Lynda Barry (2008)
Earlier this year I was asked to lead a workshop on comic books for 4th and 5th graders. I had organized activities like this for kids in the past, but never for a group quite this young. So I trimmed a few points in my presentation notes about comics history and highlighted examples of how the art form is used to tell different kinds of stories. I simplified the drawing exercises and group activities in order to encourage the students to make comics of their own.
While I was preparing for the workshop, news broke that that South Carolina House Ways and Means Committee had approved budget cuts against the College of Charleston that would effectively penalize the school for assigning Alison Bechdel’s comics memoir, Fun Home, for their freshman reading program. The state representative that proposed the bill claimed that the comic’s depiction of homosexuality “could be considered pornography” and that the college’s selection was tantamount to “pushing a social agenda.” Shocked and outraged by this move, I complained to friends and colleagues. But I also looked again at the packet of course materials I had prepared for the elementary school students in my comics workshop. Along with a new Adventure Time comic, I had included excerpts from Krazy Kat, Astonishing X-Men, American Splendor and a short comic by Lynda Barry. It was this last one that began to worry me.
Barry reflects upon the self-doubt and judgment that can paralyze creative expression in “Two Questions” from her 2008 collection, What It Is. She recalls the playfulness and experimental energy of her own childhood drawings, drained by the onslaught of those two questions: “Is this good?” and “Does this suck?” The doodles, vines, and swirls of text that surround Barry in the four-page comic make her internal conflict visible in a way that beautifully illustrates the interplay of the word and image. But reading it again, I became concerned about how the vernacular phrase “Does this suck?” would be received. I worried, too, about the moment when Barry’s describes the monstrous manifestation of her insecurity as a pimp that says, “I don’t steal nothing from the girl except her mind!” Would I be prepared to address these references and if asked, to explain the sexual connotations that shaped their meaning? What might their parents think? Or the South Carolina state legislature? Would I allow my own kids to read this comic?
As it turned out, the workshop was incredibly successful. The kids were enthusiastic and full of ideas, excited mostly about superhero comics and anime, but open to learning about other genres too. During the first break one started talking about The Walking Dead. Other kids sat up in their chairs and nodded in agreement. I was stunned by how many knew (or claimed to know) the comic and the TV series. Soon they were reeling off their favorite characters in comics. Deadpool was a huge hit, along with the Dark Knight (the movie). A couple had read Watchmen. But some of these comics are incredibly violent, I teased – do your parents know you’re reading this? The students nodded and shrugged, although there were a few guilty smiles.
By the end of our day together, it became clear to me that these 4th and 5th graders had been handling more mature material than I could have ever imagined. They negotiated the complexities of the page impressively too. We had fun playing around with interpretations of aesthetic and formal elements in our readings of comics. I realized that Barry’s “Two Questions” would not be too much of a challenge for this group — that is, if I had let them read it. I had taken the story out of the course packet at the last minute and told myself that I would find something better. I never did.
The Walking Dead
Comics and graphic novels are the focus of this year’s Banned Books Week, an initiative supported by organizations such as the American Library Association and Comic Book Legal Defense Fund to celebrate the freedom to read by calling attention to titles that are being challenged in schools and libraries across the country. That Jeff Smith’s Bone, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Craig Thompson’s Blankets, and other comics by Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Frank Miller, and Howard Cruse have been targeted may come as little surprise to comic book readers and critics. Often the issue of age-appropriateness is the central question for the complaints against the violence, sexuality, or cultural conflict depicted in these titles. I’ve had the opportunity to teach many of the comics that have been challenged over the years in my university classes where I try to approach controversial material as a source for an enriching exchange of ideas and to consider how discomfort can enable deeper inquiry into the world we all share.
But when I had the chance to put these ideals into action with a younger audience through “Two Questions,” I made a different, safer choice. It felt all too complicated, especially since I was dealing with elementary school students and their parents in a volatile political moment. I didn’t want to invite unnecessary scrutiny or cause problems for the program director that asked me to teach the workshop. My excuses all sounded reasonable at the time. The proposal to defund the College of Charleston’s first year reading program did not succeed in its original form, but I had reacted as if it had. Now I feel more than ever that I cheated the students by censoring my own reading list. Does this suck? Yes. Yes, it does.
The horrible irony about all this is that creative freedom is exactly what Barry’s comic is about. Her images speak directly to the risks we don’t take and the limits we place on ourselves out of fear. Ultimately the comic celebrates the courage to make mistakes, to create even when you don’t have answers to the two questions at the ready: “To be able to stand not knowing long enough to let something alive take shape! Without the two questions so much is possible.” It would have been a terrific lesson for those kids, but now I guess it’s turned into a different kind of learning experience for me.
So in honor of Banned Books Week, I’m asking about your encounters with banned or challenged comics. Are there controversial comics that you have chosen not to read or share with others? If you’re an instructor, how do you assess the risks and rewards of using this material in the classroom? How do your students respond? And while you’re thinking: read Lynda Barry’s “Two Questions” here.
It’s interesting how academic censorship coming from the top down can encourage self-censorship among teachers.
Well anyone who lives in an effective censorship regime will tell you that it works on the basis of fear. I’m sure that’s the way it works in most newsrooms throughout the world, America being better than most places but still no exception I suspect. Choose your targets badly and it can really backfire though. Fun Home was probably a well chosen target.
I’ve done this myself in two ways:
1. I opted for Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Gorazde over his Palestine largely because I didn’t want to deal with the grief I would get from students over the latter. Since I’m at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and thus in the middle of the Steven Salaita controversy, this is actually looking like a prescient decision to some extent: there’s lots of evidence emerging about the influence of pro-Israeli government lobbying groups on college administrations, and at least one of the student leaders opposed to Salaita was an AIPAC intern recently. Having said that, I’m now thinking about replacing Gorazde with Palestine next time to deal with the issue head-on. (But also because I like to keep the reading list circulating and thus not run any one text into the ground over several semesters.)
2. I’ve also avoided teaching Bob Crumb’s work (with the exception of the stuff he drew for Harvey Pekar). Again, it’s largely not wanting to deal with student complaints, but there’s also my own discomfort with Crumb’s all-too-easy reliance on racist and sexist imagery. If I could just get a copy of Zap #1 to spend a single day on, that would be one thing, but you can’t do that legally, making this a bit of a problem for teaching at a state school.
I had an experience like yours earlier this week, Qiana. Over the summer our campus library asked if I’d kick off Banned Books Week with a talk about comics. I’d done one a few years ago about the Comics Code, so I thought I’d come up with something new: a lecture on the Friendly Frank’s case in Lansing, Illinois from 1986. I included a short history of American comics and a discussion of Seduction of the Innocent, too, all leading to Friendly Frank’s, Reed Waller and Kate Worley’s Omaha the Cat Dancer, Denis Kitchen & and the birth of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.
You can read more about the case here. I have vivid memories of reading about it in CBG and TCJ as it unfolded:
http://cbldf.org/about-us/case-files/cbldf-case-files/correa/
But what did I leave out of my presentation? The more explicit images from Omaha. One of my colleagues in the audience asked about my decision to show only a cover from one of the collected editions. Was I censoring the book all over again? (He’s lecturing this afternoon on Naked Lunch.)
We had a long, fruitful discussion about this, and I found myself thinking, as you did, that I’d made the wrong decision. Should I have shown the images that brought those ridiculous charges of obscenity in the first place? But then I also had to take into account my audience. How would they have responded to the sexually explicit portions from the text? My colleague then asked a good question–is it more difficult to present visual texts than verbal texts? So, will he find it easier to read from Naked Lunch today? Is there a level of abstraction to written and spoken words that has a different effect on the audience than images drawn from a visual narrative?
I don’t know. I take some measure of comfort in knowing that the 30 or so people at the lecture—colleagues, students, and folks from the community—now know about Omaha and can seek out that fabulous series for themselves, but I wonder, too, if I should have included a more diverse variety of selections from Waller & Worley & Vance’s text.
Really appreciate these responses. Thanks for being willing to share your experience at Illinois, Rob. I figured that the issue over Steven Salaita would have an impact in the classes there, but I hadn’t considered the comics angle.
To Brian’s point, I’ve also heard the argument that maybe the visual elements of comics generate a more intense reaction when compared to prose representations of sexuality, violence, etc. And so this is why comics appear so often on the banned and challenged lists. But this claim doesn’t sit quite right with me – kind of reminds me of McCloud’s distinction between “perceived” text and “received” image that Hatfield and others have convincingly picked apart. I’m guessing that those who study film and photography grapple with this too. Seeing someone getting stabbed in the eye is different than reading about it…
I have a newspaper ad from 1948 where National (DC) reminds parents that the Bible is violent too (Cain killed Abel!) and kid’s books have questionable morality (Peter Rabbit stole a carrot!) in order to reassure them that their comics are the same as prose, just with pictures. (And we see how that turned out.)
I use comics as part of my pedagogic kit, teaching English as a foreign language, and I cheerfully admit to self-censorship in my choice of materials. Thus, Crumb in ‘American Splendor’, but no Angelfood McSpade.
As somebody who writes exam questions and such like for elementary school kids, I can tell you that Lynda Barry would never fly. The word “suck” usually doesn’t fly. Anything vaguely suggesting that people sometimes have sex, or have gender, or are occasionally violent, or might possibly die, or that authority is not always perfect in every way, or that there are icky things on earth — all of that gets ruthlessly censored.
I probably wouldn’t show my son the Walking Dead at this point; I’d be worried it would give him nightmares. But I wish our interest in educating our kids were anywhere near as visceral and pervasive as our desire to make sure they don’t learn things.
Hi Qiana,
I’d like to hear more about your take on the image/word distinction, or rather (as Brian describes it) the ways in which we respond — perceptually, emotionally, psychologically — to pictures and words. My own experience tells me that there is a difference, definitely in terms of immediacy and affect. As you note, you can read about things that you would have a much harder time seeing.
A couple cases from today: my son loves to read Stephen King, but refuses to see even the most mild of horror movies. And a Facebook friend of mine forwarded a story about Wal-Mart toy-rifle shooting, but noted that he couldn’t bring himself to watch the security camera video. Not to throw Darwin in where he isn’t wanted, but our minds and emotions are part and parcel of a body that was “designed” to interact in a visual world, not a textual one. And noting (as Charles does) that images exist within cultural codes does not eradicate the central, real distinction that McCloud and others are trying to register.
That said — quick turn alert! — I can say that I censor all the time, although I often just call it making choices, even if only small ones. For example, I assigned “50 Shades of Grey” to a college class in “Love and Lust,” but told them where all the most explicit sex scenes occurred so they could skip to (or skip to them) if they wished. Those scenes were not part of our discussion, although perhaps they should have been.
In the world of comics, I tend not to have students read Crumb’s (or Wilson’s or anyone’s) most sexually graphic material. But again, I think this is because such material tends not to be what I want to talk about or teach about Crumb. (“Please track all the different positions Projunior and Honeybunch assume over the course of only three pages, and note the deformation of the bodies as Crumb tries to represent them.”) I hope this isn’t just rationalizing.
And when it comes to elementary school teachers (and even higher grades, wherever students have no choice about attendance or courses), I hope that instructors are making their reading selections thoughtfully and advisedly — and perhaps even conservatively. There are plenty of things that I “allowed” my erstwhile fifth-grader daughter to read that I would never want a teacher to assign, even to her!
In sum, I’m against censorship, but sort of for varying levels of self-censorship.
(Endnote: Doesn’t it seem that there is often a kind of cool-kid bravado among those who proudly promote “banned” books — especially as they get to take sides against all those know-nothing parents and principals? I recall being in a bookstore when Marice Sendak’s “All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy” came out. I overheard one patron showing it to another, telling her about how all the moral majority folks were up in arms about this book just because — her words — it shows these kids living on the street with friends that “take drugs and shoot up.” Now in truth, there is no heroin in the book itself. But I liked how it was important to stand up for letting kids have access to a book that did.)
Like Noah, I work in educational publishing. I remember being shocked when I first started writing passages for reading comprehension tests. Forget sex or even the word “suck,” (for any age, really, not just elementary school); I once had to remove all references to knives from a story about cooking. I find the scrutiny my writing for those platforms has gone through laughable yet vaguely appalling, especially knowing that entire industry is driven by the conservative values of the state of Texas. But somehow for me that’s much easier to stomach than when actual works of art are censored in high schools, libraries, and beyond.
When I think about banned comics, I think about Phoebe Gloeckner. I can clearly see how labeling a work like Fun Home as pornography is straight-up homophobic, but with Glockner’s work, the issue feels more fraught. Knowing that those stories are based on the real experience of a child is a strong argument for why it’s important for young people to read them, plus the explicit imagery feels a lot more purposeful than, say, the gratuitous violence in The Walking Dead. But also I can’t help but feel that, were I a parent, I’d feel conflicted and worried if my fifth grader brought home A Child’s Life. I wouldn’t take it away, not just for the reasons above, but also because I’m so grateful my own parents never vetted my reading list. I know that being able to read anything and everything helped to nurture my own love of reading at a young age. Adults, myself included, feel an understandable impulse to protect kids from the world for as long as possible. But part of me wonders if we should all be reading kids, like, the comment threads from Slate at bedtime, just to start getting them ready.
For an entirely different set of reasons, I’d be hesitant to teach Gloeckner, too, even though I think everyone should read her.
Anyway, hi Qiana! You left me a really nice comment on the first post I wrote at HU, and I always meant to thank you for it. I love Lynda Barry in general, but the part in Two Questions where she hands her teacher the topless bunnies drawing is one of my favorite moments in comics, full stop.
Kim and Noah, thanks for sharing your experiences as test-question writers. Somewhere, there’s a dictionary definition of “thankless job” waiting for your pictures. It must provide an invaluable perspective on the educational superstructure.
I’ll have to think more about what would count, to me, as good reasons to introduce difficult material (which in the context of a class is tantamount to requiring it). I’m not sure that its connection to stuff-that-really-happened would be on it. Nonetheless, the question reminded me of Gloeckner’s amazing interview — mainly about the nature of fiction — with Gary Groth, who seemed at the time to have been running for a position as World’s Most Boneheaded Man.