Comic Book Citizenship

Texts in mind: "What Video Games have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy," "Understanding Comics," "Rethinking Comics," "Comic Book Culture," "Kingdom Come," "Marvels," various cover letters and my resume

It's the time of year that high school and college jobs start to open up for the next school year. Oh, there will be more - or less - later on as enrolments are finalized and shortfalls (hopefully) have to be filled in, but right now is when the good postings come online (in high schools) for things like IB History and Senior Social Studies.

This is important because of the need for cover letters and resumes. All these were lost when my wife's old computer died suddenly last year - in the middle of comps - and needed to be recreated over the last few months. The resume/CV part is pretty easy - I've gone to school a lot (4th degree now), I've taught a little (if four years of substitute teaching counts), and I've done a lot of service work over the last three years.

It's odd to reflect on service and trumpet it, but however true it is that they're done in the name of citizenship, it's also true that some of it is done in the name of filling up the CV, too. However, all these citizenship line items are from the last three years as I've been out at grad school - and that's kind of odd when one considers the clear role of citizenship training that Social Studies is supposed to play. (Part of this is due to the labour disputes of the early decade in BC and part of it is due to my moving around, but all that's for a different post.)

All these things came together in a funny way over the last couple of weeks. Yesterday, I noticed Waid and Ross's "Kingdom Come" on the university bookshelf and finally got a chance to read it. Leaving the religious aspects and the countering of 1990s antiheroic comic book protagonists aside for now, I particularly noticed the discussions about citizenship and engagement that the golden age DC heroes bruited about and reflected upon their difference from silver age heroes - my particular field of academic interest.

The other funny way that these things came together was from a happenstance re-read of the intro to Gee's "What Video Games have to teach us..." and his discussion of different readers and readership for particular texts. His focus, of course, is on the texts in his title (also near and dear to my heart) but it made me pause and consider the task of academic exploration of comics and of effective literary engagement with this particular type of text. I remember the old Bangs-ism about how writing about rock and roll is like dancing about architecture (which I think was a working title for "Almost Famous," but that's for another blog) and knew that some consideration would have to be given to the task of creating a vocabulary for this work.

Now, this isn't to say that this act of "creation" would be a solo proposition - there are other books on comics and there are other articles, dissertations, and whatnot that have done this sort of work- but simply that it would be necessary to start to internalize and refine the vocabulary to suit my needs. Hence, the consideration of Scott McCloud's two books, "Understanding Comics" and "Rethinking Comics."

These were read out of sequence (such that I rethought before I understood?) due to the nature of demand in a university library for particular texts at particular times. (They'll likely be recalled within days.) They're books I'll almost certainly buy at some point - some of the discussions of symbolism, presentation, and genre are perfect for teaching, especially in high school - but they've also got some problems for my research.

The big problem, of course, is that I'm dealing with a square text - 1950s and 1960s superhero comics, among other texts, and their relation to American youth during the push for science and technology education after Sputnik. If it was truly a cool topic, I'd be doing head comix and underground 'zinesterism and whatnot. (As my supervisor's noted - noticing the innovation of this far before I could - it's kinda radical to look at the mainstream during the 1960s rather than the canon of marginal comics.)

The problem with this square text is that it's also been the dominant genre in comics since the Comics Code Authority and basically what got comics going in a big way. This is a problem for McCloud because he believes that comics can be much, much more than adolescent power fantasies. (And I should note that I believe he's right, but I won't get into a bibliography of non-superhero comic books to establish my slight bona fides in this department.) McCloud has a reason, of course - he's calling for an expansion of the industry and a realization of its possibilities - but it's something that I have to get beyond for the purposes of research.

McCloud does note that he's read superhero comics, enjoyed superhero comics, and continues to read and enjoy superhero comics (and provides a postscript to his buddy Kurt Busiek's "Marvels" teasing him for taking the critical acclaim and accolades from McCloud as well as the success that Busiek'd always had) - but McCloud also needs to tear them down somewhat to aid his argument. That's well and fine - he's working in the now, and I'm working in the past. (His discussions of "How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way" and other books about comics art, such as Will Eisner's, reminds me that I am not done this part of the work of collating and creating vocabulary.) He's working to create new meanings and I'm searching for old meanings which were given the widest possible circulation. Lucky for me, the post-Wertham comic books got themselves mixed up with science fiction at a time when science education became part of national defense - and when scientific study became part of one's civic duty. I certainly can't claim that too much of my service record is science-based.

The other thing that I'll need to hunt down are records of the comic book culture at the time. Pustz's book (tidily named "Comic Book Culture") provides a list of some of the early 'zines that started up at the time, while also detailing the path Roy Thomas took from 'zine culture to comic book industry. (I'm so totally Stan Lee'd in my early comics education that it's all I can do to not write "Rascally" before his name.) It's interesting to note that letters pages didn't appear in comics until 1958, and that the letters usually included the addresses so that fans in the area could meet and congregate - in no small part, thanks to the 'zines. These fanzines and the conventions which comic book fans put together allowed new fans to be educated about the history of the genre and the particular characters - in effect, preparing them to be comic book citizens. (Also preparing them for comic book capitalism through the sales of old, collectable issues, but that's for another post.)

So I've gained a few more titles to have to chase down for eventual research, but I've also gained some further problemitization for my dissertation topic. I'm pretty sure it's not that much of a problem - essentially, that science education became a major facet of citizenship for youth at this time - but one still has to wonder if the question is what sorts of citizenship qualities were presented to youth at the time rather than what sorts of science and technology warnings that they received. More on this later.