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Teaching Comics Through
Multiple Lenses
Building off the argument that comics succeed as literature—rich, complex nar-
ratives filled with compelling characters interrogating the thought-provoking
issues of our time—this book argues that comics are an expressive medium
whose moves (structural and aesthetic) may be shared by literature, the visual
arts, and film, but beyond this are a unique art form possessing qualities these
other mediums do not. Drawing from a range of current comics scholarship
demonstrating this point, this book explores the unique intelligence/s of comics
and how they expand the ways readers engage with the world in ways different
than prose, or film, or other visual arts.Written by teachers and scholars of comics
for instructors, this book bridges research and pedagogy, providing instructors with
models of critical readings around a variety of comics.
Crag Hill is Associate Professor of English Education at Jeannine Rainbolt

College of Education, University of Oklahoma, USA.
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Teaching Comics Through
Multiple Lenses
Critical Perspectives
Edited by Crag Hill

First published 2017
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2017 Taylor & Francis
The right of the Editor to be identified as the author of the editorial
material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted
in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-1-138-64990-3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-62563-8 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
This book is dedicated to the teachers, librarians,

parents, reviewers, and scholars who promote the
robust communicative potential/s of comics and
to the creators past, present, and future who make
these comics.

Contents
Prefaceix
Acknowledgementsxiv
1 Introduction: The Growing Relevance of Comics 1

CRAG HILL
SECTION 1
Materiality and the Reading of Comics11
2 Designing Meaning: A Multimodal Perspective on

Comics Reading 13
SEAN P. CONNORS
3 Multimodal Forms: Examining Text, Image, and Visual

Literacy in Daniel Handler’s Why We Broke Up and
Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief 30
AMY BRIGHT
SECTION 2
Comics and Bodies47
4 Illustrating Youth: A Critical Examination of the Artful

Depictions of Adolescent Characters
in Comics 49
MARK A. LEWIS
5 Just Like Us? LGBTQ Characters in Mainstream

Comics 62
A. SCOTT HENDERSON
viii Contents
SECTION 3
Comics and the Mind79
6 Telling the Untellable: Comics and Language of

Mental Illness 81
SARAH THALLER
7 Christian Forgiveness in Gene Luen Yang’s Animal

Crackers and Eternal Smile: A Thematic Analysis 95
JACOB STRATMAN
SECTION 4
Comics and Contemporary Society111
8 Poverty Lines: Visual Depictions of Poverty and

Social Class Realities in Comics 113
FRED JOHNSON AND JANINE J. DARRAGH
9 Can Superhero Comics Defeat Racism? Black

Superheroes “Torn Between Sci-Fi Fantasy and
Cultural Reality” 132
P. L. THOMAS
10 Teaching Native American Comics With

Post-Colonial Theory 147
LISA SCHADE ECKERT
SECTION 5
End Points 159
11 End Points 161

CRAG HILL
List of Contributors163
Additional resources were compiled by Shaina Thomas.
Index165
Preface
Comics have been on the margins of culture in the United States since the 19th
century. A popular medium utilized in the circulation wars between newspa-
pers, splashing onto the big screen in the silent film era, used for instruction
and propaganda from the 1930s into the 1980s, comics have always been visible,
have always been useful; yet until recently comics have been roundly eschewed
by university scholars and K-12 teachers (with two exceptions: research into the
history of comics and comics to help struggling readers). The predominant cri-
tiques: Comics are too easy. Plots, if any, are too thin; characters are shallow, flat.
Gender and racial stereotypes abound.The medium is too superhero heavy, with
too much violence. Comics just can’t carry a narrative the way that prose can.
As long as people have been writing and talking about comics, the above
charges have been leveled against them, expounded in print and in casual con-
versation. (Many of the same arguments were made about film in its infancy.)
But now a window is opening onto and out of this body of work so prevalent
and yet so denigrated. Scholars in many disciplines are beginning to write
systematically about comics, and instructors at college and university levels are
beginning to insert comics—or graphic novels as the euphemism of the day
goes—into literature, history, psychology, and other courses. The visibility of
comics is spreading but not spreading thin. The intent of this book is to give
that visibility a qualitative shove so that the unique intelligence/s of comics can
expand how we engage with the world in ways different than prose, or film, or
other visual arts, so that the potential of comics is made explicit and productive.
The international audience for this project, in short, will have read comics,
will know the value of comics, will be familiar with some of the scholarship,
and will be looking for ways to include comics in university courses. Teaching
Comics Through Multiple Lenses: Critical Perspectives is a book that brings usable,
approachable theoretical resources to scholar educators. Designed foremost for
college and university instructors of comics courses at the undergraduate and
graduate levels and for graduate students embarking on the study of comics
(there are more and more dissertations on comics each year), the book will also
be useful for librarians looking to add comics to their collections and for sec-
ondary teachers in many disciplines (English, education, history, critical studies,
among others) who are incorporating comics into their curriculum.
x Preface
Survey of Chapters
The text can serve as an outline for thematic courses utilizing comics. For
instance, in a course that explores the construction of adolescence, the instruc-
tor could select from the comics discussed in Chapter 4, “Illustrating Youth:
A Critical Examination of the Artful Depictions of Adolescent Characters in
Comics” by Mark Lewis. For all audiences, Teaching Comics Through Multiple
Lenses: Critical Perspectives applies a range of critical perspectives to demonstrate
how comics help us read the world in ways that no other medium can. The
chapter authors are students of comics who have published articles, book chap-
ters, and made presentations on comics, work with undergraduate and gradu-
ate students, and have close connections with practicing K-12 teachers. Each
author, then, has an eye on comics as a unique art form, a vital contributor to
our conversations about being in the world, and on how comics can expand the
interpretive and communicative capacities of readers. Each chapter implicitly or
explicitly has a lens on comics scholarship, comics pedagogy, and comic reader-
ship. The collection, then, is composed with the rigor of a text for a graduate
class, but is also written with clarity, practicality and relevance, to resonate with
undergraduate students, secondary teachers, and librarians.
Chapter Overviews
Due to the preponderance of narratives that blend word and image today, it is
assumed that contemporary adolescents are natural and savvy interpreters of
multimodal texts. Raise the prospect that one reads images, however, and some
literacy educators may grow uncomfortable.The time that students spend stud-
ying literature in secondary and college English classes may equip them with
a repertoire of analytic concepts for reading and talking critically about print
text, but they are less likely to possess an equivalent set of concepts for mapping
the semiotic design of texts that interweave word and image to convey a story.
Drawing on scholarship on multimodality, visual literacy, and comics studies,
Sean P. Connors’ “Designing Meaning: A Multimodal Perspective on Comics
Reading” (Chapter 2) examines the print and visual conventions that readers
potentially draw on to construct literary meaning as they interact with the
multimodal design of comic books and graphic novels. The chapter theorizes
comics reading as a complex activity that challenges readers of all ability levels.
Multimodal YA (young adult) novels use graphic devices—for example, pho-
tographs, illustrations, and interesting typography—in conjunction with written
text. However, these texts cannot necessarily be defined as “graphic novels.”
They emphasize a high text-to-image ratio, meaning text greatly outweighs
image. This is in contrast to the roughly equal combination of text and image
present in graphic novels. The prevalence of images in contemporary YA nov-
els bears close examination, as it reveals much about readers, technology, and
literacy in the 21st century. Daniel Handler’s (2011) Why We Broke Up, illus-
trated by Maira Kalman, and Markus Zusak’s (2006) The Book Thief, illustrated
Preface xi
by Trudy White, both experiment with the relationship between text and image
in a book-length format. Both novels contain more text than images, and both
received Michael J. Printz Honor Awards after publication, an award that recog-
nizes the best YA novel each year. Amy Bright’s “Multimodal Forms: Examin-
ing Text, Image, and Visual Literacy in Daniel Handler’s Why We Broke Up and
Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief” (Chapter 3) provides an inquiry into the use
of image in multimodal YA novels by first outlining the new focus on visual
literacy, reviewing the text-to-image ratios in recent YA novels and performing
a critical analysis on Why We Broke Up and The Book Thief, two multimodal YA
novels. This chapter investigates the importance of visual literacy when reading
in the 21st century.

In “Illustrating Youth: A Critical Examination of the Artful Depictions of
Adolescent Characters in Comics” (Chapter 4) Mark Lewis argues that artists
must make choices on several visual elements—body types, dress style, and illus-
trated emotions—as an essential component to character development, thereby
providing a notable entry point for literary criticism on comics. Employing a
youth studies perspective focused upon examining representations of adoles-
cence and adolescents, this chapter demonstrates how the artful depictions of
fe/male protagonists promote certain assumptions about the beliefs, desires, and
practices of youth. In particular, this analysis reveals that the enchantment of
youth, based upon emotional attachments to nostalgic ideas of becoming a wo/
man, evidences in artists’ decisions in how to illustrate young people.
Between 1954 and 1989, the Comics Code Authority banned all references
to homosexuality. However, since 1989 characters in mainstream comics have
been increasingly depicted as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or questioning
(LGBTQ). A. Scott Henderson’s “Just Like Us? LGBTQ Characters in Main-
stream Comics” (Chapter 5) analyzes this development, paying close attention to
the ways that Queer Theory can help teachers and students understand the por-
trayal of gender and sexual orientation (both through dialogue and images) as
part of character identities. Ultimately, this chapter argues that LGBTQ charac-
ters in comics can challenge us to question assimilationist and hetero-normative
assumptions regarding sexual orientation in American society.
Recent studies reveal that one-fifth of the American population, about 50 mil-
lion people including children and adolescents, live with some form of mental
illness. Sarah Thaller’s “Telling the Untellable: Comics and Language of Mental
Illness” (Chapter 6) demonstrates the ability of comics to allow for authentic
representation of the experience of living with mental illness. Numerous authors
with schizophrenia and other mental illnesses have expressed the difficultly of
trying to accurately convey their experience relying solely on words. Comics
are a venue that can transcend the limitation of words in order to create a more
complete and accurate depiction of those personal experiences. The ability to
tell these stories is crucial for treatment, awareness, and eliminating stigma, yet
traditional written language cannot accurately express mental illness in totality.
The graphic novel work of Gene Yang is representative of the type of litera-
ture that is both highly literary and explicitly Christian, yet published entirely
xii Preface
through the secular market place (First Second Books). More specifically, Yang,
who writes both superhero comics and contemporary magical realism, is not
shy about the fact that his Catholic Christianity influences his art. In a 2010
interview, in response to a question about the Christian influence in his work,
Yang says,“I do think the Christianity I experienced was definitely Asian-tinged.
There was a lot of talk about ‘emptying yourself.’ But the way it was expressed
is that you empty yourself to make room for the spirit of God, as opposed to
emptying yourself for the sake of emptying yourself ” (Morton, 2010). This idea
of “emptying oneself ” for the other is a major theme of Yang’s work. Jake Strat-
man’s “Christian Forgiveness in Gene Luen Yang’s Animal Crackers and Eternal
Smile: A Thematic Analysis” (Chapter 7) explores how many of Yang’s charac-

ters “empty themselves” of anger, despair, self-pity, and frustration in order to
embody a life of flourishing (telos), through the vehicle of the Christian concept
of forgiveness. Although American Born Chinese and Boxers and Saints are Yang’s
most popular and commercially successful novels, Stratman discusses several of
Yang’s lesser-known works, namely short stories, including his two short story
collections, Animal Crackers (2010) and Eternal Smile (2009). Stratman’s thematic
analysis of these short graphic stories uncovers the primary need for these char-
acters to seek forgiveness (or to be forgiven) for human flourishing and growth;
moreover, this need for reconciliation—to forgive or be forgiven—is often
embedded in a religious, if not explicitly Christian, context.
“Poverty Lines: Visual Depictions of Poverty and Social Class Realities in
Comics” by Fred Johnson and Janine Darragh (Chapter 8) asks how the seem-
ingly reductive cartooning in comics and graphic novels can be used to per-
petuate, challenge, or complicate mis/perceptions of those living in poverty.
Cartooning is key to comics because it reduces its objects to essential traits that
can be read at a glance. The cartooning process thus echoes the way people
make assumptions about others based on superficial visual cues; however, com-
ics artists often transcend simple stereotyping. The authors consider how com-
ics artists do that and how instructors may help students think critically about
the joining of story, visualization, and poverty themes. The chapter explores
three very different comics pairings: the original Amazing Spider-Man comics
from the 1960s paired with Marvel’s more recent Ultimate Comics Spider-
Man series; Rob Vollmar and Pablo G. Callejo’s more young adult-oriented
The Castaways paired with Youme Landowne and Anthony Horton’s (similarly
YA-oriented) Pitch Black; and Joe Sacco’s journalistic Safe Area Goražde paired
with Marzena Sowa and Sylvain Savoia’s memoir of Sowa’s childhood in 1980s
Poland, Marzi.
P. L. Thomas’ “Can Superhero Comics Defeat Racism?: Black Superheroes
‘Torn Between Sci-Fi Fantasy and Cultural Reality’” (Chapter 9) may not be
news to comics scholars, but his tone—his call to action—will be to readers
and teachers of comics who are just now poking into comics scholarship. This
chapter will 1) push readers to think about how comics engage/disengage with
some of the provocative issues of our time, such as race, contributing to or dis-
rupting problematic discourse/s, 2) give readers encounters with new comics or
Preface xiii
provocative re-encounters with familiar comics, and 3) provide teachers of com-
ics with some potent fodder for their classes. It closes with a powerful statement:
“In the comic book universe of fantasy and science fiction, then, we must remain
optimistic for the possibilities—ones that recognize the humanity of the readers
by honoring the humanity of the characters because of their racial identities and
simultaneously without regard for their racial identities.” An important goal for
many art forms!
Lisa Eckert’s “Teaching Native American Comics With Post-Colonial The-
ory” (Chapter 10) provides the theoretical foundation for teaching post-colonial
theoretical approaches as a means to construct meaning from multimodal text
but also to challenge the contemporary emphasis on New Critical close reading
emphasized in the current educational and political culture. Educators concerned
about inclusion, literary interpretation, increasing reading comprehension, tex-
tual complexity, metacognition, engaging reluctant readers, etc.—essentially
every literature teacher—can benefit from including multicultural graphic nov-
els and post-colonial theory in their classrooms. This approach particularly lends
itself to collaboration between history, social science, and English classes. This
chapter focuses on narratives with an emphasis on Native American voices and
characters, but this approach could be adapted for a wide range of contemporary
multicultural voices.
Acknowledgements
The editor would like to acknowledge those who offered encouragement,

advice, and recommendations as this project moved from brainstorm to full-
blown manuscript: P. L. Thomas, James Bucky Carter, Adam Van Buren, Shaina
Thomas, Jennifer Dorsey, Ashley Boyd, Sean Kottke, Julianna Kershen, Kristy
Brugar, Laurie Schneider, Naomi Silverman and her staff at Routledge, and the
reviewers whose comments and suggestions helped strengthen the book. He
would also like to acknowledge the support of Lawrence Baines, Stacy Reeder,
and other faculty in the Department of Instructional Leadership and Curricu-
lum at the University of Oklahoma as this work was being completed.
1 Introduction
The Growing Relevance
of Comics
Crag Hill
I can’t pinpoint when I first learned to read. I do remember my school literacy

included the infamous “Dick and Jane” and basal series labeled by color, which
most students knew indicated ability level (and so the ranking and sorting
began). These series likely had all the phonics anyone would ever need, but the
stories, if one could call them that, were as forgettable as they could be. Fortu-
nately I was having more authentic reading experiences.
The first reading I remember being passionate about, reading worth fight-
ing over/for, were the “funnies” found in “The Green Sheet” of The Milwaukee
Journal. I would rush to retrieve the paper from the front porch when it was
delivered in the afternoon, peeling out the four-page insert before handing
the paper over to my parents. I remember “The Wizard of Id,” “Hi and Lois,”
“The Family Circus,” “L’il Abner,” “Blondie,” “Beetle Bailey,” “Nancy,” “Charlie
Brown,” “B.C.,” and a comic I grew to like, “Prince Valiant,” a strip without a
punch line, with a narrative that seemed to move at a glacial pace (some days
I couldn’t figure out if anything happened at all), with vocabulary and syntax
far beyond “Dick and Jane.” I was especially struck by the drawings in “Prince
Valiant.” I didn’t know comics—the “funnies” as I knew them—could look like
the adults in my life, even if they wore different clothes.
My parents, fortunately, were enablers. To keep me and my siblings civil on
our long car trips (a 10,000-mile round trip to Alaska for one), they would buy
us comics. I remember once picking out six or eight issues of “Donald Duck,”
“Archie,” and “Superman.” I may not be remembering the titles accurately—
and I may also be misremembering that my siblings were included in this
comics bonanza; the pleasure may have been mine alone—but I’ll never forget
the half-cocked smile on my face as I read and re-read these comics, from which
I rarely glanced up to look at the passing scenery.
I only recently realized how seminal these early literacy experiences were.
I learned to love verbal/visual jokes, serial narratives, the written word, brev-
ity, and expressive, communicative images; I needed them each day, every day,
or I felt I empty. These comics were a connective thread between me and
the world outside my home and school. Radio and television, of course, also
provided those kinds of threads—music, news, and sports—and contributed
significantly to many of my formative literacies, but I sought out comics first
2 Crag Hill
before engaging in those mediums. While school was dumbing my reading
down, limiting my literacy, the comics I was reading set me up for a lifetime of
reading and writing words and images.
Many of us can remember the first comics we read, the people we shared
them with, the places we read them, where we saved them, losing count of the
number of times we read them, with or without the cover. For many of us, that
was our first experience of being a part of a community of readers. We have
never had a life without comics (though we may have pushed them to the back
of the closet, literally or figuratively, as we pursued other literary interests as we
got older); we never distinguished between literary fiction and comics, between
reading story with text and images and story with print text (though publically,
as teachers, we might have taken such a position; I did).
Readers of comics may have been marginalized for decades, but that space
is not a negative space; readers were content in their world, satisfied with the
aesthetic and intellectual pleasures comics provided them, even in the face of
disdain or outright censorship (think of the English teacher or parent snatch-
ing a comic away from a student and not returning it). The times though are
a-changing. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “If the single man plant himself
indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round
to him.” The world is swinging round to stories told in a synergy of words and
images. Comics may or may not be mainstream, but they have entered into the
mindset, the worldview, of those who may not have grown up with comics.The
world of comics is now growing readers, while at the same time the world of
readers is growing into comics.
Definitions
Frustrated by how others have defined comics, comics artists and scholars
(Cohn, 2005; Eisner, 1985/2008; Groensteen, 2013; Harvey, 1996, 2001; Kun-
zle, 1973; McCloud, 1993) have spent a great deal of time and energy formulat-
ing an airtight definition. For the purposes of this volume, we will forego this
exercise. Not only can readers of this book find easy access to such discussions
(check out the recent discussion of the definitional project in Hague, 2014,
pp. 11–18), we are going to make the assumption that readers have a well-
defined grasp of what comics are and what they can do. For the purpose of this
volume, comics are narratives comprised of a complex mixture of image and
text wherein both images and text coexist and cohere to tell a story. Both image
and text contribute to all elements of the story, but images are the primary
signifiers (with the exception in Chapter 3, an analysis of two YA novels that
includes images as illustrations). Our primary belief is that comics tell stories
that could not be told in any other way, or as Chute (2010) puts it, the stories
comics authors “both tell and show could not be communicated any other way”
(p. 2, emphasis in the original).
For this project we have chosen to use “comics” and/or “graphic novel” rather
than the perhaps more accurate but awkward “sequential art narrative,” coined
Introduction 3
by pioneer of comics Will Eisner (1985/2008).The term “graphic novel,” how-
ever, we realize may create as many misunderstandings than it clarifies. First,
many readers may associate the term “graphic” with sex or violence, not with
the graphic arts, and some of the canonical novels in the field—Maus, Persepolis,
Fun Home—are not novels at all, but nonfiction accounts of significant family,
national, and international events.The editor a couple years ago was encouraged
to use the term “graphic novel” rather than “comics” in his progress toward ten-
ure review because “comics” connoted popular—throwaway—comic books,
while “graphic novel” connoted literature, the once despised novel now a staple
of literary scholarship in English departments. The term “comics” will be a sin-
gular noun, denoting the medium as in “film.” We will confine our exploration
to long-form and/or periodical narratives that have appeared in print and not
comic strips, editorial cartoons, or digital/multimedia comics, a vibrant, robust
body of work deserving of a critical research project of its own.
Mainstream Attention and Integration Into Schools

Comics have been successively adapted into movies (just check the latest
blockbuster/s), of course, as they have been for decades. Festivals of comics have
sprung up in towns and cities in every state, and the annual Comi-Con in San
Diego draws hundreds of thousands and spawns weeks of headlines in the popular
press. Comics, once absented from bookstore chains such as Barnes and Noble,
now occupy an aisle of shelves (and you will likely find someone browsing them,
standing, reading, gazing at just about any time of the day). Comics are being
bought and read by men and women, young and old, readers seeking enter-
tainment and readers looking for literary enlightenment (and, increasingly, many
looking for both). The names of characters in comics, the details of plot, may not
be on the tip of the tongue of every American, but the few people who couldn’t
name a comic likely have been living under a rock.
Comics, in other ways, are out of the closet, out from under the bed, for good.
Professional journals for English teachers such as English Journal, The ALAN
Review, Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, SANE: Sequential Art Narrative in
Education (http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/sane/), have published articles that
provide pedagogical resources for the secondary classroom, selections of teach-
able comics, accompanied by teaching strategies ready to implement. Scholarly
journals abound outside the English Language Arts context: International Journal
of Comic Art, whose issues can contain up to 600 pages of scholarship from
around the world; ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies (http://www.eng
lish.ufl.edu/imagetext/), dedicated to the interdisciplinary study of comics and
related media; and Image and Narrative (http://www.imageandnarrative.be), a
peer-reviewed e-journal on visual narratology and word and image studies.
Comics have become a staple in K-20 classrooms and not just for remedial
exercises (Abel and Madden, 2008; Bitz, 2004, 2008; Botzakis, 2009; Carter, 2007,
2011; Cary, 2004; Frey and Fisher, 2008; Monin, 2010; Morrison, Bryan, and
Chilcoat; 2002; Sabeti, 2011; Syma and Weiner, 2013;Thomas, 2011;Yang, 2008).
4 Crag Hill
Secondary teachers and instructors at college and university levels are inserting
comics into literature, history, psychology, and in courses in many other disci-
plines. Duncan and Smith (2009) have developed a textbook for undergraduate
courses that offers undergraduate students an overview of the comics medium
and its communicative potential. Maus, Persepolis, American Born Chinese, Fun
Home, and other comics are studied by K-20 students of all ability levels and
interests. But along with comics integrated into the study of history and literature,
teacher preparation courses utilizing the study of comics are now being offered
in many universities. The chapter authors have utilized comics in many of their
undergraduate courses (Literary Responses to War and Peace,World Mythology,
Teaching Literature to Adolescents, Children’s Literature,Young Adult Literature,

Middle Grades Language Arts Teaching Methods, English Methods, Youth and
Adolescent Literacy, First-year Writing Seminar, Women Writers, Intro to Eng-
lish Studies, Graphic Novels for Adolescents,Young Adult Literature and Literary
Theory) and in many of their graduate courses (Studies in Graphic Fiction, Spe-
cial Topics: Graphic Fiction, Diagnosing and Remediating Literacy Problems,
Teaching Composition, Sequential Art: Comics as “Ensembles of Productive
Mechanisms of Meaning,” and Content Area Literacy).
Outside the circle of chapter authors, many other courses have been offered
in different modes. “Comic Books and Graphic Novels” has been offered at
University of Colorado in a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). At Ball
State, in another MOOC, “Gender Through Comics” drew hundreds of par-
ticipants, and Emerson College recently offered five online courses for comic
book fans. The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, School of Comics (Chi-
cago), the Rhode Island Institute of Design, and other prestigious art schools
offer courses on the production of comics. On the academic side, the Univer-
sity of Cincinnati, University of California Irvine, Oregon State University,The
Ohio State University, California State University Long Beach, MIT, Univer-
sity of Southern California, Columbia University, and many other colleges and
universities in the United Kingdom and Australia offer intensive courses on
comics in their English and Comparative World Literature departments. Those
seriously interested in the studies of comics can now earn a minor in interdis-
ciplinary Comic Studies at University of Oregon, and University of Florida has
created a new discipline, Comics and Visual Rhetoric Studies.
Legitimization of Scholarship
As with young adult literature (Cappella, 2010; Coats, 2011; Gallo, 1992; and
Hill, 2014), comics scholarship has struggled with legitimization in academia, in
K-20 schools, and in the public at large (Danzinger-Russell, 2013). At the uni-
versity level, English departments and other academic departments were loath
to recognize comics as a legitimate field of scholarship. Comics, branded as a
popular medium, possessed neither a long history nor, as it was perceived, any
cultural capital worth investing time and energy in (Lent, 2014). In the 1960s,
a Ph.D. dissertation on “Li’l Abner” drew outrage from faculty and students
Introduction 5
and was met with laughter at the graduation ceremony when the topic was
announced (Lent, p. 9). Film studies and other media studies faced similar bar-
riers (Lent, p. 10).
The barriers dissolved, but not on their own. To challenge misconceptions
of comics, scholarship has been working on many different fronts, from histori-
cizing and theorizing the medium to developing pedagogy for use in schools.
To begin the long process toward legitimization in the absence of an estab-
lished theoretical base, early researchers borrowed theory from other disciplines
such as sociology, psychology, philosophy, art history, and art, and employed
methodologies common in other fields: semiotic, discourse, literary and con-
tent analyses (Lent, 2014, p.10). Rather than building from within, developing
methodologies congruent to the medium, early scholarship was predicated on
the validity of scholarship in other disciplines.
In the United States, the majority of the commentary on comics was
negative and condemnatory for decades (Lopes, 2009). It was easy to take a
swipe at a medium whose audience—children—would not speak back. Com-
ics artists themselves, laboring without recognition, paid by piecework, did not
have the means or perhaps the motivation to counter the negative press. Is it
any wonder that scholars in universities were averse to studying this much-
maligned body of work? To complicate research on the history of comics is the
dearth of archives for comics (Gabilliet, 2010). As comics has been a throwa-
way medium for generations, the medium has not drawn the attention of the
institutions that collect and make available for scholars more culturally hon-
ored materials such as books, paintings and sculpture, and historical artifacts.
So though study of the history of comics may have been one of the first fields
in comics scholarship, such scholarship was undoubtedly hampered by lack of
accessibility to primary documents. Heer and Worcester (2009) argue that com-
ics studies is now booming: “The notion that comics are unworthy of serious
investigation has given way to a widening curiosity about comics as artifacts,
commodities, codes, devices, mirrors, polemics, puzzles, and pedagogical tools”
(xi). Their seminal essay collection breaks down new comics scholarship into
four approaches: “the history and geneaology of comics, the inner workings
of comics, the social significance of comics, and the close scrutiny and evalua-
tion of comics” (xi). Hatfield, 2005 maintains that following McCloud’s (1993)
groundbreaking Understanding Comics, comics scholars embraced a new focus
on the form of comics that continues to thrive, spawning dozens of articles and
books, among them Varnum and Gibbon’s (2001) The Language of Comics:Word
and Image, Groensteen’s The System of Comics (2007) and Comics and Narration
(2013), and Neil Cohn’s pioneering work on visual language, Early Writings on
Visual Language (2003), and the provocative book, The Visual Language of Comics:
Introduction to the Structure and Cognition of Sequential Images (Cohn, 2013), the
result of a decade of empirical studies on cognition and comics. (See Cohn &
Worcester, 2015, for an overview of Cohn’s ongoing visual language project.)
Some of the richest scholarship in comics in the last decade focuses on
individual artists (Chaney, 2011; Chute, 2010; Dycus, 2012; Hatfield, 2005;
6 Crag Hill
Kannenberg Jr., 2009; Wolk, 2007). Muscling out from the shadows and ano-
nymity of the comics’ workshops of the 1930s through 1960s, many individual
artists have carved reputations for their work, their distinct style stamping the
medium, their artistry expanding the number of tools available to tell their story.
The study of comics narratives now spotlights the artists behind and within the
stories (because style is prominently marked in/on comics). The study of the
memoir genre may be rivaling studies of the superhero genre in the wake of
the boom of comics autobiographies set off by the success of Maus, Fun Home,
Persepolis, and Blankets.
Arguably the first scholarly monograph examining how comics artists trans-
late history, personal and cultural, into graphic narratives, Witek (1989) dis-
cusses the work of three artists—Jack Jackson, Art Spiegelman, and Harvey
Pekar—who he argues helped move comics from the ghetto of adolescence,
“the realms of fantasy, of wish fulfillment, of projections of power, and in the
ritual repetition of generic formulas” (13), into serious consideration as lit-
erature itself. Each of these artists not only had stories to tell that had not
heretofore been told, but in bringing forth new subjects into comics, they also
developed innovative techniques to carry these stories.This work birthed a rich
vein of scholarship that continues to thrive today: the discussion of an artist’s
body of work but not in isolation, focusing on how the individual artist not
only told stories that nudged the boundaries of historiography and autobiogra-
phy, but also catalyzed changes in comic narratives.
Chute’s (2010) book of essays details the significant contributions Aline Kominsky-
Crumb, Phoebe Gloeckner, Lynda Barry, Marjane Satrapi, and Alison Bechdel
have done to expand the aesthetic, sociopolitical, and psychological range of com-
ics. She claims that “While a few decades ago comics by women about their lives
had to be published underground, today they are taking over the conversation
about literature and the self ” (26). A full understanding of comics must make a
path through their work. Underrepresented, underappreciated, and untapped in
the comics industry for decades, women artists are given their due in this volume.
Chute extends the critical advocacy for women artists that Robbins (1993, 1999)
began at the peak of the underground comix era, studying the comics of women
who were enmeshed in the underground scene (Kominsky-Crumb); those who
were children of the era (Gloeckner, Barry, Bechdel); artists whose work was influ-
enced by the comix movement in terms of subject matter, point of view, and
artistry but whose mature work a generation later speaks anew to comics readers
and to the medium itself.The remaining subject (Satrapi), whose life in Iran before
and after the fall of the Shah was also colored by the cultural upheavals of the
1960s and 1970s, expands the map of influence women artists have now attained.
The work these five women have done is a wedge into comics’ patriarchy, and the
work in Chute’s volume wields a similar wedge into comics scholarship.
Hatfield (2005) analyzes the work of Gilbert Hernandez, Harvey Pekar, R.
Crumb, Justin Green, Art Spiegelman and other individual artists as they contrib-
ute to the cultural milieu of alternative comics, something he characterizes as an
emerging literature springing up out of the underground comix scene of the
Introduction 7
1960s and 1970s. This growing body of work has expanded the genre-busting
of the underground movement to the underdeveloped genres of autobiography,
journalism, and historical fiction, both pushing into new subjects, but also devel-
oping new form/s to embody this new content. He argues that alternative com-
ics, exemplified by book-length comics such as Maus and Love and Rockets, have
for comics “stimulated profound changes in the ways the form is received and
understood,” effectively ensuring that “comics are clearly in the process of being
repositioned within our culture” (xi).
Closing
Have comics gotten over the hump? Have the booms and busts of the last
50 years finally been relegated to the past? Has the audience for comics been
expanded, diversified, and deepened, and have the delivery systems to this audi-
ence/these audiences been expanded, diversified, and deepened so that access
remains open, the flow steady from artist to reader?
This book is but one of many projects that believes the sustainability of the
comics field lies in growing an audience, old and young, across genders, race,
and class, readers who are engaged with the telling of stories that only com-
ics can achieve, nuclear fission of image and word, an audience that can never
have enough comics, that knows comics past and present well, and believes and
advocates for a future wherein comics not only continue to push the potential
of the art form but also nudge the denizens of the world to reach their intel-
lectual, spiritual, and creative potential. We believe the critical mass is amassing.
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Introduction 9
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educational power of sequential art. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc.
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els. Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 2(2), 187–201.
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University Press of Mississippi.
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Harvey Pekar. Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press.
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Additional Resources
Carter, J. B. (2010). Michael Bitz, Manga High: Literacy, identity, and coming of age in an
urban high school. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 39(1), 100–102. Carter reviews Michael
Bitz’s data from his four-year qualitative study of the original site of the comic book
project (founded by Bitz) that engages students across the country in composing comic
book art since starting in New York in 2001. Carter demonstrates how Bitz delivers the
most compelling argument to date for the incorporation of sequential art narrative into
various aspects of schooling. http://www.comicbookproject.org
Comic Book Resources is an independent pop culture site dedicated to comic books, graphic
novels & the TV/films they inspire. (http://www.comicbookresources.com)
Stergios Botzakis’ Graphic Novel Resources (http://graphicnovelresources.blogspot.com) is an
incredibly informative blog about graphic novels. It includes reviews of recent graphic
novels with links to published reviews of the books.
ComicsResearch.org (http://www.comicsresearch.org), directed by Gene Kannenberg, Jr. cov-
ers book-length works about comic books and comic strips, from histories to academic
monographs, providing detailed information and guidance on further research.
The Digital Comics Museum (http://digitalcomicmuseum.com) provides links to free public
domain Golden Age comics.

Section 1
Materiality and the

Reading of Comics

2 Designing Meaning
A Multimodal Perspective on
Comics Reading
Sean P. Connors
Growing up, comic books were a staple of my home literacy environment.

Accompanying my parents on their weekly errands, I especially looked forward
to stopping at the local drug store where, while my mother or father talked
with the pharmacist, I passed time rifling through spinner racks filled with
colorful comic books about costumed heroes. Batman was (and remains) my
personal favorite, and on those occasions when I managed to behave myself,
my parents rewarded me by purchasing one of the many titles that featured the
character for me.
My affinity for comic books (and caped crusaders) spilled over into my play
as well. Long before I decided on a career in education, I imagined myself
taking the place of Batman. (It only seemed natural to me that Bruce Wayne
would retire one day, and, through a lifetime of intense discipline and training,
I was determined that I would be prepared to take his place.) With that goal in
mind, I spent lunchtime recesses at the Catholic elementary school I attended
battling crime on the playground, and even managed to find a willing side-
kick by the second grade. Unfortunately, the Catholic nuns that taught me
shared neither my career ambitions nor my literary tastes. Unwilling or perhaps
unable to acknowledge comic books as a legitimate form of reading material,
they instead directed me toward “real” books (read: print novels), which they
assumed would challenge me as a reader in ways that comics did not. Looking
back on those experiences as an adult, I appreciate that they contributed to
my learning a series of implicit lessons, including that in school, some books
“count” more than others, and that one’s choice of reading materials can be
made a source of shame.
As this volume demonstrates, much has changed in the years since I first
began reading comic books. Whereas educators in the 20th century generally
held comic books in low regard (Hajdu, 2008; Nyberg, 1998), today, graphic
novels—book-length narratives told in the medium of comics—receive atten-
tion at academic conferences and in scholarly publications. One finds comics
in libraries, bookstores, and art galleries, traditional gatekeepers of high culture.
At the time of this writing, the U.S. Library of Congress selected comics author
and artist Gene Luen Yang to serve as its National Ambassador for Young Peo-
ple’s Literature. By all appearances, comics have moved past the stigmas that
14 Sean P. Connors
have historically plagued this form of storytelling. For those of us who seek to
implement graphic novels into formal educational settings, however, this narra-
tive may not feel entirely complete.
As a teacher educator at a university in the southern United States, I have
the somewhat unique opportunity to teach a semester-long course on graphic
novels for adolescents. Most, though not all, of the students who enroll in the
course do so to fulfill a requirement for admission to the university’s graduate
teacher licensure program in secondary English education. Generally speaking,
students who take the course have little to no experience reading comic books
and graphic novels, though they appreciate their potential to engage readers and
express an interest in learning more about them. Perhaps because their experi-
ences reading literature in high school and college English classes focused almost
exclusively on print, however, it is not uncommon for these same students to
enter the course believing that comics, which employ a visual narrative track in
addition to a linguistic one, place relatively few demands on readers. Implicit in
this assumption is a second one: namely, that the meaning of pictures is grasped
instantaneously (and effortlessly), whereas readers must grapple with print to
understand it. One of my goals in teaching the course subsequently involves
my creating opportunities for students to reflect on the interpretive moves they
make when they read comics and to consider how they construct meaning when
they transact with this form of storytelling.
This chapter is premised on a number of assumptions, an important one being
that readers participate in a series of complex interpretive practices when they
interact with the multimodal design of comic books and graphic novels. Addi-
tionally, like Allen and Ingulsrud (2003), I assume that the relative ease with
which readers are able to do so inhibits their ability to appreciate the multiple
points of focus they attend to when they read these texts. In the sections to fol-
low, I examine comics reading through the related concepts of multiliteracies
(Cope & Kalantzis, 2000) and multimodality (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2001). To
begin, I address stigmas that have traditionally been associated with comic books
and the people who read them. Next, I introduce the concept of design (Cope &
Kalantzis, 2000; New London Group, 1996) and examine it as both a framework
for understanding how readers make meaning when they interact with texts that
incorporate multiple semiotic resources, and as a lens that I argue readers can apply
to conduct close readings of comics. Having done so, I offer a close reading of a
scene from Frank Miller’s (2002) graphic novel Batman: The Dark Knight Returns
to demonstrate how attending to the multimodal design of comics can deepen
one’s appreciation for the interpretive moves that readers make as they transact
with the semiotic design of these texts. To conclude, I reflect on the implications
of reading comics through the lens of design for teachers and students.
You Call That Reading?

As gatekeepers of young people’s literacy, teachers and librarians have histori-
cally been ambivalent toward comic books. When sales of superhero comic
books exploded in the late 1930s and early 1940s, many educators questioned
Designing Meaning 15
the influence that reading them had on children. In some cases, critics argued
that a combination of poor color and low-grade paper negatively impacted
readers’ eyesight. Of greater concern, however, were arguments that assumed
that an emphasis on pictures in comics, coupled with minimal print, impeded
young people’s development as readers. This sentiment was articulated in a
1940 newspaper column written by children’s author and literary critic Ster-
ling North, who characterized comic books as a form of “poison,” and who
argued that the corresponding “antidote” could “be found in any library or
good bookstore” (p. 56). North concluded that educators and parents who
neglected to remove comic books from the hands of children and replace them
with traditional novels were “guilty of criminal negligence” (p. 56).

In the 1940s and early 1950s, arguments against comic book reading took on
a second dimension, as critics questioned the influence they had on young peo-
ple’s development. The 1954 publication of Seduction of the Innocent by Frederic
Wertham, a German-American psychiatrist, is notable for giving voice to these
concerns. Drawing on anecdotal evidence he acquired as a result of his experi-
ences working with children at a psychiatric clinic he ran in Harlem, Wertham
argued that the violent, often lurid subject matter children encountered in the
pages of comic books led them to commit similarly violent acts, thereby con-
tributing to the problem of juvenile delinquency. At the same time, Wertham
reiterated arguments that assumed reading comic books interfered with young
people’s literacy development. For him, comic books were “death on reading”
(p. 121), a result of the fact that “all the emphasis is on the visual image and
not on the proper word” (p. 125). Wertham subsequently concluded (and many
educators agreed) that “comic books do not work in the direction of literacy”
(p. 129), an assumption that persisted for decades to follow.
Inspired by the public outcry that Wertham’s (1954) book elicited, a con-
gressional subcommittee investigated the comic book industry. Faced with the
prospect of external regulation, comic book publishers responded by volun-
tarily adopting the Comics Code, a list of prescriptions meant to sanitize the
content of comic books. As publishers hoped would be the case, this largely
silenced their critics, leading one educator, writing for The Elementary School
Journal in 1960, to conclude,“The controversy has apparently subsided” (Emans,
1960, p. 253).
Comics scholars credit a series of events, beginning in the 1960s, with dem-
onstrating that the medium of comics could be used to tell sophisticated sto-
ries about weighty subject matter. Having grown up reading comics before
mainstream publishers had adopted the Comics Code, some young people,
influenced by the counterculture movement, experimented with drawing and
self-publishing their own comics. These underground comics, as they were
called, tackled taboo subject matter, including drug use and graphic sexual con-
tent. In doing so, they flaunted social conventions and showed little respect
for authority figures and social institutions. Later, some of these same writers
and artists experimented with telling autobiographical stories. Around the same
time, mainstream comic book publishers, hoping to attract a new generation
of readers, resurrected the superhero genre. Unlike their predecessors, however,
16 Sean P. Connors
this new breed of superhero demonstrated a concern with social and political
issues such as racism, environmental pollution, and poverty (Harvey, 1996). By
the 1980s, comic books like Watchmen (Moore & Gibbons, 1987) and Batman:
The Dark Knight Returns (Miller, 2002) experimented with deconstructing the
idea of the superhero itself. In doing so, they challenged conventional wisdom
that regarded comic books as a simplistic form of reading material that was
limited to telling stories intended for a juvenile audience.
In 1992, Art Spiegelman’s (2003) graphic memoir Maus, which recounts the
artist’s parents’ experiences as Holocaust survivors, won the Pulitzer Prize, lending
comics a sense of prestige that cultural institutions had previously denied it. In years
to follow, “books-of-comics became the province of bookstores and libraries—

‘respectable’ places—as much as comic shops” (Wolk, 2007, p. 43). This re-evaluation
of comics’ literary value continued when, in 2006, Gene Luen Yang’s American Born
Chinese became the first graphic novel to win the National Book Award for Young
People’s Literature. As publishers responded to this cultural moment by publishing
graphic novels they hoped would appeal to educators’ sensibilities, and as scholars
and cultural critics began to examine the educational benefits involved in teaching
graphic novels (Carter, 2007; Jacobs, 2007;Versaci, 2007), educators gradually came
to view the medium of comics in a different light. At approximately the same time,
changes in how people communicate, coupled with scholarly attention paid the
related concepts of multimodality and multiliteracies, provided educators with a
much-needed rationalization for bringing comic books and graphic novels out of
the shadows and into the classroom.
Multimodality and Multiliteracies

Defined broadly, literacy might be said to refer to a complex set of skills and
social practices that people engage in when they use one or more modes to
make meaning. As defined by Serafini (2014), modes constitute “a system of
visual and verbal entities created within or across various cultures to represent
and express meanings” (p. 12). In Western cultures, literacy has long been associ-
ated with a single mode, print, but a proliferation of digital technologies in the
21st century has made it easier than ever before for the average person to pro-
duce multimodal texts—that is, texts which integrate words, pictures, and other
modes to make meaning. This “semiotic turn” (Serafini, 2010, p. 95) has led
some researchers in the field of literacy education to ask how people use word
and image to make meaning when they consume (read) and produce (write)
multimodal texts (Connors, 2013, 2015; Serafini, 2011). Others argue that the
ability to communicate effectively in the 21st century necessitates “multilitera-
cies” (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000; New London Group, 1996)—that is, an ability
to represent one’s ideas using a diverse range of mediums and modes. As Serafini
(2014) explains, “The term multiliteracies . . . refers to the reconceptualization
of literacy as a multidimensional set of competencies and social practices in
response to the increasing complexity and multimodal nature of texts” (p. 26). If
educators hope to prepare students for the world beyond school, the argument
goes, they need to create opportunities for them to study the broad range of
mediums and modes that society makes available to them.
Needless to say, the emergence of these related frameworks—multimodality
and multiliteracies—has prompted educators to reassess the role that comics
can play in the school curriculum.Today, graphic novels are credited with moti-
vating so-called “reluctant” readers (Crawford, 2004; Snowball, 2005); scaffold-
ing second-language learners (Cimermanová, 2014; Yildirim, 2013); supporting
students who struggle with reading and writing (Frey & Fisher, 2004); and
challenging readers of varying ability levels (e.g., Connors, 2013; Jacobs, 2013;
Versaci, 2007). Others regard graphic novels as an instructional tool that educa-
tors can use to cultivate students’ visual literacy (Connors, 2012; Frey & Fisher,
2008; Gillenwater, 2009; Serafini, 2014). Given the preponderance of multi-
modal texts that students transact with outside of school (Serafini, 2011), and
acknowledging that pictures, like words, are powerful conveyors of ideology,
creating opportunities for students to engage in conversations about how mul-
timodal texts mean is an important part of contemporary literacy instruction
(Connors, 2015; Hassett and Schieble, 2007; Serafini, 2011).
Still, literacy instruction in school remains tied to the written word. Multiple
factors potentially account for this.The emphasis that education reformers place
on standardized tests that privilege print, for example, exerts pressure on teach-
ers to teach reading and writing as they are traditionally conceived. Teachers,
especially at the secondary level, may also assume that part of their work involves
their preparing students for college reading and writing, which they (rightly)
assume remain steeped in print. Independent reading programs such as Accel-
erated Reader, which award students points for reading books based on their
readability scores, also privilege print over multimodal texts. Importantly, teach-
ers also may have relatively few (if any) sustained opportunities in either their
teacher licensure programs or professional development workshops to examine
how multimodal texts mean (Serafini, 2014). As a result, they may feel uncom-
fortable teaching these texts. For this reason, Serafini (2014) argues that “[b]efore
teachers can help support students as creators and interpreters of multimodal
ensembles, they first have to become more familiar with [related] terms and
concepts themselves and develop a more extensive knowledge base from which
to expand their literacy curriculum” (p. 18). In my work as a teacher educator,
I have found the concept of design—which is closely affiliated with the related
concepts of multiliteracies and multimodality—a useful and manageable starting
point for engaging students in the work of building the kind of knowledge base
that Serafini argues is important. Moreover, it constitutes a lens that readers can
apply to comics in the service of carrying out close readings of individual texts.
Reading by Design
The New London Group, which met in New London, New Hampshire in
1996 to consider how the field of literacy education ought to respond to a per-
ceived increase in linguistic and textual diversity, offered the tripartite concept
18 Sean P. Connors
of design—available designs, designing, and the redesigned—as a framework
for thinking about how multimodal texts mean. The term “available designs”
refers to the design grammars (or conventions) that people are familiar with as a
result of their belonging to certain sociocultural groups. Jewitt and Kress (2003)
describe design grammars as recurring patterns in the way that a group of
people uses a given semiotic resource (for example, word or image) over time.
People draw on available designs their communities make available to them
to design—or make—meaning. In the West, perspective constitutes an available
design that artists have used for centuries. More to the point, writers and artists
who work in the medium of comics are familiar with available designs for using
conventions such as speech balloons, narrative boxes, and panels. Importantly,

Kress and Van Leeuwen (2001) regard interpreting or reading a text as an act of
design, albeit one that results in the inward, as opposed to outward, production of
signs. Seen in this light, it is possible to construe comics reading as a socially and
culturally mediated activity in which readers draw on available designs for using
word and image to design or make meaning.
Readers do not merely replicate or reproduce meanings they associate with
available designs, however. Rather, the unique knowledge, experiences, and
intentions that individual readers bring to a communicative situation results
in their designing new meanings, or what the New London Group (1996) calls
the redesigned (p. 76).The redesigned might consequently be said to constitute a
marriage of “culturally received patterns of meaning” and the “unique product
of human agency” (p. 76). This view of meaning making, which assumes that
readers draw on available designs they recognize in texts and use them as a plat-
form to design new meanings, complements Rosenblatt’s (1938/1995, 1978)
theory of transactional reading, which conceptualizes literary texts as a “blue-
print, a guide for the selecting, rejecting, and ordering of what is being called
forth” (p. 11). Meaning, for Rosenblatt, arises out of an interaction between a
reader and a text.
Importantly, the New London Group (1996) identified and described five
modes that readers and writers draw on in the act of consuming and producing
texts. These include the linguistic, visual, audio, gestural, and spatial. The New
London Group identified a sixth mode, the multimodal, which encompasses
“patterns of interconnection among the other modes” (p. 78). Through their
use of a verbal narrative track, comics include a linguistic design. Their visual
narrative track, on the other hand, incorporates design elements associated with
the realm of pictures. Beyond this, comics also make use of audio, gestural,
and spatial designs, though these are often embedded in their linguistic and
visual designs. Finally, they employ a multimodal design to assemble the afore-
mentioned modes in ways that are coherent to readers. “An important aspect
of reading multimodal texts is [therefore] the ability to integrate information
from the different modes” (Walsh, 2006, p. 34). In this way, as Jacobs (2013)
argues, comic books and graphic novels “provide a complex environment for
the negotiation of meaning” (p. 9).
To demonstrate how reading comics through the lens of design can call
attention to the interpretive moves that readers make, and to the multiple
points of focus they attend to when making meaning in their transactions with
multimodal texts, I next offer a close reading of a page from Frank Miller’s
(2002) graphic novel Batman:The Dark Knight Returns. My decision to focus on
a graphic novel that features a traditional superhero is purposeful, as educators
have historically dismissed the latter genre as frivolous and simplistic enter-
tainment (Hajdu, 2008; Nyberg, 1998). To contextualize the scene for readers,
I begin by offering a brief plot synopsis. Having done so, I next demonstrate
how reading comics through a design lens, which encourages readers to attend
to a text’s linguistic, visual, audio, gestural, and spatial designs as resources for
making meaning, can promote the sort of close reading that educators have
traditionally valued.
Deconstructing Batman as Hero-Figure: A Close

Reading of The Dark Knight Returns
In the graphic novel Batman:The Dark Knight Returns (2002), author Frank Miller
imagines a dystopian future in which the character of Bruce Wayne, having retired
from a life of fighting crime as Batman, returns to vigilantism to combat a recent
crime wave that threatens to tear Gotham City apart. In a scene that takes place
relatively early in the story,Wayne, dressed as Batman, confronts Harvey Dent, who
only moments before had threatened to detonate a weapon of mass destruction
that would annihilate the city. Once a highly regarded district attorney in Gotham
and a former ally of Batman, Dent fell into a life of crime as the villain known as
Two-Face after criminals doused him with acid, permanently disfiguring one side
of his face and leaving him psychologically scarred. In Batman: The Dark Knight
Returns (Miller, 2002), Bruce Wayne attempts to “save” his former friend by paying
for his plastic surgery and by obtaining psychiatric help for him. His efforts are
ultimately in vain, however; despite the appearance of his having been healed, the
personal demons that Dent battles prove too much to overcome, and he reverts
to a life of crime.
A reproduction of the page on which the discussion to follow focuses can be
found at http://dkreturns.blogspot.com/2012/01/and-harvey-i-have-to-know.
html.To assist readers in following my argument, however, I have also included a
rough mock-up of the page in Figure 1 below. As seen, the page is divided into
a 10-panel grid. In the first tier, a single wide rectangle that spans the width of
the page, Miller uses a long shot to depict Batman, who, having foiled Harvey
Dent’s plan to destroy Gotham City only moments before, now towers over his
nemesis in a skyscraper office, his angry visage awash in a balance of shadow and
light. Meanwhile, Dent, draped in shadows, his back turned to the reader, kneels
before Batman in an act of supplication.
In the second tier, which consists of four vertical rectangles, Miller uses a
middle-distance shot to reveal Dent from the shoulders up. In the first panel,
Figure 2.1 Author’s sketch of page 55 in Miller’s (2002) Batman:The Dark Knight Returns
the defeated character faces the reader, his head lowered to his chest and his
face half-draped in shadows. In the next panel, he grows defiant, as signified by
his suddenly angry expression and his upraised head. In the third panel, Miller
unexpectedly substitutes the image of a disfigured monster in place of Dent, an
allusion, perhaps, to the monster that lurks within the man. Finally, in the fourth
panel, Dent, his anger spent and his humanity once again intact, drops his head
to his chest in an act of resignation. Across the four panels, the background
gradually transitions from light to dark.
Mirroring the design of the second tier, the third row of panels also consists
of four equally sized vertical rectangles. However, the focus now shifts from
Dent to the Batman. In the first panel, Miller uses a close-up to depict Batman
from the shoulders up. In the second, the camera gradually zooms in closer on
the character’s face, leading readers to focus on his right eye. In the third panel,
readers once again encounter the image of a monster, this time a fire-breathing
bat. Finally, in the fourth panel, Miller returns to a middle-distance shot to reveal
Batman, who faces the audience directly. Miller’s use of chiaroscuro, however,
precludes readers from observing the character’s face, which heightens the sense
of menace that surrounds the image. Notably, the background design of this final
panel strikes a balance between light and dark.
The arrangement of the final tier—again, a single rectangle that stretches
across the page—echoes the first. Miller once again uses a long shot, this time
positioning the reader to view the action from across the skyscraper office in
which the scene unfolds. Silhouetted against a window on the left, Batman
kneels on the floor and embraces a defeated Dent. Meanwhile, on the right, a
bat, silhouetted against the moon and having just shattered the office window,
is depicted escaping into the night.While the venetian blinds in the window to
the left are arranged in a neat and orderly fashion, the blinds in the window on
the right are disheveled and askew.
On its surface, the scene depicted in Figure 1 is rather unremarkable: Batman,
having foiled Harvey Dent’s plot to wreak havoc on Gotham City, confronts
the villain and manages to subdue him. A close reading of the scene, however,
accomplished by applying the design lens discussed above and attending care-
fully to the page’s linguistic, visual, audio, gestural, and spatial design, suggests
that the author is concerned with more complex issues, not least of which is
his problematizing Batman’s often unquestioned status as a hero figure. In this
scene, Miller (2002) deconstructs the character of Batman and reveals him to be
a conflicted individual with a propensity for darkness, not unlike the supervil-
lains he combats.
At its most basic level, the aforementioned scene’s linguistic design and its
visual design adheres to an available design in the West for reading a text from
left to right, top to bottom. Beyond this, Miller’s (2002) use of speech bal-
loons, a design element familiar to comics readers, constitutes a resource that
supports readers in distinguishing between speakers. In the uppermost panel,
a single rectangle, Batman begins to speak, exclaiming “Harvey . . . ” only to
22 Sean P. Connors
be interrupted by Dent, who asks, “What are you so mad about, Bats? I’ve . . .
been a sport . . .You have to admit that—I played along. And you . . .You took
your joke about as far as it could go . . . ” (p. 55). Here, Miller’s use of ellipses
influences not only the text’s linguistic design, but also its audio design, as it
cues readers to read Dent’s words haltingly, creating the illusion of voice, and
lending the impression that the character, overcome with emotion, is struggling
to express himself.
Continuing with the first panel, its visual design—specifically, the artist’s use of
perspective—apprises readers that a power differential exists between Dent and
Batman. Kress and van Leeuwen (1996) argue that in the West, vertical angles are
commonly used to establish power relationships between the figures depicted in

an image and the audience that views them. Here, Miller’s (2002) use of a low
vertical angle positions readers to view Batman, who towers over Dent, from
the latter’s perspective. Moreover, the text’s gestural design suggests that Dent
occupies a submissive position. His left shoulder is dropped, for example, as if to
suggest that he is cowering before Batman, whose outstretched cape spans the
width of the panel and threatens to engulf him. That one half of Batman’s figure
is shrouded in darkness further contributes to the sense of menace that readers
might associate with the character, as it is difficult to read his intentions.
In the second tier of panels, four equally sized vertical rectangles, Dent, con-
tinuing to speak, tells Batman, “Got the whole world to smile at me . . . Got
them all to keep their lunches down when they saw my . . . my face . . . Saying
I was cured . . . Saying I was fixed” (Miller, 2002, p. 55). At this point, a second
voice, indicated by the inclusion of a narrative box in the lower corner of the
left-most panel, is heard for the first time. In comics, a rectangular box arranged
inside the picture plane is understood by readers to signify narration. Further-
more, the fact that the narrative box is shaded grey in the original cues readers
to attribute the subsequent narration—“The scars go deep, too deep . . . ”—to
Batman, as the color is traditionally associated with the character. Miller’s deci-
sion to depict the word “deep” in bold print influences both the text’s linguistic
design and its audio design; on the one hand, through their experience with
other texts, readers recognize the visual cue as directing them to attend closely
to the word. At the same time, presenting a work in bold print also invites read-
ers to place additional emphasis on it, thereby creating the illusion of tone in an
otherwise soundless medium. In the remaining three panels, this juxtaposition
of voices, accomplished through the text’s linguistic and audio design, continues,
with Harvey Dent stating, “Take a look. Have a laugh . . . I’m fixed alright. At
least . . . both sides match . . . ” and Batman narrating, “I close my eyes and listen.
Not fooled by sight, I see him. As he is.” Finally, Dent punctuates the exchange
when he exclaims, “Have your laugh, Batman! Take a look. Take a look.”
That Miller (2002) elected to place Dent’s final line—“Take a look”—in
decidedly smaller print influences how readers experience the text’s audio
design, as it cues them to read the line as delivered in a small (or hushed voice)
voice. This reading is reinforced by the text’s visual and gestural designs. In
the first three panels of the second tier, Dent gradually raises his head as he
speaks. At the same time, his expression grows increasingly hostile. Read in
conjunction with the text’s linguistic and audio designs, readers may interpret
this as signifying the character’s growing defiance. By the fourth panel, how-
ever, when Dent adopts a meek voice, his head falls to his chest, suggesting that
he has resigned himself to his fate. One might also note that throughout the
sequence of panels, the positioning of the character’s head creates an invisible
line that gradually rises only to fall again in the last panel.
The visual design of the panels discussed above is also noteworthy. Beginning
with the left-most panel, half of Dent’s face is cloaked in shadows, an allusion,
perhaps, to his identity as Two-Face, a character who straddles the line between
good and evil, and right and wrong. In the third panel, when Batman professes
to see Dent “as he is,” however, the character is revealed to be a monster, as
though to suggest that this is his “true” self, and that no amount of plastic sur-
gery or psychiatric help can change that. By the fourth panel, when Dent’s head
drops to his chest in what I interpreted as a sign of resignation, the shadow is
revealed to have spread further across his face, signifying, perhaps, his descent
into darkness. This reading is further implied by the artist’s use of background
colors: As the panels transition from left to right, their respective backgrounds
grow progressively darker.
In the third tier of panels—again, four vertical rectangles—the focus of the
narrative shifts from Harvey Dent to Batman, a reading that is implied by the
text’s visual design, which now focuses exclusively on the latter character. In
the left-most panel, the voice of Batman narrates, “I see him . . . I see . . . ”. In
the next panel, the character shifts from narration to dialogue as he informs
Dent, “I see . . . I see a reflection, Harvey” (Miller, 2002, p. 55). Again, the
linguistic design of the panel, which places the word “reflection” in bold print,
cues readers to its significance, as does Batman’s repetition of the word in the
panel that follows.
It is worth noting that the visual and spatial design of the aforementioned
panels echoes or, better, reflects, the design of the panels immediately above. In
the left-most panel, half of Batman’s face is shrouded in shadows, much as Dent’s
is in the panel above it. The second panel, an extreme close-up, invites readers
to focus on the Batman’s right eye, lending the impression that the reader is
gradually being taken into the character’s psyche, a reading that is confirmed
in the third panel, which contains the image of a fire-breathing bat. As readers
familiar with Batman’s mythology know, as a child Bruce Wayne witnessed the
murder of his parents, and he subsequently vowed to avenge their deaths by
fighting crime. Later, when he fulfilled his vow as an adult, he adopted the guise
of the bat, a creature of the night, in a calculated move meant to invoke terror
in his adversaries. Batman’s pursuit of justice is Sisyphean, however, in that no
matter how many criminals he apprehends, his quest for vengeance is never
satiated. Instead, the character is destined to remain haunted by the tragedy that
befell him as a child. In this sense, it is possible to read Batman as a tragic if not
monstrous figure, one that is condemned to battle personal demons in much
the same way that his nemesis, Harvey Dent, does.
24 Sean P. Connors
The latter reading is further suggested by the spatial arrangement of the
panels, which juxtaposes the image of a fire-breathing bat with the image of
Harvey Dent as a monster. In this way, the text’s spatial design influences how
readers experience and interpret its linguistic design: that is, when Batman
tells Dent that he sees a “reflection,” readers understand that he is referring to
himself. This motif continues in the fourth panel, the design of which again
mirrors the panel immediately above it. Like Dent, Batman’s head is lowered
(gestural design), as thought to suggest that he also has resigned himself to his
fate, and shadows spread across his face (visual design), creating an air of menace.
Moreover, the background shading of the panel—a perfect balance between
dark and light—cues readers to assign symbolic meaning to its visual design,
which alludes to the potential for good and evil that is present in all people,
heroes and villains alike. Recognizing this, what are we to make of the character
of Batman? As readers, are we to interpret him as a heroic figure battling for
good, or as a psychologically twisted individual tormented by his own personal
demons? Is he representative of law and order, or vigilantism and an abuse of
power? These are just some of the questions that the scene’s multimodal design
invites readers to ask.
It should be noted that the spatial design of the page, most notably the sym-
metry that Miller (2002) creates through his careful arrangement of panels,
further develops the reflection motif described above.Were one to fold the page
in half, either horizontally or vertically, its two parts would mirror each other
perfectly. What, then, are readers to make of the wordless final panel, in which
Batman comforts, rather than apprehends, Harvey Dent? Again, it is possible to
read the panel’s design as inviting readers to conceive the two characters as mir-
ror images of one another. Using a long-distance shot, Miller positions readers
to view the characters silhouetted against two windows in the skyscraper office
where the scene plays out. In the left half of the image, the Batman is shown
cradling Harvey Dent in an act of compassion.The window blinds immediately
above the duo are arranged horizontally, as one might expect to find them,
connoting a sense of order and stability. The blinds in the window on the right,
on the other hand, are askew, a result of the glass’s having been shattered by a
bat escaping into the night. In this way, it is possible to read the text’s visual
and spatial designs as working together to connote order and disorder, and to
signify the psychological states that I have argued the two characters are caught
between. This raises additional questions for readers to grapple with: Might
the text’s semiotic design imply that Batman is only a step removed from the
criminals he abhors? Does he, like those he seeks to bring to justice, stand to
lose himself in the abyss at any moment?
Implications of Reading Comics

Through a Design Lens
Khordoc (2001) argues that reading comics “is not simply a question of alternat-
ing between words and pictures, but rather, a different mode of reading which
always calls for readjustment of the reading process” (p. 172). This becomes
evident when one examines the work involved in reading and, separately, writ-
ing comics through the lens of design. Readers experience print linearly, mov-
ing from left to right, top to bottom. In the case of comics, however, reading
is somewhat more recursive in nature. Granted, in the West, comic books and
graphic novels are designed with the expectation that readers adhere to the
convention of reading a page from left to right, top to bottom. Nevertheless, it
is up to readers to determine whether they will look at a text’s visual narrative
track or its linguistic narrative track first. As my analysis of the above scene from
Miller’s (2002) graphic novel demonstrates, reading comics also involves readers
in weighing different elements of a text’s semiotic design against one another,

which in turn shapes how they perceive and interpret them. In this way, comics
reading is comparable to weaving meaning insofar as it entails readers’ recon-
ciling relationships between different narrative threads (as expressed through
different design elements), with the goal of arranging them into a meaningful
pattern (that is, an interpretation of the text).
Because people learn to navigate the semiotic design of multimodal texts at
a young age as they interact with picture books, comic strips, and equivalent
texts that blend word and image to tell a story, they are surprisingly adept at
doing so later in life. This may explain why so many of the students that I work
with underestimate the thought and effort they invest in interpreting texts that
integrate words and pictures. Then again, it is possible that an emphasis on print
in school leads these students to overlook (or simply ignore) the semiotic con-
tributions that images make to a text. Page (2010) uses the term “mode blind-
ness” to describe this phenomenon, and I am reminded of it each time I include
a graphic novel in a course I teach, as it is common for students new to these
texts to report paying almost exclusive attention to a text’s linguistic design at
the expense of its visual design. As they talk about graphic novels in the context
of class discussions, however, and as they have opportunities to learn how other
readers use images as a resource for making meaning, these same students report
paying more attention to the visual design of graphic novels they read moving
forward. As one student recently explained, “We were all taught to value words
over images, but attending more closely to the visual design of graphic novels
has helped me to appreciate the extent to which images can express that which
cannot be written.”
Of course, a challenge involved in facilitating discussions about how com-
ics mean is that doing so necessitates access to a metalanguage (New Lon-
don Group, 1996; Serafini, 2014; Zammit, 2007) for talking about them. Put
another way, people require access to terms and concepts that enable them to
describe how modes other than written language mean. In the case of comic
books and graphic novels, those who lack a background in art may find the
prospect of analyzing their visual design intimidating. A metalanguage for talk-
ing about how comics mean need not be discipline-specific, however. Rather,
it can develop organically as teachers and students work together to construct
their own set of terms for describing the multimodal design of comic books
26 Sean P. Connors
and graphic novels as they read, write, and talk about them. The work does not
end there, though.
As Zammit (2007) argues, the work involved in examining the multimodal
design of texts “is not an end in itself but a means to enable students to design,
create and construct similar texts for their own purposes” (p. 72). It is not
enough, in other words, for students to become critical consumers of multi-
modal texts. Rather, their ability to attend closely to the design of these texts,
and to explain how they mean, is contingent on their having opportunities to
produce them as well. Today, a host of digital applications make it possible for
students to design their own professional-looking comic books. For students
who are intimidated by the prospect of drawing, programs like Comic Life
allow users to integrate photographs in the design of their texts. Of course,
if access to technology is an issue, then students can create their own comics
using pen and paper, much as cartoonists have done for decades. In working
with students, I have found that encouraging them to apply concepts taken
from the metalanguage we construct as we read and talk about comic books
and graphic novels in class is helpful, as doing so deepens their understanding
of these concepts and heightens their appreciation for the work involved in
making multimodal meaning (Connors, 2015).
Projects of the sort described above also create opportunities for students to
reflect on the affordances and constraints involved in using different modes to
represent their ideas. As they design their own comics, for example, students
may discover that it is possible to communicate spatial relationships more easily
using images than words. Conversely, they may find that written language allows
them to describe a character’s attitudes or feelings more precisely than they can
with pictures. As they build understandings of this sort, students broaden their
semiotic tool kits and expand their analytic repertoires.
Intuitively, young children seem to appreciate the meaning-making potential
that working with multiple modes makes possible. In many cases, their earliest
experiences with literacy involve their conjoining word and image in a single
space. Later, as they progress through the upper grades of school and beyond,
their experiences with literacy become increasingly monomodal, as the texts
they are expected to read and produce rely more and more heavily on print. If
modes are, as suggested above, characterized by their own unique affordances
and constraints, then asking students to rely exclusively on print to present their
ideas seemingly limits their ability to satisfactorily express themselves, which in
turn renders them less rhetorically dexterous.
In his edited collection of essays on speculative fiction, Thomas (2013)
encourages readers to ask, “Why are we engaging with texts? Why are some
texts allowed in formal education settings and others excluded? Why do we
perpetuate a narrow view of ‘text,’ ‘medium,’ ‘reading,’ and ‘genre’?” (p. 4). As
explained at the outset of this chapter, the manner in which educators perceive
comic books and graphic novels has changed considerably in the first decades
of the 21st century. The teachers that I worked with as a child may not have
been prepared to see a place in school for comics, or to appreciate the extent
to which reading these texts challenged me, but today, the related concepts
of multimodality and multiliteracies provide a strong rationale for including
comic books and graphic novels in the curriculum. Furthermore, as I have
attempted to demonstrate in this chapter, reading comics through a design lens
can help readers to appreciate the work involved in consuming and producing
these multimodal texts, while providing them with a framework for engaging
in close readings of individual texts. Of course, these are not the only reasons
for acknowledging comics in school. Equally important is the aesthetic pleasure
that this form of storytelling, once marginalized in schools, has brought, and
continues to bring, readers.
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Additional Resources
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shops, and finally into both independent and chain bookstores.” Jacobs argues that we must
broaden our scope of inquiry to include not only purely linguistic texts but also multimodal
texts such as comics.
Housed at the Institute of Education, University of London, the website “Mode: Multi-
modal Methodologies for Researching Digital Data and Environments” (http://mode.

ioe.ac.uk/analysing-websites-and-social-media/) provides a variety of resources, includ-
ing blogs and videos (see the series of interviews with Gunter Kress discussing modes and
multimodalities).
3 Multimodal Forms
Examining Text, Image, and Visual
Literacy in Daniel Handler’s Why
We Broke Up and Markus Zusak’s
The Book Thief
Amy Bright
In 2008, the graphic novel Skim was nominated for the Governor General’s Lit-
erary Award, one of the most prestigious prizes in Canada. Cousins Mariko and
Jillian Tamaki collaborated on the YA graphic novel, which follows Japanese-
Canadian teenager Kimberly (Skim) Keiko Cameron after a suicide shocks her
Catholic high school. Mariko contributed to the text, while Jillian composed
the illustrations. In interviews, both artists emphasized their collaborative pro-
cess on Skim, one that saw little separation between text and image. Skim was
published by Canadian publishing house Groundwood Books, an imprint of the
House of Anansi Press, well known for outstanding publications in children’s
and adolescent literature. Although the novel was recommended for adolescents
over the age of 14, the physical shape of Skim resembles a children’s picture
book. Oversized, slim, and larger than a typical graphic novel, Skim’s physical-
ity was carefully designed. At times, large, two-page illustrations fill the pages,
and at others, text takes precedence. For these and other innovations, Skim was
praised and well received by critics. However, its nomination for a Governor
General’s Literary Award soon came under close scrutiny and became the sub-
ject of a literary controversy. At the time of nomination, the Governor General’s
Awards had yet to introduce a nomination category that recognizes graphic
novels. Instead, jurors had to decide whether Skim should be entered into either
the category for “Children’s Text” or the category for “Children’s Illustration.”
Rather than recognizing the graphic novel as displaying an integral relation-
ship between text and image, jurors nominated Mariko Tamaki for the text of
the book, while neglecting to also recognize Jillian Tamaki for her illustrative
work. Like many graphic novels, the text and image in Skim are viewed as
inseparable, not easily compartmentalized into distinct parts. Isolating the text
of Skim, many critics argued, meant devaluing the book as a whole. Indeed,
Mariko Tamaki noted, “I suppose it can be argued that one could read the text
and look at the illustrations of a children’s book separately, but that’s impossible
with a graphic novel” (Nelles, 2009, para. 2). Both Jillian and Mariko expressed
their regret that a nomination for the Governor General’s Award necessitated
the separation of the text from the illustration in Skim. Jillian commented, “We
have always been co-creators. We were not put together (by a publisher). We
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frémissantes, les jarrets tendus, les ailes et la croupe en
mouvement. Et quel blanc que le leur : chaud, velouté, immaculé !
Puis j’allai vers un enclos où cent vingt poules blanches, à
l’adorable crête rouge, picotaient. Une quantité de coqs s’en
donnaient dans ce sérail : ils violaient, violentaient, harcelaient les
poulettes qui s’encouraient éperdues ; mais, prises au vol, elles y
passaient. Sous un arbre, des groupes nichaient par terre, le ventre
dans un creux, d’autres picotaient sans répit, sans souci, celles-là,
des coqs ardents qui les harcelaient toutes. Sur le vert tendre du
printemps, elles se détachaient si fraîches, si pimpantes que mon
spleen me quitta du coup.
— Vous devez avoir beaucoup d’œufs ? dis-je au gardien.
— Nous pas : le directeur.
— Si le directeur a les œufs, il doit les vendre pour arriver à
nouer les deux bouts, car le jardin périclite et s’est déjà fortement
endetté.
Puis j’allai voir les singes.
Plus de la moitié sont morts de privations et on ne peut les
remplacer.
— Ils n’ont pas ce qu’il leur faut, me dit le gardien.
Il est vrai que je les vis grignoter des fèves, et du maïs, au lieu
des figues, des oranges et autres bonnes choses qu’on leur donnait
avant. Des figues ! des oranges ! Oh ! que je voudrais en manger
moi-même !
Dans la salle des singes, on a installé les perroquets sur leurs
perchoirs. Ces bêtes au plumage magnifique me donnaient envie de
les étrangler : l’une après l’autre, elles s’étaient mises à crier en
chœur, avec des voix si discordantes et perçantes que les vitres
tintaient comme si elles allaient se briser. Hou, les sales bêtes ! elles
suent la stupidité et leur beau plumage en devient discordant lui-
même !
17 juillet 1918.
C’est adorable, mais gênant. Je lis au lit ; une nuée de papillons
de nuit, fauves, velus, à grosse tête ornée de panaches, voltigent
lourdement autour de ma tête, sur mon oreiller, en laissant derrière
eux une poudre jaune comme du pollen. Je ne puis dormir : nuit
d’orage, de pluie battante, de chaleur moite. Je dépose le Journal
des de Goncourt et vais au balcon pour me rafraîchir. Il fait un noir
opaque, fouetté par des émanations qui illuminent tout le pays, et en
bas, dans le jardin, j’aperçois un ver luisant qui brille, même quand
les éclairs embrasent tout : il s’occupe bien des intempéries, celui-
là… Je scrute la nuit, mais je ne vois pas voltiger l’amoureux
phosphorescent, incandescent, qu’elle appelle, et elle luit, luit, dans
le gazon inondé…
Quant à mes oreillers, ils sont couverts de papillons : rien n’égale
leur beauté, leur variété de formes, de couleurs, et le précieux des
tissus : jamais manteau de déesse n’a pu approcher de cette
délicate opulence. Mais, mes chéris, où voulez-vous que je pose ma
tête ? Vous me préparez une nuit blanche… Voilà, ils se fourrent
dans mes cheveux, mon cou… Je vais chercher mon verre
agrandissant… Ah ! ce sont des monstres merveilleux, à tête
énorme, au crâne bossué, à cornes, à trompes, à suçoirs, à pattes
barbelées… Seulement, mes trésors, je voudrais dormir et,
maintenant que je vous ai vus, je voudrais bien me débarrasser de
vous, et vous êtes là d’une familiarité… vous descendez le long de
mon dos, sous mon vêtement, et vous glissez, toutes ailes
déployées, le long de mes draps…
Ça va finir : je vais éteindre, et ils se colleront tous au plafond…
1918.
On lance des mines dans les bruyères. C’est une chute brutale,
pesante, sans écho, qui doit réduire en bouillie ou vous incruster en
terre. Mon Dieu, comme cela m’ébranle le système nerveux !
Dans les pinières où je me promène, il fait délicieux : la pluie
d’hier a rendu le tapis d’aiguilles moelleux ; une légère brise fait
onduler les cimes de pins ; le soleil filtre, le parfum de résine
ressemble à de l’encens : exquis, exquis ! Mes chiens courent et
aboient après un écureuil qui, de terreur, saute d’une haute pinière
dans une basse ; il tombe, ils l’ont ! Non, d’un bond il est de nouveau
en haut ; la chienne, de frénésie, bondit à une hauteur de deux
mètres et embrasse l’arbre ; aïe, elle se déchire le ventre et hurle ;
l’écureuil voltige déjà au loin, poursuivi par les deux chiens.
Rien dans la nature n’est ami ou bienveillant. Voilà des
aéroplanes de guerre qui s’exercent au-dessus des pinières…
Encore des mines, han ! han !… Les merles chantent… Je continue
ma promenade, l’esprit dispersé et ne pouvant se fixer sur rien par
l’agitation que me donne ce bruit.
Voilà encore un joli écureuil, au ventre blanc, que mes chiens ont
découvert ; il veut se mettre en sûreté dans des pins plus élevés ; il
voltige jusque sur le bord d’un chemin. Voyant qu’il ne pourra
atteindre la branche qui avance de l’autre côté, il ricoche à droite, où
une autre s’étend au-dessus du chemin ; il y saute, file en coin, puis,
d’un bond plané, atteint une branche de la plus haute pinière. Alors il
fait tant de méandres que mes chiens perdent sa piste.
Eh bien, il n’y avait pas que de l’instinct dans les agissements de
l’écureuil : il y avait certainement de la réflexion et de la
combinaison.
Au loin le canon ! les mines ! le carnage et le massacre !
1918.
Un gros rhume m’oblige de garder le lit. A portée de la main, je

puis ouvrir et fermer la fenêtre. Entre par le balcon une hirondelle.
Elle se débat contre le carreau, les ailes déployées, la queue étalée,
la respiration haletante. Ah ! la belle créature ! Bleu profond, miroitant
comme du satin. Je ne puis voir la poitrine. Sur chaque penne de la
queue en éventail, une tache blanche, les deux pennes de chaque
côté allongées en pinceau. Dieu, si je pouvais la tenir en main, la
garder un peu, la caresser ! mais elle est déjà affolée, me sentant
derrière elle : il serait cruel de la prendre. Attends, ma chérie.
J’ouvre la fenêtre. Houp ! Elle est partie !
5 mai 1922.
Je soupe chez la petite femme, avec du lait chaud et du pain de

corinthes.
Mitje et Remi reviennent avec les vaches et nous racontent
comment la génisse rousse, qui n’est encore sortie que quelquefois,
s’est mise à courir et à sauter quand la pluie, qu’elle ne connaissait
pas, est tombée sur elle :
— Nous avons eu toutes les peines du monde à la rattraper, elle
était folle.
Puis Remi dit :
— Quand elle ne sait pas que je la laisse aller sans longe, elle
reste tranquillement à brouter à côté de moi, mais, si elle s’aperçoit
qu’elle est en liberté, elle court vers la bleue, se frotte à elle et lui
lèche le mufle : c’est une curieuse bête.
— Mais, fait Mitje, les vaches s’aiment et se détestent comme les
gens. Si je ne mettais pas, à l’étable, la bleue entre la blanche et la
tachée, elles se démoliraient. C’est la bleue qui arrange tout : le soir,
elle lèche à droite et à gauche, et il faut voir la jalousie de celle qui
doit attendre et comme elle gémit… Et le matin, la bleue est toujours
couchée contre l’une ou l’autre, qui lui lèche à son tour le dos ou le
mufle… Et le long des routes, quand une vache étrangère
s’approche de la bleue, elle la regarde une fois de côté, puis
continue son chemin, tandis que les autres se rapprochent et sont
prêtes à jouer des cornes.
— Oui, ce sont de curieuses bêtes, répéta Remi, mais le moindre
homme vaut mieux que toutes les bêtes.
Je saute sur mes pieds avec une telle violence que Remi en est
tout effrayé.
— Parce qu’elles n’ont pas d’âme, bégaye-t-il.
Ame ! âme ! quelle âme ? et la bleue n’en aurait pas ! Et je
cherche une comparaison.
— Voyons, Triene, qui se dispute avec tout le monde et ne
cherche qu’à nuire, de fureur de ce qu’elle est laide… Voyons !…
Mais, devant ces six yeux incrédules, je cours vers la porte et
leur crie :
— La bleue, pas d’âme ! Moi, vous savez, je donnerais douze
Triene pour une bleue !
8 mai 1922.
Chez le boucher du village.

Il est planté au milieu de la rue, le col de sa chemise ouvert, la
poitrine nue, les manches retroussées, les bras et le tablier maculés
de sang. Il respire un instant entre deux tueries.
Un porc qui fume encore est, coupé en deux, pendu dans la
boucherie ; un bol est posé à terre sous les moitiés de la tête, pour
recueillir les dernières gouttes de sang. Un autre porc est encore sur
la charrette, étendu en plein soleil dans une caisse en lattes qui
l’immobilise, et un troisième a une corde nouée à une patte de
derrière, qui le retient au garde-fou du pont du petit ruisseau, où tout
à l’heure son sang coulera, car le boucher a bâti expressément au
bord pour y laisser écouler le sang inutile : ce ruisseau alimente
d’eau potable la ville voisine.
Le chien du boucher, un jeune de ma Loulotte, joue autour du
porc attaché par la patte, qui ne demande pas mieux que de se
familiariser et le suit de son pied engourdi, en grognant de manière
amicale.
— Mais, boucher, comme votre chien engraisse !
— C’est parce qu’il est châtré.
— Châtré ! pourquoi ? Un mâle ne vous reviendrait pas plein de
jeunes.
— Non, mais il en ferait partout, et tout le monde aurait un beau
chien comme moi, et ils vendraient les jeunes un gros prix sans que
j’en aie rien. Je ne voulais pas ça.
— Mais, boucher, une des beautés du berger de Malines est son
tempérament fougueux et féroce, et maintenant c’est une moule. Je
m’étonnais déjà de son air indolent.
— Indolent, lui, ha ! Quand je tue une bête, il m’aide. Pour
saigner un porc, je le couche, n’est-ce pas, je mets un genou sur sa
panse, je tiens un pied d’une main, et de l’autre j’enfonce le couteau.
Eh bien, lorsqu’il gigote, le chien, sans que je le lui aie appris, prend
l’autre pied dans sa gueule et ne le lâche que si le porc ne bouge
plus.
« J’achète mes veaux chez le paysan ; quand je les emmène, ils
refusent de marcher ; alors le chien leur mord la queue, et les veaux
marchent. Et tout cela, je ne le lui ai pas appris : il a compris qu’il
doit m’aider. »
Mais comme je me sens agacée de la mutilation de la belle
créature, je veux lui dire une chose antipathique.
— Eh bien, boucher, si vous ne l’aviez pas émasculé, il vous
aiderait peut-être davantage. Quant aux jeunes qu’il ferait ailleurs, ce
ne seraient que des bâtards, puisqu’il n’y a que le vôtre de vraie race
au village. Et tout le monde vous envierait votre beau chien, tandis
que maintenant…
Et je fais une moue méprisante.
— Oui, on me l’envierait ? et il m’aiderait peut-être encore
mieux ?…
Et une ombre de regret passe dans ses yeux.
Je pars contente.
Le chien mutilé va tout de même flairer les autres chiens.
TABLE
Pages
Angelinette 7
Je voulais en faire un homme 67
La petite femme et ses enfants 121
Bêtes en cage et bêtes en liberté 183
MAYENNE, IMPRIMERIE CHARLES COLIN
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Teaching Comics Through Multiple Lenses Critical Perspectives Crag Hill Full Chapter

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Teaching Comics Through Multiple Lenses Critical Perspectives Crag Hill Full Chapter

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Teaching Comics Through Multiple

Lenses: Critical Perspectives Crag Hill

Crag Hill is Associate Professor of English Education at Jeannine Rainbolt

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Edited by Crag Hill

Patents Act 1988.

This book is dedicated to the teachers, librarians,

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1 Introduction: The Growing Relevance of Comics 1

2 Designing Meaning: A Multimodal Perspective on

3 Multimodal Forms: Examining Text, Image, and Visual

4 Illustrating Youth: A Critical Examination of the Artful

5 Just Like Us? LGBTQ Characters in Mainstream

6 Telling the Untellable: Comics and Language of

7 Christian Forgiveness in Gene Luen Yang’s Animal

8 Poverty Lines: Visual Depictions of Poverty and

9 Can Superhero Comics Defeat Racism? Black

10 Teaching Native American Comics With

11 End Points 161

in the 21st century.

Smile: A Thematic Analysis” (Chapter 7) explores how many of Yang’s charac-

The editor would like to acknowledge those who offered encouragement,

I can’t pinpoint when I first learned to read. I do remember my school literacy

Mainstream Attention and Integration Into Schools

Teaching Literature to Adolescents, Children’s Literature,Young Adult Literature,

of Graphic Novels and Comics, 2(2), 137–149.

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Materiality and the

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Growing up, comic books were a staple of my home literacy environment.

You Call That Reading?

with traditional novels were “guilty of criminal negligence” (p. 56).

to follow, “books-of-comics became the province of bookstores and libraries—

Multimodality and Multiliteracies

conventions such as speech balloons, narrative boxes, and panels. Importantly,

Deconstructing Batman as Hero-Figure: A Close

commonly used to establish power relationships between the figures depicted in

Implications of Reading Comics

in weighing different elements of a text’s semiotic design against one another,

Educational Review, 66(1), 60–92.

modal Methodologies for Researching Digital Data and Environments” (http://mode.

Un gros rhume m’oblige de garder le lit. A portée de la main, je

Je soupe chez la petite femme, avec du lait chaud et du pain de

Chez le boucher du village.

Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S.

START: FULL LICENSE

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1 Introduction: The Growing Relevance of Comics 1

11 End Points 161