I did not know much about Nat Turner prior to reading Kyle Baker’s Nat Turner.  I expected to see some of the obvious images of slavery since I knew about the history of slavery, but I did not expect the images to be this graphic.  I opened the book and followed the scenes until I saw the baby being overthrown on the slave ship (page 55). I stopped and put the book down for a few days, because I could not tolerate the painful images.  The graphics were very powerful.  The first time I studied the book I had many questions and some confusion about certain actions represented in some graphics or scenes. Studying the book again after I read McCloud’s chapter three and four, the image were much more clear and my confusion dissipated.

McCloud uses the term Gutter to represents the space between the panels, which takes two separate images and transforms them into a single idea (McCloud page 66) Examples of Gutter in Nat Turner are the images of the different phases of the moon on pages 29, 33, 95, and 183 to illustrate lapse in time in the story.

Another term McCloud refers to as Closure (a great picture of it on page 114 of Net Turner) indicates a phenomenon of observing the parts but perceiving the whole, which we depend on for survival on a daily basis.  Our past experiences, prior knowledge, assist us in achieving closure. When we look at the graphics of Nat Turner we commit closure – “Our eyes take in the fragmented, black-and-white image of the ‘half-tone’ patterns…. And transform it into the reality.” (McCloud, Page 64) The first image of two intense eyes, with two hands holding an open book in a complete black background is an example of Closure. We rely on our prior knowledge to conclude that the person is secretly reading the book in the dark. A similar eye appears on page 77. Another example of Closure is the third image in the book – an image of a firm grip of a sward juxtaposed against a bright full moon.  We can conclude that the image represents rebellion in the middle of the night.

McCloud refers to the silent contract between the creator, through art and craft, and the reader where the reader is the silent accomplice. “From the tossing of a baseball to the death of a planet, the reader’s deliberate, voluntary closure is comics’ primary means of stimulating time and motion.” (McCloud, page 69) The six types of the creator’s craft are the panel-to-panel categorizations below:

These six categories I tried to apply to Nat Turner:

In trying to categories Nat Turner, I became confused because many of the scenes could be a combination of the five out of six categories.

Some of the questions that came to my mind as I studied the book were:

What if I took some of the one panel images that stand alone and make even a shorter story, summarizing the book?

What if Nat Turner were a white male, a prominent figure in the church, would that have made a difference on how we would view him and his actions? Would history tell a different story?

The question that was posed in the beginning of Perry Nodelman’s text reminded me of the discussion that we had in class last week. Nodelman asks the reader to ponder why children books have become so popular, and later debunks the assumption that children picture books are more popular than other forms writing because they are easier for kids to understand. I agree with his claims and think that picture books are enjoyable for children and adults for many of the same reasons that video games are enjoyable. The pictures that appear in children books and comics can be visually captivating, just like the graphics that you see in some video games. The visual images that appear in these different mediums attract viewers and can compel interest in the story that is told.

I found this to be true while doing the reading for class this week. The pictures in Baker’s Nat Turner were visually captivating,  and his novel is something that I would enjoy reading outside of the classroom. The text was enjoyable for me, even though I knew the outcome, because the pictures and the text work together to retell Turner’s narrative in a powerful and enthralling way. The images were thought provoking and at times difficult to interpret. I don’t think I would enjoy the text if it were easy to unravel or presented in a simplistic manner.  When I think back to my response about video games, I see now that I was practically addicted to finishing Tomb Raider that summer because the game was a challenge. I did find the narrative  that was unfolding through the game to be compelling, but part of my interest in the game came from figuring out how to work the controls, solving the game’s puzzles, and conquering whatever enemies appeared on the screen.  In the same way, learning how to read the pictures in Baker’s novel was a challenge. I paid more attention I think to the pictures at times than I did to the actual writing. Each picture told a story, and as the reader you had to work hard to unravel the meaning that was behind it.

I also think interpreting pictures along with text can be more challenging for readers. Nodelman writes that “As we shift our attention between the pictures and the text, we must shift between different ways of thinking” (154). Working to understand a written text along with the pictures that accompany it can help develop critical thinking. As a reader you work to compare what you see visually to what are reading. I think this can  result in a deeper understanding of the story that is told, and benefit learners.

I was excited to see that our syllabus included a graphic novel. Comic books were some of the first things I ever read as a child, and are something I’ve continued to read as an adult. While I’m the first to admit that they’re not all high literature, there are very real merits to the form that often get overlooked when the form is dismissed as “for kids”. Nat Turner is proof that not all comics are appropriate for children, and I can personally attest that it’s hardly an outlier in that respect. We think of any book with pictures as a ‘picture-book’, and picture-books are typically seen as appropriate for children. This always struck me as a strange way to think about books: at some point in a child’s life, books with pictures stop being seen as worthy of their attention. How did we get to that idea as a society? We love and appreciate art when it’s hung on the wall, but if it’s in a book with text, it’s not considered art anymore?
Scott McCloud‘s Understanding Comics honestly changed the way I read comics when I first encountered it more than ten years ago. While I already ‘knew’ how to read comics from growing up on them, I had never really thought about how to read them; it was a form of literacy that I had learned through exposure, the same way I had learned English. Nobody had to teach me how to read comics, so I had never really thought about the process. McCloud’s explanations of the mechanics of time and the complex interaction between image and text within the graphic novel format made me pay much closer attention to the way artists choose to lay out the series of images on a page with respect to the narrative process. I’m much more aware now when I come across a well-arranged or innovative layout of panels. Of course, the same is true of poor page layouts; sometimes it’s just not obvious what order the panels are meant to be read in, and that’s a failure of the artist to thoroughly consider the page as a whole and as a narrative/chronological space.

Cohn and Rabkin’s discussion of temporality in graphic novels was interesting. I’m used to being meta-cognitive when it comes to reading straight text or print, but I never thought about how I naturally read from left to right or top to bottom. I was also struck by the comments on the capacity or tendency of a graphic novel to depict the past or present. While Rabkin said portraying variations of past tense is particularly problematic, I thought of my own (limited) experiences reading graphic novels, all of which have been about the past. I’m thinking of Art Spiegelman’s Maus (which is mentioned in the readings) and a memoir Fun Home by Alison Bechdel.

Nat Turner too is a narrative of the past and like Maus, chronicles human suffering. What’s interesting to me is the seeming contrast between the visual style and the content of each work. A few days ago, a student of mine picked up Nat Turner off my desk and quickly paged through (I’d been reading it with my students while they did their independent reading). He started laughing and held up the image of the baby being fed to a shark to show everyone “what Miss Davidow had been reading.”

I was so immersed in the harrowing story up to that point that I hadn’t considered how the style of Kyle Baker’s work is cartoonish – even carrying traces of whimsy. I wonder if there is something to this. Baker takes Spiegelman’s approach of illustrating human atrocities in a relatively benign style compared to other ways these stories have been told. I think that a graphic novel like this about historical events that may, at this point, be too familiar helps us to bear witness in a new way. Rather than muting the reality of the situation, the unexpected format makes it new again.

What are your most memorable classes?  Most of us would like say something that includes multiple mediums: listening to readings, performances, watching film, and being shown examples of concurrent artwork alongside the literature of the time.  Some of our most robust lit survey courses in undergrad likely contained a healthy dose of art history as well.  Whether it was the tapestries or illuminated manuscripts of medieval literature or Pablo Picasso’s Les Desmoiselles alongside late 19^th and early 20^th century modernist writers, art is ubiquitously connected with literature.   Therefore, (for me), it is easy to build a bridge between the literature classroom and a graphic novel.

I was unprepared literally or graphically for the gruesome nature of Nat Turner, which probably made my reaction to what I was “reading” all the more interesting in hindsight.  I won’t finish the frames with the baby dangling over the shark, or the inset frames depicting dead faces or severed limbs.  That being said, I am likely not a prime example of someone whose softer sensibilities would be violated by such things.  My guiltier pleasures include films by Guy Ritchie, shows like The Sopranos and Sons of Anarchy, and smuttier non-literary books I don’t wish to divulge here to the public.  To me, Graphic Novels and other non-traditional literary genres are equally important in terms of our student’s interpretive faculties.   The lines of distinction by high-art and street-art are continually blurred and why the hell not?!  It’s not like graphic novels will discredit the value of those that preceded it.

McCloud’s meta-renderings of showing and telling the visual and literary concepts that go into the design renderings of graphic novels was particularly enlightening to me as someone who has not had the pleasure or privilege to have the material brought into class with any fervency.  The graphic novel allows the literature student to step back from decoding text and sit back to observe as moment, subject, and action occurs in front of them, much like watching tv or film.  Rather than busily consulting supporting text and reference lit, images and occurrence can simply wash over one’s consciousness with the effective force of display.

All of this being said, I refrain that text and picture are complementary and should therefore be practiced in balanced unison, as much as this is possible.

I found Kyle Baker’s graphic novel to be “graphic” in more than one way: certainly graphic in the pictorial sense, but also graphic in its depictions of violence, anger/hate, and bloodshed.

Concurrently with this course, I’m taking a course on dystopic literature.  To round out the genre, we considered Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games because the instructor wanted our class discussion to dip into the implications of this genre for a young adult (YA) audience.  I couldn’t help but thinking about the textual and pictorial differences of reading vs. viewing The Hunger Games as I read/viewed Nat Turner.

In a newspaper article about the collaboration of Collins and Gary Ross, the director of film adaptation, Collins and Ross explain that it was important to them for the film to be viewable by Hunger Games fans as young as twelve years old.  A tall order, in some instances: the novel depicts scenes such as an arrow piercing a child’s throat, and the child drowning in his own blood as he attempts to dislodge the arrow.  I don’t recall if or how the film depicted this moment, but I do remember having a queasier feeling in general as I watched the film than I did as I read the novel.

So, what’s the difference between reading a scene like that and viewing it?  When I was growing up and testing the boundaries of PG-13 and R-rated films—as well as novels such as Stephen King’s—the world presented to me two “truths” that I’ve always thought are irreconcilable.  On the one hand, I was told that my imagination was more powerful than anything I might see depicted in a film.  On the other hand, I was told to be wary of scary films because those images would “never go away” and be “burned into my mind.”  Okay—but if my imagination is more powerful than my eyes, aren’t I better off watching The Exorcist than if I were to read it?

The answer, I think, has something to do with innocence lost, but that’s another essay entirely.  The interesting thing is that, with Nat Turner, we both see and read about these horrific murders.  For me, I’d say the images were harder to swallow than the text, though the text didn’t go down easily, either.  This graphic novel is PG-13 at best, though I’d be one of those overprotective parents slapping an R-rating onto it.  Part of what I’m reacting to is the violent imagery; but also, the themes and issues taken up by this text are really intense.  Asking someone younger than 13 to grapple with faith-based violence, slavery, and child-slayings is a bit much, I think.

And yet—as Baker points out in his preface—we ask children to face these issues all the time in history books, though we do so highly ineffectively (perhaps because the true story of Nat Turner’s rebellion is a bit mature in content for school-aged children).  So I wonder, then, who Kyle Baker imagined as his audience for this graphic novel—and how different his authorial audience is from his actual audience.

The reason I mention young adult literature at all in this post is that I think one of the things working against comics/graphic novels as texts/artworks worth incorporating in the classroom is that, stereotypically, these texts/artworks are consumed by young people.  And yet, (at least judging by the tweets/posts so far) I think we all got something out of reading Nat Turner.  Similarly, I think the dystopia course benefited from including the YA novel—though I nearly, I admit, dropped the course when I saw a YA novel on a reading list for a graduate-level literature class.  Oh, the blasphemy!  But the class actually ended up conducting a pretty academic, thoughtful discussion about the text (and that has not always been the case with some of the more “grown-up” texts we’ve looked at so far).

As far as our other readings for this week, I wish I’d read them first—particularly the McCloud, as I think it would have helped me “tweet” more thoughtfully/educatedly about Baker.  But, speaking of age-appropriateness and audience, there was this moment in the Nodelman that was perhaps the most bizarre moment in our course readings so far this semester.  Maybe I’m overly sensitive, but my jaw dropped at the appearance of the word “rape” in the middle of an essay about “the pleasures of children’s books.”  Not only am I not sure what that Langer quote even means—I get that there are three narratives and that three is less harmonious a number than two—but I think Nodelman does a crappy job of unpacking his quote to relate it to his own essay.  Three competing narratives equals rape how exactly?  Like, gang rape?  Like, what???  It’s so unproductive to trivialize the subject of rape, never mind how surprised I was to see Nodelman/Langer trying to use rape as the anchor of a metaphor about artistic communication in, erm, children’s books.  I agree with Joy’s critique of these essays in that, unlike the McCloud, these writers only bring in a select few images to accompany what they’re trying to express in text about images.  But as far as this moment in the text goes, all I can say is thank god it wasn’t rendered pictorially.

For me, reading Nat Turner was a bit like reading in Spanish: I know how to do it in the back of my mind, but it took me several pages to get used to the new language, and even after I did, I still struggled to understand some passages. Part of this is logistical: for the first few pages, actually, I tested the theory of reading all the way across the two pages, then down, unsure of which was the correct way to read the book. But the other part of the challenge to read this text is in the artful, nuanced illustrations Baker employs.

There were pages where I stared at the pictures for minutes, unsure of what was happening. The image on pg 198 is a good example. Are they dissecting him? Are they casting him in something? Are they sawing him in half (not sure why that would happen…easier disposal of the body?). Either way, as I looked at the image, I went through the same process I go through when reading a work of literature: asking myself why I see the image one way, and what evidence I have in front of me to suggest that the image is of a dissection rather than an embalming. There are other places where this happened for me, too: pg 175, for example, and I watched myself “reading” these images in much the same way I would read a work of classical literature: mining for the things I understand, being patient with the things I don’t, re reading in between, and waiting for things to come together in the end.

After reading this text, I think the graphic novel (especially an artful one like this) offers an opportunity to walk students through the process of interpretation without intimidating them with words. They can (hopefully) see when they look at the images, and can trust that what they see is real. By giving students a graphic novel to interpret I think we give them an opportunity to trust their instincts as a see-er, or as a consumer of visual information. In leveraging this confidence we just might be able to help kids move towards interpreting sentences rather than images—using the same processes and strategies they used in their own visual interpretations.  It’ll encourage them to practice writing in this context, meet that “burden of proof” when it comes to interpretation, too…#Excited!

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).