presentation on "Showing Helder"

This past Friday I presented at the Comic Arts Conference (which is attached to Wondercon) in San Francisco. My presentation had to do with the thin line between truth and fiction as seen in autobiographical comics, specifically in Chester Brown's short story "Showing Helder." (To read the full abstract I submitted as a proposal to the committee, click on this link to an earlier blog entry.)

Here's a brief outline of my presentation. If you'd like a copy of the entire presentation, let me know here and I can email you my powerpoint.

I started off by reading the first paragraph of my abstract as an introduction, and then I moved on to discuss some examples in other media of truth and fiction being blurred (A Million Little Pieces by James Frey, "How to Tell a True War Story" by Tim O'Brien, the Assume the Position HBO specials by Bob Wuhl). I continued by discussing the rise of the "graphic memoir" in the mainstream, citing examples of Persepolis, Blankets, and Fun Home.

I then summarized the story itself as follows: Chester Brown's new issue of Yummy Fur features an autobiographical story called "Helder." It shows his encounters with a former housemate named Helder who is an abusive bully. Chester runs into problems, however, when he seeks out feedback on the story from his friends. Their opinions vary, some of them telling him to print the story as is and others challenging its veracity. (I contrasted this explanation with two images, the first from "Helder" showing the character Helder being a bully and the second from "Showing Helder" showing one of his friends objecting to the scene depicted on the previous page.)

I talked about how the story catalogues the changes he made to the story "Helder" between its original draft and final publication. The cover image in fact from the issue of Yummy Fur containing "Showing Helder" shows Chester making a change to a page from "Helder." It's very metafictional, and the first inclination is to make you wonder if he's simply documenting his creative process. But you also think that perhaps he's simply bringing the story closer to reality, because the changes he makes are always to remove panels of narration in which he talks directly to the audience, which of course would not have happened in real life. (These also don't work from a storytelling perspective, because he is TELLING his audience things he has already shown them, a prime example of a word-picture combination Scott McCloud refers to as "duo-specific.")

I then analyzed why he asked so many people for input on the story's content, a total of five different people during the course of the story (two of which, oddly enough, were in a scene Chester cut from the final draft of "Showing Helder" that eventually saw print in the collection The Little Man, to continue the metafictional maze). Is he searching for validation? When one friend Mark disagrees with him about the story, he seems rather dismissive. Or is he seeking to bring his story closer to the truth? Again what he seems most focused on (and in fact asks EVERYONE about specifically) are the moments of narration, which didn't really happen and are simply a stylistic choice. Perhaps he is already uncomfortable with this device because it is not "true" enough for him.

I turned my attention to Chester's friend Kris next, whose opinion was the most problematic. She takes issue with the way he has drawn her at one point, and he tries to please her by agreeing to redraw that part. Is he allowing his artistic vision, his interpretation of the "truth," to be corrupted then, or is he simply trying not to offend his friend? In one scene he quibbles with how he has depicted one scene she was present for, and he argues that what is on the page is how he remembers it. Thus, by not making the changes she suggests to this scene, he is acknowledging that perhaps his interpretation of events is faulty (because he only has his senses and his memory to rely on, both entirely subjective) and he is asserting that his vision for the story will be the one he puts forth. Does that make his version right and hers wrong? I don't think he means to say so, simply to say that that is all he can do is be true to his version of events.

I suggested then that the final scene, in which Kris tells Helder that she doesn't like the narration but later admits (after he has gone about removing the narration) that this was a lie she told only to prove that he never listens to her, this scene shows Brown's true intent with "Showing Helder." In the end he DID publish the story without the narration (perhaps because he had already made the changes and didn't want to go back and redo the pages again or perhaps because he had a growing distaste for the device in his storytelling, since he similarly removed a great deal of his narration from the longer story "Fuck" when it was eventually republished as I Never Liked You). But by publishing "Showing Helder" he got to have his cake and eat it too. His audience is now aware of the version of the story which had narration, and it is up to US then to decide which version is more real to US.

I started to wrap things up by pointing out that any autobiographical comic is automatically going to be distanced from reality simply for the fact that it is DRAWN, an artist's rendering. I showed a photo of Chester next to pictures of him as illustrated by Seth, Joe Matt, and Chester himself. I then proposed that none of these were the REAL Chester Brown, merely captured images filtered through a variety of lenses, much like how each person's interpretation of the murder at the center of the film Rashomon could never add up to an approximation of what "truly" happened. I continued by illustrating how Chester tends to be his own worst critic, both personally (in his analyses of his masturbation habits in The Playboy and his failed childhood romances in I Never Liked You) and professionally (as seen in this story when he is at first pleased with a page but upon rereading the entire story feels it's horrible and that he might need to run an Ed the Happy Clown story (representing an artistic step backwards in many ways) instead.

The conclusion then draws all these ideas together by turning to the notes on "Showing Helder" in the back pages of The Little Man. In that note he explains that after this story he stopped telling autobiographical stories in the present day, for fear of offending his friends (since Kris took even more offense at her portrayal here). But I stated that I felt this decision really reflected his desire to ensure his version of events remained pure, because he did choose to continue telling autobiographical stories; he simply started telling stories of his childhood because he had lost touch with his friends from back then and none of them could complain about their portrayal. However, he did start the practice of publishing copious notes in the back of his TPBs, detailing how his version of events may have deviated from "reality" (a tradition he continued on through the historical book Louis Riel actually). This way he could again freely admit his version was simply his version, a subjective look at the events portrayed, and let his audience decide what to believe, laying culpability firmly in our laps.

(I had a lot more to say about the story too, but I had already talked for thirty minutes when I was only supposed to speak for twenty, so I cut things short at various points during the presentation. If anyone has questions, please ask and I'll be happy to elaborate.)

PCA/ACA Conference

Well, I just received an e-mail telling me that my abstract on Codeflesh has been accepted for the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association Conference in San Francisco March 19-22. Yeah, didn't really expect that to happen.

My abstract:

In the final chapter of Codeflesh, Joe Casey and Charlie Adlard tell the story in a unique manner by distancing the text and visuals. The comic itself appears normal with the standard sequential images, word balloons and sound effects, but in the place of the text we expect (such as dialogue) is a letter written by the protagonist. In doing so, Casey and Adlard highlight three levels of reading a comic: the textual, the visual, and the textual with the visual. Usually, the last level is the only one considered, as comics are a medium where the interaction of words and images is central. However, as the letter and the visuals are incongruent, both essentially stand on their own, telling two separate stories that are understood independent of one another. The text and the images do work together, but in a less direct way than they do in most comics. Because of the incongruity, there is a more subtle interaction between the words and pictures, creating emotional resonances and glimpses into the minds of characters through stark juxtaposition. A close reading of the final chapter of Codeflesh shows that Casey and Adlard create a story that has three possible readings, and also draws attention to the ways in which words and images work with and against one another in comics.

***

Basically, it will be an expansion and update on the short essay I wrote on the subject a couple of years ago. It does seem strangely appropriate to deliver this paper in SF since that's where my copy of the Codeflesh collection came from--as James Sime at the Isotope was nice enough to get Casey to sign a copy at the launch party for the book and then send it to me. Looks like I may have a chance to thank him in person.

Wow, weirdly exciting.

***

In other news, some of my eBay stuff has come including the complete Warlock & The Infinity Watch. I should continue my look at Jim Starlin's work once my final one arrives as it contains issues 1-5 of Infinity Crusade, which is essential and, hopefully, I'll be able to get issue 6 when I'm in London this weekend. Then, I should be able to continue without a break until I hit Thanos (although, maybe the shop in London will have issues 2-6). Quite a lot to look at, but some very interesting stuff.

presentation 2, part 2

In the previous blog, I covered how I began my presentation on Plastic Man and the Spirit's roles as pre-postmodern heroes, focusing on how they defied the superhero genre. Now let's move on to how they both defied the conventions of the medium of comics and all storytelling conventions as well.

First of all, Eisner innovated the concept of the first page of the story being an attention-grabbing splash page that draws readers in. This was in part done out of necessity, for the Spirit was being published as a newspaper insert, coverless newsprint, so the first page of the story had to do double duty as the comic section's "cover" of sorts as well. But Eisner took it a step further, by constantly changing the logo on these splash pages, so that it was never the same thing twice. If you look at the first page of stories like "Life Below" from February of '48 or "Fox at Bay" from October of '49, you can see how he played with the logo in each story, modifying it and molding it into the story so that it's part of the image. Jack Cole's Plastic Man stories later followed suit, with some incredibly arresting first page splashes of its own (only natural, really, since Cole worked with Eisner for a time, even scripting and pencilling a few Spirit stories from late '43 to mid-'44 while Eisner was in WW2).

Eisner's layouts as well were innovative with his use of silent panels to punctuate action and his tendency towards portraying moments indirectly, showing us reaction shots rather than actions so as to engage the readers' imaginations more. And of course the Spirit comics had a unique format as well. In a time when comics were frequently reprinting strips out of newspapers, Eisner was taking comic adventures TO the papers, creating his book weekly as an syndicated insert to various papers across the country.

As for art styles, Eisner was drawing from noir and German expressionism to tell "two bottle of ink" stories like "Lorelai Rox," stories so much darker than traditional comic art as to be practically dripping in shadow. Meanwhile, Cole was breaking all the rules by combining a more cartoony or "bigfoot" style of art with the muscular anatomy found in typical superhero art. If you merely look at the contrast between Plastic Man and his sidekick Woozy Winks, you can see the dichotomy between the styles Cole was combining quite clearly.

Finally, Eisner refused to follow the restrictions of the medium of comics by using the Spirit to tell stories in multiple genres, not just superhero. He did several science-fiction stories (such as "Visitor" in Feb of '49), westerns ("The Feud" in March of 1946), and fairy tales. He twice used the Spirit to adapt famous pieces of literature, and he eventually began taking advantage of the opportunity every Halloween and Christmas to tell special tales in the spirit of the season. One of the earliest examples of Eisner bending genres came in October of 1941, when Eisner did a story called "The Oldest Man in the World." It featured a frame story of archaeologists 1000 years in the future finding a Spirit section and reading the story within, about an immortal man doing battle with the Spirit and apparently drowning in the sea in the end. They dismiss the story as rubbish but are then attacked by this same man.

This story actually also illustrates Eisner's innovative approach to art as well, as he colors the frame story differently from the "actual" Spirit section. It also serves as an example of how Eisner was constantly defying the conventions of storytelling, with its story-within-a-story which serves as a bit of metafiction (Spirit comics now suddenly exist within the world of the Spirit, calling into question what is real and what is fiction).

Eisner employed the technique of breaking the fourth wall quite often in his stories, occasionally creating characters which were thinly veiled satirical copies of his contemporaries (like Al Capp and Frederic Wertham) as well as inserting himself into the pages of the Spirit more than once.
He depicted himself in a splash page once... facing his drawing board with his back to the reader as he drew a Spirit splash page. Perhaps the most famous example of his insertion into the Spirit came on December 31st, 1950. In that week's edition of the Spirit, Eisner falls asleep at the drawing board and his assistant Jules Feiffer comes in, kills him, and creates a story featuring a character of his design posing as the Spirit. At the story's end, Eisner wakes up at the drawing board, having realized it was all a dream. However, having slept so long, the actual strip he was supposed to do for New Year's Eve would not be able to run (and in fact did then run as a part of the following week's paper).

Jack Cole had Plastic Man break the fourth wall many a time by literally turning to the reader and directly addressing them. In one adventure, Plastic Man is helping a spy protect his secret device that was aiding in the war effort, and in the end of the story Plastic Man asks what the machine does. Then he catches himself and realized it isn't safe, since there might be saboteurs reading the comic at that very moment. Cole also inserted himself into Plastic Man's adventures as well, in Police Comics 20 in July of 1943. In the story Woozy Winks needs someone to compile a sketch of a criminal, and he calls in Cole, who only agrees to set aside his work drawing Plastic Man in the comics because Woozy offers to pay him a dollar. Cole is self-deprecating to a fault, depicting himself in this story as slackjawed and speaking with a stutter for the purpose of making the incident even more humorous.

Finally, both creators broke from convention in their stories often by shifting the main character into the background. Several of Plastic Man's adventures were really about the misadventures of Woozy as he went about trying to solve crimes while Plas was occupied elsewhere. The Spirit also barely appeared in more than a few adventures bearing his name. The story "Two Lives" which I mentioned previously has him appear in the background of one or two panels only. "10 Minutes" in Sept. of '49 (a story that plays out in real time, by the by, a very innovative storytelling technique for comics to attempt) place the focus, instead of on the Spirit, on a young guy in a neighborhood who makes a bad decision and is forced to pay a terrible price. And of course, there is the story of Gerhard Shnobble, perhaps the most famous story Eisner ever created, which follows a man who can fly in his final hours, as he gets caught up in the fracas between the Spirit and some crooks that he is trying to apprehend.

I then concluded my presentation with the following:

Any one of these examples taken on its own might not be seen as especially inventive or groundbreaking. Eisner and Cole were not necessarily the originators of any of these techniques, but the fact that they used them in such volume and with such aplomb in their stories made them innovators. Their works especially stand out since they were working at a time when comics were still in their infancy as an artform. Both Cole and Eisner then could be seen as the progenitors of postmodernism in comics. These artists paved the way for the experimentation with form prevalent in indie comics of the '60s and '70s, and their creations acted as predecessors and precursors to the eventual acceptance of postmodernism into the mainstream seen in the modern era of comics.

And here, by the by, is my works cited page:

Barrier, Michael and Martin Williams, eds. A Smithsonian Book of Comic-Book Comics. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1981.

Benton, Mike. The Comic Book in America: An Illustrated History. Dallas: Taylor Publishing Company, 1989.

Brancatelli, Joe. “Jack Cole.” The World Encyclopedia of Comics. Ed. Maurice Horn. New York: Avon Books, 1976. 174.

- - - -. “Plastic Man.” The World Encyclopedia of Comics. Ed. Maurice Horn. New York: Avon Books, 1976. 559.

Cole, Jack. The Plastic Man Archives, vol. 1. New York: DC Comics, 1998.

Cole, Jack. The Plastic Man Archives, vol. 2. New York: DC Comics, 2000.

Couch, N. C. Christopher and Stephen Weiner. The Will Eisner Companion. New York, DC Comics, 2004.

Daniels, Les. Comix: A History of Comics in America. New York: Bonanza Books, 1971.

Eisner, Will. The Best of the Spirit. New York: DC Comics, 2005.

- - - -. Comics and Sequential Art. Tamarac, FL: Poorhouse Press, 1985.

Feiffer, Jules. The Great Comic Book Heroes. New York: Bonanza Books, 1965.

Goulart, Ron. The Comic Book Reader’s Companion. New York: HarperCollins, 1993.

- - - -. The Great Comic Book Artists. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986.

Harvey, Robert C. The Art of the Comic Book: An Aesthetic History. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1996.

Spiegelman, Art and Chip Kidd. Jack Cole and Plastic Man. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2001.

Thompson, Don. “The Rehabilitation of Eel O’Brien.” The Comic-Book Book. Eds. DonThompson and Dick Lupoff. Carlstadt, NJ: Krause Publications, 1998. 18-34.

Thompson, Maggie. “Blue Suit, Blue Mask, Blue Gloves—And No Socks.” The Comic-Book Book. Eds. Don Thompson and Dick Lupoff. Carlstadt, NJ: Krause Publications, 1998. 112-134.

presentation 2--Plastic Man and the Spirit: Pre-Postmodern Heroes of the Golden Age

On the morning of Saturday, October 13th I presented at the Midwest Pop Culture Association's conference in Kansas City. My presentation was the first one of the day, at 8:30 am, the morning after the free food was served at the bar as the opening night's reception. So attendance was not as great as the previous weekend's presentation. Besides the other presenters, there were less than five people there, and two of those people were the panel chair and the girlfriend of one of the other presenters. Oh, and my presentation was scheduled in a room that, essentially, was one big room that was split into two by... a thin curtain. So you could hear the presentation going on on the other side of the room the entire time I was speaking... Suffice to say, circumstances were less than ideal.

This time around my topic was "Plastic Man and the Spirit: Pre-Postmodern Heroes of the Golden Age." My presentation was supposed to be around twenty minutes in length, but I ended up speaking for about twenty-five. And I still had to cut stuff. For this presentation I had to do a lot more research, because I wasn't as familiar with the subject matter as in the previous week. This fact also meant that I didn't feel as confident just getting up there and winging it, so I wrote a bit more ahead of time with this one. I did a full intro and conclusion, plus a much more extensive outline of the body, complete with notes on which stories to discuss when and particular quotes from sources I might want to use.

Here then was my introduction, verbatim:

In the contemporary era of comics, the influence of postmodernism can be felt far and wide. Daniel Clowes, Charles Burns, and Kevin Huizenga spring to mind as obvious examples of indie comic artists whose works take a turn into the bizarre. More mainstream works inspired by postmodernism can easily be found in Alan Moore’s classic deconstruction of the superhero Watchmen or the metafiction of Grant Morrison’s Animal Man.

But postmodernism’s roots in comics stretch back all the way to the medium’s infancy. Even in the Golden Age as the genre of the superhero was still forming, it was already being deconstructed. Both Jack Cole’s hero Plastic Man and Will Eisner’s infamous creation The Spirit defied the conventions of the superhero genre in every adventure they undertook, and at the same time their creators explored the ways to defy the conventions of the medium of comics and in fact all storytelling conventions as they related these adventures to eager readers.

(I chose to call this notion “pre-postmodernism” in my abstract for two reasons. First, it seems to fit in neither category as solely modern or postmodern, utilizing some modern ideas regarding form yet serving an intent that is purely postmodern. Secondly, it sounded like an interesting hook.)

So from there I dove into the body of my presentation which I had divided up into three sections: conventions of the genre of the superhero, conventions of the medium of comics, and storytelling conventions. And for each division, I broke it down further, looked at each aspect of those conventions and explored examples of how both heroes defied them.

Starting with superhero tropes, I looked at the secret identity and how neither character really had one. After the origin story of the Spirit, Denny Colt was for all intents and purposes dead, and he walked around as the Spirit all the time. Meanwhile, in Police Comics 26, Plastic Man's secret identity as criminal Eel O'Brien is discovered by his chief at the FBI, and in order to be pardoned for his crimes, he essentially must prove himself worthy by solving three unsolvable crimes in twenty-four hours. Once the task is completed, Eel is pardoned... and is no more.

I moved on to costumes then, to briefly discuss how Plastic Man's "costume" of a red leotard and sunglasses eschewed the typical cape and mask. Then I moved on to the Spirit, who of course had no costume but a domino mask. Otherwise he was just a guy in a suit, which of course how Eisner wanted it. Eisner didn't like the idea of drawing costumed heroes, and the mask was a compromise he made with his publishers.

As for origins, Plastic Man's was very unconventional. He of course started out life as a crook, but all that changed when he had the requisite accident with chemicals. Suddenly, spontaneously, and in the course of one whole panel, he decides to leave his life of crime behind and become a force for good.

As for why he makes this drastic change in character... this explanation is all we get. Just like the explanation of how he got his powers--chemicals--it's like once Cole got the result he wanted, got the story going in the direction he wanted, he just didn't care. In a story from Police Comics 24, Plas's sidekick Woozy Winks gets his powers for a day, and in the end of the story Plastic Man unzips the red and black leotard Woozy is wearing, and Woozy exclaims dejectedly that he has lost his powers. And that's it, the entire explanation of how things went back to normal. Zip, no more powers. Again, it's very much like Cole just wanted to tell his zany stories and didn't care too much about logic.

And that brings me to tone, that Plastic Man is probably the earliest example of the trickster hero. He has a lighthearted attitude toward fighting crime, like it's actually fun for him, and his victories were often rather unconventional. In his fight with Sadly Sadly, a villain whose "power" was that he made such a sad face that would make people feel so sorry for him they would give him all their money, Plastic Man defeats him... by tickling him with a feather until he laughs.

In much the same vein Eisner mixed humor with hardboiled crime stories in the Spirit's adventures. The December 1948 story "Two Lives" involves a criminal breaking out from prison, at the same time that his doppelganger runs away from a home where he is dominated by a controlling wife. The two decide to switch lives, and while the henpecked husband happily goes to jail, the escaped con lives with the domineering wife for a week or so... and tries to turn himself in to return the jail. But no one believes him and he's stuck. Meanwhile, the Spirit's victories as a hero often involved dumb luck. He would get beat up and knocked unconscious, and the criminal would make some kind of mistake to get himself apprehended or killed while the Spirit was out cold. Not very "heroic" in the end.

I'll continue on to how the characters defied the conventions of the medium and of fiction in general tomorrow. For now, this entry is long and I'm tired.

presentation 1 -- Fostering Critical Thinking Through Comics

On the afternoon of Friday, October 5th I presented at the Two Year College Association’s Midwest conference in Chicago. About thirty people (which was as many as the room could hold actually; it was a packed house) showed up for my presentation, which was titled “Fostering Critical Thinking Through Comics.” I was allotted thirty-five minutes to speak, but because the guy before me ran a bit short, I actually spoke for about forty minutes to a very interested crowd.

I didn’t write a full paper for the presentation, because I hate when people just read their papers at academic conferences. I typed up a loose outline and then added some handwritten notes, so when it was time to speak I would have a firm framework I could build off of. What follows then is a rough estimation, from my memory, of what I said when I got up there and winged it.

First, I led off with a brief overview of a major problem all English teachers have to deal with, the difficulties we have in getting students to “look closer.” Many students, especially in intro to lit courses or writing about lit courses, have an aversion to reading, and just convincing them to even open the book can be a chore in and of itself.

If they do read the material, they often want to be handed the answers. They don’t want to analyze it themselves; they want their teacher to tell them what the story means. Literature courses challenge them in ways that other classes don’t, because it’s not simply a matter of rote memorization but instead of thinking critically. They’re also guilty of looking at the literature on purely a superficial level, never moving beyond knowledge and comprehension on Bloom’s Taxonomy to deeper levels like analysis or evaluation. When they write about literature, they want to explain the story (summarize the plot or talk about the characters) rather than interpret it (explore symbolism or thematic elements of the story).

So, as I explained, to get my students thinking of literature in a new way, I bring comics into the classroom wherever I can. It’s not a revolutionary concept by any means, because if you look at any freshman composition textbook around, it’s going to have Calvin and Hobbes strips in it (or something similar) illustrating a particular point that an author wants to make. All I’m doing then is taking that same concept and enlarging it, giving them an entire story and exploring its themes.

This technique resonates with students for a number of reasons. First, it challenges their preconceived notions of what literature is. They don’t tend to think of comics as something serious worthy of study in a classroom, so simply passing these out in class does tend to get their attention. Their reactions to comics are often polarized as well. Some students love it and think it’s cool, which gets them engaged in the material, while others hate it and think it’s dumb. To those students I simply pose the question, “why?” to begin the process of metacognition.

The students’ unfamiliarity with the form of comics works to my advantage as well, for it requires them to become more active readers. It takes more effort for them to read a comic page if they’re not used to following the page layout, and sometimes it even necessitates their going back to reread a few pages to grasp. It also engages their imagination more, thanks to the concept of closure that McCloud describes in his “Blood in the Gutter” chapter of Understanding Comics. Because readers of comics must fill in the gaps between the panels, they are less passive and are more involved in creating the narrative in their own minds. They move the characters around; they create the sounds and smells that fill in the background. Finally, reader identification is increased in comics over that in other media, for a cartoonish face could represent anyone, even the readers themselves, whereas a film character portrayed by an actor will always be “other.”

I then addressed those teachers willing to accept comics as part of their academic curriculum who still feel somewhat intimidated by the material due to their own unfamiliarity with the medium. Several of the instructors attending the presentation admitted to using a comic or two in their courses (frequently Persepolis or Maus) despite the fact that they were very anxious about how they approached it. I tried to allay those fears by asking them why they felt the need to be an “expert” on comics to teach them; “do you need to have read everything Faulkner wrote,” I posited, “to teach ‘A Rose for Emily?’” I told them that apprehension was unnecessary, that they should instead treat any comic they teach like it’s just another story. If they are confident in their use of the material, the students would follow suit.

Focusing on form and art style is often a step in the wrong direction, I told them, for it can make students too aware of the fact that they’re looking at artwork and thus detracts from an analysis of the story as a piece of literature. On the other hand, skimming the words in a comic and forgetting to “read” the drawings can cause the students to miss out on important details, so I urged them to make sure the students let their eyes linger a bit and don’t read too fast.

I also recommended that when teachers approach comics, they should couple a different type of literature with new pedagogy as well. Whatever methods they normally use to teach, they should try to shake things up when they bring in comics. If they normally lecture, try putting students in small groups, questioning, or whole-class discussion. Whatever methods they use, when teaching comics I find it’s important to focus on reader response first, and then use their responses as a starting point to dig further.

All of the above was set-up, essentially, for two case studies I presented involving my own experiences teaching comics. First, I discussed a day in one of my classes when I taught the Warren Ellis/Phil Jiminez Hellblazer short story “Shoot.” I had directed them to a website where they could read the story online, and then I went into my classroom the next day, sat down at the head of the class, and said, “So what did you think?” And I then only interjected a few times to call on people and facilitate; for the rest of the class period, a full fifty minutes, they led the discussion.

One of the few times I interjected was to explain the history of the story, how it was shelved by DC/Vertigo following Columbine and how that decision led to Ellis quitting the book. I then asked them how they felt about the decision, and we discussed the ethics of censorship and the restrictions on freedom of speech.

Obviously the story’s content, about an agent of the government seeking to find a cause for the recent rash of school shootings, led to discussions in class of the issues of gun control and violence in the media, especially since these issues are raised themselves by characters in the story. On page 15 of the story these are both rejected by the protagonist of the story as the central cause for the shootings, and my students addressed that dismissal. They talked about using violent video games as a way to unwind and release the tension; they explored how guns in the end are just a means to an end and not the cause of the violence itself.

They talked about who should take responsibility for these kids. Blaming the parents for not knowing what their kids are up to is pointless, my students reasoned. They each related stories of how they had fooled their parents at various times, how they had withheld information or hidden things about their lives. The students eventually came to the conclusion, as supported by the story on pages 10 and 20, that blaming any one thing is ludicrous. A variety of factors that make up the fabric of our society all contribute, and rather than looking at what to remove from their lives to “fix” the problem, we need to be looking at what we can add to their lives to give them more of a reason to live.

I then segued into a discussion of another story I teach, the Doom Patrol story “The Soul of a New Machine” by Grant Morrison and Richard Case. (If you haven’t read it, it defies easy summation, as my attempt during this presentation proved. You can check out this link if you want to read more about what the story’s about. [Long story short, Cliff Steele’s body was destroyed in an accident, and his brain was placed in a robot body. But one day, while the body is in for repairs and Cliff’s brain has been temporarily relocated to a jar, the body spontaneously gains sentience and tries to kill Cliff’s brain so that it can survive. (See what I mean? And that’s just part of the story…)])

When I teach this story I divide them into five groups and assign each group a question about the story which they have to answer among themselves and then present their explanation to their fellow students. They read the story in class, taking about 20 minutes, discuss their question amongst themselves (while I move from group to group to offer guidance) for 15 minutes, and then each group gets about three minutes to present their questions and responses to the class. It’s nowhere near enough time, since these are deep philosophical questions, but that’s kind of the point. They couldn’t answer them no matter how much time they were given; the goal is to get them to keep thinking about it after class.

Group one is assigned the question posed in the story itself: Does the body rule the mind, or does the mind rule the body? Essentially it’s asking which is more in control, our intellects or our animal instincts. In the story this question is quite literally posed when the robot body comes to life, attacking the brain, but it also is seen in Niles Caulder finding it necessary to quit his scientific work to satisfy a craving for chocolate, in The Brain’s desire to play strip chess. Many students who read the story come to the conclusion that neither one rules, that the brain and body must work in conjunction for us to not be constantly at odds with ourselves.

The second group receives the question “what is the mind?” In the story itself, the robot body asks Cliff on page 8 if his mind will live on if his brain dies or if they’re inextricably linked. This then raises questions about the nature of the soul, if it and the mind are one and the same. Cliff himself wonders this in his hallucination of his accident, as seen in the post-it note stuck to his brain. He wonders if his soul might already have departed for hell and the brain is just going through the motions of life now. My students tend to feel that the brain is the house of the mind, that they are related but distinct.

“What is humanity?” is the question I pose to group three, directing them specifically to Cliff’s character. Is a brain in a jar still a human being? Some will say no, and to those students I then ask “Is a man with a prosthetic limb still human?” When they reply affirmatively, I then ask them how much of the body must a person lose to no longer be a person, since Cliff is still a human brain in what is essentially one giant prosthetic body. I then turn them to Monsieur Mallah, one of the villains of this story, a gorilla which has been given human intelligence. Is Mallah human I ask? A lot of my students tend to say no, that it has merely been taught to mimic human behavior, but then I address them to an incident towards the end of the story in which Mallah and his master, whose brain ends up inside the robot body, kiss. I occasionally get a student who will remark that this kiss is “gay,” to which I reply that in order for it to be “gay” you MUST be thinking of Mallah as human. Otherwise, it’s bestiality.

Is the robot body alive once it can think for itself? How do we define life, simply by its physical characteristics or by sentience and independent thought? It’s a conceit they’re familiar with if they’ve approached science-fiction at all in the past, appearing in everything from The Next Generation to Short Circuit. Since the body does seem to act out of self-preservation, and has fears and desires, most students in the group assigned this question believe it is in fact alive.

The final group is given perhaps the hardest question to answer, “what is real?” In the story Cliff is essentially sensory deprived, being simply a brain in a jar, and he is prone to hallucinations. In the end, he cannot be sure that anything he has witnessed has actually happened, since he cannot trust his senses… for he has none. If the only way we know what is real is by observing the world with our senses, and our senses are damaged in some way, does this in fact alter our reality? Is it all subjective? Descartes is quoted throughout the story and of course his most famous quote is “I think; therefore, I am.” In the end, all we can be sure of is that we ourselves exist, which is why throughout this story Cliff Steele tells himself knock-knock jokes. This thought process is constant proof to him that no matter what else may seem to be happening, real or unreal, he at least still can count on his own cognizance.

I wrapped up then very quickly, as I had almost run out of time, directing those in attendance to Understanding Comics, to teachingcomics.org, and to my email address, included in all of their handouts, should they have further questions on approaching comics in the classroom. All in all, the presentation was a rousing success, as all in attendance seemed to laugh at the right spots. It also resulted in me being approached to write two different articles for a journal called Teaching English at the Two Year College. The first will be a review of a book on building literacy in high school students by using comics, and the second will be an instructor’s note covering much of the ground this presentation covered, focusing less on the case studies and more on how to teach comics when you yourself don’t know much about them. (Updates on those publications as they happen.)