a pre-programmed or customizable Player Character
(PC) with its own complement of weapons and, one could say, cultural ethos. In directing
their PCs’ movements, players formulate their own narratives as they encounter new scenarios
and incorporate new actions virtually every time they play. In order to advance to new levels
within the game, players must rely on the wisdom gained from their previous plays. The
application of narrative suture has also been embraced by amateur videographers, whose
submissions to YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, and other Internet-based social networks
feature innumerable revisions of stories from television and film. The videographers literally
weave themselves and their figurative points of view into their chosen narratives.
Despite complaints of the mind-numbing qualities of video games, television, and
movies, today’s students have a lot of practice suturing themselves into narratives, as well
232
18. 300 Ways to Teach the Epic (Tobin) 233
as following and recalling the kinds of multiple narrative threads and long digressions we
typically find in epic poetry. These are cognitive efforts not usually attributed to Generations
X and Y. Stephen Johnson, for one, seeks to dispel this stereotype in his article “Watching
TV Makes You Smarter,” in which he argues that, ever since the debut of Hill Street Blues
in 1981, the “Sleeper Curve,” as he calls it, “is the single most important new force altering
the mental development of young people today [and] it is largely a force for good: enhancing
our cognitive faculties, not dumbing them down” (par. 4). He explains that “to keep up
with entertainment like 24, you have to pay attention, make inferences, track shifting social
relationships. This is what I call the Sleeper Curve: the most debased forms of mass diver-
sion — video games and violent television dramas and juvenile sitcoms — turn out to be
nutritional after all” (par. 4). Similarly, the ancient epic storyteller relied on elements of
audience participation — that his audience was engaged in active listening, would follow
his tale over the course of several hours (or even days), and inferred their own cultural ethos
by tracking the social relationships among the many characters in the poems. These are the
very skills our students hone while watching episodic television shows and movies with
multiple plotlines and large casts made up of recurring roles, while making their own videos,
or while taking on the persona of a Spartan warrior in the Halo videogame series. As my
student Boris Nedinic reminds us, the virtual real-worldliness of role-playing video games
is a great feature, but “would be a wasted tool if not properly supported by ... an interesting
and engaging story” (2). The same is true for graphic novels and films like 300 that, via
vividly stylized illustrations and computer-generated imagery, tell a story through realistic
yet fantastic virtual worlds. Thus, the graphic novel and film 300 present practical, accessible,
and entertaining ways to approach epic poetry, which, through fantasy, convey to readers
generally accepted universal truths.
By aligning the audience’s point of view with that of the Greek army before battle,
Dilios, 300 ’s storyteller in both the book and the film, weaves his tale for both an external
audience and an internal one, inspiring both to adopt his cultural ethos. In this sense,
readers and viewers are sewn (or sutured) into the narrative, much as the listeners of an oral
poet would have been as they were regaled by their cultural history, like gamers are when
they select their PCs, and like amateur videographers are as they record their own deeds for
posterity. As Andrew Dalby tells us, the oral historian relies on formulae to master and re-
create “a repertoire of stories” passed down from one generation of poets or singers to the
next and, in the process, “develops the skill of producing, on demand, a poem that will
satisfy the audience” (189). Epic storytellers always personalize their narratives in order to
captivate their audiences while retaining the original tales’ characters, plots, dialogues, set-
tings, and themes. However, Dalby cautions that the learning of those formulae “does not
mean that any singer is compelled to repeat them without changing them” (189) or adding
new twists to engage his listeners.
Therefore, while we may cringe at the sight of a battle-decked rhinoceros, a lobster-
clawed hatchet-man, or a super-sized Persian king, 300 re-envisions and reanimates the
ancient art of oral history, thereby offering a practical means of teaching an often neglected
element of the epic: neither the Illiad nor the Odyssey were meant merely to lie dormant on
a page; they were to be performed before live audiences in order to awaken the imaginations
of their hearers. Gamers and YouTubers, therefore, should be very comfortable with such
concepts and should find approaching the epic in this manner more appealing than reading
a static text.
Moreover, as historian Victor Davis Hanson argues in his interview for Adapting the
Graphic Novel, 300 “is consistent with a long line of interpretation ... whether it’s vase
painters in the fourth century or Herodotus in the fifth, each person is trying to convey this
wonderful event” in his own way for his own time. Similarly, as Ruth Scodel asserts, “In a
tradition of this kind, performers neither memorize fixed texts nor improvise freely. An
aspiring performer learns stylized diction, performance style, themes, and the outlines
of narratives and recombines them before audiences” (1). In speaking of his own participa-
tion in what he calls the “long, worthy history of stylized violence,” Miller spins the same
thread that Scodel traces in the works of the epic poets and singers (“Adapting the Graphic
Novel”).
Epic poetry has always been a performance, as malleable and as open to interpretation
as any dance, symphony, or drama as seen on any stage, at the cineplex, or on your high-
definition television. Accordingly, John Clark speaks of the Iliad as a performance, saying,
“When we think of the Iliad as a story, we think of the actors and their acting” (10; emphasis
added), not of characters on a page. Similarly, Scodel suggests that the “Homeric poems are
directed toward performance, even if they were composed in writing” (3). Therefore, it
make sense that we start treating the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aenied (and even Giglamesh,
Beowulf and The Tempest) as performances, letting our students develop their own ways to
suture themselves into those narratives, as they seem to enjoy doing in their virtual worlds.
The final point to be made before presenting some results of my course unit on 300
concerns those who doubt that epic poetry can hold any interest for today’s gamers and
YouTubers. First, the graphic novel 300 continues to attract readers. It first appeared as a
five-part series between May and August 1998, with each issue named for the graphic novel’s
themes — honor, duty, glory, combat, and victory — and one year later a hardcopy, large-
format edition of the book was released (Complete Works, par. 1–7) that was reprinted in
2006 and remains in print. The film 300 was an immense and immediate success, attracting
an audience “evenly split between folks over and under age 25” (Rich, par. 5) who spent
“$456 million in worldwide box office,” making the film, at that point, “the highest-grossing
March release ever” (Boucher, par. 8–9). On July 21, 2009, Warner Bros. released its third
edition of the film on a “Limited Edition” digital video disc, featuring “The Complete
Experience” of the story that includes a copy of the graphic novel along with a digital copy
of the film that can be downloaded onto a computer or portable media player for viewing
as often as one likes.
Additionally, 300 seems to have inspired Hollywood’s replication machine. New films
based on ancient epics continue to reach theaters, often presaged with cross-merchandised
books and video games in stores well in advance of the films’ debuts. Beowulf, for example,
appeared in 2007, and a remake of Clash of the Titans was released in April 2010. Also in
2010, the first of Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson and The Olympians series of children’s books
made it to the big screen and several sequels likely will follow. Most recently, the multifarious
legends of Theseus have been recast by the producers of 300 in “The Immortals” (2011).
Geoff Boucher reports that Miller is jumping on his own bandwagon, too, in “preparing a
follow-up [to 300] now titled Xerxes which begins about 10 years before the events of 300,
and Snyder has expressed interest in it as a film property as well. [Miller says,] ‘It’s the battle
of Marathon through my lens.... I’ve finished the plot and I’m getting started on the artwork’”
(par. 10). Boucher continues, “Miller said he is not surprised Greece is resurgent in Holly-
wood. ‘Every generation returns to ancient Greece because, well, the stories are so damn
good’” (par. 10). In The Los Angeles Times, Snyder confirms plans for a sequel, stating his
intention to create an “everyman” version of the Battle of Artemisium, which coincided
with the Battle of Thermopylae (par. 7). Likewise, the film 300 has left its mark on the
small screen in the History Channel’s Clash of the Gods and Battles BC, which feature 300-
like, blood-splattered replications of fantastical and historical battles. Apparently, Hollywood
perceives that today’s youth are interested in classical themes that happen to feature lots of
guts and glory — time-tested motifs that consistently break box office records.
Perhaps students’ seeming lack of interest heretofore lies in academia’s insistence upon
treating epic poetry as capital-L Literature, instead of as plain old good stories like Holly-
wood directors and graphic artists do. Traditionally, academia has emphasized the more
noble aspects of epic poetry by stripping it of its all-too-real and all-too-human qualities.
The less-than-noble subject of the Iliad, for instance, is “mênin” (rage). As Clark states, “It
is a tale limited to four moments — anger, turmoil, reconciliation, vengeance” that, never-
theless, “end in an ethical sunset of warm and radiant humanity” (10). Despite these attempts,
however, and regardless of its sometimes less than wholesome trappings, epic poetry survives
and thrives through the graphic novel and Hollywood blockbuster. Therefore, if we are to
reach the fanboys and fangirls in our courses, we must bring the epic down from its white-
marbled pedestal to a more colorful human level.
In preparation to teach a section of Triton College’s RHT102: Freshman Rhetoric and
Composition as a linked course with HIS296: The Spartans, I incorporated a 300 course
unit into three separate sections of RHT102 in the spring, summer and fall 2008 terms.1
The in-class discussions and writing assignments of my students in those sections fulfilled
and sometimes surpassed my expectations. In my face-to-face RHT102, students read and
respond to literature by submitting one index card per session with three questions about
their readings (to ensure that my lectures cover their areas of concern), by collaborating in
groups of three or four on one-minute-papers that then form the basis for class discussions,
and by producing formal essays, one on each of the larger thematic units of Short Story,
Poetry, Drama, and the Novel. They also write another formal essay as part of their final
examinations. The epic poetry unit bridges the Poetry and Drama units, and the 300 course
module appears after students have read and discussed the formal elements and themes of
an epic poem and a classical Greek drama. Four fifty-minute class sessions are allotted to
the 300 course module: two class sessions to view the film and to discuss how it reflects
epic conventions; one to compare it with the Iliad and Sophocles’ Oedipus the King; and
one review session. In self-directed study, students can supplement their understanding of
the texts at several reliable websites devoted to ancient culture and history, Greek literature,
the full text of The History of Herodotus and reviews of 300 via links at my own English
Composition website.
In those three semesters, we read and discussed Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried
(1986), poems related to ancient history and war,2 including those of Brian Turner (an
American veteran of both Iraq Wars) and Anton Sinoon (an Iraqi native in residence during
the first Gulf War), Books I (“The Rage of Achilles”) and XXII (“The Death of Hector”)
of Homer’s Iliad, and Sophocles’ Oedipus the King. In each of these readings, students
encountered the themes of honor, duty, glory, combat, and victory, all of which also appear
in 300. I then encouraged them to apply those Classical themes to our own national discourse
about righteous leadership by government officials, patriotism, justifiable acts of war, and
the glory of combat. Students then were given the option to write a review of or critical
response to either Oedipus the King, the film 300, or a twentieth-century American drama.
Many chose to write about 300, some of whom compared and contrasted its content with
that of the graphic novel.
In presenting and discussing the aforementioned themes conveyed in print, on the

screen and through interdidactic discourse, students rely on many of the Learning Styles
described by Lynne Celli Sarasin in Learning Styles Perspectives: Impact in the Classroom, par-
ticularly auditory, visual, abstract, sequential, concrete or reflective learning (15–21). As a
community-college instructor, most of my students are adult learners, whom Sarasin further
classifies as experiential learners (11). Those experiences frequently include recent combat
or military support duty, the sharing of which enhances and enriches all of my students’
understanding of the texts since we are less inclined to treat epic poetry as mere “stylized
violence.” Instead, we explore where and how our cultural ethoi about patriotism and warfare
were formed and analyze those ideals for relevancy in the twenty-first century. Thus, we
debate the very existence of universal truths that are readily apparent in fantasy (but less so
in reality).
The epic conventions are quickly accounted for in the book and in the film 300, as we
can see in Table 1, the first column of which I typically present in the classroom after my
students have read and discussed portions of the Iliad and the entirety of Oedipus the King
and have skimmed the graphic novel in class before we view the film.3
TABLE 1
Epic Conventions Epic Conventions in 300
An epic is a long, narrative The real Battle of Thermopylae lasted three days, but Dilios
poem written in lofty style. tells us Leonidas’ entire life story in laudatory style.
It begins in medias res ... In the graphic novel, Dilios begins his story as the 300 march
toward Thermopylae, flashes back to Leonidas’ childhood
feats of valor. In the film, Dilios begins his story as the
combined Greek forces amass to reengage Xerxes’ armies at
Plataea and flashes back to Leonidas’ birth.
... with the declaration of a Throughout the book and the film, Dilios, Leonidas, and Gorgo
theme, usually concerning Gorgo reiterate the themes of honor, duty, glory, combat, and
weighty issues and mighty victory, as well as reason versus madness and/or superstition.
deeds. Each of these themes also appear in the Iliad and Oedipus the
King.
Its setting is expansive with In the book and the film, we witness several representatives of
a multi-cultural cast of the nations of the Persian Empire in their particular costumes
characters embodying their bearing their particular weapons on the battlefield. Leonidas
particular socio-religious ethoi. and the 300 portray Spartan ideals; Xerxes and his emissaries
display their ethos, albeit somewhat inaccurately, as is the case
in the Iliad.
Its hero is of national In the book and the film, Leonidas is King of Sparta, is
importance and is a demigod purported to be a descendant of Hercules, the son of Zeus and
or of divine ancestry with is portrayed as being in excellent physical shape with high moral
immense physical or moral standards.
stature.
It features expository, didactic In the graphic novel and the film, Dilios explains discrete
digressions from the plot that Spartan traditions and culture and the personal histories of some
include mini-history lessons, of the warriors. In the film, the camera slowly pans the treasure-
catalogs of warriors, war laden contents of Xerxes’ tent, and we are shown stacks of
machinery, weapons, and war weapons organized and artfully displayed on the battlefield.
prizes.
Epic Conventions Epic Conventions in 300

It speaks of supernatural forces In the graphic novel and the film, the oracle warns Leonidas
interfering with men’s actions “to honor the Carneia,” Zeus is credited with wrecking a
and the superhuman feats portion of Xerxes’ armada, and the 300 are presented as expert
of men. warriors of superhuman valor and skill, particularly Leonidas.
Its purpose is didactic in that We learn about some aspects of Spartan traditions, history, and
it transmits a culture’s history values, particularly what behaviors are truly honorable, glorious,
and ethos as it entertains dutiful, and rational for cultures in crisis, many of which
the audience. continue to be valued today.
After viewing the film together, my students and I return to the first column of this
table, and I ask them to recall and describe specific scenes from 300 to support the assertion
that the film fulfills the epic conventions. Typically, they respond with three or four items
from the second column, which I then reveal in full in order to complete the discussion.
In the process of doing so, students invariably summarize Classical Greek cultural beliefs
and values by comparing and contrasting the characters and plot of 300 with those of the
Iliad and Oedipus the King, thereby reinforcing and demonstrating mastery of concepts cov-
ered in the Poetry and Drama course modules. Likewise, they discuss the gender roles that
appear in the film, comparing and contrasting their own expectations of those roles and
how they have shifted over time.
We then discuss how the epic is performed in both the graphic novel and in the film,
beginning with the way in which historical accuracy undergoes an epic metamorphosis. The
portrayal of Xerxes and his weaponry, for instance, is a good example of the use of epic con-
ventions. I inform students that Miller admits that reality is “never [his] goal” and insists
that “taking liberties” with historical fact “and thinking more and more abstract really
falls into historical tradition” (Murray 3), as Dalby and Scodel describe epic poets having
done. Xerxes seems to have taken on a life of his own under Miller’s pen, as he explains:
“what I wanted out of Xerxes when I was drawing the comic book was to have one figure
that would show the sheer size and exotic qualities of a very rich, very pleasure oriented
culture. As I worked on it, he just got taller and taller and more little ringlets and stuff
all over him to the point where I was driving my painter out of her mind. The idea was
just to get across the opulence of the Persian Empire in contrast to the very stark, severe
Spartans” (2). More importantly, aside from creating this type of dramatic synecdoche, such
fantasizing can reflect the very real distortions of encountering the unknown for the first
time. Miller points to his decision to draw Xerxes’ elephants far larger than to scale: “If you
were a Spartan at the time, it seems really unlikely there were 70 foot elephants in Ther-
mopylae, okay? There haven’t been a lot of them spotted. But how would you remember it
when you first saw this monster? It would be 70 feet tall because nobody from the Greek
side had ever seen an elephant” (3). Intriguingly, however, Miller admits that he “never
intended for [the graphic novel] to be a movie,” but that, in hindsight, he “would have
made it a film” himself (2). Lydia Ballard corroborates the book’s camera-readiness saying,
“From an artistic standpoint, 300 is visually arresting ... each illustration is a two page
spread — which only adds to the book’s allure. It feels like a movie in wide screen format,
larger than life and majestic in its expansiveness” (par. 8). This comparison of the large
format version of the graphic novel with a movie is especially apt, since it highlights “the
theatricality of Miller’s visuals” (par. 8), many of which my students note are painstakingly
recreated in the film.
Thus it makes perfect sense that Snyder states his deliberate intention to recreate
Miller’s self-admittedly stylized version of the Battle of Thermopylae, not the historical
battle itself. Snyder says, “we want every environment to be an environment that is of the
imagination,” inclusive of “landscapes, or battles, or action, or architecture,” which were
“taken from what Frank did.... [W]e said okay, let’s make that real, but let’s not try and
make it into a thing that you’ve seen” (“Adapting the Graphic Novel”). In doing so, Snyder
literally revivifies the Battle of Thermopylae through Miller’s lens, adding his own layers of
drama as an epic poet would do. In this sense, both Miller and Snyder follow the tradition
of epic poetry described by Dably and Scodel.
One additional level of such metafictional creation occurred during filming. Instead
of building physical sets or moving the cast and crew to the site of Thermopylae or a rea-
sonable facsimile, live actors performed their roles in front of a blue screen on minimal
“foreground terrains,” as 300 production designer James Bissell refers to them in the webisode
Making of 300. Like Miller and Snyder, Bissell admits his intention was not to represent
the actual in his virtual world. He calls the film an “operatic treatment of the Battle of
Thermopylae,” adding, “in that sense we’re not really married to historical truth and we’re
not married to realistic filmmaking conventions.” Therefore, while its story is based on his-
toric fact, the film 300 ’s plot, settings, costumes, choreography, and script diverge from the
graphic novel’s portrayal of the event and are several times removed from Herodotus’ version
of the Battle of Thermopylae — just as the Iliad, the Odyssey, and to an even greater extent,
the Aenied, all of which deal with the fall of Troy and its aftermath and tell largely unverifiable
tales that, nevertheless, speak of universal truths and real human experiences. Since the
makers of 300 are very much aware that their stories are more personal works of imagination
than of impersonal fact, I argue that the graphic novel and film combined perform the same
function that the original storytellers would have performed for their audiences who sat lis-
tening to songs about Troy and about Thermopylae.
I then ask my students if these entirely above-board admissions to taking many artistic
and aesthetic licenses with the historical Battle of Thermopylae moot the strategy of pointing
out the graphic novel’s or film’s historical inaccuracies. In the summer and fall 2008 sections,
I projected the article “Ahmadinejad Weighs into Row Over U.S. Film” onto our classrooms’
screen and asked my students to write individual minute-papers responding to Ahmadine-
jad’s assertion that 300 is a weapon of “psychological war, propaganda and misuse of the
organizations [the people of the United States] have themselves created, and for which they
have written the rules, and over which they have a monopoly” through which we “are trying
to prevent [Iran’s] development” (par. 8). The students then formed groups and compared
answers, after which each group’s secretary presented their findings to the class for more
discussion. At this point, discussions enlivened as students debated the definition of “his-
torical accuracy,” what authors and directors in general can, in my students’ words, “get
away with” while modifying the original plot, setting, and characters, why Snyder in par-
ticular thought such modifications necessary in his version of 300, and how movies get
made and are advertised to target specific types of audiences. Ultimately, they decided that
Ahmadinejad had a right to complain about how the Persian army was portrayed, but that
it did not constitute an act of espionage or war. Instead, the film’s mythos was all “just busi-
ness.”
As is typical for Triton College in general, in all three semesters my students came
from diverse cultural backgrounds, including self-declared Greeks, Pakistanis, Turks, Chris-
tians, and Muslims. Our discussions featured many exchanges of personal religious beliefs,
customs, and traditions that informed students’ reception of the texts and the messages they
perceived within them. Thus, my students and I actively participated in an interactive learn-
ing environment that exceeded my own expectations by encountering and sharing entirely
new perspectives on literature in general, epic poetry in particular, and what we continue
to learn about our own society from them. Where I had expected students merely to see a
performance of an epic, they applied what they saw in the very manner in which a true epic
should function, as a didactic transmission of culture.
Such personalization and real-world application of the lessons in this course module
appeared in students’ essays as well, as evinced in the following examples. From the summer
2008 section, Claudia Hernandez speaks of the universal themes that she did not expect to
find in a movie like 300: “This movie is a moral tale for today’s age.... This movie points
out values that we as humans sometimes forget. It shows us that sometimes rules have to
be broken in order to defend and protect those in danger.... This movie also shows that
devotion in what one does and in what one believes will always pay off ” (3). For Hernandez,
300 functions like epic poetry by transmitting democratic and altruistic ideals: one should
reject tyranny and sacrifice oneself for the good of one’s people. Similar altruistic ideals are
noted in Piotr Pilat’s essay from Fall 2008, in which he writes, “The story of Leonidas and
his 300 [warriors] should be an inspiration for anyone who wants to achieve something in
... life. The idea of going to a battle knowing ... that you will achieve something, and that
what you do will not go to waste, is one of the biggest sacrifices that can be made” (4). Both
Hernandez and Pilat find in 300 some of the major themes of the Iliad and Sophocles’
Oedipus the King while acknowledging their continued value in the current era, demonstrat-
ing that several goals of my course module had been achieved.
Hernandez’s classmate Jose Jimenez exceeded my initial goals by applying a cross-cur-
ricular approach to the film. Describing the film’s adherence to current media practices and
audience expectations, he writes, “[t]he movie was damn entertaining. It had everything
that American cultural norms tell us we want. As [a] sociology major, I’ve come to learn
that one of the most powerful agents of socialization is the media. We learn three specific
things from the media: what is attractive, a love and fear of violence, and an expectation
to be entertained. This movie has all three” (4). Like Hernandez, Jimenez points out the
film’s success in transmitting culture, but he speaks of very current ideals of perhaps ques-
tionable value. Nevertheless, we see that the film 300, like epic poetry, teaches its audience
about cultural norms.
Ron Bolger, another summer 2008 student, scrutinizes the historical accuracy of 300
beyond what was covered in class discussions and compares the agoge (the period of military
training Spartan boys started at the age of seven) to the situation in “many parts of Africa,
where they make children into killing machines at young ages to serve the army. It is a sad
realization, but necessary to survive in the time of the Spartans as well as in today’s Africa”
(2). His conclusion, however, speaks volumes about the efficacy of the course module, as
follows.
Most, if not all, of the guidelines [sic] of an epic tale are met by 300, but a question still lingers.
Without the addition of certain aspects in the film, would the tale still be an epic? The clear
answer is no. Without the influence of the director/writers, the film would be a documentary
and not an epic tale and we could not pull away the same ideals about the film. History is boring,
and in order to liven things up a bit and create a story that will entice the listener or reader we
must be willing to bend the truth and entertain. Above all, I was entertained immensely by this
movie, and have truly gained a new respect for epic tales that I would have never thought possible.
I look back upon the classic epics and see that 300 is just a neo-manifestation of ancient Greek
storytelling at its best [Bolger 5].
Bolger thus confirms Miller’s contention that “the stories are so damn good” and reflects
Miller’s realization while in Greece that “the myth and history overlap begins to blur ...
[t]he fact and the myth are inseparable, which adds to the storytelling allure” (Boucher,
par. 10). In such manner, Bolger hits on the head the very nail I had intended my students
to find: the epic, performed instead of read, successfully transmits culture more efficiently
and effectively than a static text while bringing ancient ideals from a misconstrued and sup-
posedly long-done past into our present.
This concept of the past inextricably embedded in the present also found its way into
an essay on Oedipus the King in Fall 2008. Student Brian Plazas writes, “In today’s fast paced
world, we tend to think that our present has nothing to do with our past. We have become
a materialistic and egotistical culture thinking we are the supreme civilization and have sur-
passed all before us. How wrong we are. The modern world is anchored to the past on a
subconscious level” (1). He concludes his essay that “In today’s technologically connected
world, we should look back to our ancestors as guides.... We have replaced the Greek Gods
with money and computer gods. But if we listen to the whispers of ancient kings, we might
be able to learn from their mistakes and hear our salvation as a race. It will bring us one
step closer to deducing the truth behind the human condition” (Plazas 3). Plazas’ essay, in
analyzing, interpreting, and synthesizing course materials from both the Poetry and Drama
units, demonstrates that treating epic poetry as a performance makes students more apt to
understand and apply its form and content beyond itself. By presenting epic poetry as a
form of entertainment, like drama, we reanimate it in its original form and give students a
means of engaging with it in a more familiar and comfortable manner as well as give them
a means to understand why and how our culture influences our personal, political, and
societal choices.
Thus prepared, my students finished their semesters with the metafictional science fic-
tion classic about honor, duty, glory, combat, and the costs of victory, Kurt Vonnegut’s
Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death (1969). The novel
is a fitting choice, since it also covers another recurrent theme of classical literature and
300: fate versus self-determinism. While some students struggle with Billy Pilgrim’s back-
ward and forward leaps through time and space, when they are reminded of how epic poetry,
graphic novels, and movies often employ the same storytelling technique, they become
more comfortable with it and can employ a semester’s worth of course content to the novel.
In their research-based essays on the novel, students frequently returned to concepts
addressed in the Iliad and 300 to describe Pilgrim’s predicament, thereby demonstrating
that in returning to the ancient past we often find the roots of issues that continue to plague
us today.
While such returns have been rewarded in my own classrooms, not every epic poem
will replicate these results. Gilgamesh, the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid and Beowulf, along
with many others not currently in the Western canon, have been recreated as graphic novels,
and film versions of these epics (or portions thereof ) do exist. However, few have taken on
the Herculean task of reanimating these works according to the epic conventions. Therefore,
those versions are unlikely to achieve the goals of the 300 course module described here,
which is to introduce students to the real value of epic poetry as performance: the wisdom
of the ancients is very much with us today.
NOTES
1. In subsequent semesters, I have taught only online courses and have been unable to overcome copyright
restrictions to provide a copy of the film in my course shells. Asking online students to come to campus to watch
a movie as a group, or to rent the movie for individual viewing, is simply impracticable. Therefore, my experiment
with 300 ended in December, 2008. Nevertheless, my RHT102 students still read two books of the Iliad as a
bridge between our Poetry and Drama units, and the discourse over the legacy of the epic continues.
2. These poems included Richard Lovelace’s “To Lucasta, on Going to the Wars” (1649), Percy Bysshe Shel-
ley’s “Ozymandias” (1818), John Keats’ “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” (1816) and “Ode on a Grecian
Urn” (1819), Thomas Hardy’s “Channel Firing” (1914), Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” (1920), Randall
Jerrell’s “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” (1945), and Wislawa Szymborska’s “End and Beginning” (1993)
in translation. The entire courses’ readings were not, however, limited to these themes.
3. Due to departmental concerns for the availability (and, more importantly, the price) of textbooks, I do
not require my students to purchase the graphic novel 300. Instead, the book and the film were held on reserve
in Triton College’s library for my students who wanted closer looks at them.
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19. Comics (as) Journalism
Teaching Joe Sacco’s Palestine to Media Students
ALLA GADASSIK AND SARAH HENSTRA
This chapter examines a case study of using comics in the undergraduate classroom:
teaching a now-canonical piece of graphic nonfiction in an English class comprised mainly
of journalism and radio & television arts majors. Joe Sacco’s Palestine collects nine stories
first published separately in 1993 after the author-illustrator’s two-month journey through
the West Bank and Gaza Strip; the 2001 compilation was reprinted as a special edition with
introductory commentary by the author in 2007. Sacco’s report on the first Palestinian
intifada focuses on the stories he encounters through interviews and casual encounters with
individual Palestinians as well as on his own reactions to and interactions with these indi-
viduals. The self-reflexivity that characterizes Sacco’s journalistic approach made for class
discussions that themselves became self-reflective for our media students: scrutinizing genre
distinctions, deconstructing reading practices, articulating professional standards, mapping
the rhetorical scene, and demythologizing notions of objectivity and neutrality. Reading
and discussing Palestine became a process through which our students grew aware of the
rhetorical construction of mainstream news, including the strategies that underlie their own
work. Combining a reading of Palestine as comics journalism with a critical account of
classroom interactions, we seek to demonstrate both the professional salience and pedagogical
potential of the graphic narrative form beyond the traditional disciplinary boundaries of
English Studies.
As the instructor (Henstra) and the teaching assistant (Gadassik) for an upper-division
required course entitled “The Nature of Narrative: Nonfiction” at Ryerson University in
Toronto, we were curious how media studies majors would react to a text that breaks jour-
nalistic conventions in its form and content. In particular, how would journalism students
organize their responses to Joe Sacco’s highly ironic depictions of his position as a “jour-
nalist”? Sacco’s book has already spurred ongoing debate among literature scholars, but how
would aspiring young media professionals negotiate the irony of his text?
As a text that questions traditional boundaries between genres and styles, Palestine fits
well in a course that was structured to straddle divides between disciplines. Media studies
program curricula often include English courses to help students expand their knowledge
of literary history as well as develop their writing and analytical skills. Since storytelling
models are emphasized in both fictional and nonfictional media production streams, English
courses also contribute to students’ understanding of narrative themes and structure. Short
243
story and nonfiction genres can be particularly relevant for those students who intend to
work in print journalism or broadcast television — in our case, the majority of the class. At
the same time, the material of an English course can seem far removed from the working
models that students acquire in their media production courses. In considerations of form,
long prose, and scholarly writing styles are seen as incompatible with newsprint or broadcast
writing, which privilege briefer, more conversational modes of address (for example, see
Robert A. Papper’s widely referenced style guide for broadcast writing). More importantly,
on the level of course content, the deconstruction and analysis foregrounded in literary crit-
icism can clash with a discipline that still rhetorically emphasizes strong claims to truth.
Broadcast and print journalism, in particular, continue to invest in ideals of objectivity and
impartiality — so much so that students in our class initially had difficulty viewing Sacco’s
self-reflexivity as anything but bad journalism. Indeed, public opinion about what jour-
nalism stands for is behind much of the controversy surrounding Palestine and Sacco’s sub-
sequent works. The media-watch group CAMERA, for example, objected to the cartoonist’s
2003 New York Times piece “The Underground War in Gaza” primarily not on the basis of
its “predictably one-sided” content, but because “the Times presents it as objective reporting
by a ‘journalist’” (Hollander). The author’s claim that his work comprises “comics journal-
ism”— a term he first coined during interviews about the book Palestine— thus posed a
provocative challenge to the boundaries of our students’ professional field, throwing down
the rhetorical gauntlet even before we began to discuss the particulars of the text.
Many of the skills our students learn in their media courses, including story research,
source verification, and expert testimony, are geared toward the construction of a more com-
plete and ostensibly neutral portrait of an event. For example, Tony Harcup’s handbook for
journalism principles and practice includes only a brief discussion on the impossibility of
objectivity, before ending on a note of optimism regarding the importance of diligent cov-
erage in maintaining overall impartiality (60–62). The pedagogical model of responsible
journalistic work emphasizes objective evaluation of multiple perspectives, effacement of
personal editorial comments, and reliance on verified facts and figures. This claim to impar-
tiality and personal distance becomes especially prominent when one considers the differences
in local, national, and international news reporting. Due to both practical and ideological
considerations, some of which will be discussed later, international news coverage is par-
ticularly reliant on institutional sources, and is thus less subject to individual reporters’ self-
scrutiny for editorial bias or ethical responsibility. Moreover, as international media reports
typically contain fewer human-interest stories, students in the class viewed them as somehow
more impartial than the individual accounts foregrounded in Palestine.
Interestingly, Sacco himself implicitly gestures towards such a disciplinary contradiction
in his discussion of Palestine’s inception. Upon first graduating from a journalism program,
he considered himself well-informed, media literate, and prepared to tackle serious political
issues. But when he encountered more scholarly deconstructions of politics, such as Edward
Said’s postcolonial critiques or the structural analyses of Noam Chomsky (in other words,
texts outside of mainstream journalistic discourse), he felt as though he received a new “edu-
cation” that vitally supplemented his earlier journalistic training (Sacco, Palestine ix). In
particular, his external readings and personal experiences led Sacco to understand media
coverage on a broader political and institutional scale, and to question the “objective” bias
of international reportage he found in the American press. During his sojourn in the occu-
pied territories, Sacco was struck by the difference between what he was used to hearing in
the media and what he was experiencing: “I was seeing firsthand that journalism does not
19. Comics (as) Journalism: Sacco’s Palestine (Gadassik / Henstra) 245
always get to the bottom of things, that it can be used to obscure” (Binelli 40). Considering
David Berry’s classification of different approaches to journalistic objectivity, Palestine could
be placed in the rare category of “perspectivism,” which holds that “truth can be found
beyond self-experience, but ‘circumstance’ conditions this reality and therefore objective-
truth is not achievable” (140). Sacco’s work in Palestine thus rests uneasily between an ongo-
ing, firm commitment to journalistic integrity and a conscientious departure from the kind
of foreign coverage that our students were trained to evaluate and produce.
While Sacco was the cartoonist whose label for the genre stuck, there is nonetheless a
history to “comics journalism” that reaches back to reportage in the pre-photography era.
Brad MacKay locates its roots in the American Civil War, when illustrators went to the
front to sketch battle scenes for popular printmakers like Currier and Ives (25). Other pre-
cursors might include Thomas Nast’s satirical cartoons in Harper’s Weekly and Garry Tru-
deau’s Doonesbury. Many commentators also link comics journalism with the New Journalism
movement popularized by writers like Truman Capote and Tom Wolfe in the 1960s. This
approach to reportage challenged the power structures of news organizations — and the gov-
ernment and industry interests that supported them — insofar as it drew attention to the
mediation inherent in any journalistic enterprise (Versaci 110). Rocco Versaci argues that by
the late 1980s, this overtly politicized approach to journalism had been re-marketed as “lit-
erary nonfiction” and thereby drained of its radical implications, so that readers accepted
as commonplace the questions about objectivity and truth that arose in this genre and went
back to ignoring them in their encounters with “regular” journalism (111). Because of the
marginalized status of comics, claims Versaci, journalists working in that medium have so
far managed to escape this depoliticizing trend and to maintain a more radical stance (111).
In the notebook he keeps during his time in the occupied territories, Sacco is clearly
aware of his marginal status in the media. He is occasionally questioned about his influence
in the press by the Palestinians he interviews, and a diary entry prefacing the special edition
of Palestine shows Sacco’s reluctance to reveal his opinion on this matter: “They wanted to
know about freedom of the press, could I write about what I had seen, yes, I said, but it
won’t be within the mainstream, I didn’t have the heart or the guts to tell him what a laugh
comics are in the United States” (xv). The freedom of journalistic coverage is not limited
by political structures in this case, but rather by economic considerations and by the cultural
bias against particular narrative forms. Sacco’s investment in journalistic investigation is
tempered by a sense of powerlessness that he feels as an independent reporter working in
the comics genre. Undoubtedly, the high level of self-critique in Palestine emerges from
Sacco’s early awareness of this medium bias. A trace of this awareness makes its way onto
the pages of the text: as Joe (Sacco’s younger, more naïve self as portrayed in the book) parts
with a Palestinian man, his internal narration states, “I will alert the world to your suffering!
Watch your local comic-book store” (10). The irony of this heroic statement and its elliptical
conclusion rests on Sacco’s humility in the face of cultural stereotypes about his chosen
medium.
Palestine is premised on the idea that American media coverage of the region’s conflicts
is one-sided in its emphasis on Israeli interests and experience. Early in the book Joe recalls
how news stories about the Klinghoffer murder portrayed the Palestinians as faceless terrorists
while insistently personalizing and humanizing the Jewish American victim: “We get the
full profile, the bereaving widow, where he lived and what he put on his corn flakes till he
sounds like the guy next door who borrows your ladder. You see the power of that?” (6).
Designed in part as a corrective to this pro-Israeli bias, Sacco’s graphic narrative resists the
depersonalization and erasure of the Palestinian people. Keeping in mind that the cover of
a comic book is typically a meeting point between the everyday time and space of the reader
and the fictional time and space of the story, we asked our students to examine how Palestine’s
cover image might prepare readers for some of the book’s arguments. The overhead view
of what we later learn is the Jabalia refugee camp is the equivalent of a “crane shot” in film,
designed to give us the layout of the land. At first glance the scene is one of war-torn
chaos — careening vehicles, oozing mud, wandering livestock, overflowing dumpsters, scur-
rying people — reminiscent of an urban war zone. But the details contradict Western pre-
conceptions by revealing not guns or tanks but, rather, citizens taking their children to
school and heading to work. The title lettering appears submerged in the artwork: a little
girl is depicted as walking right between the letters. This design detail led one student to
infer that, for Sacco, Palestine’s national identity is organically inscribed in its people and
its landscape despite any political designations imposed from above; another student read
it as a promise that Sacco’s own analysis will emerge from the scenes he is witnessing rather
than being “slapped on top” by experts.
Having students flip through the first pages of the text after this discussion about Pales-
tine’s cover image revealed that, from the bird’s-eye-view introduction, we are taken directly
into a close-up encounter with the individuals Sacco has interviewed. The drawn faces are
large, filling and spilling past their frames and confronting readers with heated opinions.
These pages establish an early insistence on the proximity and presence of the Palestinian
people, an approach that gives the lie to the Zionist slogan, “A land without people for a
people without land!” relayed later on in the chapter (13). Sacco’s artistic practice is well
suited to the task of combating stereotypes. His commitment to visual detail dictates that
“when he draws crowds of people, he cannot bring himself to draw a generic face on any-
one.... [He] takes the time to give each person a unique expression” (Verzemnieks). While
the early volumes in the Palestine collection employed the “cartoony” approach Sacco
describes as his default drawing style, the author gradually realized that a more realistic
treatment was necessary to avoid stereotypical portrayals (Sacco “Presentation”). Aryn Bartley
also reads into this highly representational drawing style an ethical effort on Sacco’s part to
privilege the perspective of individual Palestinians over his own (51). Before he ever offers
an opinion, then, Sacco’s quest to give voice to the Palestinian experience by listening to
individuals’ stories already radically contradicts the normative journalistic treatment of this
part of the world. The book eschews historical overview and expert political opinion in
favor of a discursive focus on individuals and small communities at the margins of main-
stream media coverage.
Of course, many of the best nonfiction narratives supply the “other side of the story”
or fill the gaps in well-known media accounts. The biography shows the private side of the
public figure, the documentary profiles a forgotten corner of the world, and the photojour-
nalistic exposé reveals the underbelly of a seemingly above-board enterprise. What more
can journalism students learn from Sacco than simply to choose a good angle to create a
good story? In fact, Sacco’s driving question isn’t just how to tell the silenced stories but
how to approach the subject most ethically, given the conflicting interests. How does a jour-
nalist avoid participating in the polemic in a context where all stories are framed polemically?
Sacco’s most innovative answer to this question in Palestine is to emphasize and account for
the shaping power of his own perspective upon the narrative he creates. Rather than asking
readers to accept the truth of his account, he constructs a narrative that encourages us
actively to interpret and reflect on what we’re reading. Thus, each chapter’s title page features
a different image in which Joe’s figure, in bold, stands out against a faded backdrop — a reg-
ular reminder of his authorial influence.
Our students were encouraged to explore Sacco’s self-reflexivity through a consideration
of the following question: why is Joe drawn throughout the text wearing opaque eyeglasses?
(Figure 19.1). Students formed small groups to note down their thoughts, and then joined
to debate as a class the possible reasons for Sacco’s choice. All agreed that the opaque glasses
set Joe apart from the book’s other characters and, frame by frame, remind readers of his
privileged position in the story. But a sharp division emerged in students’ interpretations
of what, exactly, this position entailed. Some associated the opaque glasses metaphorically
with the blindfold typically worn by Justice in courthouse statuary, and therefore perceived
in Sacco’s depiction of them a claim to objectivity, or at least neutrality. Others believed
that, as a visitor, Joe is not as involved or invested in the scenes as the “native” characters,
and so his reactions are meant to be read as relatively unimportant (thus his facial expressions
are obscured by the glasses). This second reading sees the glasses as a defense against the
kind of criticism leveled at early writers of “New Journalism” like Hunter S. Thompson,
who was said to “sacrifice knowledge for a parading of personality” (qtd. in Versaci 115).
Particularly in cases of politically controversial or emotionally sensitive subject matter, the
emphasis on the journalist’s personal experience and perspective is felt to be “inappropriate”
or “besides the point.” However, as we shall see, Sacco doesn’t hesitate to detail his reactions
elsewhere in the text; in fact, he tends to (over)dramatize such reactions ironically, at his
own expense. So why would he hide his eyes with opaque glasses? One student responded
to this rejoinder by acknowledging that, as journalists-in-training, the students might be
projecting their own discomfort with Joe’s ubiquitous presence in the book onto his artistic
choices. Finally, another student suggested that “Joe” is merely a placeholder for the author’s
focalizing presence — that the glasses symbolize (or, perhaps literalize) the “lens” through
which Sacco is viewing the scene. As readers, we are kept continually aware of the intrusion
of this lens and are also continually invited to peer through it to regard the scene through
Sacco’s perspective. The author’s own assessment of his narrative approach supports this
interpretation: “The reader’s seeing it through my eyes. A person can look at what I’m say-
Figure 19.1. “Joe’s opaque glasses.” Joe Sacco. Palestine: Special Edition. Seattle, Washington: Fan-
tagraphics, 2007. 227.
ing and judge whether he or she believes in my account” (qtd. in Verzemnieks). The class-
room discussion provided an effective excavation of the tension that sustains and motivates
Palestine: the tension between the accurate portrayal of first-hand, subjective experience and
the imperative of objectivity handed down by the journalistic tradition.
Sacco goes beyond emphasizing his own influence on the story to comment ironically
on his shortcomings both as a journalist and as a guest in Palestinian homes. The critical
distance created through irony between Joe the character (experiencing the moment-by-
moment events) and Sacco the author (piecing the story together in retrospect) comprises
an important aspect of the book’s inquiry into the ethics of reportage. The interplay between
text and image is crucial to this deployment of irony in Palestine. For example, we witness
Joe’s greed and cultural insensitivity as he gorges himself on his host family’s limited pro-
visions, and across the panel our eye falls upon a woman snickering at his boorish behavior
(75). Joe is also greedy for a story that will sell. He is constantly on the hunt for what he
calls the “bangbang” element for his book (118): when his friend is reluctant to photograph
a baby deformed by tear gas exposure in utero, Joe objects, “Journalistically speaking, you
gotta be a Doubting Thomas; you gotta make sure. It’s good to get your finger in the wound.
Your whole head would be better ... wish I’d seen that baby” (77). Yet he repeatedly shies
away from any first-hand encounter with violence, and his abject fear when out after curfew
is graphically emphasized by the crowded rows of dark panels and shadowy backgrounds
(212). For Sacco to position himself in the role of ironic commentator upon the actions of
his younger, more naïve self means that greater authority accrues to him as author of the
text. Charles Hatfield observes the reliance on what he calls “ironic authentication” in many
of today’s nonfictional comic books. Deliberately augmenting the tensions that already exist
between visual and verbal codes in comics, authors like Sacco engage in “metacartooning”
as a way of “graphically asserting truthfulness through the admission of artifice” (131). As
readers, we prefer humility to arrogance, so we’re more likely to drop our guard and be
taken in by Sacco’s assessments if we sense he’s being up-front with us about his limitations
and mistakes.
But in Palestine, the motivation for the irony directed at Joe and his journalistic pre-
tentions goes beyond the preemption of readers’ skepticism. Most of the graphic narratives
upon which Hatfield is commenting are autobiographical; in comics journalism, the stakes
around notions of “authenticity” and “truth” are likely to be even higher. Encountering
Sacco’s visibly prominent and often unlikable textual alter ego encouraged our students to
reflect on existing media constructions of news correspondents. For one of the discussion
components of the class, students were asked to bring names and descriptions of investigative
journalists whose work they admired or found exemplary. Students were encouraged to look
at the journalists’ personal websites, interviews, or on-air promotions of their work. This
broader base of familiar and current examples allowed for a discussion of how news coverage
implicitly (and often explicitly) positions the character of the journalist as a brave superhero
or a passionate detective. For example, we discussed the persona of CNN’s correspondent
Anderson Cooper as a humanitarian hero who has worked to defend the stories of victimized
people after his own life was touched by tragedy. Po Bronson’s magazine profile of Cooper
was referenced as an example of how often the journalist’s work tends to be contextualized
by details about his private life and by carefully selected heroic metaphors. Cooper’s persona
was compared and contrasted to that of another CNN correspondent, Christiane Amanpour,
whose Iranian background and British upbringing gave her (as one student pointed out)
more authentic “weight” in Middle East conflict coverage. These specific examples were
expanded to broader themes of journalism as a mediated form of aid, or as a worthy fighting

cause. Once students compared and discussed their own examples with the themes we picked
up in Palestine, it became clear that previously established distinctions between objective
impartiality and subjective partisanship grew tenuous. In particular, many students who
expressed a personal commitment to humanitarian causes voiced their own concerns about
how their social awareness could be balanced with professional journalistic needs in the
field. These personal concerns were also tied to institutional changes, as we debated whether
the fairly recent emergence of “embedded journalism” allowed reporters unprecedented
access to authentic events or, conversely, increased pressure to side with their military hosts.
Keeping in mind this debate, we returned to Sacco’s persona in Palestine for a new
perspective on how the role of the investigative reporter is both supported and undermined
in the text. The first pages of Palestine portray Joe fulfilling the role of a daring investigator:
moving easily through the markets of Nablus, coolly surveying the scene, predicting what
the man on the street will say and do next. “Now watch this,” he tells us, exchanging Arabic
greetings with a stranger. “Now I’ve got him!” (4). But as Mary N. Layoun points out in
her analysis of “relational literacy” in Palestine, this position of journalistic mastery is pred-
icated on disengagement and cannot be sustained once Joe begins to develop relationships
with his subjects and to recognize the narrative authority of others besides himself (188).
The arrogance with which he first introduces us to his subject later becomes a point of self-
mockery, and in general Sacco guards against readers’ automatic tendency to appoint the
narrator as hero of the story. If Joe appears at times more caricature than character, with
his goggle-glasses and distorted facial expressions, the exaggeration undermines the story’s
realism just enough to prevent our idealization of Joe. This visual insistence is strengthened
verbally, too, by repeated descriptions of Joe as “shaking like a leaf ” when he witnesses vio-
lence and as eager to escape: “Okay, I’m sated, that’s enough of that ... I’ve had my fun ...
I’ve got some burning tires and automatic fire to add to my collection ... to my comics mag-
num opus ... that’s enough of that” (125). Asking our students why Sacco portrays himself
first as unflappable war-zone correspondent and later as cowardly milquetoast exemplifies
a pedagogical strategy Douglas Hesse calls “reading for texture”: looking for places in the
text where writers deviate from the expected, then speculating to what effect (23). It’s rhetor-
ically crucial that Joe enters the Palestinian scene with his head full of familiar stereotypes
and journalist-as-hero pretentions. To witness these stereotypes overturned, these pretentions
shattered, in the face of the complex socio-political realities Joe encounters takes us through
the same stepwise process of acting on assumptions and finding them fall pitifully short of
the demands of real-life (or, in our case, readerly) interactions.
Sacco’s self-reflexivity as a reporter/narrator includes scrutinizing the extent to which
his understanding relies on, and is limited by, his role as a Westerner visiting the region.
The representations he has consumed his whole life in the West inform his views on, for
example, the hijab. Confessing that the veiled women “are just shapes to me, ciphers, like
pigeons moving along the sidewalk” (137), Joe sets out to interview members of a local fem-
inist organization in an attempt to overcome his stereotypical views. The conclusion that
a more “authentic” encounter with the other produces a more enlightened perspective is
undercut, however, by the next section, entitled “Still One of the Boys.” Joe sits cross-
legged beside two men in Jabalia, contributing to and laughing uproariously at their sexist
jokes (141). The cartoonish distortion of his face (tears streaming, mouth agape) drives home
the ironic recognition that Joe’ ability to relate to Palestinian women is circumscribed by
his desire to identify with and win acceptance from Palestinian men. Similarly, Joe experi-
ences a moment of pleasure upon sharing a taxi with an “Americanized” Palestinian woman
from Chicago, but as she begins to rail against American Jews and Joe realizes he’s encoun-
tering difference, not sameness, the close-ups of her face become uglier, almost to the point
of monstrosity (126). Readers witnessing this visual shift readily grasp Sacco’s demonstration
of the way categories of self and other determine representation. The tension between por-
traiture and caricature shapes a self-critical narrative that reflects upon the category of the
“other.”
In a creative exercise centering on the construction of the reporter’s persona, students
produced images of themselves in their current or future media roles. This was done through
drawing, pasting together collages, or working with digital imaging tools. Students were
encouraged to consider Sacco’s work for inspiration, but to pursue their own self-represen-
tations in whichever form they found most appropriate. We were fascinated by the range
and diversity of issues that emerged in these personal assignments. Some chose to visualize
their ideal career, often including ironic notes about how unattainable their goals seemed
at present; others commented on their current work as journalism students. One student
created a photo-collage that deals with the difficulties in communication arising between
reporter and subject (Figure 19.2). The collage is made from a single, repeated image and
changing text that reflects an interview in progress. As the interview continues, the student
reporter finds herself simplifying the wording of the same question again and again, so as
to be understood by the other person. This deceptively simple vignette is rich in comedic
irony, if one considers the context of the author. This particular student has difficulty with
speech enunciation, so at first it seems as though the questions are simplified in order to
accommodate her speaking abilities. However, the increasing frustration of both the reporter
and her assistant dog makes it clear that the sequence mocks the disparity between the
reporter’s rich English vocabulary and the limited vocabulary of her peer. The reporter is
misunderstood by the subject not because of her speech, but because of her use of compli-
cated words. The sequence thus deals with the kind of incongruity between scholarly lan-
guage and professional “field” language that media students, as we noted earlier, often face
outside of the English classroom.
Another student drew a self-portrait reflecting her self-consciousness in the interview
process (Figure 19.3). In this intricate sketch, the student’s comics alter ego feels as though
her pestering questions turn the interview into an invasive interrogation process. As she
pries into the subject’s personal and private moments, she begins to feel more like a voyeur
than an objective reporter. Moreover, the portrait reflects her sense of inadequacy or ille-
gitimacy at being merely a “student” journalist. The disparity between her institutional
position and her investigative aspirations echo the kind of self-conscious comments we
observed in Sacco’s text. The assignment led students to consider how the tension between
impartiality and personal investment must be negotiated during every assignment. However,
the creative component served an additional important pedagogical function: by portraying
themselves through constructed visuals, students grew aware of the importance of Sacco’s
aesthetic choices in Palestine. In particular, as they created idealized or mocking versions of
themselves, students came to understand that Sacco’s own comic-book alter ego, “Joe,” is
not a direct stand-in for the author of the text. Instead, the self-figurative images in Palestine
are constructed by the author in ways that undoubtedly depart from whatever “real” person
existed at the time of the coverage. To consider this doubling of the journalistic persona
reminded the students that the ethos of the reporter in a journalistic text always brings with
it a set of unspoken expectations and responsibilities.
Figure 19.2. Self-reflexive assignment by Miriam Spies. Student assignment, 2008. Reprinted with
the artist’s permission.
Figure 19.3. Self-reflexive assignment by Raylene Knutson. Student assignment, 2008. Reprinted
with the artist’s permission.
Journalism and broadcasting programs place heavy emphasis on storytelling tools and
techniques: students gain experience with a wide range of production methods and materials
and become highly versant in the ethical considerations around factual verification, protec-
tion of sources, and documentation of facts. The medium itself, however, is often effaced.
Form is acknowledged primarily insofar as it needs be clear and un-obstructive — from
simple language to seamless, invisible editing. This treatment of the medium as transparent
is most evident in discussions of visual representations such as photographic work. As Barbie
Zelizer points out in her recent analysis of news images, journalists rely heavily on photo-
graphic verisimilitude in authenticating their reports and accounts. The photographic rep-
resentation supports the journalist’s claims of witnessing a particular event and substantiates
the published story (171). Yet, despite this dependency on images, “the visuals of journalism
are the source of inattention by the journalistic world” (173). Particularly as regards pho-
tography, then, the form of journalistic reporting was not seen by our students as something
that required an ethical or critical approach. Many in the class were careful to separate
Palestine from conventional reporting, pointing to the comic-book format as proof of Sacco’s
partisan guilt.
We worked to trouble this assumption about the invisibility (and neutrality) of jour-
nalistic form in our class discussions on the visual style and structure of Palestine. To recon-
sider the distinctions between photographic and drawn form, we began by asking students
to consider the dual meaning of the word “representation.” A given narrative speaks of its
subject matter the way a portrait represents its subject; a narrative also speaks for its subjects,
the way a lawyer might represent the interests of his/her clients. When it comes to photo-
graphic images, the applicability of this second sense of “representation” is elusive to students
at first, but both are crucial to Sacco’s enterprise in Palestine. Showing students a political
poster from the book collection The Design of Dissent served to illustrate the way photo-
graphic images can powerfully represent specific interests: a boy is depicted with arm
upraised, ready to hurl a piece of rubble (Glaser and IliW 18) (Figures 19.4 and 19.5). Rec-
ognizing the un-translated caption as Arabic script was enough to prompt our students to
read the image as representative of Palestinian national pride and political defiance. Another
poster, created in 2003 to promote construction of the Israeli/Palestinian wall, portrays the
bodies of wolves and sheep being combined in various ineffective ways, with the caption,
“...TRIED EVERYTHING ... EXCEPT: SEPARATION” (Glaser and IliW 22). Pointing
out that determining who is wolf and who is sheep in the poster depends entirely on one’s
subject position made for an important transition into a discussion of how images shape —
and are shaped by — their encounters with textual evidence, cultural assumptions, and the
viewer’s political beliefs.
The problematic relationship between photographs and their claims to truthfulness
sheds light on why Sacco may choose to use comics as a self-reflexive form of news reporting.
On the one hand, comics have a long history in political caricature and editorial commen-
tary — genres associated more with bias and personal opinion than with “truth.” On the
other hand, comics may be perceived as more honest and forthcoming than a photograph
without a credited or verified editorial source. This is further complicated by Sacco’s own
transitions between different visual styles and levels of verisimilitude. Like all graphic nar-
ratives, Palestine contends with the challenges of a reductive visual iconography, the necessary
evil of a medium that “rel[ies] on stereotyping as a way to concentrate narrative effectiveness”
(Royal 7). In interviews about his drawing style, Sacco describes the constant negotiation
between realistic and “cartoony” aesthetics as necessary for the depiction of the “essential
Figure 19.4. “Political poster used by PLO in Ramallah in 2000.” Glaser, Milton, and Mirko IliW.
The Design of Dissent: Socially and Politically Driven Graphics. Gloucester, MA: Rockport, 2006.
17. Reprinted with permission.
truth” of his subject matter. He individualizes faces in crowd scenes to avoid having Pales-
tinians “look like a bunch of ants or something”: in this case, the essential truth is the fact
that “there are individuals who have suffered this” (Sacco “Presentation”). Elsewhere, though,
he relies on the stylized iconography of comics to evoke movement, atmosphere, or emotion.
“A cartoonist can take someone back in time ... [or] to a different place altogether,” explains
Sacco. Such narrative machinations, made possible by the medium, convey truth by “drop-
ping a reader right into the situation” (“Presentation”). The difference being pinpointed
here between “essential” truth and “objective” or “factual” truth clearly has to do with the
Figure 19.5. “Political poster from 2003.” Glaser, Milton, and Mirko IliW. The Design of Dissent:
Socially and Politically Driven Graphics. Gloucester, Massachusetts: Rockport, 2006. 22. Reprinted
with permission.
depth, individual perspective, proximity, and capacity for emotional identification built
into the account. Hillary Chute enumerates the accolades Sacco’s work has received for its
“depth” and “density,” concluding that “the thickness of the verbal-visual form in Sacco’s
hands transmits what can feel like surplus information or plenitude” (460). The sense of
narrative plenitude counters the journalistic tendency towards reduction and abstraction —
the temptation to capture the symbolic photograph and the sound bite and move on. Readers
are correspondingly drawn into the work of interpretation and are barred from consuming
these images as passive spectators (Whitlock 966).
Sacco’s use of the comic book form enables Palestine to engage on multiple levels with
the issue of containment, taking it up as a political question, as a unifying theme, and as a
set of structural concerns in the text. On a narrative level, physical containment is one of
the major threads that connect the various personal accounts in the text. As Joe points out
in Palestine, almost every person he interviews has either been detained by security forces,
or knows a family member who has been incarcerated in one of several Israeli prisons. When
he is not crossing through checkpoints on his way to and from the Palestinian territories,
Joe is often observing events that occur near fences and walls. The prominence of check-
points, fences, and soldiers suggest that these are the primary images that Palestinians
encounter at the limits of their homes and streets. Our students readily identified corre-
sponding patterns of containment and “overflow” in the comic book’s visual layout. When
scenes of violence are depicted, the panels’ neat, parallel sequencing becomes jumbled, and
the frames overlap. In many parts of the text, Sacco makes his cross-hatching drawing style
especially prominent, so that the crossing lines of his pen become fences that lock in the
clothes, prison uniforms, houses, and streets of the Palestinians. When Sacco relates Ghassan’s
tale of being interned and interrogated by the Israeli secret police, the frames shrink pro-
gressively and the gutters are inked black (102–13). The implication is that, unlike elsewhere
in the text, under these oppressive conditions there is no room left for imaginative inter-
pretation, satisfactory closure, or meaning-making. In this way Palestine asks what model
of citizenship and cultural memory would arise in a situation that places people in constant
states of claustrophobia and containment. This is how Sacco ends the book: first with a
story about a Palestinian boy mocked by soldiers, and finally with images of his bus stuck
between checkpoints.
A number of students argued that the visual emphasis on containment presents the
perspective of his Palestinian sources, and not of Sacco himself. Whereas the author was
earlier criticized for the insertion of his own, personal voice, here he was accused of too lit-
eral (or visual) an adherence to witnesses’ accounts. However, we pointed out that journalists
are always required to rely on personal statements and accounts, usually textually inserted
as quotations. Why, then, would this visual quotation in Sacco’s book be unacceptable? We
pursued the debate further by asking our students to examine, in small groups, the section
entitled “Public and Private Wounds” (32–33). As Joe is taken on a rushed tour of a hospital
in the occupied territories, panels overlap and the angled, scattered text boxes lead reader’s
eye along a number of divergent paths. The journey of the eye echoes the meandering and
dizzying journey that Sacco himself must have taken during this excursion. Students also
pointed out that the text boxes recall the cut-out and unglued captions of a newspaper
mock-up, still in disarray and without a fixed position in the layout. The two pages have
an unfinished feel, resisting any hierarchy of images and words.
On the left page, a man in pain escapes the rectangular frames that surround the other
images and is instead surrounded by a barbed halo of dramatic scratches (Figure 19.6). Stu-
dents suggested that here, Sacco is trying to evoke the idea that the suffering and pain of
an individual become uncontained (both physically and politically) and spill into the mar-
gins. Students also noticed that two of the images are framed by drawn corners that recall
the corners of a scrapbook. This provocative decision suggests a number of possible inter-
pretations. Firstly, Sacco may experience guilt at having been a spectator to acute human
suffering, snapping pictures in the hospital as if he were a tourist collecting mementos. Sec-
ondly, the corners may suggest that these images were copied from actual photographs that
Sacco recorded at the time of his visit. Indeed, some of these original photographs, along
Figure 19.6. “At the hospital: framing and containment.” Joe Sacco. Palestine: Special Edition. Seattle,
Washington: Fantagraphics, 2007. 32.
with their subsequent comics-style interpretations, are included in the recent special edition
of the text (xxiii–xxvi). The two hospital images with drawn scrapbook corners may thus
be pointing to photographic referents that exist in Sacco’s archive. In this case, the framing
choice may reveal Sacco’s continuing belief in the “authenticity” of photography, alongside
a parallel reluctance to rely solely on the archival images.
Palestine’s most significant shift in representational perspective occurs in “Through
Other Eyes,” when Joe recalls a conversation with two Israeli women who ask him, “Shouldn’t
you be seeing our side of the story, too?” (256). Walking through the Arab market with one
of these companions, Joe suddenly finds himself regarding the Palestinians surrounding him
as strange, hostile, and threatening (259). The panic brought on by looking through other
eyes is an important reminder not only that identifying with one side of the conflict auto-
matically turns the other into the enemy, but that, no matter how much distance or objec-
tivity Joe might seek to maintain, refraining from this sort of exclusionary identification is
impossible. Further, as Aryn Bartley points out, Palestine explores in detail the possibilities
of “ethical substitution,” the Levinasian relationship that suggests taking on the suffering
of the other, or laying down one’s life to save him/her (51). Sacco’s discomfiting confrontation
with the limits of this ethical ideal as a political practice informs his self-reflexive depiction
of Joe’s panic in the Arab bazaar. Indeed, much of the irony in Palestine underscores the
moral quandary wherein the American journalist critiques his own privilege but finds himself
unwilling, in the end, to relinquish it (Bartley 64). Walking in Jabalia after curfew, Joe’s
nervousness centers on the fact that “One could be mistaken for a Palestinian out here”
(212). In the hospital scene, Joe is shown towering over the bed of a wounded patient,
clutching his camera like a menacing instrument (32): he is allowed access to these private
scenes of pain because of his position as a journalist, and there is something inherently
exploitative in the act of feeding them to his reading public. The power relations inherent
in the enterprise of “getting the story” are thus complicated further by both the unavailability
of the role of neutral witness in such a divisive conflict and the guarantee of international
mobility and access conferred by American citizenship.
Jackie Harrison writes in an article geared toward journalism practitioners that “news-
rooms are mundane places of quotidian conflicts and compromises, but they are rarely places
of high moral drama” (67). Our approach to teaching Palestine nonetheless asked students
to consider the hidden moral dramas — the ethical and ideological considerations — playing
out in their own work as well as Sacco’s. Student objections to partial perspectives and
“biased” stories should be embraced when teaching Palestine, not only because they reveal
the specific political goals that underlie Sacco’s project, but because they reflect back on the
editorial framing that underlies all media reportage. Constraints imposed by time, economy,
and institutional pressures will frame our students’ future work, as will journalism’s uneasy
reliance on corporate sponsorship and distribution. In reading and discussing Palestine, stu-
dents are brought into an encounter with a graphic narrative that invites them to critique
its deliberate and self-declared bias, but also to reflect on the wider ethical role for self-
reflexivity in journalistic narratives. Teaching this material also requires self-reflexivity about
our own stance as educators. An objection to our inclusion of Palestine on the syllabus came,
through the Chair of our department, from the parent of one of our students, who com-
plained that the book’s bias had “silenced” her ( Jewish) daughter in class. For this parent,
the text’s outspoken refusal to comply with expected journalistic standards of objectivity
and detachment was exacerbated by our implied endorsement of its truthfulness — or at
least of its narrative authority — in selecting it for our course. Palestine’s controversial subject
matter means that we must be prepared to defend our syllabus decisions and to decide
which aspects of our own identities are relevant to the personae we project as teachers of
this text. What are the advantages and limitations to teaching (through) controversy? What
can we learn from the boundary wars between genres incited by comics journalism: the
struggles to distinguish verbal from visual, fact from fantasy, personal from collective, balance
from bias, fiction from nonfiction? What exactly stands to be lost or gained in accepting
Sacco’s work as journalism? Grappling with these questions, students could consider Sacco’s
text as a critical foil to their own work in the media, or as an inspiration to experiment with
and reflect on their own experiences as practitioners.
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About the Contributors
Anne Cong-Huyen is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at the University of

California at Santa Barbara. Her research focuses on global literature and media, digital human-
ities, and ethnic studies. She is associated with UCSB’s American Cultures and Global Contexts
Center, the Transcriptions Center, and the UC Transliteracies Project.
Jonathan D’Amore received his Ph.D. in English from the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill. He teaches literature and writing at St. Michael’s College in Colchester, Vermont.
He is the author of American Authorship and Autobiographical Narrative: Mailer, Wideman,
Eggers.
Edward Brunner teaches modern literature and cultural studies in the Department of English
at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He has published books on Hart Crane, W. S. Mer-
win, and Cold War poetry and essays on African American cartoonists from the 1930s and 1940s,
on the popular-front and wartime comics strips in the Daily Worker, and on the innovative
mainstream comics artist Milton Caniff.
Lan Dong is the author of Mulan’s Legend and Legacy in China and the United States and Reading
Amy Tan, and the editor of Transnationalism and the Asian American Heroine: Essays on Literature,
Film, Myth and Media. She has published a number of journal articles and book chapters on
Asian American literature and films, children’s literature, and popular culture. She received her
Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and is an associate
professor of English at the University of Illinois Springfield.
Alla Gadassik is a doctoral candidate in screen cultures (radio/TV/film) at Northwestern Uni-
versity. She conducts research on the relationship between filmmakers and technology, with a
special focus on the development of cinematography and animation. She has published articles
in Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, and the award-
winning collection Popular Ghosts: The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture.
Sarah Henstra is an associate professor of English at Ryerson University in Toronto. She is the
author of The Counter-Memorial Impulse in Twentieth Century English Fiction. She has also pub-
lished articles on narrative and public memory across various media: digital archives, documentary
films, talk shows, and popular novels.
Susanna Hoeness-Krupsaw is an associate professor of English at the University of Southern
Indiana. She teaches contemporary American and Canadian literature, women’s literature, and
other humanities courses. Her research interests include E.L. Doctorow and Margaret Atwood.
Caroline Kyungah Hong is an assistant professor of English at Queens College CUNY. She
received her Ph.D. in English from the University of California at Santa Barbara. She is writing
261
262 About the Contributors
a book project on comedy and humor in Asian American literature, film, and popular culture.
She is also the co-managing editor of Journal of Transnational American Studies, a peer-reviewed
online journal.
Stefan Hoeppner is an assistant professor of German literature at the University of Freiburg,
Germany. He is the author of Zwischen Utopia und Neuer Welt (2005), a study on the image of
the United States in the writings of novelist Arno Schmidt (1914–1979). He has published on
Utopian literature, romanticism, and contemporary German literature and pop culture, partic-
ularly graphic narratives and pop music.
M. Catherine Jonet is an assistant professor of women’s studies at New Mexico State University.
She received her Ph.D. in theory and cultural studies from Purdue University. Her interest in
graphic narratives ranges from a fascination with narratives produced in zines and other forms
of subcultural ephemera to a love of graphic memoirs.
Joshua Kavaloski is an associate professor of German and director of German studies at Drew
University in New Jersey. His scholarship and teaching encompass narrative prose and film of
the twentieth century. He has published essays on Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Jurek Becker,
and Daniel Kehlmann. His is currently finishing a book entitled The Myth of High Modernism:
The Performative and Literature in the 1920s.
Jessica Knight received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.
Her research focuses on the uses and cultural currency of memoir and autobiography, historically
as well as in contemporary popular and educational contexts. She currently teaches at the Uni-
versity of St. Thomas.
Christina Meyer holds a Ph.D. in American literature and culture. She studied at the Leibniz
University of Hannover, and at the University Paul Valéry in Montpellier, France, and received
a doctoral fellowship from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) to conduct research
at Columbia University. She is an assistant professor in the Institute for English and American
Studies at the University of Osnabrück. She has co-edited books and special issues on comics
and graphic narratives, and has published articles on Art Spiegelman and other artists. She is
writing a book on American newspaper comic strips.
Adrielle Anna Mitchell is an associate professor and chair of English at Nazareth College of
Rochester in New York. Her recent articles include “Picturing National Identity: Iconic Solidarity
in Autobiographical Comics” in Studies in Comics, and “Spectral Memory, Sexuality and Inver-
sion: An Arthrological Study of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic” in ImageTexT.
She teaches courses on literature, writing, culture, and international graphic narratives.
Katharine Polak MacDonald is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Cincinnati, where she is
completing her dissertation, “Gutter Love: Comics and the Mediation of Trauma.” Her work
has appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Thin Air, and other journals. She has several
forthcoming essays in collected editions and an encyclopedia of graphic novels. In addition to
her scholarly projects, she is working on an autobiographical graphic novel, Top Heavy: Life as
a Mutant.
Judith Richards is an associate professor in the Department of English and Modern Languages
at Park University. She teaches Spanish American and Latino literature, international women’s
literature, and the graphic novel. She is the author of “The Struggle to Naturalize Literary
Studies: Chicana Literary Theory and Analysis,” in Engendering Rationalities and is writing an
article on women’s literature as historical narratives with Cynthia Williams.
About the Contributors 263
Derek Parker Royal is the founder and executive editor of Philip Roth Studies. His essays on
American literature and graphic narratives have appeared in numerous journals such as Contem-
porary Literature, Modern Drama, Studies in the Novel, and International Journal of Comic Art.
His books include Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author and Hernandez Brothers:
Conversations. He is working on a manuscript concerning American ethnoracial issues in con-
temporary comics.
Edward A. Shannon is a professor of literature and has served as convener of literature and co-
director of Master of Arts Liberal Studies at Ramapo College of New Jersey. He is the author
of The Prentice Hall Pocket Guide to Writing About Literature. His most recent publications
include an essay on Winsor McCay and Robert Crumb for The Canadian Review of American
Studies and an essay on Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson for the Mark Twain Annual.
Alexander Starre is a research assistant in the English Department at Georg-August-Universität
Göttingen, Germany, where he serves as program coordinator for the B.A. and M.A. in American
studies. He has published essays on media history and theory, self-reference, textual materiality,
as well as ecocriticism and early American captivity narratives.
Daniel Stein received his Ph.D. in American studies from the University of Göttingen, where
he is a research associate. His publications include the co-edited essay collections American
Studies as Media Studies and Comics: Zur Geschichte und Theorie eines populärkulturellen Mediums.
He is the author of Music Is My Life: Louis Armstrong, Autobiography, and American Jazz and
the co-editor of the forthcoming collection From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels: Contributions
to the Theory and History of Graphic Narrative.
Mary Ann Tobin holds a Ph.D. and is director of teaching and learning at Triton College in
River Grove, Illinois, where she teaches English composition and literature. “300 Ways to Teach
the Epic” is a slight departure from her primary scholarly interests in 19th-century British lit-
erature, but it exhibits her interests in pedagogy and material culture. Her publications include
articles in Critical Insights: Great Expectations and The Dickensian.
Susan R. Van Dyne is the author of Revising Life: Sylvia Plath’s Ariel Poems. She co-edited
Women’s Place in the Academy: Transforming the Liberal Arts with Marilyn Schuster, analyzing
how feminist scholarship has changed the curriculum. She is a founding editor of Meridians, a
journal of feminism, race, and transnationalism. She is professor of the study of women and
gender at Smith College, where she teaches American women’s poetry, public history and archival
memory, and the cultural work of memoir.
Cynthia M. Williams lives in Kansas City, Missouri, and teaches English at Johnson County
Community College and history at Ashford University. She recently finished her doctoral dis-
sertation on text and performance in immigrant Asian women’s literature. She is writing a book
on women’s literature as historical narratives with Judith Richards.
Index
Abel, Jessica 74–76, 108, 126 249, 253; critical 49, 88, 90; Baker, Kyle 36n4, 69, 72, 73
Abnett, Dan 57–58 cultural 8, 222; Freudian 17; lit- Baker, Nicholson 16, 186, 192, 193
Abouet, Marguerite 8, 161–71 erary 8, 81, 86, 92, 94, 228, Bakhtin, Mikhail 156, 158, 159n3
Acid 177 229, 230; rhetorical 9, 221; vi- Barry, Linda 45–46, 125
A.D. New Orleans After the Deluge sual 9, 131, 170, 200, 221, 222 Barry, Shank 27
199 Anderson, Ho Che 69, 72, 74 Barthes, Roland 205, 210–11
adaptation 24, 59, 82, 86, 122, An Antholog y of Graphic Fiction, Batman 2, 17, 19, 22–23, 82, 122,
173, 177–80, 181; film 9, 80, 90, Cartoons, and True Stories 50 161, 178, 181, 185, 221, 225, 227,
181, 200, 206 anti-hero 228 229–30
Adorno, Theodor 134, 174–76, Arab in America 199 Battle of Artemisium 234
182n8 Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung 152 Battle of Thermopylae 9, 232,
Aeneid 232, 240 The Archaeolog y of Knowledge 158 235–38
Aesop 230 Architexts of Memory 206 battlefield 153, 232, 236
African Americans 23, 27, 29, 32, “As Long as You Love Me” 86 Baym, Nina 44
36, 36n9, 37n14, 37n17, 37n22, Ash Can School 12, 16, 24 Bechdel, Alison 7, 9, 12, 105, 107–
68, 72, 78, 189, 227; artists 26; Asian American ComiCon 80 17, 117n3, 118n5, 119, 121–27,
cartoonists 27; characters 6, 27 Asian Americans 7, 8, 71, 80–89, 127n1, 127n2, 127n4, 128n6,
Africans 26, 68, 165, 167, 169–70, 90–92, 93n3, 95, 99; see also 128n13, 199, 201, 203, 212, 215–
171n3 Chinese Americans; Japanese 28, 228
ageism 225 Americans Bennett, William 95
agency 63n38, 82, 90, 91, 106, 111, Asians 70, 71, 80, 81, 83, 87, 88, Beowulf 234, 240
131, 134, 140, 215, 224, 227, 230; 89, 90, 93n3, 98 Berlin Alexanderplatz 146, 157
self 133–34, 138, 141 Asterios Polyp 121 Berlin City of Stones 8, 145–59
aging 225 Astérix 174 Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt
Ah Sin 84, 91 Atwood, Margaret 161 157
Ahmadinejad, Mahmoud 232, 238 Auerbach, Erich 158 Bernstein, Susan Naomi 230
AIDS 72, 113, 117 authenticity 77, 142n3, 206, 248, Berry, David 245
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland 258 Berryman, John 12, 21
215 authorship 46, 210 Bertozzi, Nick 6, 53, 60–61
alter ego 194, 212–14, 248, 250 autobiographical narratives 9, 33, The Best American Comics 50
Alternative Comics 53 45, 131, 163, 212, 217; see also au- bias 27, 29, 131, 205, 244, 245,
Alternative Comics 206 tobiographies 253, 258, 259
Altman, Robert 77 autobiographics 204; see also auto- The Big All-American Comic Book
Amanpour, Christiane 248 biographical comics; graphic 53
American Born Chinese 6, 70, 81, memoir bildungsroman 82–83; see also
83–87, 90–92 autobiographies 37n22, 41, 50n6, coming of age
American Civil War 245 124, 126, 127n5, 131, 138, 141, biographies 72, 74, 124, 181, 246
American Idol 86 172n7, 205, 210–12, 214–19, Bissell, James 238
American Splendor 212–13 219n1; see also autobiographical Black History Month 29
American Studies: An Antholog y 27 narratives; life writing Black Hole 9, 221
American Studies Association Autobiographix 212 Blackboard Jungle 24
36n1, 50 Autobiography of My Mother 218 Blair, Barry 68
American Widow 187, 199 Avatar: The Last Airbender 80, Blankets 121
Americanness 79 92n1 blogs 126, 200, 222, 230
analyses 6, 9, 22, 24, 27–28, 36n6, Aya 8, 161–71, 171n3, 172n7 Bloom, Alan 95
37n16, 37n20, 42, 43, 49, 50n4, Azzarello, Brian 227 Bloom Country 26
50n8, 55, 59, 61, 62, 63n33, 89, Blue Front 186, 190–91
92, 94, 98, 99, 103n7, 104n6, B., David 199 “The Blue Scorpion & Chung”
109, 117n2, 119, 121, 122, 133, 163, Back Dorm Boys 86, 91 89–90, 92
177, 180, 181, 185, 186, 200, 212, Backstreet Boys 86, 91 Boler, Megan 97, 103n2
219, 221, 222, 225, 226, 227, Baeten, Jan 181 Bonanza 86
228, 229, 230, 231n2, 244, 246, Baker, Anthony 189 Booklist 162
265
266 Index
The Boondocks 6, 26–33, 35, Chin, Frank 83 turalism 94–103; and race and
36n9, 36n12, 37n18, 37n19 Chin, Vincent 87 ethnicity 67–79; and translation
borders 1, 14, 59, 60, 63n32, Chinatown 83 161–71; and trauma 185–96; see
142n3, 179 Chinese Americans 82, 84 also cartoons; comic books;
Boulevard of Broken Dreams 193 Choi, Sungyoon 187 graphic narratives; graphic nov-
Bourdieu, Pierre 42, 49 Chomsky, Noam 244 els; newspaper strips; sequential
A Box of Matches 192 Chute, Hillary 6, 11, 36n8, 37n4, art
box office 235 53, 62n14, 107, 114, 116, 120, 122, Comics Code 19, 22, 88, 91, 177
boyhood 14 123, 126, 127, 128n7, 128n8, 131, The Comics Journal 202
Boyle, T.C. 41 136, 138, 139, 142, 163, 164, 167, comics journalism 243–245, 248,
Brainard, Joe 178 169, 170, 171n2, 172n5, 172n7, 259; see also Sacco, Joe
Braxton, Greg 26, 31 201, 231n1, 255 Comics Made in Germany 174
Breathed, Berkeley 26 Citizen 13660 7, 81, 89, 92, 94– A Comics Studies Reader 200
Brentano, Margaret 16 103 coming of age 33, 81, 130, 214; see
Brinkmann, Roff Dieter 177–79 citizenship 28, 62, 81, 89, 98, 256, also bildungsroman
broadcasting 90, 244, 253 258 comix see underground comix
Broch, Hermann 158 civil rights 6, 27–30, 36n13, 72, commerce 11, 13, 17, 22, 23, 149
Brothers and Keepers 210 74, 103n3, ; see also King, Mar- commodification 175
Brown, Chester 192 tin Luther, Jr. commodity 13, 43
Brown, Jeffrey 45–46 Clark, John 234, 235 communication 6, 9, 24, 40, 42,
Brunetti, Ivan 43, 45–46, 50 the Clash 23 43, 46, 47, 49, 57, 61, 62n19,
Burns, Charles 9, 48, 221 Clash of the Gods and Battles BC 63n24, 85, 114, 173, 226, 250
Busch, Wilhelm 173 235 communities 13, 24, 29, 44, 69,
Bush, George W. 28, 31–33, 35, 54 Clash of the Titans 234 72, 90, 101, 106, 134, 190, 196n1,
Butler, Judith 37n20, 106, 110–12, Classics Illustrated 1 199, 202, 230, 246; African
117n1, 132–36, 140–42, 185; see classroom 1, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 12, 28, American 72; Asian American
also gender performance 29, 30, 42, 50, 59, 60, 68, 70, 71, 83, 93n3; discourse 222,
79, 81, 87, 95, 96, 98, 99, 100, 226, 230, 231n2; ethnic 70, 72,
Calvin & Hobbes 226 103, 103n5, 121, 122, 123, 124, 74, 89; multicultural 78
CAMERA 244 126, 127, 132, 133, 162, 200, 211, The Complete Maus see Maus
Camus, Albert 117, 216 219n2, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225, composition 2, 6, 9, 24, 46, 74,
Cantos 195 230, 231, 236, 238, 240, 248, 139, 159, 161–65, 221–31, 231n1,
Capote, Truman 245 250; college and university 5, 235
Captain America 23, 72–73 28, 133, 243; composition 9, Consolation of Philosophy 198
Carnet de Voyage 203 162, 163, 221, 222, 226, 230, A Contract with God 96, 128n8
Carré, Lilli 123, 125–26, 128n12 231; high school 32; literature 7, Cooper, Anderson 248
Carroll, Lewis 214 8, 42, 94, 96, 99, 103, 198, 200, copyright law 11; see also fair use;
Carter, James Bucky 164 208, 216, 223, 225; Women’s intellectual property rights
cartoonists 6, 11, 26, 28, 33, 37n14, and Gender Studies 119, 120, 121, Costello, Elvis 23
40, 45, 51n13, 76, 86, 191, 244, 130 creativity 194, 210, 228
245; American 27, 203; editorial close-ups 60, 61, 93n4, 115, 116, criticism 1, 5, 31, 36n2, 44, 46, 95,
36n10, 48 168, 246, 250 142n3, 165, 174, 177, 179, 180,
cartoons 32, 36n4, 37n19, 46, 47, Clowes, Daniel 41, 123, 228 182n6, 203, 204, 211; cultural 12,
48, 63n32, 67, 69, 80, 84, 86, Clyde Fans 202 88, 121; literary 120, 200, 244;
92n1, 97, 108, 118n5, 122, 126, CNN 248 Marxist 12
128n13, 161, 163, 164, 167, 170, cognition 222–224 Crumb 12, 20–22
171n1, 172n6, 173, 191, 192, 193, Cold War 11, 20, 24 Crumb, Robert 15, 17, 20–24, 27,
194, 195, 196n1, 215, 216, 245, Collins, Martha 186, 190–91 37n22, 40, 41, 44, 68, 181, 213–
249, 253; editorial 26, 46, 68, Collins, Wilkie 2 14
194; political 26, 30, 33, 36n3, Comic Book Confidential 12, 17, 21, Cruse, Howard 121
36n10, 37n17, 226; see also 23 Cuba: My Revolution 199
comics; graphic narratives comic books 1, 5, 11, 12, 17, 37n24, Cubism 146
Castro, Jef 91 43, 47, 50n4, 68, 86, 87, 90, curricula 29, 42, 99, 103n1, 130,
“Catch Me Now, I’m Falling” 23 122, 155, 180, 200, 211, 212; see 181, 182, 182n10, 199, 222, 243,
Cavey, Sue 213 also graphic narratives; graphic 263; college 40, 53; literary 95
censorship 19, 24, 116 novels
Chabon, Michael 41 Comic Strips and Consumer Culture Dalby, Andrew 233, 237
chador 130–31, 135–36, 138–40 22 The Dallas Morning News 27
Chan, Charlie 86 comics 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 8; and African Daredevil 210
Chaos! Comics 53 Americans 26–36; and American Dark Horse Comics 53, 212
Chase, Alisia Grace 165 culture 11–25; and Asian Ameri- The Dark Knight Returns 9, 175,
Chatman, Seymour 42, 44 cans 80–92, 94–103; and author- 221, 225, 230
Chen, Sean 87 ship 40–50; and composition Däubler-Gmelin, Herta 32
The Chicago Tribune 27, 173 and rhetoric 221–31, 232–41; Davies, Ray 23
child-image 214 and gender 105–17, 119–27, 210– Davis, Angela 29
childhood 1, 43, 48, 84, 105, 107, 219; in Germany 173–82; and Davis, Lydia 41
113, 116, 117, 125, 128n8, 135, history 145–59; and journalism DC Comics 19, 22, 53, 58, 128n11,
136, 156, 161, 180, 206, 214, 215, 243–59; and life writing 105–17, 229
217, 236; see also boyhood 198–208, 210–19; and multicul- “Death Is a Star” 23
Index 267
DeCarlo, Dan 69 Ennis, Garth 227 Gay Comix #19 113

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Entertaining Comics 177 Gaye, Marvin 24
Empire 158 epic 9, 70, 194, 232–40, 241n1 gays 113, 117, 178, 215
Defining Visual Rhetorics 221 Epileptic 199 Gaza Strip 243
Deitch, Kim 8, 186, 193–95, 196n1 Ermarth, Elizabeth Deeds 145 gender 2, 7, 8, 43, 79, 81, 89, 92,
DeKoven, Marianne 6, 120, 122, Es liegt in der Luft 157 104n5, 104n6, 106, 109, 110, 111,
123, 126, 128n8, 163, 164, 167, ethics 96, 219, 248 116, 117n1, 121–22, 124–25,
169, 170, 171n2, 231n1 ethnicity 7, 67, 68, 70, 79, 82, 131, 127n3, 128n13, 131–34, 136–37,
Delisle, Guy 202 132, 205, 206 170, 198, 217, 219, 229, 237;
Delonas, Sean 68 Executive Order 9066 88; see also identity 7, 110, 133; performance
de Saussure, Ferdinand 223 internment; Japanese Americans 8, 133, 134, 141; studies 6, 7,
design 40, 48, 60, 111, 228, 246; Exit Wounds 123 119–22, 124, 127, 128n9, 130, 199
elements of 223–24 Extremely Close and Incredibly Loud Gender Trouble 132
The Design of Dissent 253–55 186 George Sprott 1894 –1975 202
Deutsche Comicforschung 175 German literature 8, 175, 177, 179
Dickens, Charles 2 Fables 227, 228, 229 Ghost World 123, 228
Didion, Joan 210 Facebook 232 Gibbon, Edward 158
DiMassa, Diane 126, 127n1 fair use 12; see also copyright law; Gibbons, Dave 12, 22
Dirks, Rudolph 26 intellectual property rights Giglamesh 234
disability 219 fantasy 84, 111, 155, 157, 189, 194, Gillenwater, C. 222, 223
discourses 9, 28, 32, 35, 54, 57, 199, 206, 213, 230, 233, 236, Gilroy, Paul 80
68, 69, 70, 109, 110, 120, 124, 259 GIS 229
135, 145, 195, 212, 221, 222, Farewell to Manzanar 89, 92 Glass, Ira 43
223, 226, 228, 230, 231n2, 235, Farrokhzad, Forugh 135 Glorious Revolution see Islamic
236, 241n1, 244 Faulkner, William 158 Revolution
displacement 8, 130, 134 Feininger, Lyonel 16, 51n12 Goethe 181
Ditko, Steve 2 Felski, Rita 186 Gold, Glen David 41
diversity 2, 27, 68, 81, 95, 97, 159, fiction 5, 6, 8, 11, 12, 17, 19, 20, Golden Age 161
250; cultural 67, 79, 96; ethnic 23, 41, 63n31, 109, 162, 172n7, Good as Lily 81
68 174, 186, 196, 199, 213, 216, 230, Gordon, Ian 22, 23, 36n6, 36n14
Döblin, Alfred 146, 157, 158, 159n5 259; see also novel; short story Gorman, Michele 170, 172n8
Doctors Without Borders 199 Fiedler, Leslie 179 Graff, Gerald 32, 181
documentaries 28, 33, 36n13, films 9, 11, 12, 16, 17, 19, 20, 21, graphic humor 26
62n5, 98, 166, 186, 194, 246 22, 23, 24, 54, 62n5, 62n10, graphic memoir 7, 8, 9, 81, 89, 94,
Donald Duk 83 62n11, 63n33, 67, 77, 80, 86, 96–97, 99, 101, 105, 107, 118n4,
Doonesbury 26, 245 89, 90, 109, 121, 122, 131, 157, 118, 123, 204–5, 208, 210, 212–
Double Happiness 81 158, 169, 171, 180, 181, 182n8, 13, 216, 219, 230; see also autobi-
Doucet, Julie 202 189, 196n1, 198, 200, 210, 213, ographical comics
Doxiadis, Apostolos 199 216, 224, 230, 232–40, 241n1, graphic narration 42–43, 45–47
drama 218, 233, 234, 235, 237, 241n3, 246 graphic narratives 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 8,
238, 240, 241n1, 258; American Fingeroth, Danny 202 9, 10n1, 27, 36n8, 37n22, 40, 42,
235; Greek 235 First Second 202 43, 48, 50n8, 53, 54, 55, 57, 59,
Drawn and Quarterly 161, 162, 202 Fish, Stanley 95 60, 61, 62, 62n8, 62n18, 62n21,
Drechsel, Wiltrud Ulrike 174 Fisher, Douglas 164 63n26, 63n36, 63n37, 63n38,
D’Souza, Dinesh 95 500 Essential Graphic Novels 202 67, 68, 69, 70, 79, 81, 82, 86,
Duffelmeyer, Barb Blakely 224 Flower-Fruit Mountain 82 87, 89, 90, 92, 96, 97, 98n5, 119,
Dumm, Gary 213 Foer, Jonathan Safran 186, 188 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 126, 127,
Dürer, Albrecht 145–46 Follies, Ziegfeld 23 127n4, 127n6, 128n9, 128n13,
Dykes to Watch Out For 127n1, Footsteps in Gaza 199 136, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 170,
128n13, 199 Fortune 94, 98, 103, 104n7 171, 172n7, 186, 187, 192, 194,
Dylan, Bob 23–24 Foucault, Michel 46, 133, 158–59 196, 210, 211, 214, 243, 245, 248,
The Four Immigrants Manga 81 253, 258; Asian American 80,
Eakin, Paul John 211 framings 54, 55; contextual 55; 81; fictional 5, 125, 126; in Ger-
E.C. Comics 19, 24 textual 54–55, 56, 57, 60 many 173–82; multiethnic 7, 69;
Eco, Umberto 12, 22 Freedman, Ariela 121 nonfiction 5, 9, 198–208; see also
education 1, 6, 24, 27, 29, 30, 97, Freud, Sigmund 17, 19, 20, 185, 191 cartoons; comics; graphic mem-
103n2, 229, 244; literary 95, 96, Frey, James 216 oir; graphic novels
164; multicultural 95, 97 Frey, Nancy 164 graphic novels 1, 2, 6, 9, 10n1, 11,
educational technology 12 Frusin, Marcelo 227 21, 40, 48, 49, 50, 50n1, 51n14,
Eggers, Dave 41, 50n6, 204, 210 Fu, Binbin 82 51n15, 68, 70, 71, 72, 74, 75, 76,
1893 Chicago World’s Fair 189 Fun Home 7, 12, 20, 105–17, 119, 77, 78, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86,
Eisner, Will 6, 27, 40, 45, 49, 123–26, 127n2, 127–28n6, 98, 119, 121, 122, 123, 127n1,
51n14, 53, 59, 60, 61, 63n25, 67, 128n10, 128n13, 199, 201, 203, 128n8, 130, 131, 136, 141, 142,
85, 96, 119, 128n8, 182n1 212, 215–18, 228 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 151, 152,
Eisner Awards 119, 162 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 161, 162,
Elder, Will 19, 20 Gaines, Kevin 27 163, 164, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170,
Ellerston, Anthony 224 Garden of Eden 110 171, 172n8, 175, 181, 186, 187,
Embroideries 126, 128n12 Gardner, Jared 123 196, 208, 210, 225, 232, 233,
Ender, Evelyne 206 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 80 234, 235, 236, 237, 238, 240,
268 Index
241n3; definition of 47; educa- historiography 145, 147, 148, 155, ImageTexT 202
tional 1; literary 119; see also car- 156, 158, 159 immigration 11, 81, 104n5, 171
toons; comics; graphic narratives history 2, 82, 14, 15, 17, 19, 21, 23, imperialism 11
Graphic Novels 202 26, 27, 28, 30, 31, 32, 36n7, The Impostor’s Daughter 8, 119, 124
Graphic Novels and Comics in Li- 37n17, 37n22, 41, 44, 45, 49, 51, In the Shadow of No Towers 12, 35,
braries and Archives 6 63n38, 67, 68, 74, 78, 86, 92, 37n24, 49, 53–55, 187, 226
Gravett, Paul 202 94, 96, 97, 98, 99, 103, 104n5, Incognegro 227
Gray, Harold 36n3 107, 113, 114, 115, 121, 122, 125, Inge, M. Thomas 42
Gray, Richard 195 130, 139, 145–48, 153, 155–56, injustice 72, 89, 98, 99, 190
Great Depression 148 159, 165, 167, 182n2, 189–90, intellectual property rights 11; see
The Green Hornet 87, 89–90 192, 193, 194, 196n1, 202, 216, also copyright law; fair use
Green Lantern 68, 198 219n1, 225, 235, 236, 237, 243, International Journal of Comic Art
Groensteen, Thierry 54, 55, 62n11, 245, 253; American 6, 29, 35, 202
62n13, 62n15, 63n25, 63n30, 72, 80, 87, 88, 189, 196n2; cul- Internet 12, 33, 35, 51n13, 163,
200, 201, 203–4 tural 2, 233; family 213; per- 222, 232
Ground Zero 56; see also 9/11; sonal 215, 217; public 215, 217; internment 81, 87, 88, 89, 94, 97–
World Trade Center oral 108, 232, 233 99, 103, 104n7
Gudding, Gabriel 186, 194 The History of Herodotus 235 The Interpretation of Dreams 17
Guevara, Che 137 Hogan’s Alley 36n2 Invasion of the Bodysnatchers 12, 17,
Guibert, Emmanuel 199 Hogarth 169 20
Guillory, John 95–96, 103n2, Hollywood 89, 131, 178, 182n8, The Invention of Curried Sausage
103–4n5, 104n6 234, 235 179
Gulf War 35, 235 Holocaust 147, 148, 155, 185, 188, Iran-Iraq War 137
Guthrie, Woody 23 199, 218, 227 Iranian Revolution see Islamic
gutters 24, 57, 70, 100, 108, 169, Homer 235, 241n2 Revolution
226, 256 homosexuality 108; see also gays; Iraq War 32, 195, 235; see also
lesbians; queer Gulf War; war on terror
Hajdu, David 19 Hoover, J. Edgar 29 Islamic Revolution 130, 136, 139,
Haley, Bill 23 Horkheimer, Max 174, 175, 176, 156, 217
Halo 233 182n8 Islamic women 134; see also veil
Hammett, Dashiell 12, 17, 19, 23 Horrocks, Dylan 222 It’s a Good Life If You Don’t Weaken
Hansberry, Lorraine 28 Houston, James 89 191, 192, 202
Hansen, Mark 47 Houston, Jeanne Wakatsuki 89 It’s a Wonderful Life 108
Hanson, Victor Davis 233 How the Other Half Lives 16 Ivory Coast 162, 165, 166, 167, 168,
Harper’s Weekly 245 How to Tell If Your Teacher Is 171
Harrison, Jackie 258 Brainwashing You with Eurocen-
Harte, Bret 84, 86, 91 trism 29 Jackson, Jessie 95
Harvey, Robert C. 222 “Howdy Dooit” 19 Jacobs, Dale 222
Hatfield, Charles 10n1, 168–69, Hughes, John 86 James, Henry 193
194, 200, 201, 206, 248 Hung, William 86, 91, 93n3 Japanese Americans 88–89, 92,
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Hurricane Katrina 199 94, 95, 98; see also Nisei; Sansei
Genius 41, 204, 210 Hutcheon, Linda 155 Jenkins, Shabazz K. 29
Heath, Stephen 232 hybrid texts 9 “Jesus Christ” 23
Heathen Chinee 80, 84, 86, 88, 91 hybridity 11, 126, 169 The Jew of New York 76–79
Heck, Don 2 Jewish Americans 245
Heer, Jeet 50n3, 200 “I Am Its Secret” 135 Jews 72, 76, 77, 78, 153, 215, 250
Helfer, Andrew 199 “I Want It That Way” 86 Jimmy Corrigan 188, 189
Hellblazer 227 “(I Wish I Could Fly Like) Super- Johnson, Denis 41
Hellboy 181 man” 23 Johnson, Mat 227
Helmers, Marguerite 221 iconicity 226 Johnson, Stephen 233
Hemingway, Ernest 44 iconography 67, 68, 69, 70, 253, Jones, Gerard 19, 21
Hergé 68, 169 254 Journal of Educational Sociolog y 1
Hernandez, Claudia 239 icons 14, 16, 21, 67, 178 Journal of the Graphic Novel and
Hernandez, Gilbert 69, 168 identities 7, 14, 28, 46, 49, 54, 59, Comics 202
Hernandez, Jaime 69, 168 62, 67, 68, 69, 70, 75, 77, 78, journalists 74, 80, 151, 213, 243,
Herodotus 232, 234, 238 82, 83, 84, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 244–50, 253, 256, 258
heroism 23, 69, 89, 90, 225 95, 97, 98, 99, 103n3, 104n6, Journey to the West 70, 81, 82, 90
Herriman, George 16–17, 20, 40, 113, 114, 115, 125, 127n3, 130, 131, Joyce, James 108, 114, 117, 146, 157,
48 132, 124, 125, 139, 185, 202, 210, 158, 159n5, 181
heterosexuality 121 212, 213, 214, 215, 217, 228, 246, Judge 26
high art 12, 44, 174; see also low art 259; ethnic 70, 71, 76, 77, 82, justice 37n22, 99, 189, 201, 204,
high culture 122, 175, 177, 178, 228; gender 7, 110, 133; politics 227, 228
182; see also low culture 103n3; racial 27, 36n12, 70; sex- Jyllands-Posten 68
Hill, Charles 221 ual 7, 105, 106
Der Himmel über Berlin 158 ideologies 11, 12, 20, 22, 23, 30, The K Chronicles 6, 26, 32–33,
hip hop 28, 36n12 74, 140, 142n3, 152, 155, 176 36n4, 37n17
Hirsch, Marianne 163, 164, 169, Iliad 232, 234–40, 241n1 Kafka, Franz 158, 179, 181
171n2, 187, 195 Image Comics 53 Kalman, Maira 126
His Cheap Suit Serenaders 24 Image Duplicator 20 Kannenberg, Gene 189, 202
Index 269
Kaplan, E. Ann 189 lithograph 13, 41 176, 177, 180, 181, 187, 201, 214,
Katchor, Ben 76–79 “Little Boxes” 23 224, 225, 230, 231, 234, 239,
Katin, Miriam 199 Little Nemo in the Palace of Ice and 243–59
Keaton, Buster 157 Further Adventures 12, 17 Mein Stundenbuch 157
Kelso, Megan 123, 125, 126, 128n12 Little Orphan Annie 36n3 Meisel, Edmund 157
Kent, Clark see Superman Lloyd, David 227, 228 Melnick, Jeffrey 187, 188
Kierkegaard, Sören 46 Lockpez, Inverna 199 memoir 7, 8, 9, 43, 81, 89, 92, 94,
Kim, Derek Kirk 81 Loeb, Jeph 227 96, 97, 99, 101, 105–9, 114, 116,
Kincaid, Jamaica 218 Logicomix 199 118n4, 119, 121, 122, 123, 125,
The Kin-der-Kids 16 Lolita 215 128n6, 128n13, 166, 188, 199,
King, Frank 16 Los Angeles race riot 33 202, 204, 205, 206, 208, 210–
King, Martin Luther, Jr. 28–30, The Los Angeles Times 27, 234 19, 219n2, 230; see also autobi-
36, 72, 74; see also civil rights Love and Rockets 69 ographies; life writing
King, Rodney 33 Lowell, Amy 42 memory 57, 62, 107, 109, 113, 115,
the Kinks 23 Lucky Luke 174 116, 125, 135, 156, 185, 187, 188,
Kirby, Jack 2, 20, 22 Luks, George 16 192, 193, 195, 206, 217, 219; cul-
Kiyama, Henry Yoshitaka 81 Luminis 24 tural 188, 256
KKK 33, 37n21, 190 Lutes, Jason 8, 145–59 Men of Tomorrow 19
Knight, Keith 6–7, 26–36, 36n4, “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)”
36n5, 36–37n14, 37n17, 37n21, MacKay, Brad 245 24
37n22 MacNelly, Jeff 26 metafiction 51n16, 54, 155, 156,
Kolb, Eberhard 147 Mad 19 238, 240
Kramer’s Ergot 50 Mahne, Nicole 180 MetaMaus see Maus
Krazy Kat 17, 48 Making Comics 203 metamedial mode 49
Kreitz, Isabel 177, 179–81 Malcolm X 199 metamorphosis 77, 237
Krigstein, Bernie 19–20 Mandrake the Magician 68 methodologies 2, 5, 24, 29, 81,
kunstlerroman 108 manga 31, 63n23, 69, 81, 128n11, 122, 127, 186, 223
Kurtzman, Harvey 19, 20 166, 170, 171, 174, 176, 202 Mickey Mouse 161
Mann, Katrina 20 Middle East 30, 33, 131, 132, 248
The Lagoon 123, 125 Mann, Ron 17, 20, 22 Miller, Frank 9, 40, 122, 210, 213,
Lahiri, Jhumpa 83 Mann, Thomas 158 221, 225, 232
Lanning, Andy 57, 58 Marie Claire 119 A Million Little Pieces 216
Layoun, Mary N. 249 Marston, William Moulton 17 Mimesis 158
Lead Pipe Sunday 13 Martin, Ricky 86 “Mr. Tambourine Man” 23, 24
The League of Extraordinary Gentle- Marvel Comics 2, 20, 22, 24 modalities 55, 62n11, 141, 227
men 22, 51n15 Masereel, Frans 157 Modan, Rutu 123
Learning Styles Perspectives 236 Massenzeichenware 174 model minority 80, 86, 88
Lee, Bruce 87, 89 Master of Education 6; see also Modern Fiction Studies 123, 124,
Lee, Jae 87 Yang, Gene Luen 171n2
Lee, Jim 87 material culture 11, 19, 21, 24 Modern Language Association 5,
Lee, Stan 2, 20, 68 materiality 47, 49, 176 6, 202
Lee, Wen Ho 87 Maus 12, 20, 21, 22, 23, 69, 96, modernism 24, 44, 146, 147, 156,
Lefebvre, Henri 191 118n4, 120, 121, 123, 124, 125, 158
LeFevre, Didier 199 155–56, 159n2, 173, 175, 199, modernity 191, 192
Lejeune, Philippe 206, 211, 212, 212, 213, 215, 218 A Moment of Silence 53
217 May-Day Parade 153 Mondrian, Piet 46, 50n11
Lerer, Seth 42, 49 Mazzucchelli, David 121 Monkey King 70, 81–86, 90, 91,
Lesbian Nation 114 McCarthy, Todd 232 93n2
lesbianism 105 McCay, Winsor 12, 15–18, 20, 21, Moore, Alan 9, 12, 22, 119, 221,
lesbians 113–15, 117, 127n1, 152, 23–24, 194 227, 228
218 McCloud, Scott 12, 15, 16, 40, 42, Morales, Robert 72, 73
Lethem, Jonathan 41 43, 45, 49, 50n10, 50n11, 51n14, motifs 46, 83, 200, 235
“Let’s Have Nigger Hearts for 68, 69, 81, 97, 100, 108, 118n5, “Mourning and Melancholia” 185
Lunch” 21 120, 127n3, 128n6, 163, 164, 166, movies see films
“Letter from Birmingham Jail” 28 167, 169, 172n4, 176, 177, 180, multicultural literature 7, 94, 97,
Lewis, Reina 130 203–4, 216, 217, 222, 231n1, 103, 104n5
liberal arts 12 231n3 multiculturalism 7, 87, 95–99,
Lichtenstein, Roy 20 McDonnell, Patrick 17 103n1, 103n2, 103n3, 104n6
Life 26 McGruder, Aaron 6, 15, 26–36, multi-genre 222
life-story 191, 208 36n4, 37n16, 37n17, 37n18, multimodal texts 9, 221–24, 226,
life writing 7, 105, 106, 108, 124, 37n19 230–31
211, 217, 219, 219n2; see also au- McKenzie, Jon 132, 133 multimodality 223, 226, 230,
tobiographies; memoir McLuhan, Marshall 50n10, 176– 231
literacy 7, 61, 81, 94, 96, 120, 77, 180 music 23, 36n12, 138, 169, 195
127n3, 163, 164, 165, 222, 223, media 6, 8, 12, 24, 27, 28, 32, 33, Musil, Robert 158
224, 226, 229, 230, 249; multi- 37n18, 40, 42, 47, 48, 50n10, MySpace 232
modal 222, 224–26, 231; visual 51n16, 54, 56, 57, 60, 62n20, Myth of Sisyphus 117
6, 54, 62, 63n36, 131, 142, 162, 63n36, 70, 80, 86, 87, 88, 90, myths 62, 82, 86, 116, 117, 157,
163 97, 128, 164, 168, 169, 173, 175, 188, 228
270 Index
The Namesake 83 Oxford English Dictionary (OED) postmodernism 155

narration boxes 14, 75 47 post-race era 7, 80
Nast, Thomas 13, 245 post-racial world 80
The Nation 31, 202 Paige, Satchel 72 Potsdamer Platz 149–51, 157
National Association of Comics Art Pak, Greg 87 Pound, Ezra 198
Educators (NACAE) 6, 50n1 Palestine 9, 96, 120, 121, 199, 243– “Pretty Boy Floyd” 23
National Council of Teachers of 58 Pride of Baghdad 230
English (NCTE) 164 panels 8, 16, 17, 19, 24, 33, 35, 48, The Principle of Uncertainty 126
National Endowment for the Hu- 53, 55, 56, 57, 59, 60, 62n16, printed books 2, 47, 49
manities (NEH) 95 70, 76, 85, 100, 101, 107, 109, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics 156
National Public Radio (NPR) 161 125, 163, 164, 166, 168, 169, 176, propaganda 24, 32, 35, 94, 97
Native Americans 29, 78, 196n2 178, 186, 188, 189, 190, 191, 194, psychology 17, 228
Navab, Aphrodite Désirée 141 196, 200, 203, 204, 206, 213, Publishers Weekly 162
The Navigator 157 218, 224, 226, 227, 248, 256 Puck 26
Neshat, Shirin 8, 130–42, 142n3 Pantheon 49, 202 “Punisher: The End” 227
Neufeld, Josh 199 Papadimitriou, Christos 199 Pustz, Matthew J. 68
New Journalism 245, 247 paperbacks 23, 170, 225
New London Group 223, 224, parody 19, 87, 88, 113, 133, 134, queer 105, 108, 112, 117, 124, 125–
228 140 26, 127n1, 203
New York Herald 27 patriotism 31, 53, 56, 235, 236
New York Post 68 Peace, Warren 227 race 7, 8, 17, 31, 33, 37n14, 67, 68,
New York Times 32, 51n15, 95, 97, Peanuts 27, 44 70, 71, 72, 74, 79, 80, 87, 90,
125, 126, 128n11, 128n13, 202, pedagogy 6, 24, 40, 42, 49, 50n1, 92, 98, 99, 100, 103n4, 104n6,
244 94, 95, 96, 103, 103n2, 125, 130, 131, 132, 228, 240
The New York Times Book Review 162, 163, 175, 181, 203, 204, racism 15, 21, 23, 33, 83, 92, 98,
202 223, 224, 231 104n5, 190, 191; bias 27; imagery
The New Yorker 9, 202 Pekar, Harvey 9, 37n22, 212–14 15, 21; profiling 27; stereotypes
newspaper strips 11, 36n2, 36n9 Percy Jackson and the Olympians 30, 36n11
Nietzsche 179 234 radicalism 28, 29, 31, 37n19
“9 A.M. EST” 53, 57–59 La Perdida 74–76, 126 radio 9, 90, 100, 180, 182n8, 195,
9/11 6, 7, 27, 28, 30–33, 35, Persepolis 7, 69, 96, 119, 123–26, 243
36n10, 37n18, 37n23, 37n24, 127n6, 128n11, 130–42, 155–56, Radway, Janice 27
53–55, 60–62, 185, 187, 189, 177, 180, 199, 205–8, 212, 214– A Raisin in the Sun 28
199; see also Ground Zero; Sep- 17, 226, 228, 230 Rajewsky, Irina O. 176, 180
tember 11th, 2001; World Trade persona 45, 49, 163, 214, 233, 248, Rassi, Toufic el 199
Center 249, 250, 259; author 42, 45, Raw Magazine 13, 23
9-11: Artists Respond 53 46, 51n12; reader 42, 43, 44, 45 reading 1, 2, 6, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14,
9-11: Emergency Relief 53, 59 The Philadelphia Inquirer 27 17, 20, 22, 24, 29, 40, 42, 43,
9/11 Report 199 The Photographer 199 44, 46, 47, 47, 49, 51n15, 54, 57,
“9066” 88–89, 92 photographs 28, 74, 98, 110, 115, 59, 60, 61, 77, 87, 97, 102, 207,
1913 Armory Show 12, 17 116, 130, 134, 135, 139, 141, 149, 108, 109, 111, 113, 114, 115, 116,
Nisei 88 157, 186, 188, 199, 224, 248, 117, 119, 120, 121, 124, 125, 127,
No-No Boy 89, 92 253, 255, 256 131, 136, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166,
nonfiction 5, 6, 8, 11, 198–99, 202, photography 8, 130–31, 168, 245, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 176, 180,
206, 208, 243–46, 259 253, 258 181, 186, 187, 189, 194, 195, 200,
Norris, Frank 2 Pierce, Richard 158 201, 204, 211, 212, 215, 219, 223,
novel 67, 70, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, Die Piloten 177, 178 224, 226, 227, 231, 233, 235,
85, 92, 11, 132, 137, 138, 155, “Plain Language from Truthful 243, 244, 247, 258; close 14, 22,
156, 157, 158, 159n3, 161, 162, James” 84, 91 40, 50n10, 61, 74, 92, 109, 135,
165, 166, 167, 168, 171n3, 179, Plath, Sylvia 12, 21 163, 170, 200, 224; comprehen-
180, 188, 235, 240 Player Character (PC) 232–33 sion 5; critical 8, 125; profi-
Nyberg, Amy Kiste 12, 19, 22 Plummer, Ken 106 ciency 40; skills 1, 50n10
PMLA 42, 169, 171n2 realism 146, 166, 205, 216, 249
Obama, Barack 68, 80 A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography “Reality 9/11” 53, 59–60
O’Brien, Tim 235 212 Red Cross 53
Odyssey 232–34, 238, 240 poetry 2, 6, 8, 9, 11, 12, 17, 21, 107, Red Ryder 68
Oedipus the King 235–40 163, 178, 179, 186, 196, 204, Reed, Ishmael 30
Okuto, Miné 7, 81, 89, 94–103, 232–40, 241n1; see also epic Regards from Serbia 205
104n7 political caricatures 26, 253 Reinventing Comics 203
On the Road 194 political science 24, 211 Renaissance 145–47, 199
O’Neil, Denny 68 politics 6, 24, 28, 33, 35, 36n12 representations 13, 46, 55, 56, 57,
Opper, Frederick Burr 26 62, 88, 98, 99, 103, 103n3, 130, 59, 60, 61, 62, 62n19, 62n21,
Orientalism 130, 142n3 171, 176, 194, 217, 221, 244; 63n29, 67, 68, 75, 81, 85, 86,
Ormes, Jackie 27, 36n7, 36n9 African 170; American 6, 27, 32; 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 95, 96, 99,
otherness 68, 69, 79, 97, 207 black 26, 28; identity 103n3; 103n3, 103n4, 104n5, 105, 107,
Oubrerie, Clément 8, 161–71, racial 80 109, 110, 113, 116, 119, 120, 121,
171n3 polyphony 156, 158 122, 123, 130, 134, 145, 146, 158,
Outcault, R.F. 15, 16, 26, 27, “Poor Lil’ Mose” 27 163, 169, 187, 192, 210, 211, 212,
36n2, 36n6 Pop Art 12, 20, 24 213, 214, 216, 219, 227, 249,
Index 271
250; cultural 94, 103n5, 113; 164, 176, 182n1, 208; see also car- “T” 53
ethnic 69, 74, 76, 81; media 27; toons; comics; graphic narra- Tabachnick, Stephen 6, 36n8, 202
pictorial 223; visual 7, 8, 9, tives; graphic novels “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid
37n17, 203, 221, 229, 253 Seth 8, 186, 191–93, 202 Blues” 23
Reynolds, Malvina 23 sexuality 44, 81, 89, 92, 105–7, Tamaki, Jillian 123, 125
rhetoric 9, 15, 29, 35, 43, 138, 140, 110, 113, 115, 117, 117n1, 126, 178, Tamaki, Mariko 123, 125
221, 226; visual 221 199, 206, 219 Taylor, Diana 186
rhetorical analysis 9, 221, 222, 226 Shakespeare, William 2 Teaching the Graphic Novel 6, 202
Rhode Island Notebook 194 Shamway, Gerry 213 television 9, 23, 26, 28, 33, 35,
Riis, Jacob 16 Shank, Barry 27 37n18, 53, 56–57, 59–60,
Rilke, Rainer Maria 158 “She Bangs” 86 63n32, 85, 86, 89, 90, 163, 166,
Riordan, Rich 234 Shiga, Jason 81 167, 168, 171, 186, 194, 224, 232,
Ripper 68 Shoe 26 233, 234, 243, 244
rock and roll 23 Short, Jeremy 1 The Tempest 234
“Rock Around the Clock” 23 “A Short History of America” 21, The Ten Cent Plague 19
Ross, Alex 15 23 The Terrible Twos 30
The Rough Guide to Graphic Novels short story 67, 92, 235 terrorist attacks 6, 7, 27, 53–62;
1 202 Shortcomings 71, 81, 248 see also 9/11; World Trade Center
Rounthwaite, Adair 141 Shuster, Joe 17, 22 terrorists 31, 33, 245
Royal, Derek Parker 7, 81 Siegel, Jerry 17, 21 Texas History Movies 1
Ruttmann, Walter 157 signifier 70, 75, 108, 132, 223 text balloons 14
Rygulla, Ralf-Rainer 177 Sin City 181 Tezuka, Osamu 69
“Singing in the Bathtub” 24 theory 9, 130, 132, 133, 134, 142,
Sacco, Joe 9, 41, 96, 99, 120, 121, Sinoon, Anton 235 158, 159n3, 166, 174, 176, 177,
199, 243–59 Sixteen Candles 86 180, 185, 186, 201, 203, 206, 211,
Safe Area Gorazde 199 Skim 123, 125 219, 219n1; feminist 127, 203;
Said, Edward 121, 130, 203, 244 Slaughterhouse-Five 240 literary 202, 228
St. Nick 30 Small, David 121, 125, 212, 214 The Things They Carried 235
Sale, Tim 227 Smith, Sidonie 9, 105, 106, 109, (Th)ink 32, 36n4
Sandell, Laurie 8, 119, 124 113, 211, 212, 219n1, 219n2 Thomas, Roy 2
The Sandman 206 The Smurfs 174 Thompson, Craig 121, 203
Sansei 88 Snyder, Zack 9, 232, 234, 238; see Thought Balloonists 200
Santa Claus 30 also 300 (film) 300 (film) 9, 232–41
Santiago, Wilfred 69 social networks 232 300 (graphic novel) 9, 232–41
Sarasin, Lynne Celli 236 Some Imagist Poets 42 “Thrilling Adventure Stories” 13, 14
Satie, Erik 46 Sophocles 235, 239 Time Magazine 22
Satrapi, Marjane 8, 9, 69, 96, 99, sound effects 14, 194 Timm, Uwe 179
119, 121, 123, 124, 126, 127, 127n2, speech bubbles 164, 167 Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly
127n4, 128n7, 128n11, 128n12, Spider-Man 2, 53, 54 Concern 6, 40–51
130–42, 142n1, 155, 156, 159n2, Spiegelman, Art 6, 9, 12, 13, 22, Tintin 68, 174
177, 180, 199, 205–7, 212, 214, 23, 35, 37n24, 40, 49, 51n15, To the Lighthouse 147, 158, 204
217, 218, 226, 228 53–56, 60, 62n19, 62n21, “Tom Joad” 23
Schiffer, Marcellus 157 63n37, 69, 96, 99, 120–22, 125, Tomine, Adrian 71, 81
Schjeldahl, Peter 9, 50n8 128n7, 155–56, 187, 195, 212–13, Tommaso, Rich 72
school 1, 30, 83, 84, 86, 133, 137, 215, 218 Top Shelf 202
156, 162, 163, 164, 171, 173, 246; The Spirit 27, 128n8 Töpffer, Rodolphe 173
curricula 99, 181; elementary 29; Spirou & Fantasio 174 Torchy Brown 27, 36n9
high 6, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32, 36n14, The Squirrel Mother 123, 125 Torres, Alicia 8, 186–88, 199
99, 114, 125, 175, 181, 182, 198; Steinbeck, John 2 Tran, GB 81
library 86 Stitches 121, 125, 212, 214, 215 transformation 7, 41, 54, 82–85,
School Library Journal 162 storytelling 2, 47, 70, 117n2, 125, 91, 105, 179, 180
Schulz, Alfred 48, 134 155, 188, 192, 213, 240, 243, 253 translation 8, 112, 127n2, 162, 173,
Schulz, Charles 27, 69 “Street Code” 20 174, 182n7, 202, 241n2
science fiction 12, 16, 20, 199 Stuck Rubber Baby 121 transmission 239
“The Scorched Face” 17, 19, 23 Studies in Comics 202 trauma 8, 35, 53, 57, 60, 63n31,
Seal of Approval 12 Sturm, James 72 83, 101, 108, 124, 125, 136, 185–
Second World War see World War subjecthood 230 96, 219
II superhero 14, 20, 21, 22, 53, 54, Trotsky 137
Secret Identities 81, 86–87, 89, 90, 69, 82, 86, 87, 88, 90, 92, 167, Troy 238
92, 93n4 174, 178, 185, 189, 198, 199, 225, Trudeau, Garry 26, 37n19, 245
Seduction of the Innocent 12, 20, 230, 248; adventures 14; Ameri- Turner, Brian 235
161, 182n5 can 23, 53, 87; comics 12, 20, Turner, Morrie 27
Seeger, Pete 23 21, 22, 37n24, 48, 72, 199; fans Turok, Son of Stone 192
self-portraits 9, 51n12, 211, 212, 15; stories 22, 47 TV see television
213, 215, 250 Superman 2, 17, 22–23, 53, 54, typography 14
self-reflexivity 9, 48, 51n16, 96, 72, 82, 161, 213, 225
243, 244, 247, 249, 258 symbols 8, 11, 82, 111, 130, 136, Ulysses 114, 146, 157, 159n5
September 11th, 2001 53 137, 138, 140, 148 underground comix 15, 20, 21, 24,
sequential art 1, 2, 10n1, 107, 120, The System of Comics 200, 204 37n22
272 Index
“The Underground War in Gaza” The Washington Post 27, 31, 32, 95, Wood, Mary 16
244 162 Woolf, Virginia 158, 198, 204
Understanding Comics 12, 15, 16, “Watching the Detectives” 23 Worcester, Kent 50n3, 200
40, 42, 43, 49, 97, 120, 163, 166, Watchmen 12, 21, 22, 23, 119, 175, Word Is Out 108
176, 177, 203, 216, 231n3 181, 206, 227 Worden, Daniel 42, 44
Understanding Media 176 Watson, Julia 105, 106, 109, 113, world literature 8, 162, 163, 165,
Unpopular Culture 204 117n4, 211, 219n1, 219n2 199, 202
Updike, John 41, 43, 44 Watterson, Bill 226 The World on Sunday 16
We Are on Our Own 199 World Trade Center 53, 55, 57,
V for Vendetta 9, 22, 206, 221, 228 The Weapon 80, 92n1 60; see also Ground Zero; 9/11
vacuum 228 Wee Pals 27, 36n9 World War I 147, 148, 152, 153
veil 8, 130–42, 142n3, 156, 107, Weeds 23 World War II 28, 72, 88, 89, 92,
224, 249; see also Islamic women Weimar Republic 8, 145–49, 151, 94, 147, 148, 173, 174, 179
Versaci, Rocco 107, 166, 167, 245, 153, 155, 158–59
247 Weiner, Robert 6 X, Malcolm 29
video games 47, 131, 232, 233, Wenders, Wim 158 X-Men 20, 88, 122
234 Wertham, Fredric 12, 17, 20, 22,
videographers 232, 233 24, 161, 182n5 “The Y-Men” 88, 91, 93n4
videos 222, 233; see also YouTube West Bank 243 Yang, Gene Luen 6, 70, 81, 85,
Vietnam War 137 White, Hayden 147 89
Vietnamerica 81 Whitlock, Gillian 117n4, 127n5, Yang, Jeff 91
vigilante 227–29 156, 167, 207, 211 The Year of Magical Thinking 210
violence 68, 111, 131, 137, 139, 140, Wicomb, Zoe 204 yellow journalism 16
148, 153, 156, 177, 185, 190, 191, Wideman, John Edgar 210 The Yellow Kid 15, 16
199, 225, 227, 229, 230, 239, Wikipedia 47 yellow peril 80
248, 249, 256 Wilde, Kim 138 You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town
Von Eschen, Penny 27 Williams, Bert 23 204
Vonnegut, Kurt 240 Williams, William Carlos 204 YouTube 9, 86, 91, 93n4, 131, 222,
Willingham, Bill 227, 228 232, 233, 234
The Wail of Loneliness 113 Wilson, Emmet 72
Walker, Alice 2 Winfrey, Oprah 80 Zap Comix 68
Wallace, David Foster 41 Witek, Joseph 10n1, 21, 169, 201 “Der Zeichner der Laute” 145
war on terror 27, 33, 185; see also Wolfe, Tom 245 Die Zeit 49
Iraq War Wolk, Douglas 107 Zelizer, Barbie 253
Ward, Lynd 11 “Women of Allah” 130–31, 134– Zograf, Aleksandar 205
Ware, Chris 6, 8, 13, 14, 40–42, 35, 139, 141 Zorich, Chris 1
44–45, 48, 186, 188 Women’s Studies Quarterly 123, 124 Zurier, Rebecca 68
Warner Brothers 22 Wonder Woman 17, 68, 120 Zwigoff, Terry 21

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DONG

Teaching Comics and Graphic Narratives

Lan Dong is associate professor of English at the

Transnationalism and the Asian American Heroine:

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers

1. Comic books, strips, etc., in education.

BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE

© 2012 Lan Dong. All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form

On the cover: (top) Drawing of the Yellow Kid by Richard F.

Manufactured in the United States of America

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers

Part I : American Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

Part II : Ethnic Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67

Part III : Women’s and Gender Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105

9. Our Graphics, Ourselves: Graphic Narratives and the Gender Studies

Part IV : Cultural Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145

Part V : Genre Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185

Part VI : Composition, Rhetoric, and Communication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221

About the Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261

I can literally say that I learned vocabulary words in comic books.

1. Art and Commerce in the Classroom

Hillary Chute, in her article “Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative,”

Required Texts and Educational Technolog y

Incorporating Popular Music

response. Knight creates a counterpoint to the immediate mediatization of the attacks on

The Comics Reader: Antisocial Nerd or Art Aﬁcionado?

The Pains of Production: Authorial Presence in Comics

The Stuff That Comics Are Made Of

A Cultural Perspective on Graphic Narratives

Frames and Framings

Graphic Narratives and 9/11

Figure 5.6. Jessica Abel. La Perdida. New York: Pantheon, 2006. 5.

In contemporary time popular and intellectual ﬁgures as disparate as Oprah Winfrey

Teaching American Born Chinese: A Close Reading Approach

Teaching Secret Identities: A Cultural Historical Approach

Sample Discussion Questions on American Born Chinese

3. In an interview, Yang states: “There is an idea within Christianity of intention behind

Sample Discussion Questions on “The Y-Men”

Sample Discussion Questions on “9066”

Sample Discussion Questions on “The Blue Scorpion & Chung”

2. For more on the Monkey King, see Chen, Lai, Pearson.

The Trouble with Multiculturalism; or, Aren’t We All

If traditional multiculturalism privileges a tidy image of diversity and positions texts

Framing Citizen 13660 in the Multicultural Literature Classroom

The Politics of Visibility in Citizen 13660

8. “The Slippage Between

Situated at the intersection of contemporary theories of life-writing and theories of

Stories as Communal Property

commercial, the televised spectacle of the Nixon

Picture This: Gender Under Construction

intelligible to her brothers as an object of ridicule, culturally if not visibly differentiated

Getting a Lesbian Life

In the Shadow of Young Boys in Flower

Various anxieties circulate about the comics in general. Do the autobiographical

Wonder Woman’s Airplane Is Invisible: Gender and Graphic

“Comics” Wars: Gender Studies Versus Fan Culture

The Personal Is Political: Autographics and Fictional Graphic

Conclusion: Thinking Through Method

Art can be a powerful means of challenging the stereotypes of mutually

Performance Theory: A Brief Discussion

Teaching Persepolis and “Women of Allah”: First Steps in

Persepolis and the Performance of the Veil