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Comics Master Class: Leveraging Your Cultural Literacy

lostgirlsmooregebbie
From Lost Girls by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie

by Aldo Alvarez, Ph.D. AKA Dale Lazarov

Cultural literacy in comics is not a new thing. Knowing a character's history or having expertise in scientific Flash Facts are both different kinds of cultural literacy. Using either or both to tell a new story are ways of leveraging your cultural literacy. What the last 30 years of sophisticated comics have brought to the table is an expansion of what you can use as cultural literacy in sequential art.

The unexpected side effect of this expansion is that there are so many comics that employ it badly if not problematically. A few weeks ago, I was reading Milestone Comics' Icon and I was startled by its creators' attempt to leverage an understanding of African-American literary culture that the creators apparently didn't have. Writing in her diary, Rocket describes herself as inspired by Toni Morrison to be a writer…but her narrative captions didn't sound like that was the case at all. To be precise, the captions in Rocket's voice sounded like Standard Issue Frank-Miller-Inspired First Person Narrator Captions.

Given that one of Milestone's primary purposes was to reflect African-American experience in superhero comics, and that Rocket wanted to express an authentic cultural aspiration, using Toni Morrison as a name-drop with no actual connection to the text is a huge disconnect. Had I been Icon's editor, I would have suggested that Alice Walker was a more likely model for Rocket's prose style, given what already was in the script. Asking the creators to make it a little bit less Frank and a little bit more Alice would have adjusted things and wouldn't have taken much effort. Both the character and the cultural context of the story would have connected with a resonant and sustained allusion to an African-American writer who wrote about women seeking liberation and self-determination.

Instead, Rocket's self-definition tag felt as preposterous as the time Eurythmics was mentioned in passing in a panel of an early 80's issue of Dial H For Hero.

Cultural literacy matters because it's the context for how you create and the context for how your work is read. As an Astute Geek Elder Gay Latino Wizard, I try to vary what I read between old-timey and new comics, prose fiction, poetry, non-fiction and moving image media from a diversity of cultures and creators to keep myself from becoming calcified. Say, I wouldn't have had an unexpected insight about cultural literacy and its relationship to creating comics had I not picked up Icon. (I hadn't read it because, 23 years ago, I could only read what I could borrow from public libraries.) Without my cultural literacy in 20th Century literature, fine arts and cinema, I wouldn't have known of the narrative effects that have been erroneously attributed by hagiographers to Alan Moore as his innovations in comics. Nope, Alan Moore just has massive cultural literacy and knows how to use it meaningfully. Appropriating characters, juxtaposing and recontextualizing them? That's totally out of the Postmodernist literature playbook…and, also, out of MAD Magazine's.

Here are some suggestions for leveraging and expanding your cultural literacy as a creator of comics or any other complex form of artistic expression:

• Cultural literacy is made from three things: 1) what you know from engaging with the human experience, 2) what you know from the humanities and sciences that document it, and 3) the expertise you build on the first two with deliberate research.

Nobody's born with facts or metaphors. The good news is you accrue plenty of them just by being alive and you can learn new things in a field or tradition when you study it deliberately. You can use anything you've understood to make comics. Eventually, it becomes rewarding to fill your knowledge base and skill set with culture that you decide to explore in depth. I researched and read pre-Comics Code Romance comics and pre-Gay-Liberation gay pulp novels so I could mash them up in a graphic novel that's a love letter to what both traditions have done for me as a reader and a creator.

• Think of your cultural literacy as the cultural background of the story the way that a sense of space and location in comics art adds a layer of meaning to character, story and feel. Your cultural literacy is to your work what Gotham is to Batman.

• A common way to reward your readers with your cultural literacy is to use it to say something new with it, or to comment or critique the culture you used in your story. Superficially appropriating, say, the narrative techniques of someone in the tradition you aspire to be part of — without culture-jamming it, transforming it or making it say something new — is just copying. The scene ending the last episode of Mad Men is an extraordinary use of cultural literacy because it has so many layers and implications to it. Some of these layers and implications are in contradiction with each other in a poignant or scathing manner!

• Explicit or subtle uses of your cultural literacy in your work are equally valid. That said, for this use to be rewarding for readers, make sure the direct allusions you make are resonant with the story and the Easter Eggs are a meaningful expression of the story. Employing your cultural literacy to tell a story does not replace the need for dramatizing people, ideas, the storytelling design and/or feelings as if culture is a set of manga pictograms that refer to something without having to evoke it as an immersive narrative experience.

What isn't an effective use of your cultural literacy is a superficial aggregation of details from other texts that don't add something to the plot, the characters, the texture of the sequential narrative style, or the feels. If you use your cultural literacy in a way that's haphazard, that has to be the point of its use and not a chance sloppiness that has no rhyme nor reason.

• The downside to employing your cultural literacy in a layered and textured way is that it requires time for preparation, multiple drafting and editorial reflection on your work. It's much harder if you don't have the space to improvise and revise until the relationship between the work and the culture it relates to feels organic rather than prescriptive.

If you have to be productive in a "turn and burn" way, you lack the time for the process and contemplation required to effectively employ cultural literacy. It can be done, but you'd need to work with a detailed creative scaffold for your project that you depend on in the process of fully writing and/or illustrating it.

About The Author(s):

Aldo Alvarez, Ph.D. is the author of INTERESTING MONSTERS (Graywolf Press, 2001) and has an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University of the City of New York and a Ph.D in English from Binghamton University (SUNY).  He's tenured faculty at Wilbur Wright College in Chicago and teaches writing, research, fiction, gay and lesbian literature, graphic novels and LGBT Studies. He was born and raised in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, a shipping port and college town in the west of the island that received comics pamphlets, glossy comics magazines and comics hardcovers from all Spanish- and English-speaking countries.  He also writes and art directs gay graphic novels as Dale Lazarov.

Dale Lazarov writes, art directs and licenses wordless, gay character-based, sex-positive graphic novels published under the Sticky Graphic Novels imprint: TIMBER (drawn by Player), SLY (drawn by mpMann), BULLDOGS (drawn by Chas Hunter & Si Arden), PARDNERS (drawn by Bo Revel), PEACOCK PUNKS (drawn and colored by Mauro Mariotti and Janos Janecki), FAST FRIENDS (drawn by Michael Broderick), GREEK LOVE (drawn by Adam Graphite), GOOD SPORTS (drawn by Alessio Slonimsky), NIGHTLIFE (drawn and colored by Bastian Jonsson and Yann Duminil), MANLY (drawn by Amy Colburn), and STICKY (drawn by Steve MacIsaac).  Sticky Graphic Novels are published in hardcover by Bruno Gmünder GmbH and in digital format through Class Comics.  In his secret identity, he is Aldo Alvarez, Ph.D. and he lives in Chicago. His website is at StickyGraphicNovels.com.


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Rich JohnstonAbout Rich Johnston

Founder of Bleeding Cool. The longest-serving digital news reporter in the world, since 1992. Author of The Flying Friar, Holed Up, The Avengefuls, Doctor Who: Room With A Deja Vu, The Many Murders Of Miss Cranbourne, Chase Variant. Lives in South-West London, works from Blacks on Dean Street, shops at Piranha Comics. Father of two. Political cartoonist.
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