Comic Book Literature

  It's funny how time flies and how the memory seems to go with it. I remember when I was fourteen and decided to write the great American novel. I thought then that I was going to have to like the dreaded of all subjects, English. I gave it a good try. I gave 110% to the writing assignments, read most of what they told us was good, and really tried diligently to care about gerunds. But like it or not, a lot of English was drier than my grandmother's skin. I tried remembering some of the things my classmates and I read in our junior high school English classes and I managed to come up with a few: The Canterbury Tales, Romeo and Juliet, and A Rose for Emily, other than that, I draw a blank. Seems I spent less time reading the textbook than I did the comics I hid inside it.

  I look back at that time now with affection. The eighties and early nineties were a revolutionary period for comic books. With comic book writers like Grant Morrison, Frank Miller, and Alan Moore, children didn't graduate from reading comic books into reading other things; the comics seemed to mature with us. Of course, our teachers didn't see the literary revolution occurring in coming books – I'd wager most of our teachers hadn't read a comic book since their own youth. But now the comic book readers of the eighties are coming of age, we're entering the workforce, we're slowly taking over the world, and it's time we made a few changes.

If I were to ask teachers if they taught or considered incorporating comic books into their lessons, the answer I expect from most would be “no.” Comic books, while another form of creative writing is not represented in nearly all of today's literature textbooks, even though comics have been around for centuries. According to Will Eisner, comic creator and advocate for comics in the classroom, “Long before the invention of the alphabet, which depends on readers' ability to memorize its code, sequential pictures were used to record knowledge and communicate man's experiences, either read or imaginary” (75).

  I think this issue may have started because comic books are not simply a medium based on words as a short story is. Instead, comics are words juxtaposed with art work – art work that often times seems very iconic, almost –dare I say— cartoonish . This creates problems with elements such as description. Whereas in a short story, the reader must be told that an apple tree stands near the house, in a comic we have a visual depiction of said apple tree and its proximity to the house. As Eisner said, “Critics of comics have complained that while educators are trying to teach the proper use of language, comic books and strips are violating every rule. This is an understandable criticism, but it is based on the assumption that [comics] are designed primarily to teach language. Comics are a message in themselves!” (77).

By allowing students to study comics, the students will find the concepts taught in literature classes – not just elements of literature, but the universal themes scholars study and analyze literature for – in a form more easily understood. Comics have grown up, says The Curriculum Review, “In a flash, comics have become so sophisticated that university researchers consider them challenging reading material and more instructors are employing them to increase student literacy” (Spark 1).

Theoretically, comic books are not considered literature because literature is the study of written words as they appear on the page. Literary critics have accepted that the “words as they appear on the page” may appear like prose or poetry or the lines of a play – each consisting of their own rules of structure on how they are to appear, but those critics have yet to accept the idea that “funny books” can hold the literary import as the other forms of writing.

  The word “literature” comes from the Latin word “ litteratura ,” a derivation of the word “ littera ” which translates today as “a letter” (OED). A “letter,” according to linguists, is an arbitrary icon meant to represent a sound produced in speech. So, “literature” is a visual way of reproducing speech.

  “Literature” is a form of communication. It, however, differs from speech in that the communication that takes place is in a visual form rather than an audio form. “Literature,” differs, however, from most visual art forms like sculpture, painting, and architecture in that it relies on the juxtaposition of “abstract icons” arranged spatially as the vehicle by which a message is sent. But this definition could include anything meant to be read. Literature is also subjective to the author as opposed to objective – as journalism aspires to be. So literature is a subjective visual art form which relies on the juxtaposition of abstract icons arranged spatially to convey an intended message to the receiver.

“Comic books” are thought to be understood by readers of nearly all ages, in nearly every part of the world, but the truth is , comic books are barely understood even by the very people who create them. As George Dardess points out in his article “Bringing Comic Books to Class,” “Until recently there has been no concerted attempt to find or invent a language to describe the sequential art narrative's special powers. And without such a language it has been difficult to be clear about what the sequential art narrative really is” (218).

But there has been one man who has attempted to supply academia with just such a language. According to Scott McCloud, author of Understanding Comics and Reinventing Comics , comic books are “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intending to convey information and/or produce an aesthetic response in the viewer” (9). Comic books are a form of literature in which the use of abstract icons include but are not limited to “letters” of the alphabet, but also abstract images like illustrations such as a tree that represents itself, a tree. In comic books, the use of icons such as letters and illustrations go hand in hand so that if one were to be taken away, the other would not be enough to communicate the intended message.

  For example, “The tree is next to the house.” This is no different in content, idea, transmission, or expression, than “The tree is next to the house.” Of course, this rarely convinces people. People insist that it's the words that matter. Despite the fact that even when the words are misspelled and in the wrong order the same meaning is still perceived. This only shows that the word order, the word form, and position is not as important as we'd like to believe.

If one were to speak with an expert in Renaissance English about the plays of Shakespeare, it is nearly inevitable to hear the claim that Shakespeare's plays were never meant to be “read,” but to be “seen.” Other playwrights agree; they write their plays to be seen and heard on the stage, not to be read and picked over in English classrooms. And yet, we do it.

Poetry, it is said time and again, should not be simply read silently to one's self, but read aloud, to hear the sounds the words have with each other. And one can not find a foot to stand on when arguing against this point. We agree; to hear T.S. Eliot's “The Waste Land” is much more effective in portraying a sense of hopeless despair than for the reader to simply run over the words with their eyes. And yet, we do it.

Prose itself has only been considered literature for a relatively short amount of time. Earlier critics thought than any writing that was no written in verse could never be “true or beautiful.” And yet, we still study it.

We study the great works of poetry and plays alongside that of prose because they are literature. Despite the fact we should never read a play but see it, despite the fact we should never read a poem but hear it. Why? Because it's literature. And we split hairs about comic books for its presentation of pictures and words.

In their conceptual stage, comics, short stories, novels, poems, and plays are indistinguishable. They all start as an idea in a writer's head. Once a comic book writer gets an idea, he writes a script much like those written by playwrights or screenwriters. Each panel, or individual scene of action, is described in such a way as to tell the readers everything they need to know about the story. It is standard practice that the words in a comic are mostly dialogue, so everything else must be described in such a way as for an artist to be able to see the tale – and then make that visualization assessable to the readers. In the midst of all this, there is also the need to express action, time, closure, emotion, motivation, while still abiding by all the “rules” of literature like “show don't tell,” “use the right word,” and “do not omit needed details.” A comic book script contains all the elements of a short story in that it tells the artist the plot, the point of view, points on characterization, and so on; much the way a play tells actors how to perform their roles.

As Allen Ellis and Doug Highsmith point out,   

To... critics, comic books were just a new kind [of] juvenile literature with too many illustrations and not enough text. But these critics were mistaken. The comic book was a new medium altogether, a medium that relied on the interaction of words and pictures to tell stories in an unique way, with its own highly developed conventions of interpretation that bore more resemblance to film than to literature or drawing. Reading comic books was teaching young readers a whole new vocabulary, one that was largely foreign to adults, because adult readers did not immerse themselves deeply enough in this new cultural form to learn its language. . . Sewell reported being introduced to the cryptic world of comics by children who explained to her the importance of the conventional elements of comics; of the symbols such as the z 's which indicate snoring, of curved lines to emphasize movement, and the reliance upon onomatopoeia. It was an epiphany for her as she was suddenly able to see what the children saw. Perhaps this, more than anything, is the reason for elite adults' aversion to comic: they quite simply do not understand them (33, 34).

The artist(s) (usually consisting of a penciler who illustrates the story, an inker, who goes over the pencilers ' initial drawing, adding depth and detail, and a colorist, who finishes the product by adding color, most often completed with the aid of a computer), receive the writer's script and take it from the very abstract, iconic form of letters stringed together in the form of sentences and move up from the abstract into the more realistic iconic form of pictures found in comics today.

Scott McCloud attempts to explain this idea by saying that... “Pictures are received information... the message is instantaneous... Words are perceived information. It takes time and specialized knowledge to decode the abstract symbols of language... Our need for a unified language of comics sends us toward the center where words and pictures are like two sides of the same coin” (49). He points out that a photograph of a woman's face is not as realistic as a woman's face – it's an abstraction of a woman's face. Next, a realistically drawn version of the woman's face is further down the “abstraction continuum.” The continuum continues past caricatures even unto a circle with two dots for eyes and a line for a mouth – nearly the simplest way for a person to draw a face. Beyond this abstraction is the letters f-a-c-e which in no way resembles the woman we first took a photograph of, but still conjures the same pictures in our mind. Beyond that, McCloud assumes “Two eyes, one nose, one mouth” (49) to be an even further abstraction since it doesn't even refer to the face but still conjures one in the readers' mind.

Linguists stress that words have certain characteristics, among those are arbitrariness, meaning that a word and what the word refers to have no relation. For instance, c-l-o-c and k has no relation to an instrument that reports time. C-l-o-c-k are five arbitrary icons, when strung together, represent an instrument that reports time. Similarly, the symbol  has the same function. What is the difference between clock and  ? Nothing more than a level of abstraction.

  Comics can tell any story – even the most classic. Boy meets girl. Boy falls in love. Girl leaves boy for Siamese Twins from the circus.

  Much of the literature studied in junior highs, high schools, and universities, are studied for two reasons: lasting literary value, and the use of literary devises to achieve desired results. Comic books can be used to teach plot, characterization, structure, theme, point of view, symbol, allegory, fantasy, humor, irony, denotation and connotation, imagery, similes and metaphors, personifications, apostrophes, metonymies, paradoxes, allusions, tone, musical devises, rhythm and meter, philosophy and time periods.

Using comic books in English classrooms is like using microscopes in biology classrooms. Just as a microscope can reveal the minute detail of the lines on a bee's wing, or demonstrate the way a cell divides, a comic book can also reveal what cannot be easily seen in many works of literature. A comic can make concepts like onomatopoeia so much easier to grasp – and retain – than trying to remember it by reading Poe's “Masque of the Red Death.” Just as a microscope can bring small, foreign objects closer, and enlarge the image so that we may view it easily, a comic book can bring the story closer to its reader than a long, monotonous page of print in a literature book can. Comic books are great for decreasing the distance between the reader and the subject matter. Whether it's swinging eighty stories above the streets of Manhattan with Spider-Man or soaring through the farthest reaches of space with the Green Lantern, comic creators have a way of putting the reader inside the boundaries of the comic's panels. This creates an involvement between the reader and the story that sometimes isn't accomplished (especially with high school students trying to tackle a story like Hawthorne 's The Scarlet Letter ) with some of the older works of literature that high school and university teachers expect their students to learn. And finally, comic books are like microscopes in the way that they both make understanding of the subject matter a little easier. A teacher can lecture over the concept of mitochondria but the concept doesn't become real until the student uses the microscope and sees the mitochondria in its place within a cell. Comic books likewise can teach nearly any concept taught today using the standard literature canon, with higher reader comprehension, stronger retaining of material, and I believe with less animosity towards the reading material. As Ellis and Highsmith observed, “The appeal of this genre is especially great for disinterested and reluctant readers, but accomplished readers are also fans” (26).

It is a sad assumption to make, to assume that today's literary scholars and teachers believe that the only masterpieces worthy of study are only the masterpieces they themselves have already had to study. Comic books are identical to any other form of literature in their conceptual phase – they both begin with a writer making up a story. It's only in presentation and marketing that comic books differ from the writing of Mark Twain or Ambrose Bierce. Or as George Dardess claims: “The only important general characteristic the sequential art narrative form lacks that... others share is respectability” (214).

  Looking back now, I wonder sometimes if Beowulf wore spandex and a big “B” on his chest or if Grendel's mom had long flowing hair a lot of cleavage, whether or not literary buffs would dismiss it as “pop culture” and push it aside. When I think about my high school days, I could almost kick myself for not paying more attention to the stories we did read. Gawain and the Green Knight, Macbeth, The Odyssey? These would be great comics! But of course, there are no pictures in these stories. And who could take a green headless knight, a bunch of fortune telling witches, and a man-eating Cyclops seriously if we had to see pictures of them?

  It's been more than ten years since I've decided to write the great American novel, and I haven't made much progress on it since then, but I have grown to respect the literature I did manage to read in those impressionable years, whether it was Shakespeare or She-Hulk, Beowulf or Batman . They say it's the journey not the destination, but I think it's time we traveled down another road – one where boys swing between the buildings that line it, and where the shadows of flying heroes fall on us as we walk. I bet once get started, the idea that “this is the wrong way to go” will dissipate, and we'll all agree that the scenery and the people who walk up and down the street aren't as different from what we are used to in the first place.

Bibliography

Dardess , George. “Bringing Comic Books to Class.” College English. 57.2 . February

1995. 213-222.

Eisner, Will. “Comic Books in the Library.” School Library Journal. 21.2 . October

1974. 75-80.

Ellis, Allen, and Doug Highsmith . “About Face: Comic Books In Library Literature.”

Serials Review . 26.2 . 21 -44.

“ literature ” Oxford English Dictionary.

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. Northhampton MA: Tundra Publishing LTD,

1993.

“Spark Reading and Writing Fever with Comic Books.” Curriculum Review. 39.8.

April 2000. 10-11.