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Man, that's a cheap-shot title for this column. But I couldn't resist.
But first: as you'll recall from my
first column (you've been reading them all, right?), I made some cogent points about why graphic novels belong in the libraries of research institutions like Columbia. My focus in that article was the literary and artistic merit of the format, and mainstream critical recognition of same. And all my columns so far have examined why certain titles belong in our collection from that perspective: what do they have to say? How do they say it? Where do they belong on the continuum of artistic and literary expression?
But…what if there's another way to teach these books? What if it's not only about the story, the art, their inspirations and their influence? What if it's not even about teaching people how to "read" a comic (that's the Scott McCloud "read" I'm invoking)? What if you tried to teach graphic novels from the inside out, instead of the outside in? What would that look like?
It would look a lot like the Stanford Graphic Novel Project, that's what.
In the winter 2008 academic quarter, two Stanford English Department instructors—Tom Kealey and Adam Johnson—convened a class with the goal of creating an original graphic novel as a class project.
There were three simple guidelines: the story should
• be adapted, rather than created.
• be adapted from the real world, rather than from fiction.
• have the opportunity to do some good in the world.
Many students applied but fourteen were chosen, eight writers and five artists. A majority of the fourteen, I'm delighted to report, were women (originally, there were 12 women and 4 men, but two of the men dropped out—possibly because they learned the comic wouldn't be about superheroes). A visiting journalist,
Eric Pape, an investigative journalist with a history of writing articles on the subject of war and its costs, was auditing the class as part of a
Knight Fellowship and became an adviser, which was understandable given the non-fictional aspect of the story. And, together, these fourteen students, two instructors, and one journalist created something which—I think—is unprecedented: a truly collaborative sequential art story…in six weeks.
The students started their project by reading Scott McCloud—obviously—and a handful of other important works as well. Not everything on their reading list was non-fiction. For example, they read
Watchmen because—well, because you have to read
Watchmen, right? They read
Journey into Mohawk Country,
Epileptic,
The 9/11 Commission Report, and a couple of anthologies. And they talked about stories.
Many topics were entertained as potential subject matter. The students looked at blogs of soldiers serving in Iraq. They looked at the story of
Ishi, a California Native American born in the mid 19th century, who is believed to be the last Native American to have lived completely outside of contemporary western culture. But, in the end, they turned to a story that had been written by their auditor, Eric Pape,
a story about a young Cambodian woman, originally the operator of a shake stand, named Tat Marina.
I always seem to go back to movies—they're such a natural complement to comics, aren't they?—so today's movie question involves a show of hands for everyone who's ever seen the movie "
The Killing Fields." If you've seen it, besides discovering what Sam Waterston looked like before he was in "Law & Order" and how lousy his Boston accent is, you learned a bit about the rise of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge and the horrific toll they exacted on the Cambodian people, best exemplified by
the expanses of land filled with the dumped bodies of the roughly 1.7 million Cambodians they slaughtered during their four years in unchallenged power. Sadly, the legacy of those horrible days lives on in ways both expected and not—many of the Khmer Rouge officials managed to stay in power long after their reign ended. The Khmer Rouge practiced a particularly nihilistic version of Communism, in which one of their mottoes was, "To keep you is no benefit. To destroy you is no loss." In his story, Pape mentions a common Cambodian warning aimed at young girls: "Beware of powerful men: They may kill you if you refuse their advances. And beware of their wives: They may kill you if you do not."
Marina was caught in this paradox, involved with a seemingly-kind man she did not even know was married. She suffered a gruesome fate—possibly better, possibly worse than that of the Cambodian movie star Piseth Pilika, who was shot and killed in 1999, most likely by the jealous wife of Pilika's lover, the Cambodian prime minister. Pilika appears in the class's project, giving her own [fictional] warning to Marina.
The students read this story and the eight writers set about writing, researching, re-writing, re-researching and arguing. The five artists in the class waited for all this to play out, so that they could get their hands on the story and work with the three designers to begin to interpret it visually. Both writers and artists were getting an invaluable lesson in how to craft narrative—more complex for the writers, in many ways, than a traditional creative writing course, as they needed to understand how to let the art tell the story in places (one of my favorite examples of this is a full-page image of shakes spreading out as far as the eye can see, as the Shake Girl thinks about how many shakes she has to sell to afford the things she wants).
The result is a powerful, moving story of the human cost of social chaos, of social and political currents that operate at high levels but manage to filter down to those who have nothing to do with them. You can read the entire book online
here, until the day that (fingers crossed) the project finds a publisher—and then you'll understand the title of this column.
Meanwhile, I'm pretty sure this kind of approach to studying comics in academia is unique. There are a lot of courses about reading and understanding comics: Art Spiegelman taught one last year here at Columbia, Ivan Brunetti teaches one at the University of Chicago (which he talks about in
this interview); I'm sure you've all come across one somewhere. But I don't think these other courses offer the same opportunity to put up the hood and get your fingernails greasy in the nuts and the bolts of the medium. (If I'm wrong, tell me in the comments!) Faculty wouldn't need to re-create the wheel: in addition to Scott McCloud's
Making comics, Jessica Abel and Matt Madden have just released what could serve as the
basic textbook for such a course. But Kealey and Johnson have given their students the opportunity to look at comics from both sides now, and that's something that more courses could learn from.
All images may be found at
http://www.stanford.edu/group/cwstudents/shakegirl/pageturn.html©2008 The Stanford Graphic Novel Project
Karen Green is Columbia University's Ancient/Medieval Studies Librarian and Graphic Novel selector.
Comic Adventures in Academia is © Karen Green, 2010
