Category Archives: Roundtables

Race and the Risks of ‘Kiddie Garbage’ Cartooning

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The index to the Indie Comics vs. Context roundtable is here.
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“Ridicule or attack on any religious or racial group is never permissible.” – From General Standards Part C of the 1954 Code of the Comics Magazine Association of America

One of the consequences of the CMAA “Comics Code” of 1954 was that industry artists, writers, publishers, and distributors stopped taking risks when it came to race. At least, for a while. The slippery language of the “religion” section of General Standards Part C was broad enough that even the most tentative efforts to find an audience for increasingly complex, multi-dimensional images of blackness were scaled back. For several years, as the Civil Rights Movement transformed the social and political landscape of America, the mainstream comic book industry erred on the side of caution. (And I’m not just talking about those infamous beads of sweat.)

We know, of course, that the anxieties surrounding the Comics Code Authority’s strict guidelines opened up a space that mid-1960s underground comix would seek to fill. As Leonard Rifas states, “comix artists often tried to outdo each other in violating the hated Code’s restrictions,” deploying irony, satire, and caricature – notably, “extreme racial stereotypes” – to assert their freedom of expression.

In an interview from Ron Mann’s 1988 documentary Comic Book Confidential, R. Crumb explains:

We didn’t have anybody standing over us saying, “No, you can’t draw this. You can’t show this, you can’t make fun of Catholics… you can’t make fun of this or that.” We just drew whatever we wanted in the process. Of course we had to break every taboo first and get that over with, you know: drawing racist images, any sexual perversion that came to your mind, making fun of authority figures, all that. We had to get past all that and really get down to business.

Small press and indie comics creators continue to adhere to this countercultural checklist nearly sixty years later, gleefully undermining each new generation’s standards of good taste and decency with new artistic infractions. But Crumb’s approach to what he refers to as “absolute freedom” in the above quote does not adequately account for the risks taken by many African American artists and writers for whom the constraints, the taboos, and the violations differ. For me, then, examining indie comics and cartoonists in a larger contextual way means recognizing that there is more than just one Comics Code when it comes to race. And it means taking seriously the complex social and aesthetic tensions that black creators must navigate in order to exercise their own rights to free expression, even when they can’t get over or get past all that.

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Cartoonist Barry Caldwell’s semi-autobiographical character Gilbert Nash is reprimanded in the 1970s strip above for making “kiddie garbage.” The regulating body standing over him in this instance belongs to an acquaintance that doubles as the physical manifestation of the cartoonist’s self-doubts. Her pointing fingers and exclamations intrude furiously into his drawing: “You should be out on the streets making great art about the black experience!”

Caldwell illustrates how an entrenched politics of racial respectability intersects with ongoing debates within black communities over the social function of art. Comics are derided by the woman in the strip as a frivolous medium through which white cartoonists are afforded the luxury of feelings, but a treacherous, irresponsible choice for a black artist with a greater obligation to his people. This is what is at stake when the chastising voice says, in other words: “No, you can’t draw this.” And yet four panels into exposing what is presumably a private exchange, Gilbert has already claimed his existence as a comic artist during the Black Arts Movement, rebuffing the viewer’s objectifying gaze with a question of his own. Taboo is drawing one’s self into being as an indie black cartoonist.

This is the context that shapes my reading of the comics of Jennifer Cruté. The two collected volumes of her comic strip, Jennifer’s Journal: The Life of a SubUrban Girl, feature autobiographical sketches of her upbringing in New Jersey suburbs as well as her life as a freelance illustrator in New York. With round, expressive black and white cartoon figures, Cruté’s characters appear to come from a charmed world where “ridicule or attack on any religious or racial group is never permissible.” The wide faces tilt back and break easily into open-mouthed grins and scowls. Her freckled persona wears teddy bear overalls, while an older brother’s Afro parts on the side, Gary Coleman-style. Like the cursive “I” that is dotted with hearts on the title page, the comic adopts a style more closely associated with the playfulness of a schoolgirl’s junior high notebook. The title foregrounds the space of socio-economic privilege and gentrification that her family occupies during the 1980s complete with Cabbage Patch Dolls, family vacations to Disney World, and copies of Ebony and Life side by side on the coffee table.

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Race introduces a source of friction that impacts Cruté’s decision to represent her experience as a young black girl through caricature. There are plenty of comic strips that depict the lives of children, but much like Ollie Harrington, Jackie Ormes, or more recently, Aaron McGruder, Jennifer’s Journal uses children to explore the absurdity of racism and the means through which blackness is socially constructed. She traces her earliest affection for Kermit the Frog, for instance, to the episode of “The Muppet Show” when she mistook guest Harry Belafonte for puppeteer Jim Henson. And in scenes that take place down South, fears of lynching and racial violence dominate the story’s action, while the narrative turns to everyday micro-aggressions and more subtle humiliations to capture her own encounter with racism in the suburbs.

The first volume’s cover image further aligns Cruté’s work with the confessional mode of popular small press and indie comics; a young African American girl nervously pulls down the pants of a plush toy bunny, while surrounding her are other undressed stuffed animals posed in various sexual positions. The fact that young Jennifer’s inspiration comes from an art history book open to a painting of a nude Adam and Eve speaks to the notion that visual images have the power to confer an uninhibited sense of expressiveness and wicked curiosity. Likewise when her reflections turn to religion and sin, Cruté confesses her nightly struggle to abstain from masturbation. She portrays the temptation as she tries to go to sleep beneath a pictorial thought balloon that recalls the image from the book’s cover, although this time the nude Edenic bodies that entice her to “Come on, Jenn! Touch it!” are created in her own brown-skinned image.

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My point here is that the push and pull of creative freedom and self-regulation play out in Jennifer’s Journal on multiple registers. Though warnings mark the front and back cover to alert readers that the book is “NOT recommended for children,” the comic’s aesthetic choices incorporate cautionary measures that gesture toward the kind of “instructive and wholesome” entertainment that the Comics Code Authority sought to preserve. In an author’s note, she writes: “I draw simple characters with round figures to soften the complex and contradictory life situations I depict.” But despite this stated intention, I can’t help but see a rewarding motley of signifiers in the comic – some that soften, others that rankle and surprise. The comic playfully mocks both the demand for racial respectability and the longing for a vision of reality that treats frank discussions about racism and sexuality as inappropriate.

I have tried to be careful not to suggest that black artists and writers are the only ones entitled to complex images of blackness in comics, nor are they the final arbiters of how best to represent and confront racism. As Darryl Ayo points out in his post about Benjamin Marra’s Lincoln Washington: “People are going to do what they’re going to do.” But as Darryl goes on to suggest, there should be a more meaningful, substantive awareness of historical context in our interpretations of comics that explore racial conflict. I believe we should also ask tougher questions about how and why particular notions of absolute freedom are idealized in underground, indie, and small press comics. And why there isn’t more room in these discussions for the “kiddie garbage” of Jennifer Cruté and the other creative risks that black comics creators are taking right now.

The Feminist Phantasmagoria of Fukitor

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The index to the Indie Comics vs. Context roundtable is here.
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I discovered Jason Karns’ Fukitor thanks to the controversy in The Comics Journal thread over his use of racist imagery. That I  ordered some issues based on those questionable images probably hints at my take on the controversy. Bigotry can be funny. It wasn’t too long ago, for example, that I was chortling through a documentary on Fred Phelps’ Westboro Baptist Church (I believe it’s called Fall from Grace, available on Netflix). They’re the ‘God hates fags’ family/church who express opposition to the homosexual control of America through a series of signs — often presented at funerals of soldiers and rock stars — on which they thank God for AIDS and pray for more dead soldiers. Even the KKK finds their ideology objectionable (really). It’s hard not to laugh at that. You really can’t caricature the Phelps clan. How could their message be any more risible? Nor will arguing with such people do much good if they’re too extreme for white power groups. Some belief systems are too nuts to take seriously. I don’t mean that we shouldn’t worry about hate groups and religious extremists, just that it would be a bit silly to treat what they say or believe within the parameters of a rational discourse. You don’t need to argue with them, just keep away — and laugh from a safe distance. The Westboro Church would fit right into a Fukitor storyline, if Karns ever felt like “analyzing” Christianity. His aesthetic is well suited. Phelps’ religious justification for his homophobia is about as convincing and complicated as the following (only with hellspawn that are to be more feared for being less straight):

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Fukitor 7, “Doctor Werewolf versus the Zombie Sadists”

I imagine that something like that is what Phelps fears in the afterlife should gay marriage achieve equality. There’s no way that image or one like it should enter a theological discourse where it’s not taken as imbecilic. Yet, it seems that the primary opposition to Fukitor is that people are going to take it too seriously, that its macho-chauvinistic worldview isn’t sufficiently ludicrous to simply point at it and laugh. (Like a censor, the critic is, of course, quite capable of not being swayed by the dangerous message he perceives. The problem is, you know, other people who don’t possess the critic’s cultural analytic skills.) Some of the response over at TCJ reminded me of those critics of Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers who pointed out the Nazi-like uniforms worn by its heroes as evidence for the film’s fascism. With a style that hardly could be called delicate or nuanced (or so I thought), he both delivered on the entertaining genocidal slaughter of a highly evolved alien insect species while pointing out that it was genocide we spectators were enjoying. Karns’ extremism is doing something similar: Fukitor’s diegeses take place within a particular sort of mindset — a souped up, more explicitly rendered version of 70s and 80s action film heroics and grindhouse terror. It finds enjoyment there in the same way one might be entertained by the xenophobic worldview of Chuck Norris’ Missing in Action series, but makes it all sufficiently extreme that only a true psychopath could ever find it a plausible expression of otherness. Here’s an example of heroic victory (against the Viet Cong) from the comic:

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Fukitor 5, “The Green Hellion”

Having the hero become a cannibalistic war machine with one of “our boys” hiding in the back, meekly proclaiming victory with his fist raised in a feeble show of solidarity is enough to create something of a Brechtian distancing effect – at least, within me. That’s another way of saying I’m not merely going along with the literal views of the characters, nor is the story wanting me to. However, Darryl Ayo might still say (if he ever bothered to read the comic): “This isn’t subversive, this is the real thing. This is what racist caricature and hostility against nonwhites in the popular arts looks like. This is what racism looks like, served straight up.” What this fails to see is the caricature of white masculine power that pervades the comic. I can’t imagine even the staunchest white power patriarch wanting this comic to represent his worldview (just like the KKK has its rhetorical limits). Maybe Phelps is right, people need signs: “do not identify with hero,” “do not sympathize with the bigotry.” Thus, I’m going to supply some context for those who believe Fukitor entertains its ideal reader by simply presenting a shared worldview (as if this reader thinks the comic fairly presents his ideological take on existence).

Much of the imagery in the three issues (5 through 7) that I purchased more easily serve radical feminism as misandrous stereotypes/parodies of patriarchal power than as actual reinforcement/mere reiterations of said power. Most of the examples for these stereotypes in what follows came from Judith Levine’s My Enemy, My Love. It occurred to me while reading some of that book around the same time as Fukitor that Karns shares or mocks (you decide) the same nightmarish fantasy that Andrea Dworkin, among others, has about masculinity: “Violence is male. The male is the penis; violence is the penis or the sperm ejaculated from it. What the penis can do it must do forcibly for a man to be a man.” [p. 138, Levine] Perhaps Karns’ most manifest take on this theme (if it’s possible) will be what he’s currently working on, a barbarian tale called “The Coming of Kok,” but from what I have in hand, look at this pinup scene from issue 5’s inside cover:

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A demonic cabal (cf. red eyes) of white capitalists (note the business suits) is about to sacrifice a woman (with the ceremonial sword) after a masked executioner-type finishes sexually having his way with her. It’s hardly reading between the lines to find affinity between this drawing and the radically feminist conflation of capitalism and patriarchy: “to attack male supremacy […] consistently, inevitably means attacking capitalism […]” and “when you talk women’s liberation you inherently talk anti-capitalism and anti-private property.” [p. 78-9, Echols; first statement is from Redstockings’ co-founder Ellen Willis, the second from an unknown speaker at the 1968 Sandy Springs conference] Levine suggests this analysis understandably leads to misandry: “[M]an-hating remains not an action but a reaction, not a power but a subversion of power. In a patriarchal world, woman-hating is built into every institution. […] If misogyny is the Establishment, man-hating is no more than a counterculture.” [p. 18] She analyzes three overarching stereotypical categories of misandrous imagery (Infant, Betrayer and Beast), but the one that Fukitor deals in, almost exclusively, is the Beast: “Images of [which] confront the male body, its attractions and its threats. While [its subtypes] the Prick and the Pet indicate a raised eyebrow (and a raised skirt) toward “animality,” the Brute and the Killer embody women’s detestation and terror of male violence.” [p. 27]

The Brute is represented by that big, fat, white trash dude in quasi-Klan gear who’s just polished off a lot of Bud before going to town on his victim. Levine describes this subtype as “the ogre under that bridge, and his weapon is real: rape. Representing predatory, rapacious, implacable, and misogynistic sexuality, the Brute embodies what every man could do to every woman, and crucial to his efficacy as a terrorist is his penchant for disguise.” [p. 136] Those men surrounding the Brute represent another subtype, the Killer. This guy is the technocrat who avoids empathy in favor of realpolitiks, i.e., downplaying feminine characteristics in favor of masculine ones. Violence is always an abstraction, a matter of rationality. It’s as if Karns used this stuff for a script: Capitalists, not wanting to get their hands dirty, are using a loutish workingman — plying him with cheap beer — to rape a woman in service of their plutocracy. In other words, capitalism rests on a big fat underbelly of structural violence (violence that’s written into the system), and that violence is rape. If you’ve spent any time reading feminist critiques of pop culture on the web, you’ll know that the term for this emboldened allegorical message is ‘rape culture.’ Quoting Susan Brownmiller, Levine notes how sexual violence is conjoined with keeping the peace: “Man’s discovery that his genitalia could serve as a weapon to prehistoric times, along with the use of fire and the first crude stone axe. From prehistoric times to the present, I believe, rape has played a critical function. It is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.”

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From Fukitor 6, “Dick: Vice Squad”

Phallogocentric laws require like-minded law enforcement, and Detective Dick is rape culture’s perfect policeman — a renegade who won’t go soft on crime, which is analogized to womanhood. He is also an example of another subtype, the appropriately titled Prick. He is “imperious, self-centered and self-satisfied, puffed up and truculent.” Dick’s the walking embodiment of the phallus, i.e., “masculine authority, power, patriarchal law and language; [depending] for its reputation on not being seen.” [p. 160] His eyes are behind shades, so he can see you, while you can’t exactly return his look.  According to Laura Mulvey, the stereotypically masculine role is to do the defining, the feminine is to be defined: “In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female form which is styled accordingly.” To reverse the gaze, to see through those shades, is to possibly see the phallus as a flaccid, impotent penis (smaller than you think, like the man behind the curtain in Oz). Thus, “[a]ccording to the principles of the ruling ideology and the psychical structures that back it up, the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification.” The Prick has to keep up appearances of being hard. One way of doing this is pretty common throughout Fukitor, such as in the present example or the “Green Hellion” page above, namely use a weapon as the phallus, making violence the signifier of hardness, of masculinity. I don’t much see a difference in Karns’ treatment and the feminist message of, for example, Sue Cole’s “President Raygun Takes a Hot Bath”:

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Both take pleasure through humorous depiction of overcompensating macho violence. In showing the Prick for what he is, “humor is the great deflator.” [p. 165] The message behind “Dick: Vice Squad” cannot reasonably be equated with Dirty Harry’s expressed anxiety towards San Francisco’s feminized, liberal bureaucracy when the hero’s success at dealing with hostage situations tends to look like this:

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In the same issue, Karns satirizes another prominent area of phallogocentric domination, the objective world of science. Rather than the image of a rationally disinterested observer that feminists such as Luce Irigaray have questioned, the scientific explorers of “Buttraping Bat-Apes on Pluto” are bullheaded and driven by petty jealousy and selfishness:

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Being petulant children, they require a mothering figure. Instead of the Beast, these fellows fit the stereotype of the Mama’s Boy (a member of the Infant class). Levine describes it as, “women trade stories of manipulating and being manipulated by, doing for and being done in by their big male bundles of needs, demands, and expectations. Yet women are exasperatingly eager to take the rap for these bad boys: if men are babies, guess whose fault it is?” [p. 32] The men, because of their cocksure nature and obstinate refusal to listen to the woman, are systematically dismantled in the fashion suggested by the story’s title. But she has her day, avenging her fallen colleagues:

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Thus, the woman becomes the hero only after slaughtering the butt-raping primates, chaining the masculine spoils around her neck. This image is a more comically violent interpretation of Martha Nochimson’s feminist critique of Kathryn Bigelow’s meteoric rise in Hollywood power circles with Hurt Locker. Referring to her as the “transvestite of directors,” Nochimson wrote, “[l]ooks to me like she’s masquerading as the baddest boy on the block to win the respect of an industry still so hobbled by gender-specific tunnel vision that it has trouble admiring anything but filmmaking soaked in a reduced notion of masculinity.” The director, like the female scientist, appropriates phallic power by dressing herself in it. Although Karns isn’t necessarily criticizing his character’s actions.

I could keep going with examples (such as Karns’ twist on the James Bond spy as a werewolf, a swaggering poonhound that he reduces – recalling Twilight‘s Jacob — to a lapdog), but that’s enough. Either the reader will buy it at this point or never will. A comic that can be read so effortlessly as radical feminist stereotypes of masculinity in pop culture suggests something other than a straightforward support of white male privilege. If Karns had done all this in prose form, it would read something like talking points from Valerie Solanas’ hilarious SCUM Manifesto:

The male is completely egocentric, trapped inside himself, incapable of empathizing or identifying with others, or love, friendship, affection of tenderness. […] His responses are entirely visceral, not cerebral; his intelligence is a mere tool in the services of his drives and needs; he is incapable of mental passion, mental interaction; he can’t relate to anything other than his own physical sensations. […] He is trapped in a twilight zone halfway between humans and apes, and is far worse off than the apes because, unlike the apes, he is capable of a large array of negative feelings — hate, jealousy, contempt, disgust, guilt, shame, doubt — and moreover, he is aware of what he is and what he isn’t. […] To call a man an animal is to flatter him; he’s a machine, a walking dildo. It’s often said that men use women. Use them for what? Surely not pleasure. […]

 His greatest need is to be guided, sheltered, protected and admired by Mama (men expect women to adore what men shrink from in horror — themselves) and, being completely physical, he yearns to spend his time (that’s not spent `out in the world’ grimly defending against his passivity) wallowing in basic animal activities — eating, sleeping, shitting, relaxing and being soothed by Mama. Passive, rattle-headed Daddy’s Girl, ever eager for approval, for a pat on the head, for the `respect’ if any passing piece of garbage, is easily reduced to Mama, mindless ministrator to physical needs, soother of the weary, apey brow, booster of the tiny ego, appreciator of the contemptible, a hot water bottle with tits.

Fukitor takes enough pleasure in puncturing and dicing up men, mocking and castrating phallic power, to qualify as an auxiliary work in service to the Society for Cutting Up Men: “[T]he Men’s Auxiliary are those men who are working diligently to eliminate themselves, men who, regardless of their motives, do good, men who are playing ball with SCUM.” One doesn’t have to agree with the message being delivered to find something enjoyable or worthwhile here. Regarding Solanas’ appeal to some feminists, Levine writes, ”a kind of lunatic nihilism helped burn over the old assumptions, clearing space for constructive revolutionary ideas.” Quoting Vivian Gornick: “The first time a woman said, ‘Cut it off!’ it was great. You never dreamed for a minute she meant it. It was the announcing: we are no longer afraid to say the unsayable.” [p. 216] Appreciating Solanas doesn’t make a woman into the nightmare a Men’s Rights Advocate has every time he hears a Loreena Bobbitt joke. Likewise, enjoying Fukitor doesn’t commit one to supporting whatever views that are expressed therein. As alluded to above, it’s a fairly simplistic view of how belief systems work in the minds of racists, gun rights advocates, chauvinists, paleoconservatives, the pro-war contingent, or whomever else might be represented within Karns’ aesthetic to believe he’s merely giving voice to how they feel about themselves. Nevertheless, even if one takes the comic as a straightforward depiction of a troubled psyche’s bigoted worldview rather than (as I’ve been arguing) the intentional use of such a worldview for comical purposes, one could still laugh at it by treating it as if it’s as worthy of serious reflection as one of Phelps’ signs.

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References:

Echols, Alice (1989) Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975. University of Minnesota Press.

Levine, Judith (1992) My Enemy, My Love: Man-hating and Ambivalence in Women’s Lives. Doubleday.

Gender Spring, Gender Break

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The index to the Indie Comics vs. Context roundtable is here.
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I talked about this comic a bit in comments over here. It’s still on my mind several weeks later. It’s one of the favorite things I’ve seen by Johnny Ryan, I think. I love its rhythm; it has a merciless dream logic that has more to do with Kafka or David Lynch than with standard gag cartooning. (Which is probably why the commenters at Vice seem so thoroughly alienated.

Beyond that, and intertwined with it, I really like the way that gender in the comic is both omnipresent and divorced from individual bodies. The main character, Mills, wears a t-shirt with a picture of a vagina on it that says “Pussy Pounder University.” Mills appears to have a working class masculine job digging holes, so you could see the shirt as a kind of frat-brother marker of hyper-masculinity.

But the strip mostly works against that reading. When he has a break from his job, Mills doesn’t do manly things like drinking beer or checking sports stats; instead he straps springs onto his feet and goes bouncing off into the woods. The bizarre panel where we see him first standing with the springs has him, unnaturally tall in the foreground, juxtaposed with a television tower in the background. It semss like a parody of masculine imagery, turning Mills into a failed phallus. That’s more or less confirmed when he goes bouncing off into the woods shouting “wee!” and then immediately stumbles and bashes his head against a tree trunk.

Up to this point, we haven’t really gotten a clear view of the shirt. When we finally see that he’s wearing a vagina, he’s flat on the ground bleeding from the head. In fact, in the image, his head looks like the vagina on his shirt; the line of his mouth mirrors the curve of the text, and his tongue looks like the lips in the image. The liquid coming out of his mouth becomes a double entendre for sexual lubrication; the blood reads as menstrual blood. He isn’t a dude-bro who owns the pussy as a sign of hyper-masculinity. Rather, he is his shirt, a feminized victim of violence.

If a man can become a symbolic vagina, then it makes sense that a woman can become a symbolic phallus — which is what happens in the next panel. Just as Mills initially seems to fit into a standard male stereotype, so the women who find him seem default valley girls, grossed out by blood, shallowly distracted by fashion (“Whoa, check his rad shirt!”) But then they pick up a giant stick/penis and start thrusting it into Mills’ head/vagina while screaming “Harder! Harder!” The rape imagery is not especially subtle — and what they get from that rape is the shirt with its symbolic vagina, turning them into the bros partying with the other guys at spring break.

The structure of the strip — build-up, violence, pause, escalation of violence — imitates, or references, rape-revenge narratives. But the dislocation of gender dislocates the violence as well. Unjust violence doesn’t lead to just violence; the victim does not become the victimizer. Instead, the victim just gets attacked again, because when you’re weak people take your stuff. Femininity is still, as in rape-revenge, used as a narrative trigger for violence, but that trigger is presented self-consciously as symbolic. “Woman” is an arbitrarily assigned position; a marker that has more to do with narrative convention than it does with actual bodies or identities. The vagina on the shirt is, for that matter, no more or less a drawing than Mills or the girls who find him. Why do we see Mills as male initially, anyway? “Mills” isn’t a strongly gendered name; he’s got mid-length blonde hair. No one refers to him as “he” in the first part of the strip; we just know he’s a guy because he’s digging that hole, which is a guy thing, and the people around him have facial hair. In a narrative, gender is a convention — but a convention that can kill.

I doubt Ryan would exactly agree that this was the context of his strip. He’d probably say that he wasn’t thinking about it that hard, or that he was just following his ideas wherever they took him. Still, I don’t think that makes me wrong. The central idea here — that weird vagina shirt — seems in keeping with a lot of Ryan’s comics, where gendered body parts float free of the bodies they’re supposed to be attached to, and narratives of gendered violence are scrambled with a malevolent clumsiness. It’s body horror as failed punchline, bouncing carelessly along till you bash your brains and/or gender out in the forest. Even then, though, meaning is still drawn on you; arbitrary and inescapable, like Fort Lauderdale.

How Can You Hate a Fan?

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Kerfuffle, in common parlance, is a “disturbance, commotion, fuss.” Unassumingly rustic and awkward, kerfuffle is an inherently strategic word. Kerfuffle is cute and funny sounding. It’s easy to imagine a kerfuffle as a small sheep-kitten hybrid. It’s a wonder the English language Pokemon games never appropriated it. Not unlike baby-talking, kerfuffle allows the speaker to dismiss whatever battle or disruption she chooses as futile, silly, and beside-the-point, and to seem good natured, good humored and superior while doing so.

Critic Heidi MacDonald opens her article on the recent Jason Karns comments-war at The Comics Journal with the word. She writes, “Indie comics circles don’t have kerfuffles—defined as in depth analysis of the social, racial or gender-based meaning of a certain comic or statement. Those are for nasty old mainstream comics.” Until the site shut the comments down, the ‘kerfuffle’ occurred between one camp who thoughtfully addressed the troubling prevalence of racism, misogyny and violence in comics and in Karns’ work in particular, and an equally passionate camp defending the nostalgic value of racism, misogyny and violence, (at least, that was my take.) Her reduction of this debate makes her sound parental and hokey. I wonder why she works so hard to diminish something the comics community cares deeply about.

MacDonald then shifts and observes the possible use for more study of ‘cultural context’ of independent comics, vacillating with statements like “BTW, I’m not advocating for change here,” and finally concluding,

“Context seems to have less and less inherent value against this backdrop where immediate emotional resonance is the currency. Perhaps it’s this very quality that makes comics one of the most vibrant and relatable mediums of the day.”

Perhaps it’s this very quality that makes comics such a safe haven for deeply offensive power fantasies. Most of the article wanders around without going anywhere. MacDonald hypothesizes that contextual analysis is only of “secondary interest to those consuming and creating comics,” yet its unrealistic to expect any subgroup or population to be motivated to contextualize itself. She also shores up her vision of contextualization with anecdotes from mainstream comics criticism. Tellingly, she relates Todd McFarlane’s rejection of deeper readings of his work, but does not give examples of actual analysis. Critique of a comic’s racial and gender-based meaning does not a cultural contextualization make. According to her definition, it makes a kerfuffle.

It’s unclear whether MacDonald is calling for greater analysis or not, and if the Karns debate doesn’t count for serious analysis, what would do better. MacDonald is a central figure in contemporary comics criticism, and its worthwhile to get to the bottom of what she means by ‘cultural contextualization,’ and why she thinks it could be helpful. What is she advocating for, if weakly? An institutionalized project? A tit-for-tat expose of independent comics’ parallel problems to superhero fare? Does pointing out sexism and racism count as contextualization? Warrant it?

Contextualization isn’t unknown to comics discourse, after all. MacDonald contextualizes Frank Santoro, the writer of the original Karns post, as a heart-of-gold veteran comic lover. How can he be blamed for seeing the best in a vile, racist comic book? He is part of a culture of fandom, a background MacDonald urges her readers to consider before she mentions anything else from the Karns debate. Karns is “one of those energetic and imaginative artists who has so far chosen to work in the gross out genre.” MacDonald typifies most cartoonists as “ethnically homogenous groups of suburban white kids” whose work falls short when they “stray too far away from writing what they know.” This last one deals in some knee-jerking stereotyping—I’d consider that a good part of independent cartoonists are rather open-minded art students living in urban settings.

The comics industry is structured around a cult of individual creators and super-fans. Even outside of autobiographical work, any ‘famous’ cartoonist’s life history and personality will be well-known, and factor into how fans read a work. Cartoonists are fashioned as auteurs, and creator rights seems to be the industry’s de facto high priority topic. Publishers and critics contextualize comics all the time, but always at the level of the creator, who is framed through the culture of fandom and attributed its origin story. Cartoonists are cast as introverted misfits with great imaginations– their particularities and belonging to the ‘brotherhood’ of comics fans rises above whatever culture they are ‘outsiders’ to. Their culture is their comic-making. To use an example Heidi MacDonald skirts around, Craig Thompson’s Habibi is pretty racist, but how can you deny that he’s also a really nice guy? He loves comics so much. Don’t his personal qualities somehow temper the book? Isn’t this all excusable, considering he’s a white guy from a small, Midwestern place? I suspect that ‘cultural’ contextualization is a comfortable go-to, and readily used to reconcile fissures like the Karns debate.

As she stated, MacDonald doesn’t want change. She calls for a future where independent comics can continue to move forward on its vibrant, beautiful trajectory, everybody holding hands and drawing in different styles, in a void, all on board. Emotional resonance is the currency. It is exchanged for the train ticket. The ticket-man accepts empathy, insight and nostalgia equally. He knows the first two are a little harder to come by. The important, unifying thing is that everyone is making comics, and that everybody knows your name. Karns isn’t so bad– he’s a fan just like you. Don’t go and make a fuss.

 

comiccon

Indie Comics vs. Google Trends Showdown

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The index to the Indie Comics vs. Context roundtable is here.
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We had some fun playing with google trends and indie comics in the comments of this post, so I thought I’d fiddle with it some more.

Garfield vs. Spiegelman. Brutal.

Garfield vs. Penny Arcade. Closer than I’d thought.

Fantagraphics vs. Comic-Con. Also a bit unexpected.

Chris Ware vs. The Hernandez Bros.

Chris Ware vs. R. Crumb.

Alice Munro vs. Alison Bechdel.

Craig Thompson vs. Anthony Trollope

Marjane Satrapi vs. Chris Ware

Matt Groening vs. the Simpsons
 
All right, that’s enough. Play along in comments if you’d like, though.
 

Leave Those Kids Alone: The Graphic Textbook, Reviewed. (UPDATED 3/14)

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The index to the Indie Comics vs. Context roundtable is here.
____________
I was one of nine hundred and seventy-one backers of Reading With Pictures’ The Graphic Textbook Kickstarter campaign. I pledged $10, and the other backers collectively pledged $77,410. I think it’s safe to say that the other backers were, like I was, impressed with the advertised concept of “A comic that every teacher will actually want to use… and a textbook that every student will actually want to read!” It made me think of Larry Gonick’s comics, which I read devotedly as a kid and were a really useful supplement to my lessons about physics, math, and especially world history. If The Graphic Textbook brought that kind of academic rigor and energy to a new generation of elementary schoolers, it would certainly be worth my $10 donation.

The Graphic Textbook and its accompanying teachers’ guide are a project put together by the organization Reading With Pictures, founded by comic book writer Josh Elder in 2009. Its mission statement is to “revolutionize the role of comics in education,” and The Graphic Textbook is their latest major step towards achieving that goal. The Textbook boasts a diverse group of writers and artists, each assigned a general area of education (Language Arts, Social Studies, Math, and Science). Every section has three to four comics in it, each nominally meant to teach a standard lesson in an entertaining way. The teacher’s guide suggests that The Graphic Textbook is meant to supplement larger lesson plans, where a teacher might go over the basics on any given topic and then ask the class to read the associated story. The concept of a comic being used as a supplementary educational material is an intriguing one, and I was eager to see how Reading With Pictures chose to execute it.

Close to a year and a half after their Kickstarter surpassed its goal, Reading With Pictures finally sent backers near-complete previews of the textbook and teacher’s guide. I’ve had time to take a look at them over the past few days, and, frankly, I’ve been very frustrated with what I’ve read. Brief flashes of inventiveness are completely buried under ugly art, terrible pacing, confusing attempts at humor, walls of text, and unclear (sometimes actively incorrect) information. The question I found myself wondering most frequently as I was reading through the book was “why does this need to be a comic?” It’s a question the book struggles with, is deeply insecure about, and never manages to overcome.

I’ll start with the textbook itself. The first subject the book covers is language arts, and the first comic in that section is “The Power of Print,” by Katie Cook. The comic takes the form of a short essay on the history of print and the written word, arranged in a six panel grid with an illustration under each small block of text. The text itself makes many enormous generalizations, most likely because there is only space for a few words in each panel. More frustratingly, though, the illustrations do nothing to accurately convey the appearance of the artifacts being discussed. Cave drawings, hieroglyphs, and the Gutenberg Bible are depicted in a blurry, washy style that does not adequately communicate the subject matter. Ironically, the comic begins with the words,

A long time ago, there was no form of writing. Stories, information and more were all passed from generation to generation by word of mouth… this was terribly inefficient. Have you ever played the game “Telephone”? Things get lost and change as each person passes on the information.

Just as information is lost and changed when people retell stories without writing them down, information is lost and changed when crude drawings are created to substitute for actual pictures of the artifacts being discussed. As someone who not too long ago was reading textbooks, I know that this:

gutenbergbible

Is no substitute for this:

gutenbergbiblepage

I’m assuming the artists/writers of these chapters had very little editorial oversight, because the narrative bounces around unforgivably for something that’s supposed to be a straightforward teaching tool*. From the chapter on print:

printugh

Where did that panel about checking sources come from? In a traditional textbook that information, if it were deemed important for the lesson, could be put in a ‘did you know’ type textbox on the side, not disrupting the main narrative. In this case, though, the (already shaky) narrative of the history of print is disrupted by a warning about checking sources, and then slingshots to “print is dead” because there isn’t any space for any real facts or examples. There is no good reason for this to be presented as a comic instead of a short prose section with illustrations.

The chapters immediately following the one on the history of print made me much more optimistic about the rest of the book. Tervor Mueller and Gabriel Bautista’s story about an alien learning about metaphors is cute and fairly informative, although quite generic. Mike and Janet Lee’s “Special Delivery to Shangri-La,” lettered by Jim McClain, is a very standard kids’ comics story about Jules Verne and his adventures in an orientalist fantasyland version of Tibet (two stories in the Textbook feature bizarrely orientalist appropriations of stereotypical “Asian” culture without much reason or explanation.) The goal of the “Special Delivery” story is to teach kids vocabulary using visual cues, and I guess it does that alright (“Unhand that parcel, you pilfering primate!”) but the ‘Tibet is inhabited by monkeys and sasquatches’ premise was distracting. It probably wouldn’t have bothered me as much if I hadn’t been reading it as part of a textbook, but in the context of a textbook, where several comics are nominally portraying concrete facts, the weird orientalism seems especially irresponsible.

tibet

Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey’s “George Washington: Action President!” is one of the best-executed comics in the book. Van Lente and Dunlavey take the Gonick approach, splitting a complicated biography of George Washington into manageable little chunks, illustrating each one with a gag. My only complaint about the story would be the very light touch it demonstrates when brushing on the topic of slavery, choosing to portray Washington and his valet, William Lee, as equals and friends rather than as owner and (relatively) privileged slave. The story also makes several references that are too clever for their own good – for instance, this is the final panel of the story:

williamlee

It’s a clear homage to the classic “Spider-Man No More” panel from Amazing Spider-Man #50, but is it appropriate in this context? None of the students reading this book will understand the reference, making it potentially confusing, and it seems tonedeaf to compare a slave being freed from a lifetime of bondage to Spider-Man temporarily throwing away his costume. It’s a problem that crops up many times in the Textbook: coy, self-congratulatory references to the history of comics, especially superhero comics, that add nothing to the lesson and will be ignored at best and confusing at worst.

Chris Schweizer’s “The Black Brigade” is by far the best comic in the Textbook. Both it and “George Washington: Action President” fall in the social studies chapter, which makes a lot of sense – it’s much easier to tell a compelling comic-book story about real events that happened to real people than it is to try and spin abstract concepts into a comic. “The Black Brigade” is the only comic in the textbook that could stand on its own, and it reminds me a lot of the dense historical comics in Spirou collections I enjoyed as a child. It plays to the medium’s strengths by not trying to depict too broad a swath of history, instead focusing on a brief skirmish during the revolutionary war. The art is lovely, and the story is not burdened with too many superfluous characters like many other comics in the Textbook seem to be. It made me wish that Schweizer had been assigned more chapters, since his is without question the best in the book.

tyre

Unfortunately, the remainder of the stories in the Textbook are all actively bad (with one exception, which manages to only be mediocre.) The final comic in the social studies chapter, “Field Trip” by Russel Lissau and Marvin Mann, falls into the same trap as “The Power of Print.” The very under-developed plot (anthropomorphic animals look at armor and ancient weapons in a museum and imagine their uses) constantly makes reference to the interesting and intricate nature of the artifacts being discussed without ever showing a real picture or careful drawing of one. Given that the main character of the story, snobbish Caleb, considers all forms of art except weaponry “boring,” I think he would find this comic the most boring art of all, since it eschews actual pictures of the artifacts in question. This story falls especially flat for following directly after “The Black Brigade,” which manages to show an exciting battle scene without having anyone stand around wistfully talking about it first.

caleb

Although it might not seem like it, up to this point my dislike of the Textbook was only moderate. I believe that, despite the crushing mediocrity and odd choices made by some of the stories in the previous sections, elementary schoolers still have the potential to learn and retain some facts from these chapters (especially if led by a creative and adaptable teacher). It is with the math section that the Textbook stops being mediocre and begins being actively bad.

The first story in the math section is “Lumina: Celebrity Super-Heroine: Menace of the Mathemagician!” written by Josh Elder and drawn by Jen Brazas. It’s a shitshow. Keeping in mind that the teacher’s guide describes this as a story aimed at grades 3-6, I can not understand how Elder, the founder of Reading With Pictures, thought that a nonstop string of Twitter jokes, selfie jokes, and tired pop culture jokes (Gangnam Style? Really?) would be comprehensible, much less appropriate to the lesson. The art is very muddy, and the text almost unreadable. The story surrounding the lesson is laughably complicated; as an adult with a pretty good understanding of 3rd to 6th grade math, I could not easily parse out the math lessons contained in the piece (to be fair, there are several placeholder pages, so maybe a fantastic, clear math lesson is going to go in that empty space. Unlikely). Most of the math in the story is not real, but rather an idiotic series of plot devices (“For my first feat of prestidigitation, I multiplied Alpha Male’s 1 percent body fat by a factor of 70, thereby proving that bigger isn’t always better”).

mathcomic

(This is somehow an entire page of a comic that’s supposed to be teaching fractions.)

“Lumina” is followed by another miserably poor attempt at an educational comic, “Finding Ivy” by Michael Bramley. Bramley’s story is bizarrely high-concept, to a point that seriously undermines its simple lesson. The goal of the story, as far as I can tell, is to teach students how to read an analog clock, solve simple, time-related math problems, and recognize roman numerals. Maybe Bramley thought this would be too easy for 3rd through 6th graders, because the story he ended up writing is nearly incomprehensible. In “Finding Ivy,” time is represented as twelve different “zones,” each of them numbered. Each zone is arbitrarily inhabited by some magical character (and I do mean arbitrarily – zone one is inhabited by Humpty Dumpty, whereas zone ten is always Halloween because October is the tenth month). Three trains race from zone to zone, each representing a different hand on a clock. The zones are a big metaphor for a clock! Oops, I should have said ‘spoiler alert,’ because I just gave away the big reveal.

What I just summarized is only the framework for the story. The actual story itself is about a lost little girl named “Thyme,” who is assisted by a young man named Jung. Jung helps her escape from the station guard, who is a monster of some kind. They ride the trains around until Thyme is reunited with her family, and Jung gives her a pocket watch, which doubles as a map in Bramley’s needlessly complicated Neil Gaiman-nightmare of a universe.

zoneone

Continuing the math section’s streak of embarrassing failure is Geoffrey Golden and Nathan Pride’s “Probamon,” a Pokémon parody that would have been horrible in 1998, and is no better now. “Math Addem” (GET IT?) is a Probamon trainer who doesn’t understand probability, causing him to lose all his Probamon to Team Random (referred to as Team Rocket in one panel, oops). Of the four stories in the math section, this one comes closest to actually teaching math, but buries its only useful diagram repeatedly underneath dated pop culture references and Pikachu jokes. It reads like the worst ripoff Mad Magazine parody of Pokemon possible, and emphasizes everything it possibly can over the math parts, which it seems to consider boring.

pika

The final math comic, Jim McClain’s “Solution Squad,” is bad to the point of making me not even wanting to write about it. The story itself is constituted of unreadable walls of boring text, and does not contain any useful math concepts. Oh, and the only black member of the eponymous Solution Squad is named “Equality.” The story is so devoid of anything actually relating to math that the teacher’s guide suggests having the students calculate the number of handshakes that would take place if every member of solution squad shook every other member’s hand, an exercise that would work just as well if the students were shown a picture of any six people in the world**. It’s a completely worthless addition to the book, and, if the teacher’s guide is followed as written, a waste of a math period.

solutionsquad

The final section in the book covers physics, and while it isn’t quite as bad as the math section, it’s not for lack of trying. It opens with Roger Langridge’s “The Adventures of Doctor Sputnik: Man of Science!” a story nominally meant to teach the basics of Newtonian physics. The problem is, Langridge does a terrible job of illustrating the principles he’s trying to teach, to the point that some panels would give a student learning these principles the completely wrong idea. For instance, in demonstrating the law of inertia, Langridge uses this panel:

inertia

The problem is, the law of inertia states that an object at rest will stay at rest unless acted upon by an outside force. By drawing the professor yanking on Spud’s arm, Langridge is representing a strong outside force being placed on Spud, who is resisting it, thereby completely misrepresenting the law.

Langridge then makes the baffling decision to jump straight from Newton’s first law to trying to explain how friction works, something well beyond the scope of this lesson. What’s worse, not only does he bite off more than he can chew, he makes another fundamental error in his illustration of air resistance:

airfriction

Langridge’s illustration suggests that it is easier to move Spud because the force moving him is flying through the air, which is again painfully wrong. Spud’s mass and friction against the ground haven’t changed, meaning that the forces acting on him have nothing to do with friction, and everything to do with the mass and velocity of the object exerting force. To a first time reader, though, this sequence clearly shows that it’s easier to move things if the acting force is moving through the air. (All of this, by the way, comes before Langridge even gets to Newton’s second law of motion.) It’s a mess, and could actively harm students’ understandings of basic science, which is inexcusable.

The second to last comic in the Textbook is the exceptionally bland “Like Galileo,” by James Peaty and Tintin Pantoja. It’s a very straightforward biography of Galileo, illustrated without humor or nuance. There’s really no reason for it to be a comic, since the drawings are all very static images that could be swapped out for more useful images such as a photograph, a detailed drawing of a telescope, or a portrait of Galileo. This is about as bland and traditional as educational comics get.

The final comic in the book is also one of its worst. Written once again by Josh Elder and illustrated by Tim Smith III, “Genghis Kong and the Silverback Horde” is a long, violent mess of a story containing only one scientific concept and a host of orientalist tropes. The story doesn’t have much body to it, just a giant gorilla dressed in his D.W. Griffith best and a lot of idiotic ninja fighting. The one scientific principle in the story is the square-cube law (which determines how large an object/creature can plausibly get), which I cannot remember ever appearing on any elementary science curriculum (and if it did, certainly not on its own). The teacher’s guide recommends spending 2-3 class periods on this garbage comic, a sample of which is below:

mongorillas

Given the quality of Josh Elder’s contributions to his own project, I begin to see why the rest of the book is riddled with so many terrible decisions. There appears to be no unifying editorial oversight, and the focus seems to be on drawing comics first, and then retconning them into being somehow educational second. Unfortunately, that’s not at all how textbook-writing works.

There is one more document to look at before I pass a final judgment, and that’s the teacher’s guide, specifically, the comics included with it. Upon opening the Teacher’s Guide, the first thing a reader sees are a couple pages about how to read comics. That’s useful information (although I would think it better suited in the textbook itself, for the students). What follows, though, blasts past the line between “useful” and “self-congratulatory” and gets well into “masturbatory” territory: an eight page comic about the maligned wonders of comics. Created by Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey, “Comics and the Classroom: A Match Made in History” is a crudely drawn mess. It presents a history of the American comic book, starting with Gaines and E.C., and moves clumsily through stories of various other heroic white men, contrasted against uninteresting, prudish, “others.” It’s just so totally unnecessary as a forward for this teacher’s guide, and it reads like a crash course on a very specific type of comics culture, one that a teacher should not have to be a part of to use The Graphic Textbook. Most jarringly, Van Lente and Dunlavey include this panel:

jap

Again, this is an instance where a scan of a Milton Caniff original would have been fine. It frankly disgusts me that they took the time to re-draw this kind of racist trash, and that they seem to think it’s all a big joke. There’s no condemnation of this image other than as ‘propaganda,’ I mean, they could have saved 8 pages of terribly drawn comics history and just said, “COMICS ARE WRITTEN BY AND FOR WHITE MEN.”

The other comics in the teacher’s guide are both boring and unimportant (one is a two page comic that reads, in its entirety, “Everyone has heroes. Some real, some fantastical. But did you ever wonder… who they consider heroes?” HINT: THE ANSWER IS A TEACHER LIKE YOU! THANX FOR BUYING THIS BOOK!) The final comic drops all pretensions and apes Larry Gonick outright, presenting the reader with a nerdy professor/narrator who takes the reader through time, showing examples of comics through the ages. It’s unfunny and awful, and it made me wish for the hundredth time that I was just reading real Larry Gonick comics instead of poorly planned, unedited junk.

In keeping with the educational theme, I would give The Graphic Textbook a D-. As a teaching tool it’s largely a gimmick, far too few of the comics inside even topping mediocrity. Notable exceptions like “The Black Brigade” are drowned out by the sheer terribleness of entire other sections. For this project to have worked, it would have required an editor ensuring a consistent level of clarity and accuracy, this seems to have had neither. It pales in comparison to Larry Gonick’s similar books, and frequently does not justify its own existence. If this is comics’ ambassador to the elementary classroom, it might be better if comics keep out.

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* “Comics are effective teaching tools because they require readers to not only passively receive information, but to interact with the text and images to construct meaning, and that is the key to the magic,” boasts the teacher’s guide.

**The exercise would actually be improved, because no students would have had to read “Solution Squad.”

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Update 3/14:

Since writing this review, Kickstarter backers received complete PDF files of the finished textbook and teacher’s guide. Some things have changed dramatically, and I wanted to address them.

An introductory section has been added to the textbook, containing a one page comic by Gene Luen Yang (summary: Comics! They’re great! I’M great!) and a prose introduction by Josh Elder. Elder’s introduction contains the same kind of bombast as the Reading with Pictures site (this is only a small sample):

…The Graphic Textbook uses the comics format to make traditional educational content more engaging (especially to struggling readers), more efficient (for more advanced readers) and more effective (for all readers).

(This infuriates me about as much as you would expect given the actual quality of the textbook.)

Except for their order, the majority of the stories in the textbook are completely unchanged from the pre-publication copy I reviewed. I was disappointed to see that nobody had changed the obvious typo I pointed out in the “Probamon” story (doesn’t anyone read my scathing reviews? Anyone???) but I guess it’s stupid of me to expect any level of editing in this book.

teamrandom teamrocket
(oops)

Two stories have changed majorly since my initial review. Those are “Solution Squad: “Primer,”” written by Jim McClain and illustrated by Rose McClain, and “Lumina: Celebrity Superheroine in “Menace of the Mathemagician,”” written by Josh Elder and illustrated by Jen Brazas. I’ll write a little about each, since I would feel unfair if I left this review as-is, given that the stories differ significantly from their pre-publication equivalents.

Jim and Rose McClain’s Solution Squad has undergone the most dramatic transformation between the pre-publication and final copies of the textbook. Instead of the highly truncated story in the pre-publication copy, McClain republished the entire first issue of his independently published Solution Squad (minus some supplementary character background information). The infamous “handshake problem” is no longer the focus of the lesson – it’s been replaced with a fairly thorough explanation of how to find prime numbers using the sieve method. So do I like it better?

squad

Unfortunately, the answer is still a solid no. The Solution Squad story is now twenty-four pages long. Twenty-four pages! The first twelve pages are completely (and I mean completely) unnecessary. They contain zero math concepts, instead focusing on the day-to-day minutiae and incredibly complex backgrounds of the members of Solution Squad. Six full pages are devoted to the workings of a prime number sieve (a standard textbook could explain this simple tool using one or two small illustrations and a short text explanation), and the remaining six pages are, again, unnecessary exposition.

Now, I know I’m purposefully missing the point here – Josh Elder might say, “yes, the comics are decompressed, but it helps kids understand these concepts better when sympathetic characters are acting them out and taking the time to explain them!” I can respect that, but I’m sorry to say that it’s not what I’m seeing in this case. If the comic was limited to the six pages that explained the sieve, I might be more sympathetic, although the art is fairly confusing. At its core though, this is a fine lesson: here’s how to find prime numbers, and now let’s use that to decode a message. Very good. What I can’t tolerate is that seventy-five percent of a twenty-four page math lesson is completely devoid of math. The story reads like Jim McClain wanted to write a cool superhero story and the math was an afterthought. None of the complicated character dynamics, arcane backstories, elaborate seatbelts or pneumatic tubes Solution Squad moves through are important when it comes to the only relevant part of the story: those six pages that explain, step by step, how to make a prime number sieve. If anything, those six pages frustrate me more than anything else in Solution Squad, because they indicate a potential for actual educational value that much of the textbook lacks. If a good editor had made McClain focus more on the teaching parts (he’s a math teacher with twenty-seven years of experience! He knows his stuff!) and less on the “wow, I get to write a really complicated superhero comic!” parts, it could have actually been good (or at least, you know, educational), instead of the confusing space-filler it is now.

primer

Josh Elder’s Lumina story has also been lengthened by several pages in the final version of the textbook. Unfortunately, that added length does not bring any added quality; the new pages are entirely consistent with the pages I’d seen previously. Josh Elder, despite his boisterous claims about the quality of his educational comics, does not seem interested in teaching anything. Math is treated in this comic like Star Wars is treated in The Big Bang Theory.

blahblah

Pages and pages of Twitter jokes (outdated even now, since the site has gone through one if not several redesigns since this comic was drawn) crowd out the fleeting references to actual math. When I originally reviewed this section, I worried that I wasn’t being fair and that the placeholder pages indicated that something much more substantial was coming. I was being much too generous. This story teaches literally nothing about math. Math is referenced only tangentially (“Rabbits, you see, just love to multiply”), and treated as boring. Yes, there are panels like this:

zero

but I refuse to acknowledge these as actually teaching math. Math isn’t taught in throwaway panels, and you can’t teach math through brief, winking references. Elder’s story fills ten full pages of this so-called “textbook.” One and a half pages are devoted to shitty Twitter jokes. The rest aren’t any better (“Flight achieved by subtracting 90% of his personal gravity– like a boss!”). This is pathetic. And I’m not even able to say, “at least it’s a fun comic!” The story is terrible, the art is uninteresting, and the math is missing. Hardly “more efficient” and “more effective.”

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that an entirely new page was added to the math section since my initial review. Written by Jason Allen and drawn by Heidi Arnhold,“Squirrels vs. Birds “Prime-Composite Showdown!”” is a one-page word problem that simultaneously undermines the concept of the book and yet manages not to rise above Lumina’s standard of quality. Here’s the page in question:

squirrelsvsbirds

Seeing this page immediately after Lumina is jarring. Given that it’s only a page long and it has more math in it than Lumina did (not that it explains anything – what are prime and composite numbers?), it’s hard not to read it as an argument in favor of traditional textbooks. This is, essentially, a basic word problem with a pulpy illustration. It’s clearly a better use of space – you don’t need ten pages of bad Twitter and Gangam Style jokes to teach a basic math concept. Unfortunately, the problem doesn’t make any sense. In keeping with Graphic Textbook tradition, no editor seems to have looked at this page. In fact, this page would work significantly better without any illustration, because the words and images work together to make this question incredibly confusing. The robots have prime and composite numbers painted onto them, and the word problem draws no connection between the number (or strength) of either side and their respective number sets. So, when the question asks, “Who do you think will win? Why?” there’s no good answer. Will the robot with bigger numbers painted on it win? Will the robot whose set gets larger more quickly win? It’s totally unclear. What is clear is that Allen and Arnhold wanted to draw some robots. Contextually I take it the squirrels are supposed to win, since the birds’ robot is described as a “monstrosity.” This page isn’t referenced in the teacher’s guide, though, so the “correct” answer remains a mystery.

Despite the differences between the pre-publication and final versions of the Graphic Textbook, my review score remains an emphatic D-. Reading through it again to write this update has rekindled my frustration with the book, especially since Reading With Pictures recently announced that the textbook will be distributed by Andrews McMeel Publishing. The thought of kids having to read this book depresses me. Hell, the thought of the earnest, well-meaning people who made this book depresses me. Despite all the good intentions in the world, The Graphic Textbook is a waste of money and time. With only a couple exceptions, none of the comics in this book are worth reading for any reason, much less educational ones. This textbook is amateurish and bloated, and accomplishes exactly zero of its stated goals. It’s bitterly ironic that a book so invested in the idea of comics getting respect deserves so little. Without question, there are opportunities for comics to be used constructively in the classroom. But educational materials require an understanding of their audience that this cudgel of a book does not have. This book fundamentally underestimates kids – it underestimates their attention spans, their sense of humor, and their ability to learn. If any good comes of this book, it will come in the form of rebellion against projects like this. Kids demand higher standards than The Graphic Textbook can dream of.