Tag Archives: teaching

Poster Boy

Posted on by

The index to the Comics and Music roundtable is here.
______________
 
Do D.I.Y. posters—the Xeroxed or silkscreened posters you find on lampposts and kiosks in big cities, advertising bands and events—constitute a form of comics? The question is at least arguable. In 1975, theorist Pierre Fresnault-Deruelle posited that a comics page (and the double-spread that occurs after the turn of a page) is understood by readers in both linear and tabular ways. The panels on a page are read one at a time, in order, as the reader follows the linear progress of a narrative, but the page can also be read as a table or a map, as a single image subdivided and organized to impart information. (There’s a tradition of artists, beginning perhaps with Frank King and including Jim Steranko, Neal Adams and J.H. Williams III, who emphasize the overall tabular design of their pages much more than typical cartoonists do.) Both comics pages and D.I.Y. posters, then, function as single-illustration “tables” according to Fresnault-Deruelle’s definition—they have that tabular dimension in common.

A related point: many comics artists have made posters, and vice versa. One excellent book on posters is the RISD Museum/Gingko Press exhibit catalog Wunderground: Providence, 1995 to the Present (2006), edited by Judith Tannenbaum and Maya Allison (with design by Helene Silverman and Dan Nadel). Wunderground assembles posters from the Fort Thunder renaissance of Providence’s underground, by such key Paper Rodeo/Kramers Ergot/Monster cartoonists as Mat Brinkman, Brian Chippendale, Jim Drain and Leif Goldberg. One of the first selections in Wunderground is Brinkman’s Eagle Square (2000), (Update: Eagle Square is actually by Brian Chippendale) an image designed to mobilize opposition to the construction of a new strip mall:
 

image1

 
This poster has much in common with Brinkman comics like Teratoid Heights (2003) and Multiforce (2005), including the impossibly dense delineation of a surreal, maze-like environment and the focus on a single character navigating said environment (I imagine the cowboy on the left side of the poster following the path into the labyrinth). While I’m not sure how Eagle Square represents the cause—does the multi-colored tower represent the “historic mill complex,” the prospective strip mall, or neither?—the poster is an eye-catching companion to Brinkman’s sequential art. Robert Crumb’s album covers and comics reflect his love of “old-timey” music; Evan Dorkin channels his obsession with Ska music into his images for the American Skathic series of CDs and the milieu of his Hectic Planet series; and Mat Brinkman simultaneously makes comics, posters, and tapes of homgrown electronic music, ignoring distinctions between different media. Culture is culture.

I’m not writing this essay, however, to theorize the nature(s) of culture(s), even if such sweeping theories were possible. Instead, I want to tell a personal story about how comics enter into dialogue with music and with single-image posters. Teaching is part of the story too, since it happened during my “day job” teaching English at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina.

In spring 2002 I taught my first class on comics and graphic novels, but it was a creative writing class, and I was charged with teaching the students the basics of visual storytelling. Which, frankly, was ridiculous: I can’t draw, I’m a mediocre fiction writer, and at that time the only comics theory and history I’d read was McCloud’s Understanding Comics. (No Feiffer, Kunzle, Witek: I hadn’t even seen Steranko’s History of Comics.) Still, I dove into the class because I was into comic books—especially, blindly, nostalgically, the 1960s Marvel comics of my childhood—and I got lucky: the students in that class were a ferociously sharp bunch, challenging me with controversial ideas (“Prince Valiant looks like book illustration to me, not comics!”) and generating better work than I expected.

One of the best students in that class was a junior named Chris Williams. Chris had been an Art major, but transferred to English when it became clear that his interest in cartooning (particularly Mike Allred’s American version of la ligne claire) didn’t jibe with the Art department’s emphasis on conceptual and abstract work. Some of my class assignments focused exclusively on writing—students were expected to write both a full-script comic and a Marvel-style plot—and Chris was very good at these. He truly excelled, though, when I asked the students to draw images to go along with their words. He put more background detail into his pictures than anyone else in the class, and his figure drawing, clearly inspired by Allred, was rubbery, expressive, and compulsively readable. My major critique of Chris’ art was that his images read too much like outlines, like ethereal diagrams of spaces and people, and I asked him to use cross-hatching and spot blacks to bring solidity to his pictures. Chris cheerfully ignored this suggestion, and even made a joke about my nagging; for one assignment, he turned in a splash page featuring a rocket blasting through outer space, but refused to paint the universe in shades of inky darkness. Chris’ astronauts flew instead through a field of white paper punctuated by lines indicating the bright areas of his fictional stars.
 
I did have an influence on Chris in one way, though: I loaned him all of my Love and Rockets collections (13 of the fifteen that collected the entire run of the original L & R magazine), and they blew his mind. He loved how Jaime Hernandez out-Allreded Allred, how Jaime stripped his drawings down until every line carried expressive meaning. (He also noticed that Jaime was a wiz at laying down big slabs of ink.) He fell for the stories too. Chris played guitar in a loud slow-core band called Maple Stave, and he connected with Los Bros’ love of rock and roll, and their attempts to import the speed and recklessness of the music (such as the out-of-control, almost abstract orgy in Gilbert’s “Bullnecks and Bracelets”) into verbal-visual terms. During this period, Chris drew and xeroxed a zine that combined an irreverent approach to the superhero genre, tonally very similar to “Mechanics,” with a stone-cold swipe of Jaime’s line-up cover to Love and Rockets #1 (which is itself—as revealed in The Art of Jaime Hernandez book [2010]—a riff on a Raymond Pettibon illustration on the back of a Black Flag 45). At the end of our class, Chris returned my L & R books, along with two surprises: he gave me the two volumes that I didn’t own (House of Raging Women and Hernandez Satyricon), and he drew me an original comic strip about what he’d learned (or tried to learn) from the art of Los Bros.
 

image2

 
After Chris graduated from college, he went home to Raleigh and took a bookstore job. He also saw lots of bands in various Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill venues—Local 506, Nightlight, the legendary Cat’s Cradle—and Maple Stave occasionally opened for headliners like Port Huron Statement and Section Eight at these venues. Most importantly, he kept at his art, experimenting with screen printing and crafting images with splattery, phantasmagoric colors. Many of Chris’ interests collided in 2004 when bars and galleries started hiring him to screen-print gig posters, and he’s crafted over two hundred since, most of which can be seen at his Storenvy site here. I’m proud of the work he’s done, I delude myself that I had a little influence over his creative direction, and I’m impressed by anybody who can make art pay.

Chris has come back to ASU for visits (once to attend an opening reception for an exhibit of his work at the campus art gallery) and during these visits we’ll sometimes get together for a lunch that typically ends with Chris giving me copies of his newest posters. I like them all, but I have a favorite, an image of a soldier dressed in olive-green fatigues sitting in a field of red plants. The soldier is an immediately legible cartoon abstraction conventionally situated in the center of the composition, while the plants are a network of indistinct, slashing brush lines that represent energy as effectively and abstractly as Kirby Krackle: the result creates vibrant friction between two different modes of comic-book expressionism.

I’ve framed and hung this image on the wall of my living room, next to original art by Ben Towle and Richard Thompson, so I can’t scan it. My version of Chris’ image has no text on it, but he recycled the picture (and, presumably, the screen) for a 2008 gig poster, and it’s the following, without blue lettering, that greets guests as they walk into our parlor:
 

image3

 
After decades of over-indulgent comic book reading, my default mode is to narrativize every image I see, wrap them in stories that tame their visual extravagance. Initially, the story I ascribed to Chris’ soldier-in-a-field was tragic: he’s manning a military radio, waiting for a message that’ll reassign him to the Front or bring him bad news about the point platoon. (Note the worn anxiety on his face.) Yet now I wonder if this original tale was too pessimistic. Maybe the soldier has exiled himself to the blood-red field, to tune a civilian radio and listen to stations and music banned in the barracks. Maybe his life was saved by rock and roll. Maybe a network of beats and notes link Jerusalem Crickets and Maple Stave, comics and posters, teacher and student, me and you.

Race in the Comics Classroom

Posted on by

While it has become something of a cliché to assert that race poses a significant challenge in the classroom, I have long ceased to think of race and teaching in these terms.  Indeed, as a professor of African American literature, I regularly deal with the difficult issue of race and have developed, and help my students develop, tools to grapple with American racial history and persistent racial tensions and conflicts.  Which is why I was caught completely off guard in my comics course when I taught Aaron McGruder’s Boondocks and found myself attempting to discuss race with students completely unprepared to do so.

Students in my comics course are primarily white and male, though the ratio of men to women is significantly better than that of white to non-white students.  The students are primarily not readers of comics.  Out of 45 students, about half of them have read a comic strip or editorial cartoon, but not recently.  7 or 8 of them have read a comic book (usually Maus or Watchmen).  Of that 7 or 8, 2 or 3 are currently regular readers of comics, typically superhero comics, or, on occasion, manga.  My goal in the course is to introduce students to the many kinds of stories creators tell using this form.

I’ve taught Boondocks before, in Introduction to African American literature.  I taught it alongside Toure’s collection of short stories Portable Promised Land.  The two works come at the end of my class, and serve as examples of contemporary African American literature informed by (1) the prevalence of blackness in American popular discourse, (2) a long standing and well-established African American literary tradition, and (3) the shifting and competing definitions of blackness in post-Civil Rights America.  In that course Boondocks works really well because, I realize now, students have been well prepared for a discussion of how McGruder plays with American racial discourse.  Basically, race and blackness are not marginal to the conversation in this course.  It’s the very air we breathe.

In my comics course, on the other hand, there is very little discussion of race.  In fact, the only time race comes up is when we read books where the race of the characters is explicit (like Boondocks as opposed to something like Stitches or Spider-man) and, thus, unavoidable.

Here is what I want my students to get from The Boondocks: Aaron McGruder employs visual racial hyperbole as the foundation of his satire–we are confronted visually with racial stereotypes (the hood rat, the black militant, the Uncle Tom, the ditzy white girl, the confused biracial girl, etc.) that are then used to simultaneously deconstruct white supremacy and lampoon the absurdity of American racial thinking.

Take the above images, for instance.  On the left is Riley Freeman, 8-year old gangsta wanna-be; on the right is rapper 50 Cent. Riley here isn’t simply recognizably black (which he needs to be for the entire premise of The Boondocks to work).  He is stereotypically black–the cornrows, the baggy pants, the bling.  We are meant to call to mind images from pop culture, like 50 Cent, that present very specific, very limited constructions of black masculinity.  Riley is recognizable because we see him everyday.  McGruder’s genius, though, is what he does with this stereotype.  Riley is a child whose aspirations to thug glory are played for laughs.  For instance, to express his outrage at being moved to the suburbs by his grandfather (you can’t have street cred if you come from the suburbs), Riley changes the street sign at the corner from Timid Deer Lane to Notorious B.I.G. Ave.  In an early strip, he tried to get a refund on a toy lightsaber because it didn’t do any actual damage when he used to hit Cindy (the strip’s resident white girl) over the head.

The things Riley aspires to–fame as the result of violence, hot and cold running women, conspicuous wealth, swagger that other boys envy–are all things that 50 Cent (and countless other rappers and professional athletes) is famous for.  Indeed, they are things that we reward rappers for.  In the character of Riley, McGruder not only dismantles this particular stereotype of the black male by showing how much empty performance it is; he also implicates us–the larger culture–in this performance.  50 Cent needs an audience for his gangsta spectacle.  And because we–including the students in the comics course–provide him an audience, McGruder’s satire seems to suggest, kids like Riley have every reason to believe the spectacle pays off.

In my African American literature class students, while missing the vocabulary of comics (encapsulation, gutter, panels, etc), are nonetheless able to talk, in basic ways, about the ways McGruder uses the visual language of race.  But this is only true because the students and I spend 13 or 14 weeks talking about the various ways race is constructed and becoming comfortable having these conversations.  We can have this conversation because it is no different, really, than any of the conversations we have all semester.

In the comics course, though, my students had no context, in general, for McGruder’s racial satire. My comics students don’t recognize the racial markers as markers, as constructions.  Instead they read them as authentic:  Black men really are that angry and paranoid.  Biracial people really are that confused.  Black kids really want to be gangsters.  Again, it’s not that these kids are incapable of untangling and dismantling social constructions.  They are perfectly capable of criticizing constructions of the masculine hero in a superhero comic or recognizing that the childhood represented in Calvin and Hobbes or Peanuts isn’t real, but rather a literary vehicle used to discuss “big ideas.”  They had, of course, spent the semester successfully grappling with other kinds of cultural/literary constructions (the “I” in memoirs, journalistic objectivity), but race seemed to exist in a different category from these. It is highly charged, powerful, and invisible to people like my students who benefit from the stereotypes and privilege engendered by racial constructions.

The fact is, most of us are unprepared to talk about race.  It is a failure of the culture we live in that the only time my students are having substantive conversations about race is in my 15 week literature class.  Despite the fact that, as a society, we talk about race all the time [examples: the racial implications of Strauss-Kahn’s sexual assault of an African maid in his hotel room and Schwarzenegger’s years long affair with his Latina housekeeper; Cornel West’s assertion that the President is scared of free black men; the quickly-pulled Psychology Today article about black women being the least attractive of all human beings; the recent thread on the comics scholars list in which no one, seemingly, knew the definition of womanism], we do it very badly.  We are often speaking ahistorically or speaking as if stereotypes are biological and cultural truths or as if color-blindness is the ultimate goal.  When my students find themselves in a course where the discussion of race begins with the assertion that none of the above things are true (as my comics students do), but without the proper critical tools, it is not surprising that they fail to rise to the occasion.  They are merely replicating failings of the culture they live in.
_________
Conseula Francis is associate professor of English and director of African American studies at the College of Charleston.