I’d like to welcome everyone back to The History of the Modern Comic Book – a column that (roughly) parallels my class (of the same name) which I’m teaching in the Department of History at Michigan State University.

Last time around, I introduced you to the class – we looked at how the class was being taught, what it covered – that kind of thing. If your brain needs to be refreshed (or you simply didn’t catch the first column), check it out here. In this edition of the column, I want to go back to the basics and explore a really important topic that will lay the foundation for the rest of the “semester.” Specifically, I’d like to focus in on why should we care about comics? Well, that’s not really a good way to frame the question. We’re all comic readers and fans here – we read comics because they are compelling, exciting, escapist, or…whatever. A better question is why should there by a class on the history of comics? Are comics “important enough” to devote a university class to. (like somehow university is about only teaching “important” topics…and what does “important” mean anyway? Probably a conversation left for another day. What were we talking about? Oh yeah, comics). Lets be honest, despite the incredible strides the medium has made, most people still have a low opinion of comic books. To many, comic books are little more than cheap, disposable artifacts of popular culture and not worthy of serious reflection or investigation. So, why should we care about comics? There are a bunch of ways we could tackle this question.

The most common answer is that comics represent an original medium – a way of telling stories and conveying information that is unique. But is this true? Do comics actually provide something unique? Does the combination of of sequentiality (the passage of time), images, and text do something that can’t be done in painting, novels, film, or television? I’d definitely say yes. And there are lots of other people who agree with me (or, more appropriately, I agree with lots of other people in this regard). There is lots of other media that does some of what comics do – but there isn’t another form of storytelling that does everything that comics do, quite in the way that comics do it. To be fair, I’m glossing over the details quite a bit. You could go so much deeper in this regard. For those are interested, check out the works of Scott McCloud (specifically his book Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art).

Next up is the important role that comics play in the domain of visual literacy. What exactly is visual literacy you say? Basically, its the ability to understand and process information that’s pictorial – and its become amazingly important since the 20th century. Comics play a pivotal role in the visual literacy phenomena. Comics challenge the supremacy of the purely printed word. They blur the boundaries between the picture and the word – both must be read as an integrated whole. If you can’t interpret the imagery (in conjunction with the textual information), you rally aren’t going to get the story – simple as that. By way of example, lets take a look at this snipped from from Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale’s Batman: The Long Halloween.

In the first version, I’ve pulled all of the text. Its clear that batman is talking to a couple of guys, and one of the guys is offering his hand to Batman. But beyond that, its damn near impossible to to figure out exactly what is happening.

In the second version, I’ve flipped things – pulling out all of the images. Now you know what is being said, but you don’t know who is saying it, who they are looking at, what they look like, etc. However, the third version of the image makes a hell of a lot more sense because you get the integrated whole – the text, the sequentiality, and the images.

The third “why should we care about comics” speaks directly to the topic of this class – their historical significance. Before the spread (and entrenchment) of the television, comic books were the primary form of entertainment media for youth. In 1947 in was estimated that 95% of boys & 91% of girls between the ages of 6 and 11 and 87% of boys & 81% of girls between the ages of 12 and 17 purchased comic books. Since then, these numbers have waxed and waned (mainly waned). However, you simply can’t ignore media, any media, that had this large of an audience. The bottom line is that its pretty safe to say that comic books have, in one way or another, touched the lives of most people.

The final approach, and the one which is the most interesting to me, has to do with the fact that comics are incredibly reflective of current culture. Think about it, the time from production to publication is extremely short with comics. Their publication frequency is also much higher compared to other media – books, etc. This means that comic books are more “nimble” than other media. Comics can integrate current events, themes, social concerns, etc. in their story-lines very quickly. This means that they have the potential to be far more reflective of currents events, current social issues, etc. (and offer a finer grained representation) than other media.

So, there you have it, my reasons why we should care about comics – and, more specifically, why teaching the history of comics as a university class is important. Now, I’m not so self deluded that I think these are the only reasons – quite the contrary. There are definitely other reasons. These are just the ones that I find particularly compelling.

So, with that, I’m going to sign-off. For those who’ve got a hankering to see what other topics I covered in this lecture (there was more than just what I talked about in this column), I’ve made all of my lecture slides available for download on the course website. I’ve also recorded the entire lecture and stuck the audio up on the course website as well (something which I’ll be doing for all of the lectures). All of this can be found in the Resources section of the course website (On tap for next week’s column: Comics, In the Beginning: From Prehistory to Golden Age. We’ll be looking at the emergence of the genre, and how it (and the publishing industry that supported it) began to evolve into what we know and love today.

In the meantime, check out the course website – and read what the students are writing about their weekly books. You can also follow me on Twitter where I’ll be tweeting updates on the class (as well as my other classes and my exciting life as an academic…trust me, its thrilling).

Assistant Professor Ethan Watrall

Michigan State University