In 2009, my brother and I self-published “The End of Gath,” a graphic novel trilogy. It was based on an idea (a dream, really) my brother had that grew into a Steampunk/science fantasy story. Being a graphic artist, he had the images in his mind, but not necessarily a fleshed-out narrative. I’ve written some fiction – short stories, one novel perpetually in revision – and have critiqued and edited many works by friends over the years. My brother asked me to assist with the written part of his three-part tale, and I jumped at the opportunity.

It was an interesting project – I had to write with the idea that the visuals would cohabit the pages, but for the most part, those visuals didn’t exist when I wrote my bits. We constructed it not in standard comic panel structure, but as what I consider a truer version of the term “graphic novel”: large visuals interspersed with blocks of text. My brother created illustrations that were imaginative and beautiful to look at. We critiqued and suggested changes to each other’s contributions. After a number of years of work, we had a finished product we both loved. Others seemed to love it, too – especially the pictures. Not surprisingly, they were the first things anyone noticed about the book … sometimes the only things people noticed. There are words there, I wanted to say, if only you’d bother to read them. Damn. Had I spent long hours of work and thought on a glorified picture book?

The answer is no. It’s a good story, and I’m proud of my part in creating it, adding much to my brother’s original framework. The book might have benefited from making the text stand out more vis-a-vis the illustrations (larger type size, different font, etc.). But I am sold on the graphic novel format as a distinct and effective way to tell a story, communicate ideas, etc. I am sure there are people who would never have picked up that book, never have viewed more than a page or two without the illustrations. The visuals draw people in, make the text come to life, enhance it in so many ways.

As such, I don’t view graphic novels or the comic panel format as any kind of “dumbing down” or oversimplification of a given text. Rather, it is another way of communicating and enhancing the author’s message. And, just as video games demand and develop certain skills that are beneficial to learning, graphic novels and comics, as Scott McCloud points out, ask that readers use their imaginations and play an active role in their understanding of the story told. This is due, in part, to the manipulations of temporal and spatial elements that McCloud discussed. But it is also seen in the way writers may illustrate a story to show an elaborate analogy and help the reader make connections. For example, Art Spiegelman, in his devastating two-part work, “Maus,” tells his father’s Holocaust story and its emotional and psychological aftermath through the depiction of the European Jews as mice and the Nazis as cats. Readers may, after a while, get so involved in the story that they almost forget the characters are shown as animals, but the subtext of hunters and prey remains – one that can easily be understood by people of different eras, ages and backgrounds.

I hope the use of graphic novels and comics grows in schools and in the literary world.  We should use every tool at our disposal to enliven learning, reading and writing for our students – and everybody else, for that matter.

The McCloud comic-strip pointed out a few theories I never truly considered. From observation, I have learned that McCloud’s illustration on object permanence, panel  three on page 62, is an accurate reflection of child behavior. My niece, at one year and five months, finally understood the concept of object permanence this past summer when she learned to hide her toys in the couch cushions and retrieve them upon request at a later time. McCloud takes the idea of object permanence and extends it to the idea of closure. Closure being the idea of “observing the parts but perceiving the whole” (63). The most intriguing and valuable to our discussion would be the application of closure to literature, particularly Nat Turner. Each image only showed a part of the story, like the early pages set in Africa, where the reader must assume the complete setting. The most important spaces of the text are those moments between the panels which McCloud names “The Gutter” (66). His chapter title, “Blood in the Gutter,” now makes sense, and the connection between McCloud and Baker’s Nat Turner is made. Baker has many bloody gutters, with shadows creeping up on helpless victims, Turner’s attacks hidden and obscured, and only the brutality of Turner’s co-conspirators is clearly illustrated. McCloud’s comic brings forward the ‘blank’ space, which I once would have called ‘empty.’ In this space between Baker’s illustrations is the majority of the story of Nat Turner. What did he do when nobody was looking, what did he not report after he had been captured? It also seems unusually convenient that all of Turner’s co-conspirators died in their rebellion and Turner survived to tell the tale of how he primarily directed the violence, that little blood was on his educated hands. Perhaps the gutter can do more than fill in the gap between one moment to the next, perhaps it can allow readers to question the work. The gutter allowed Baker to avoid the reality of the situation, that Turner’s attempt to catch up with the rest of his murderous group is as unlikely as a dog trying to catch a mailman in a densely packed neighborhood. They had to stop to kill at each house, yet Turner was free of that time consuming task and was successively unable to catch up. Baker’s panels seem to excuse Turner from the most heinous acts, but the gutter allows the reader to question and interpret the time not illustrated.

On Scott McCloud: I take seriously his assertion that the content of a graphic novel can directly influence the ways in which we read it. A lengthy, drawn-out panel can influence the perception of time and a rough sketch can indicate the ruggedness of an action. Reading Nat Turner, the coarse, crude drawings were emblematic of the grittiness of the subject matter. I got that. I just don’t get how this makes it literature.

On the coattails of our discussion regarding video games, I think my reaction toward graphic novels is very much the same. My fascination with games, beyond my anal-retentive min-maxing of character attributes to break the algorithm of every game I can—this so-called “theorycrafting”—is in regard to their textual/expressive potential. Yet even despite how much I agree with Gee’s assertions that player choice in Deus Ex can “mean something,” I hesitate to call JC Denton’s disposition toward multinational corporate corruption and government conspiracy “literature” … or my process of annihilating it as literary.

I respect Baker’s Nat Turner and very much enjoyed reading it, as much as one can enjoy 200 pages of massacre. It was a quick read, and I found many of its moments quite powerful. Yet I feel literature must be read, imagined, and interpreted. You can interpret a painting, of course. But a painting is art. And art is not necessarily literature (though the written word can certainly be considered artistic). After all, when the words “run” and “boom” compose of 50% of the words embedded within the story’s frames (aside from the excerpts), there’s much to question whether a graphic novel—at least in Nat Turner’s case—is read or, perhaps better put: viewed.

I think there’s additionally plenty to be said that Scott McCloud directly compares comic books and graphic novels not to literary giants like William Shakespeare and Edmund Spenser but visual expressionists like Van Gogh and Munch (which he transposes himself within at one stage of the piece). Perhaps this is a point that does not need to be made; this is an argument I’m not sure anyone ever even said. I think the visual rhetoric of a piece like Nat Turner is certainly something worth examining, but like the idea of actually teaching a video game in a classroom, I think there is more to learn from Nat Turner than there is to learn about it (not that I have anything against teaching it or video games in the classroom necessarily).

When I took Professor Tamara Harvey’s class for English 701, I had to read Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. It absolutely made me think differently about comics and the graphic novel, but I still wasn’t sold on their usefulness in the classroom.

What’s ironic about my dismissal of using graphic novels in the classroom is that I was a yearbook adviser. I went to countless workshops all over the country to learn how to get students to READ the yearbook and every workshop stressed using modular coverage (a “mod”). A mod can be a graph or a little side story with a photo or statistics or something like that– think pictures and infographics. The point is that it breaks up a story into bite-sized chunks to make the information more palatable. I knew that if I wanted students to read the yearbook, I’d be more successful in my pursuit by using mods.

Three years later this pin on Pinterest, combined with this week’s reading, finally sold me on why it’s perfectly acceptable to use a graphic novel in the classroom:

The caption for this picture says, “This is what you’re competing with, people. If you don’t know how to make a pretty resume—outsource it to someone who does”. It made me realize that just as language changes, so does its presentation to people. I don’t care how old you are, sometimes “pretty” language, complete with pictures, is the most effective way to communicate something; this week’s readings are an example of this.

Joy explained it well in her post. Unlike Joy, I read (or re-read) McCloud’s chapters before reading the other articles. I thought it was almost hypocritical for the authors to laud the picture book or graphic novel and yet describe the importance of lines, for example, using words. McCloud’s work shows just how much work and thought goes into the creation of comics. Rather than only using words, the author uses pictures as well to communicate. That is talent.

If you are like three-years-ago me, and you are still on the fence about using graphic novels in the classroom, consider reading Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi.

I read it for Professor Harvey’s class and learned more about Islamic culture and the revolution than I’d ever learned before (and yet I still questioned the presence of graphic novels in the classroom!). I could have read a memoir on her, but it probably would’ve taken me a longer time to read it, and I wouldn’t still remember it, that’s for sure.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that comics, graphic novels, infographics, mods– it’s where we are going. Just pick up a newspaper! Think about how much more you learned from textbooks when they used pictures. Thinking back to one of our first readings from Lee Shulman’s article, “Taking Learning Seriously,” he said “If we take learning seriously, we must take responsibility for the ubiquity of amnesia. We need to reexamine much of what we teach, and how we teach it” (13). Graphic novels definitely deserve a place in the classroom because if this sleep deprived mom can remember comics and a graphic novel from three years ago, I’m pretty sure a teenager will as well.

The readings this week were about graphic novels, comics, or any other sort of “picture book” and how they are more complex than one might first expect.  I strongly support using graphic novels in the classroom whenever possible—especially when students are choosing a book freely to read. They often seem less intimidating to students who are not strong readers, or seem like an “easy” choice to students who are good readers, but in reality they are complex and thought provoking.

Even knowing this, I was surprised by how much detail and deliberate choice is involved in constructing these works.  Kyle Baker’s preface highlights this, saying, “Comic books/graphic novels are a visual medium, so it’s most important for an artist to choose a subject with opportunities for compelling graphics” (6).  Not every story can be successfully told as a graphic novel—so from the very beginning, the author of such a novel must make a good choice.  Understanding Comics takes this idea of deliberate choices further in speaking about the gutter and how “in the limbo of the gutter, human imagination takes two separate images and transforms them into a single idea” (66).  Readers are much more active in this reading because they have to take what is left unsaid, undrawn, but that does happen, and fill in the gutter.  Thus, “to kill a man between panels is to condemn him to a thousand deaths” (69).

The details matter in graphic novels, and I would not deny that everything from color, to shape of the frame, position of the frame, to size of the frame and much more play a role in this.  I’m convinced—graphic novels require care, thought, and active skills in both creating and reading them.  So here’s my question—are they literature? I can’t deny that reading all 200 pages of Nat Turner had me emotionally invested, sickened, confused, uncertain, and sympathetic at different points—all things any good piece of writing should do.  But I also can’t deny that it only took me an hour to read, which would not be true of most 200 page works of literature.

So is time spent what makes something count as literature? Is it the ability to decode specific symbols? Or is it the story, the ability to get caught up in something outside the self, the absorption in another world, the puzzling through and coming to a conclusion in the end?  Aren’t all of those things part of what we value about literature? Don’t we get all of those things out of good traditional and good graphic novels?

The genres are still different—to say their not cheapens them because the form is part of the work whether it is a traditional novel, a graphic novel, or even an oral folk tale.  But maybe the point is that since each can be equally complex, requiring thought and interpretation, we should regard them as equal mediums of story.

Joy Wagener

I began this week’s reading with the Cohn, Rabkin, and Nodelman pieces, thinking they’d prepare me for what I would have to figure out in the more graphically presented material in the McCloud chapters.  I started with what was familiar, yet was completely thrown by the language they used and the material they discussed—it just didn’t connect as well because there were not always illustrations of what they were talking about.  How can you explain a graphic medium without including some graphics?  For example, Nodelman’s article goes into tremendous detail about the stylistic devices used in graphic literature. He discussed the format, mood, shapes, lines, symbols, point-of-view, focus, color, and movement in graphic novels, yet he includes few than 25% of illustrations of these styles.  The Cohn article (“Mis-en-Page”) offered more complicated information (theory?) about graphic novels which left me feeling more confused about what he was discussing; he included a few illustrations of what he was discussing, but I cannot say that I really understood his point about “conventional, rhetorical, decorative, and productive” conceptions.  I felt these articles were informative, and even interesting, but I had no idea what I was missing until I picked up the McCloud chapters.

McCloud described all of the stylistic devices of graphic novels that the other authors discussed, but instead of just telling about it, he actually showed it to the reader.  His delivery of information about graphic novels through the media of a graphic novel was highly effective and I found myself really enjoying the lesson.  I especially enjoyed his conversation about the “closure” leaps made between panels of a comic and the chart of those closures on page 74.  I referenced these closure methods throughout my live Tweet of “Nat Turner.”  I’ve read comics and graphic novels before, but I had never really thought about how much the reader invents the story between panels.  Then in chapter four, McCloud goes into more depth with the use of time made between panels, in the “gutters.” It’s very easy to follow along and understand the concepts used in graphic media.

Having completed the reading, I felt armed and prepared to take on “Nat Turner.” The pre-reading material made “Nat Turner” more enjoyable for me as I was able to identify the stylistic choices and techniques Baker used to tell the story, leaving out information and allowing the reader to fill in the blanks.  I’ve been tossing around the idea for a while now of teaching a graphic novel to my students, and now that I have these articles and information in hand, I feel well prepared to do so— but they’ll definitely have to read the McCloud book before reading the assigned graphic novel.

McCloud’s breakdown of the cognitive process involved in reading comics was quite illuminating.  I certainly agree with his use of the word “faith” in chapter three to describe the process by which we conceive of a single reality from our innumerable but fragmented observations and experiences.  Chapter 4 felt a little flat to me; the assumption that a photograph represents only a single moment in time doesn’t seem to be especially relevant.  I have no photographical skill myself—which is really a bummer—but I appreciate photography precisely because it is capable of presenting so much in what seems like so little (i.e. a single second); every photograph is a story In Medias Res and the best ones expand into both the past and future exponentially.  In chapter five, about the use of lines, this seems to be something left unsaid; while Chester Gould was able to help create his character Dick Tracy with bold lines and excessive shading (in the picture on p. 126 Dick Tracy explodes out of the netherworld of his blazer) these were also presented in tandem with Tracy’s dialogue and situation.  Moreover, Dick Tracy himself is found in a context of the hard-broiled American hero.  Dick Tracy, the comic, helped establish this genre, of course, but it also played off of previously established roles—most notably the cowboy myth.

Rabkin seemed like a good example of the strong apologist movement, defending the validity of comic books against their poor reputation in a way that doesn’t seem totally authentic to me.  For one, I don’t think that reputation actually exists in my generation.  For another, we might not read comics in schools, but that doesn’t mean it’s because we think they are below education.  It’s quite likely because comics are 1. New 2. Untraditional and 3. Not universally popular; many teachers don’t like comic books, so why would they go out of their way to teach them?  I’ve read one or two graphic novels, which I enjoyed to some extent, but I’ve never considered comics lowly or foolish.  I think one thing that might betray comics is that since we use the same inferential-interpretation method for reading them as we do constantly to make meaning (reality) in our lives the impetus is to read a comic quickly; it doesn’t take the time that reading a traditional narrative does, and because the comic is a series of images (a strip) we aren’t asked to patiently go through each image in the way that being at a museum asks us to look at each painting even though there are many.  As Cohn says, it’s easy to forget that a comic strip occurs on a page.

The readings this week have really got me thinking about the difference—if there is one—between interpreting words and interpreting pictures.  Comics blur the line that does, in some small but pragmatic way (the respective medium of presentation), exist between them, but they also ask us to ask the question, “Do we read comics?”  This question, in turn, makes us stop to think about our definition of reading.  I keep thinking about the cliché, “A picture speaks a thousand words.”  I wonder.  Like interpreting a poem, skilled interpreters engaged simultaneously in an interpretation will find a considerably larger amount of meaning / potential meaning than a single, isolated, and otherwise untrained interpreter.  This suggests that a picture speaks as many words as the interpreter is capable of reading into it.  Moreover, we’d all probably describe the same picture definitely, just like we’d draw the same description differently (though our artistic abilities would differ significantly).  Not only are the amount but the type of words will also be different.  The same, though, is true with interpreting a poem (as we have seen).  Is there any essential difference in the means of interpretation?  What if we did a comic strip for the Ball Turret Gunner poem?

I’m inclined to conclude—however hastily—that the distinction between interpreting pictures and literature is mute, and that because reading is, at least in my viewed, an act of interpreting words the term “reading” itself could be applied to interpreting comic books or picture books without much controversy.  Thinking about that, maybe Rabkin’s right and I am wrong: Maybe the reason we don’t spend time interpreting comic books is that while we’re capable of agreeing that graphic novels (for instance) are a legitimate form of art we’re still not going to approach them with the methods we have learned and practiced from and for tradition models.  For example, on p. 89 in Nat Turner we see young Nat reading the bible.  This is the first image of the bible we have in the novel, and the cross on the cover is upside down.  On the next few pages it is right-side up.  Now, is this original inversion because Nat Turner, trying to teach himself to read, probably first didn’t understand which way the letters / words were oriented?  Or is Kyle Baker indicating the cross on purpose to indicate that Nat Turner was destined from the beginning to be like Peter rather than Christ?  (In Catholicism, the Petrine cross is an inverted cross which represents Peter, the first Pope [who was given “the keys of the kingdom” by Christ], who was crucified upside down.)  I thought about the second possibility first, but I ruled it out almost immediately.  Why?  I suppose because I was reading a comic book and not a poem.  On the other hand, one of the problems we face with comic books could be that we non-comic book readers don’t know the tradition that comic book writers come out of.  When I read a published poem, I have an idea about what the poet has read and some conventions that will be used or ignored—these will help me interpret the poem.  With comic books I don’t know any of this.  Is the tradition employed that of comic books themselves (do comic books reference previous comic books the way literature references previous literature), or the traditions of photography, or literature, or all of them?  Can I really be asked to juggle all these different mediums and their traditions?  Taking comic books too lightly might be a problem, but the prospect of taking them seriously presents its own problems as well.