Slowly back away from the comic book

October 28, 2006

Guest Post by Morbo

Some of you might not like what I have to say today. Some of you might even accuse me of having my head up my posterior, as occurred last week. But hey — you don’t come here to be bored, right?

Here it goes: Comic books aren’t literature. I bring this up because of a recent Washington Post article about what kids are reading in public schools these days. The piece quoted “experts” who asserted that many of the books assigned to kids are too hard and turn them off to reading. It pointed out that many kids would rather read “graphic novels.”

I’m sure they would. I’m sure lots of other kids would rather play computer games in school and blow off math class. That does not mean we let them.

I will concede that some schools probably get carried away and assign tough books too early. The answer to that is to assign age-appropriate material, not race to the dregs of publishing.

Let’s consider the term “graphic novel.” This is a euphemism for “comic book.” I don’t care if “graphic novels” are longer and don’t always feature heroes in tights and capes. I don’t care if some have won awards. If what you are reading features pictures of people and word balloons, you are reading a comic book.

Comic books have their place. Sure, kids like them. After all, fast-paced stories about superheroes and monsters are fun. I suppose even a little exposure to them in school is not the end of the world.

But English education must eventually center on real literature. And real literature isn’t just about a fast-moving plot and a clever story.

Real literature teaches us something about the human condition and perhaps even ourselves. It offers things a beach thriller never can. (For more on the power of real literature, I recommend “Why Read?” by Mark Edmundson.)

If we don’t push our youngsters in school, if we fail to introduce them to real literature, we are consigning them to life of thrillers about lawyers, cops and cats that solve mysteries. They deserve more. They deserve an encounter with real literature — books that have the potential to change your perspective and maybe even your life. Public schools have an obligation to at least offer this to every kid — even if many reject the gift.

I would submit there is a political dimension to this as well, although one often overlooked. An introduction to real literature, I believe, can broaden a person’s perspective and has the potential to make him or her a better and more thoughtful citizen all around. It’s no guarantee, but at least the potential is there.

I’m convinced that no one in the Bush gang has ever read a real book. It would show if they had. Consider the ongoing debate over the role of torture in the “war on terror.” One of the oldest themes in literature is the idea that as we fight the thing we fear the most, we must take caution lest we become that thing. This apparently never occurred to anyone at the White House because they couldn’t get through “Animal Farm.”

In 2000, Al Gore was ridiculed by right wingers when he told an interviewer that one of his favorite books is Stendhal’s “The Red and the Black.” In a stunning display of the anti-intellectualism that marks modern conservatism, right-wingers openly mocked Gore as an out-of-touch egghead.

I can only wonder how many dead Americans and Iraqis would be alive now if we had that egghead in the White House — a man who reads real literature and learns from it — instead of an uncurious, literature-spurning boob whose last major literary accomplishment was getting through “My Pet Goat.”

instead of an uncurious, literature-spurning boob whose last major literary accomplishment was getting through “My Pet Goat.”

Uh-hem THE Pet Goat.

Could it be great literature has become too hard for the teachers to teach? That they have too many students who are unprepared in so many ways that the administration types are grasping at straws to come up with anything?

A love of reading is a love of learning and that is the greatest thing a teacher can pass on to students. Believe me, it is possible to love reading and comic books, just as you can love books and movies. I pity the students who will never have the chance to learn this wonderful lesson

  • au contraire

    Or to more exact

    anata wa totemo warui desu.

    Japan is one of the most literate countries in the world and some of its best literature is in the form of picture books. I am not sure manga or comic books do it justice.

    YES, I know, a lot of the manga for adults has all sorts of sex and violence with pictures but I have read a lot of picture books that are good interesting books with good plots and character developement. In addition, the books would lose something withoout the pcitures.

    You can call them whatever you want but you need to admit that some COMIC books are good literature.

  • Should comic books/graphic novels be part of a school curriculum? Of course not (although at least one has won a Pulitzer Prize), but it’s unfortunate that you were unable to make your point without disparaging the medium.

    I was a bright, inquisitive child who did well in school, and read books voraciously (and yes, I read “Animal Farm” sometime in second grade), yet reading comics, I was regularly coming across words and themes I hadn’t been exposed to elsewhere. On its simplest level, the ideals of responsibility and tolerance permeated almost all the comics I read.

    Many kids are uninterested or afraid of reading and comics can be an important bridge from “The Little Engine that Could” and “To Kill a Mockingbird”. They can be reminded that reading is both fun and rewarding.

    Of the comics I’ve read, most are more intelligent than 95% of what passes for entertainment on television. What’s amazing to me, is that many of the same people scoffing at comic books think nothing of racing home to watch Desperate Housewives.

    Are comic books for everyone? Of course not, but there is a lot more to them than you seem to be willing to recognize. Personally, nothing done by Mappelthorpe does anything for me, but that doesn’t mean I don’t respect that it is art and contributes to our society’s growth.

    You’re certainly right about all of us needing to push kids into a true exposure to literature and that comics don’t really have a place in schools, but your derision of comic books in the process sounds remarkably similar to your own post’s points on the “Bush gang”.

  • Our daughter, now a high senior, typically gets assigned some hefty reading and is a reasonably bright kid. Her only experience with a “graphic” work came last year – Art Spiegelman’s Maus — and it took her forever to get through it. I found it impossible. Perhaps it’s the way our brains are wired, but we both found that the pictures and frames interrupted the flow of the narrative to such an extent that we lost track of what we were “reading.” Fortunately, her interest in the subject was motivation enough to get through it. Otherwise, I think she’d have gone nuts.

  • What strikes me in reading this is that you have clearly never read some of the most widely acclaimed graphic novels. You acknowledge early on that not all graphic novels fit comic book stereotypes and then spend the rest of your post disparaging graphic book novels with comic book stereotypes.

    Go read “The Watchmen”, “V for Vendetta” or “Maus” and then come back and try to argue that they don’t “have the potential to change your perspective and maybe even your life.” Heck, the first two I mention dwell heavily on the point that “we fight the thing we fear the most, we must take caution lest we become that thing.”

    In my experience, readers of graphic novels are often the best and most self aware students around, and they also tend to read straight literature at a much higher rate as well. In short, it seems that you bring little to this topic other than an uneducated bias against “comic books”.

  • I usually agree with what I read here, but I must say that this isn’t just a heap of crap, it’s a dangerous, angel-sided heap of it.

    If you want kids to enjoy literature, get them to enjoy reading. If you want them to enjoy reading, the way to do that is not to try to give them books that will teach them about the “human condition”. It is to give them books that are enchanting, enthralling, riveting stories. Teach them that reading can be, as Thoreau described it, like “being in dreams, awake.” When we take a writer like Dickens, lets say, and teach him because he shows us a lot about the human condition, to use your overworked term, we are making children read him for reasons completely OTHER than the contemporary audience of Dickens did. They read him because he was compellingly readable(still is).

    If we try to use the teaching of reading to also teach books that will supposedly make our students better people, we break the back of this most feeble beast. Poor Leo Tolstoy wrote Anna Karenina to prove the dangers of adultery. As Lawrence correctly observed, he failed because it is the “phallic splendor” of the novel that makes us read it. Tolstoy repudiated his own novel, and yet it DID succeed. Lawrence explains this by saying “when you try to nail anything down in a novel, you either kill the novel, or the novel gets up and walks away with the nail.”

    The irony, of course, in all this is that each era often despises the writing that future generations will consider sublime. Shakespeare was regarded ambivalently for centuries–Pope even went back and rhymed his blank verse and Bowdler sought to clean him up. Dr. Johnson wrote in a worried tone that the rise of the popularity of this new literary form, the “novel” would mean that people no longer read poetry, and predicted terrible consequences. Dickens was regarded as below the salt. And in two hundred years would anyone really care to bet a hundred of todays dollars that children will be reading Gravity’s Rainbow–Pynchon’s wondrous, unique novel instead of something by Steven King. I love Pynchon, but I’d have to put my money on King–whom I never read. The point is we often don’t know why a book is going to be good. If we can’t even decide that for ourselves, why do we insist on making the decision for our children–especially in view of the fact that we do a better job of turning them OFF reading than of improving them.

  • Classifying things is the critic’s quest. Artists and their audience don’t really care whether comic books or graphic novels are Literature, in the same way that they don’t care if any particular novel is or isn’t Literature.

    Wuthering Heights was denigrated when it first came out. Years later it becomes one of the great classics of Literature.

    Forget classification: get on with the reading. If kids will read comic books, chances are they’ll read something a little more complex later on. And that’s not guessing: it’s the core of a very serious argument that took place in library science decades ago. Do we only stock the classics, or do we stock what people want to read?

    I don’t think that’s a difficult question to answer. And I don’t think anyone can predict which books or forms of media are today’s Wuthering Heights.

  • beep,

    That sounds like the stories my students tell about how much they hate doing their mathematics HW. I am an unabashed proponent of rewiring brains to be ever more flexible ;-} After all, that seems to me to be the thing that makes our brain special. I hope that in the end the two of you found it a wortwhile story and a powerful message, but even if not, I think she is better for having read it.

  • I figured out why this irks me so much. It reminds me of the way Science Fiction and Fantasy are so often derided as “not real literature”. Why on earth is it that we pick out the reading materials favored by nerds and geeks everywhere and then try to argue that they aren’t as enlightening as those read by everyone else. Maybe, just maybe, the hyper-smart are onto something.

    A lot of my students are also in AP Language this year and they just read Ender’s Game. I had one girl tell me she would never have picked it up because the description had the word “aliens” in the second sentence. None of them can put it down now and many want to complete the series, which is both compelling and thought provoking. I am sure that the same blind bias that says graphic novels aren’t worth reading also says sci-fi can’t be either, and I always wonder why it is that people who so often decry others for deriding and trying to force out of the classroom books they have never read would do the same.

  • How to make gigabucks in America:

    Comic-book-a-tize the Bible.

    Serialize it.
    Show the sex.
    Make the blood vibrant vermilion.

    But…
    God doesn’t “smote”
    He “BLAM! BLAM! BLAMS!”

    [Aside: Jesus… am I $$$ genius or what?]

  • Since other commenters have already done a pretty good job of defending graphic novels, I’ll take a crack at another of Morbo’s slams.

    I’m sure lots of other kids would rather play computer games in school and blow off math class.

    Depending on what they are playing, they might learn more math in the computer game. See this book.

    From a reviewer of the book:

    Johnson argues – to me, convincingly – that even though modern mass market entertainment may appear “dumbed down”, it really isn’t, and that at a basic physical level, our brains are being made to work harder, get more exercise if you will, and develop higher cognitive functions as a result.

  • Novels used to often be published with illustrations. Various devices were used to make them easier to read. Section headings that told what the next part was about were popular–like in Candide, 6-How a fine inquisition was celebrated and Candide was whipped–even then it was somewhat ironic in tone. On the other hand literature now is so much faster paced than literature of old. Authors used to ramble abound about weather, forebears and social mores before they got into their stories. Now, even in literary works, they pretty much get going from page one.

    Our first books are picture books. Our attention spans are shrunk by internet, tv and movies. They say that the techniques of movies have evolved so much that the fast cuts and flashbacks would be incomprehensible to early movie-goers. So I say give the teachers (they’re on the front lines) whatever crutches they think they need to reach the kids. It’s all about the reading. Once they have that habit and ability, many will choose to read real literature. It’s not really for everyone.

    PS Graphic novels bug the crap out of me. 🙂

  • Right on, jimBOB.

    I was reading this ABC article about the book and the discussion of problem solving and balancing objectives. It got me to thinking about my own current obsession, Dawn of War: Dark Chronicle. I would love to sit someone down, teach them resource management and basic skills for a fast paced real time strategy game like this, have them watch a 4×4 LAN battle and then tell me that the game is actually making me dumber.

  • re: #8 socratic_me…

    Actually, I’m wondering if our difficulty wasn’t that we’re both extremely distractable (in her case, well documented) since otherwise she has a rather high aptitude for reading — and doesn’t complain about homework. I can’t say that she ended up enjoying the books, but she remains fascinated by the subject, so the experience did no harm.

  • Go read “The Watchmen”, “V for Vendetta” or “Maus” and then come back and try to argue that they don’t “have the potential to change your perspective and maybe even your life.”

    I read “The Watchmen” recently and the only thing I came away with was the feeling that I was too old to be reading comic books.

    Alan Moore is completely overrated.

  • Morbo, to demonstrate the weakness of your generalization all you need to do is compare the New York City created by Tom Wolfe in Bonfire of the Vanities to that of Ben Katchor in Julius Knipl. Wolfe is an accomplished master of prose, but his presentation of the city and its inhabitants is cartoonish in every sense but the literal whereas Katchor poetically captures the feel and style of an ethnic lower Manhattan continuously disappearing and yet persisting in its buildings and the memories of its inhabitants.

  • Go read “The Watchmen”, “V for Vendetta” or “Maus” and then come back and try to argue that they don’t “have the potential to change your perspective and maybe even your life.”

    This is true, and I think Morbo overstates his case, but a different perspective is possible: While these comic books (and I’d add some of Neil Gaiman’s work to the list) can be deep and provocative, one’s understanding and appreciation of them is necessarily shallow if one hasn’t read the literature that’s influenced the writers. Someone who’s read V for Vendetta without being aware of 1984 or Darkness at Noon, for example, is missing out on a lot. Moore, Spiegelman, and Gaiman are well-read and create situations in their work that resonate with great works of literature, which is largely (I think) why their efforts are good and well-respected. It’s reasonable for readers, ideally, to acknowledge the same background.

  • Given our era, anything which encourages kids to read should be applauded. As a child, I read to escape; now I read to learn.

  • carwinrpc nails it. My closest friend is an elementary teacher and reading recovery specialist. There are two components to developing reading in young children: fluency and habit. Of the two, building reading for pleasure as a habit is the most significant.

    When my son was about third-grade age, I became concerned that he was becoming a TV child and would never develop the reading habit that has brought me joy all my life. I got him hooked on comic books, then introduced him to other things that I knew he would enjoy (the first book without pictures was Spider Robinson’s short story collection Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon). He read it to shreds, and as a teenager was such an avid reader that he forced his friends to read things he was excited about so they could talk about them with him.

  • RSA,

    I agree with the sentiment, but think it applies equally well to literature. If you do not understand the writing that influenced the author, you are missing out.

    Good catch on Gaiman, btw. Both his graphic novels and his traditional works are excellent. And he even throws in some great humour when combining with Pratchett.

  • I agree with many of those who have been defending graphic novels. However, beyond that I find Marbo’s willingness to delegitimize experts unsettling. It is things like this that lead us to have “debates” over global warming.

  • Hey, who says liberals don’t have conservative values? Just look at what we are discussing!

  • Sci-Fi literature with both style and depth: I’d include William Gibson, Ray Bradbury, Neal Stephenson, Aldous Huxley, Kurt Vonnegut, Cory Doctorow…

    Is Neil Gamon too pulp?
    Philip K. Dick cool but lousy stylist?

  • Let me see if I follow the reasoning, MAUS isn’t literature but Lynne Chenney’s SISTERS is?

    I think that Rowling has proved that an engaging story and enjoyable characters are enough to get 9 year olds to slog through 400 pages. Similiarly, generations have followed Batman because they can relate to a complex and dark character.

    Blame the material, not the medium. Does an idea mean less in a blog than a book? How about a simple animated strip like Lowry’s “WWJD”?

    -jjf

  • Just as education professionals, parents, or students are wrong to use graphic novels as an escape from pure prose, your criticisms of graphic novels are equally wrong. Whether you choose to call them graphic novels or comic books (there’s a difference in my opinion that would obviously be lost on you), they do not automatically call for fast pacing or clever plots (since when is that bad anyway?); they can and do teach us things about the human condition and even ourselves; and if done well, also engage a reader in (gasp!) art (shades of elitism!).

    When I was in high school, our high school foreign language classes required us to go teach a local elementary school class for a half hour a week. Passing by a second grade class then being taught by my former kindergarten teacher, I just had to say “hi” to her. She was so excited to talk with me. However, she was having some frustrations with her class over some group behavioral and performance issues. She spontaneously asked me to tell her students what made me such a successful student and good reader. I hastily replied to her in a low voice that I couldn’t because I believed that reading comic books at age 5 and 6 made a difference for me and that comic books are supposed to be bad.

    She immediately turned to her class and loudly said, “Everybody! Everybody! He says that he read comic books when he was your age. Read comic books. Comic books are good. They improve your reading skills. I WANT you to read comic books.”

    I turned to her in shock and confusion and said, “But I thought they were supposed to be bad for you!”

    Her reply was, “Oh no! Studies show that children who read comic books at early ages develop better reading skills than children who don’t.”

    I was in shock! I grew up in an environment where reading comic books was a bad thing. This was the first time anyone PRAISED such a thing. But the truth is that at the ages of 5, 6, and 7 I was being exposed to words like “molecule” that made my classmates go blank, Darwinian theory (mutants), mythology (Greek, Roman, and Norse), folk legends, and scientific reasoning. No wonder I found encyclopedias so magnetic. All I had to do was open a random volume to find a topic that helped understand better what I had been reading in my comic books. Meet those writers and artists and you will discover that many of them were very well-read themselves. And that explains the allusions to classical and other literature that abounds if you would just get off your high horse and look for it.

    Any decent teacher would know how to use graphic novels to challenge a student underperforming as a reader to read a prose-only novel like Animal Farm and visualize the content. What they have taught that student to do is not simply go watch the movie version, but to create it. In the process, that student has learned what well-written words can do: convey sounds, tactile experiences, tastes, smells, visual images as well as concepts and ideas.

    By the way, before inserting head in posterior, do be sure to douche very well. It makes for a more pleasant and odor-free experience.

  • By the way, before inserting head in posterior, do be sure to douche very well. It makes for a more pleasant and odor-free experience.

    You ought to know.

  • “And real literature isn’t just about a fast-moving plot and a clever story.”

    Nor is it about obtuse plot lines and turgid dialogue. As I recall, there were plenty of fast-moving parts and clever story lines in Shakespeare. Just because Dostoyevsky doesn’t lend himself well to the “graphic novel” format doesn’t mean that “Crime and Punishment” is the be-all and end-all of Western literature. As someone here has already argued, adding illustrations to the great works of literature has actually improved its readability, not detracted from it.

    I am not accusing you of rectal-crainial infusion but I am saying that your argument amounts to style vs. substance or form vs. content.

  • Dismissing comic books and graphic novels with prejudice is a sure way to arouse ire.

    It’s only anecdotal, but I devoured comic books as a kid, as well as traditional children’s and then adult literature (and lots of sci fi and fantasy along the way). The girl the article quotes, who wants to read Japanese manga? She wants to read! In fact, she might be like lots of young Americans who start learning Japanese because they’re engaged by the culture! But Morbo decides that Morbo doesn’t like comic books, so they must Bad For You and A Waste of Kids’ Time.

    Don’t think “or ” … think “and.” Comics AND books. They’re related but distinct art forms. Kids can learn from both.

    Oh, and while I only have a master’s and speak two Asian languages, two other friends of mine who have PhD’s from Ivy League schools and are fluent in Chinese also read comic books as children. I’ve noticed that a lot of smart 20- and 30-somethings have comic books in their backgrounds.

  • Interestingly my children read a lot of manga, and a lot of it is printed in the Japanese style and is read from back to front and from right to left. They have had no trouble adapting to this.

    They also read ‘regular’ books a lot of the time as well. It just depends on what they feel like at the time.

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